Solitude 

From various events that I won’t try to explain, I started pondering the age old question of how to figure out if someone is a robot or not. I present my findings (with discussion from outside parties).

• Use a magnet: Cheap and easy, but won’t work unless large machine parts are involved.
• Go upstairs: Again, cheap and easy but only effective on Daleks. And they tend to be easy to spot anyway.
• See if they like microchips: A dead cert to work, but really just a bad joke.
• Have a Voight-Kampff Machine handy: Turing tests at the extreme, but pretty handy. Problems: they don’t exist and if they did you might find out that you are an android.
• Hand them a knife: If they start slamming between their fingers at an alarming speed, then they’re Lance Henriksen and should be killed immediately.
• Cut them in half: Only works if there are large numbers of machine components. So, cut in quarters. Or, just keep cutting until you see wires. If you’re wrong, then they’re not going to complain. Downside: potentially murderous and fairly time consuming.

Those are my methods. If anyone has any better, I’d like to hear it.

I’m a man who knows a lot about Vin Diesel (having clocked up at least 15 hours in the last week refreshing the Vin Diesel fact page) and I think he would be angered over the sequel to his ground-breaking work in xXx. Who can forget the bike that somehow hit a ramp with a 2 degree incline and got about 40ft of air? Or that boat? Or the bit with the great acting?

Let’s start with the name: xXx2: The Next Level. Christ in a glove, how can they pack the title with any more hyperbole? First there are 3 bloody X characters (the X is for eXtreme). Attention grabbing. Then there is a 2. On the posters I believe the 2 is actually superscript, so that’s xXx squared: giving, if my maths hasn’t failed me yet, 9 X’s. When you think “Goddamn, that name is just eXtreme enough”, they throw in a colon and a subtitle “The Next Level”. Wow. What a load of shite.

Second, Xander Cage is dead? Like Vin is actually killable. My arse. Ice Cube plays the new xXx who is apparently “more extreme, more angry, more black” than his predecessor (I’m fairly sure that Sammy Jackson says that in the trailer).

Finally, it’s advertised as being by the director of Die Another Day. Honest to Bob (Hope, that is), why would any sane person mention that someone who touched Die Another Day had gotten within 50 miles of filming? Didn’t they spend months hunting that fucker down and found him in a hole begging for his life? Wait, that was Saddam but it should’ve been him, dammit! DAD was easily the worst Bond film in years. Stupid bad guy (diamond face), satellite plot nicked from Goldeneye (a fantastic Bond film), poor swordplay (no-one has ever had a real sword fight that went on more than 2 minutes), invisible car (oh fucking dear), bland Bond girl (who the hell was it anyway?), face swapping (Face-Off theft), and a shit ending to the imprisonment we see at the beginning. What a pile of crap DAD was. Honestly, I could go on all day about that shit, but we’re here to talk about XXX2:Hardass, Punk Bitches From HELL.

I’m sure it’ll make enough money for the producers to ejaculate in nightly without fear of having to use any of the tained sample to buy a new yacht, but it still looks a bit pish.

Hollywood sequels, eh?

I propose the Grid Computing Drinking Game. The rules are relatively simple and can be played alone (in fact, it is highly unlikely anyone else will want to join in). The only prerequisites are that you need to be doing research or revision into Grid Computing, and you have a bottle of your favourite tipple handy. Rules are as follows:

• Anytime “Ian Foster” or “Carl Kesselman” are mentioned, you take a drink. If they are mentioned together it’s a triple.
• Anytime someone talks badly about Globus, gives you that look or knowing laugh, take a drink.
• Anytime there is a hand-waving definition of a core concept, unfinished specifications or a problem that has no real solution, take a drink. Make it a stiff one.
• Some horrible mish-mash of web services on steroids forced into a tutorial, taking up hundreds of lines of code where every other language since FORTRAN could have done it in one? You know what to do (and you’ll know the tutorial when you see it).
• GWSDL, OGSA, OGSI? One for each letter in the acronyms.

Wow. This studying lark just got more fun.

Tins. I know a man who collects tins. Vinyl. I know people who collect vinyl. Badges. I know a girl who collects badges. Cuddly toys. I know someone who collects bears and other similar stuffed toys. If you ask any one of them why, they can’t give good answers. Most of them “like” what they collect but if asked why they “like” it, they are stumped.

These people are not alone; I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t have a collection of some sort. Some are more traditional than others, but everyone collects something. Why?

What is it that drives us to collect what are largely fairly arbitrary things? Few, if any, collections are necessary in the true sense of that word (we can live without them). So what is it? Consumerism? A feeling of intangible value in that which we collect? I have no idea and it’s long been a question that has bothered me.

It strikes me that money is rarely the motivating factor, often people are to caught up in creating a complete collection to sell. Sometimes it’s not even the objects themselves. How many record collectors have never played their collection and never want to? Instead, it seems like it is the very idea of collecting that is the appeal. Why? I still do not know.

What is it about the need to put things in a particular way? What is it that drives us to achieve order? In this series, I probably won’t attempt to answer these questions but I’ll look at some examples and ask some more questions.

First up, how do you order your CD collection? If you look at a given set of CDs in someones house they have order. This has a very obvious purpose: lookup. If CDs aren’t in a fairly predictable order, finding something becomes tricky.

Originally, I had a single rack for my CDs. Alphabetically ordered by artist, sub-ordered by release. The standard method. Easy look-up, and can listen to an artist progressively. This was fine until multiple racks were necessary to accomodate my growing collection. At a rack change, should one start with a new letter or overflow? Also, adding new CDS got to be a problem. Everything after the position had to be moved down somewhat. If we assume an even spread of artists over letters, that’s half of your collection moving every time. Not fun.

The first and most naive solution is to place new CDS into a separate pile and then periodically insert them all. This takes less time over all, but is a royal pain in the arse and is the sort of thing that is procrastinated over endlessly.

Another solution is to introduce buffering space after each letter. This means that only CDs in the section in question need to be moved. This has two problems. Firstly, slack space. No-one likes having empty slots everywhere. Secondly, it still needs a periodic move around. Not perfect, but getting better.

For some reason, I then started separating by genre. One rack had CDs from a particular (and very broad genre) while a different rack would contain another. This did make finding CDs much quicker.

For a good while now, they’ve been arranged by association. The racks form an essentially 2D space (depth doesn’t really matter), and CDS are placed into the racking such that bands are grouped with bands that are somehow connected. These connections are loose. Some sound similar, others supported each other, some just seem right. This works remarkably well for me. Knowing where the single band used to form the origin are, I can place my hand onto the racks within 2 CDs of the one I was looking for (which itself is easily within eye range). It also makes mood based browsing exceptionally easy, just pick an area and move. CD insertion also seems to work fairly well as bands tend to release albums every 2 years and the local space around them changes fairly well.

Problems? Periodic changes are needed (less frequently I find, because finding new music tends to branch outward) and are a pain. Also, some people who approached particular bands from different routes from me find it difficult to pick anything out.

Obsessive? Perhaps. Just helps to have an order that works for me. Anyone got any better ideas?

The last time I checked out the GreaseMonkey Repository (which will be moved to UserScript.org at some stage), I was a little underwhelmed. Greasmonkey is a great idea (allowing people to change sites at will is a game changer), but at the time the scripts just didn’t do anything that I was interested in, beyond the occasional advert blocker.

A quick look through the greatly boosted number of scripts reveals some really nice efforts. The best ones I installed are below (all can be found in the repository):

• Javadocs 1.4.2 - I’d have killed for this during my project. It automatically redirects Java 1.5 api pages to their 1.4.2 equivalent. Handy in conjunction with javadocs.org.
• Hotmail Single Window - I’m using my Hotmail accounts less and less due to GMail but one or two I can’t close. It annoys me that they use javascript to open external links, but this little script fixes that. Nice.
• Inline MP3 Player - The killer app, in my opinion. It adds an inline play button next to any mp3 linked on the web. Want to preview what an mp3 blog is offering? Just hit the button. Outstanding.

There are more available, and more to come I’m sure, but the great thing about GreaseMonkey is you get what you want. Worth a look.

The best Tom Hanks sequels never made:

1. Turner, Hooch And Moggy - Hooch gets rabies, so Turner (played by Hanks) teams up with a smart ass cat to fight crime and save Hooch before the local government put him down. Voice of Moggy provided by Steve Guttenberg.
2. The Red Mile - Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) is a moody prison guard who moves to an all woman facility in North Dakota. On his arrival, he is befriended by wrongly convicted female murder with bad sanitary towels. Dark, gripping and messy drama.
3. Bigger (And More Extreme) - When bored with his executive career, a fortune telling machine turns Josh (Hanks) into a hideously disfigured giant working in a Mongolian circus. He fights the locals and cruel circus master to regain dignity and his freedom from a life in chains. Features sky-diving and nudity.
4. Apollo 14: Search For Spock - Admiral Kirk and his bridge crew risk their careers stealing the decommissioned Enterprise to return to the restricted Genesis planet to recover Spock’s body.
5. Philadelphia Reborn: The Dead Rise Again - The story of a lawyer who returns from the dead to take his revenge upon Philadelphia, creating a zombie army as he goes. Meg Ryan leads a team of international biologists intent on finding a cure to “the disease”, falling in love with Hanks in the process.

Man, forget this computing lark, I’m going to be a big Hollywood producer. Show me the money! On that note, Tom Cruise tomorrow…

As my plan for working on both my UGC cinema listing RSS Feed and Actors RSS feed has not progressed as well as I had hoped (I haven’t really started the overhaul yet, by which I mean I haven’t looked at either in months), it’s good to see someone else doing something about it. Jonathan Paisley has created an experimental WAP interface for UgcRss. It’s running over home ADSL so may break, but it seems fairly solid to me. Thanks for that!

A good start to the month with former kings of Glasgow indie-pop, Bis, reforming under the new name of Data Panik (they are being clear that it is pronounced Dah-tah.) Eight or so songs have already been recorded, featuring all three Bis members. Live they will have a real drummer, where formerly they had a drum machine.

This month also began with a normally joyous event, the release of a new Idlewild album. Although the band have been moving slowly away from their punk-tinged debut over the years, it is still quite shocking to hear an Idlewild album that is so resolutely bland. Where previous albums had intelligent lyrics wrapped up in fervent Scottish rock or indie lullabies, Warnings/Promises has a continual acoustically focused sound; all strumming with nothing to stand out from the mire of mediocrity. The thoughtful lyrics remain with some truly outstanding and amusing lines, but without the musical hooks to back themup the album might as well be wallpaper.

The Mars Volta released the first single from their newest album, Frances The Mute. The Widow features a slightly tighter version of the album track, as well as 14 minute b-side Frances The Mute (suprisingly, not on the album of the same name.) Frances The Mute (the song) is one of The Mars Volta’s few weak moments; 4 minutes or so of excellent prog rock, wrapped in another 10 of noise.

As sophomore albums are all the rage, Hell Is For Heroes followed up the excellent debut album from the beginning of 2003 with Transmit/Disrupt. Although lacking the vibrancy of The Neon Handshake, this album still manages to deliver a sizeable slice of rock. The opening number, Kamichi, sets the pace with a fast but fairly straightforward jaunt of drum-led music, with later tracks laying down serious and extremely tight riffs.

Because the beginning of this month was handed over to finishing my final year project, cinema trips were light on the ground. However, unlike January with its one sided fight, March has two competitors.

Constantine is a big-screen bastardisation of Hellblazer. Gone is the mysterious Liverpudlian private investigator, replace by a much more americanised version played by Keanu Reeves. I’m fairly sure every other review of this film by someone who knows anything about the character has pointed out the flaws in the conversion: John Constantine now being an american with black hair (the original character famously looks like Sting), the presence of real action sequences (he’s more of a thinker than a fighter), the lack of character (both Reeves and Rachel Weisz are atrociously bad in this film), and other less important factors.

Strangely, the film is reasonable up until a point, if ignoring the acting. It’s watchable if mindless entertainment. Once the cross shaped shotgun appears the film dives into cringeworthy territory. Thankfully, this happens late in the day. Not bad, but not great either.

The Life Aquatic, With Steve Zissou is quite a different beast. An oceanographer (played by Bill Murray) goes on a mission to find the mysterious and possibly fictional Jaguar Shark. In the mean time, he has to deal with his waivering marriage, his newfound 30-year old son (Owen Wilson), financing troubles, a reporter intent on exposing his idiocy, pirates and more.

The comedy found in this film is as deadpan as it comes. Dry, but never without character, the jokes (if you can call them that) expose a lateral wit that lets us explore the quirky cast throughout; as funny as it is charming.

The characters themselves are well-thought out and the acting is phenomenal. Murray shines as Zissou, Wilson manages to get passed his usual smug and awkward characterisation to play a Kentucky gentleman with aplomb, William Dafoe is hilarious as the jealous German left hand man, and the others are equally good.

A clear win for The Life Aquatic, an interestingly offbeat film that deserves more acclaim that it seems to be getting.