Once again, the film fights are behind. Time to catch up:

Knocked Up is a surprisingly grown-up comedy. Expecting a bit of a gross-out, it was a pleasure to see a well-developed movie; with a decent enough plot, and even some (shock) character development. While it still has enough set-pieces to entertain (the trip to Vegas being particularly notable), it’s good to see that they’re part of the story, rather than the story being an excuse for them. It’s not a masterpiece, by any stretch, but it is worth seeing. One of the best comedies of the year.

Let’s get straight to it for the next one: 1408 is about as lazy a Stephen King adaptation as you can make (without producing utter excrement like Dreamcatcher). That’s a real shame as it has a handful of genuinely jumpy moments, before it descends into horror movie cliché, dream endings, and King’s own silly trappings: haunted inanimate objects. Cusack does the best he can with the material, while Samuel L Jackson phones in his five minute performance. Pretty dreadful, despite a decent opening.

As I’m sure many have realised by now, Run, Fatboy, Run is not a Simon Pegg film. Sure, he stars in it, but I’d be willing to bet that his 3rd-tier writing credit is due to the handful of jokes he wrote for it (and I’d bet on which ones they are). David Schwimmer, as director, proves himself woefully incompetent. He manages to create a fairly one-dimensional world, with painfully unrounded characters and poor motivations. It being a comedy is no excuse, as Pegg himself has proven time and again, for simply holding up a flimsy premise as completed material and running some fart jokes through it. Apart from the outstandingly funny Dylan Moran, this film is without merit.

Finally, Michael Clayton has George Clooney as a kind of fixer lawyer, dropped in to solve problems. Although he’s supposed to be great at it, the character isn’t doing so well. His best friend has gone nuts and is going against a multi-million dollar client. The main problem with this film is direction: it meanders in the set-up, and fails to really get going at any decent pace. The performances are strong, and the story is interesting enough, it’s just not going to really grab anyone.

It’s a tough choice, and Clooney nearly had it, but I think the winner from these four has to be Knocked Up.

Last year I was a young pup at 23. As of today, I’m an old and enlightened 24 year old *COUGH*.

Being 24 is a lot like the TV show of the same name: you’re an untouchable badass willing to do anything to protect your ideals, and there any number of terrorists willing to launch an attack on you within a few seconds of the hour mark (pro tip: if it’s a couple of seconds to the hour, maybe cover your head to be safe). Also, your daughter is probably fairly crap at not being kidnapped.

Anyway, the changes this year have been, in many ways, subtle. I’m still working for the same BigCo (in a different job), most of my circumstances are pretty much the same (aside from a few personal items), and that’s just fine with me; everything is going pretty great.

Here’s to another year of this.

I’ll start by saying that if you’re not a programmer, you’re not going to be interested in this post. You might want to run along and read something better. You probably also want to be a Java programmer.

JDOM is a great Java library for dealing with XML in a reasonably sane way. You turn your XML into an org.jdom.Document object (using a handy utility like SAXBuilder), and then you can use various query and manipulation tools on it. It does, however, have some fairly silly exceptions.

Recently, I was doing some XPath queries as part of a web-app. Like a good developer, I wrote some unit tests so I knew that the XPaths were correct, the XML conversion was correct, etc. I wrote the actual code to implement the test cases and everything worked fine. Great.

Upon deploying the web-app to the container and running it properly, JDOM throws a ClassCastException and says the Document is the cause. Bizarre. After a few checks and no luck , we (I say “we” because there are now a few interested parties) break out the debugger for a look at the running web-app. [Let me stop for a second to say that debugging running web-apps is a triumph of tooling; very useful stuff.] The created Document looks fine, the code steps through ok until… bang. The debugger stops working. Ah.

After a lot of head scratching and googling, we finally figure out the problem: JDOM depends on the Jaxen API for XPath. While our unit test container (actually an IDE) has a reference to a copy of Jaxen for an unrelated reason, the deployment doesn’t. So the problem is one of dependencies.

However, the thing that made this tricky to debug was JDOM throwing an unrelated Exception. A ClassCastException seems completely inappropriate here and helped masked the real cause. A ClassNotFoundException pointing to the Jaxen library would have a) made sense, and b) pointed us at the real cause.

Lessons:

1. Libraries are only as sane as the most insane thing they do.
2. Unit tests start falling apart if the environment in which they are run does not match the final environment. This can be a very subtle problem.
3. Throwing exceptions is only as useful as the quality of the feedback the exception provides.
4. Debug, debug, debug. If the debugger fails, don’t panic.

Here’s hoping the JDOM guys get rid of that erroneous ClassCastException and switch to something a little more helpful.

I recently decided it was time to upgrade my phone, since my previous phone was starting to fail me in several ways (i.e. the battery was fecked). So I opted for the Nokia N95. (Note: if you’ve ever had my mobile number, it’s still the same. I haven’t changed it since my first phone.)

I had a couple of good reasons for making this choice. First, after my last phone, I’m a big fan of Nokia phones and the Symbian OS. Everything nice I said about my previous phone still applies, but I can now appreciate features like the active desktop style interface a bit more. It had always annoyed me that the screen you get upon unlocking a mobile is near enough useless; basically, a glorified splash screen. Nokia S60 phones are different: switch on active standby and you get 5 icons on your desktop which are shortcuts into your favourite programs (customisable). As well as that, you get the next few events from your calendar displayed clearly and prominently, plus the next items on your to-do list. That’s exactly how it should be, the most important info clearly displayed.

Another major selling point of the N95 is the camera. The previous camera I had was only 1.2 megapixels and performed poorly in all but the best light conditions. My new phone has a 5 megapixel chip, a much better lens, and a two stage auto-focus, which helps the camera pick out the best lighting conditions.

There are plenty of other nice little features (wifi, visual radio, enough oomph for 3D games) but what does it get wrong?

1. It breaks the Nokia charger standard. Every Nokia phone I’ve ever seen used a standard charger, making it easy to find a spare if you’re away from home. The N95 uses a much slimmer charger. Not good.
2. The battery life. With great new features, comes great power consumption. If you don’t use the bigger features you get a fairly standard charge for a modern phone (2 days+). If you hammer the features, you could easily wipe it in half a day.
3. It came with Moby as the standard track. It’s not 1999, and I’m not doing a car advert, thanks.

Other than that, I’m very happy with it. Highly recommended.

With this August entry, I’m back up to speed, after the delays for the previous few months.

First up, The Hoax is a strange tale about an author that decided to fake Howard Hughes’ auto-biography while the reclusive billionaire was at his peak. Richard Gere has never been better than here, as the self-interested writer who will do whatever it takes to become huge. As his plan unravels, he keeps digging, coming up with more bizarre solutions. An excellent take on a bizarre idea which is, apparently, true.

No-one was expecting much from a sequel to the family comedy Bruce Almighty, especially with Jim Carrey replaced by the usually more adult Steve Carrell, and Evan Almighty does nothing to beat those expectations. If anything this film is more preachy and less funny than its predecessor. I’m sure kids would lap it up, but there’s little here for the grown-ups.

Finally, to finish Robert Ludlum’s trilogy, The Bourne Ultimatum casts Matt Damon as the man who can weaponise just about anything in his pursuit for the truth, Jason Bourne. The set-up is relatively simple (a journalist is fed information about Bourne, and Bourne works with him to find out how he became what he is), but brings together a number of great action sequences. This, as with the rest of the series, is a masterclass in how to do action sequences; keeping it near the boundaries of plausible while still spectacular enough to warrant viewing. The plot wraps up more neatly than might be expected too.

I’m a little torn this month, but I think The Bourne Ultimatum edges it over The Hoax because there are so few action films that can get away with not having “action” as an excuse for lazy cinema.