Coraline, now in theaters in 3D

We saw Coraline^[IMDB][wiki] the other day. It was shown in one of the new digitally projected 3D systems at our local multiplex.

Wow.

I was very taken with the book by Neil Gaiman, who is one of my favorite authors. It is a simple story about a young girl who feels neglected by her workaholic parents. They move to an old house that has been divided into flats, taking the large flat for their own. While exploring the house, Coraline (not Caroline!) finds a locked door in the parlor that appears at first to open onto a brick wall. Later, she finds it opens into another world where her "other" mother and father dote on her. They seem a little creepy, an effect enhanced by having large black buttons sewn in place of their eyes. She can stay, but only if she consents to have the buttons herself.... Read the book and you'll never look at buttons the same way again.

The movie actually extends the story beyond the book in several ways, and it does it without breaking it. In fact, the film's version of the story is better at least as handled on screen. The writers added an entire new character and improved the depth of the back story of the villainess. They even managed to fit a musical number in that was written (but not performed) by They Might be Giants.

Given that it was directed by Henry Selick (who directed Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and Monkey Bone) the stop-motion animation is as striking as could be expected. More striking is the delicate use of 3D projection. The 3D was used to give extra depth to the scenery without abusing the audience. It was not used as a gimmick. There is a hint of the effort expended on the animation in a short segment after the credit roll that shows a sequence shot from a wider angle and without any of the clamps or wires removed. There was some CGI used, but mostly for cleanups and wire removal.

In short, see this movie.

XKCD on Anathem

Today's XKCD is a review, of sorts, of Neal Stephenson's new novel Anathem. Randal seems concerned about the amount of invented vocabulary required for basic comprehension of the story.

While sympathetic to Randal's point, I suspect he hasn't devoted quite enough attention span to get what Stephenson is actually up to in this one. It is the sort of book where putting it down too soon will make it impossible to pick up. Being set in an entirely distinct culture it requires a fair amount of context and vocabulary to keep the alien flavor. Although, if you are well-read in the right topics, a lot of what is said will sound isomorphic to things you already know.

Read in the right frame of mind, it might even teach some hard to explain ideas about the nature of consciousness. There is an interesting riff relating the solving of an abstract problem to the collapsing of a wave function, and a different spin on the many-worlds explanation of quantum mechanics that almost made sense.

As I write this, I've read about 3/4 of Anathem, and it clearly is worth the attention I've paid it.

As proof that XKCD does get it in general, I present the previous comic, which demonstrates the power of a log scale to collapse the entire universe to a comprehensible size...

This Summer's Guilty Pleasure

We spent a couple of hours watching game shows tonight. Yes, game shows. Silly game shows. Silly but entertaining train-wrecks in slow motion kind of game shows.

First up was Wipeout. Imagine running an obstacle course for best time in a field of 24, with a cash prize of US$50K for the winner. Now imagine that the course designers were nuts. Think rodeo clown nuts. And that some network suit accidentally signed off on the building plans without asking too many questions about the number of giant rubber balls, large barrels, spinning turntables, or mud pits called for. Or perhaps the suits just said "oh just get three of everything and stop bothering us with details". One of the producers (co-executive producer Scott Larsen) has been quoted as saying "I come up with most of my challenges after a few beers laying in bed, sort of half awake, half falling asleep. So I kind of dream them up."

It is hard to describe unless typical Japanese game shows are an available frame of reference...

And speaking of the high art of the wacky Japanese game show, I Survived a Japanese Game Show was next up. Here the producers recruited a bunch of gullible people from all over the US and flew them to LA to be on a reality show. When the arrived at LAX, they were swept off to the international terminal and sent straight to Japan where they discovered during a studio tour that the reality show was really a chance to appear on a Japanese game show (apparently called something translated as “You’ve Got to Be Crazy”) where TOHO studios will do their best to humiliate them all each week, sending the looser home, until the last contestant standing is handed a cool $250K. And TOHO studios are perfectly capable of humiliating the pants off a bunch of naive contestants....

Personally, I can hardly imagine deciding to go on a reality show at all, let alone let a producer talk me into leaving the country on only a few minutes warning. Since all of the contestants did just that, it is pretty clear that they start out an ant or two shy of the whole picnic...

But they are both fun to watch for the sheer spectacle of it all.

Twin Musicals to End the Year

We ended the year on a Hollywood Musical note, but perhaps not the traditional sort...

First, over the weekend we made it up to our local Krikorian branch to see the Tim Burton treatment of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Then on New Year's Eve, we watched John Travolta carry off Divine's role on the "Shake and Shimmy" DVD edition of this years film version of the stage musical made from John Waters' classic cult film Hairspray.

The short version of what follows is simply that both are quite entertaining and well worth pursuit on either disc or screen.

Sweeney Todd

First, I should say that I have never actually had the chance to see a production of the original musical, but I have known of it and the story for some time. Also, one of my favorite misuses of musical theatre in film occurs in the Kevin Smith film Jersey Girl, where the little girl Gertie (Raquel Castro) coerces her father (Ben Affleck), grandfather (George Carlin), and his blue-collar work buddies into performing some of it as a grade school project. (Incidentally, the film is worth seeing for those scenes alone, even if it could have benefited from reducing the Jennifer Lopez role all the way down to a brief cameo and a photo on the mantelpiece.)

And, of course, I have been a fan of Tim Burton since tripping over his short animated film Vincent many years ago. Since then, his films have always proved to be nicely odd and edgy, and generally among my favorites.

This film is no exception. It is the highest class and highest budget slasher film I have seen, bar none. The supporting cast is as strong as the lead roles, but never draws attention completely away from the strong horror film plot. And there is enough blood around to satisfy just about any fan of the genre. At the same time it is also a Shakespearean tragedy, as well as a light romantic comedy.

Without seeing the original staging, it is hard to be too critical of the musical choices that were made. However, all of the main characters hold up the musical ends of their roles quite satisfactorily.

All in all, we were thoroughly entertained by this one, and look forward to adding a DVD to the collection.

Hairspray

The original film is probably the most mainstream of all of the John Waters cult films, and certainly of those films that Divine was involved in, but it still has the Waters touch in spades. I wouldn't call it his best work ever (I'd favor Polyester or Pink Flamingoes of the ones I've seen ahead of it) but it is worth watching even if only for the ensemble cast.

Then they made a Broadway Musical out of it, which just seemed like a nutty idea at the time... but it apparently worked. I haven't had the chance to see the a production of it, but it did well and won awards.

Since other musicals have been doing well when moved (back) to film, it then made sense to try doing that to Hairspray.

One key feature that makes the 2007 adaptation work is the choice of John Travolta to replace Divine. I don't know who else could have brought as strong a voice to that role without being overshadowed by Divine himself or the makeup job required for the part.

With the cast anchored by Travolta as Edna, the rest of the ensemble is suprisingly strong, including new discovery Nikki Blonsky as Traci, and Christopher Walken as her father Wilbur. Travolta and Walken really do play well off each other although there are a couple of moments where one wishes the scene had cut a moment or two sooner... The rest of the cast is just as strong, the song and dance sequences are well structured, all the cast can sing, and there are even some nice cameos by original cast members to watch for.

I doubt I'll benefit personally from the song lyric subtitle track or the detailed dance instruction sequences that were included as extras on the DVD, but some of the alternate versions and dropped musical numbers were also nice to see.

This is one DVD that would really benefit from a quality sound system...

An impressive single-tasker

We've all had the experience of taking a string of Christmas lights out of the box, testing them to prove they work, stringing them up, and finding that now they don't work. Until now, I haven't known of a better solution than to inspect each bulb individually, which is a painful process.

This year, I found the right tool for the job: the Lightkeeper Pro.

Its advertising, packaging, and even its documentation reads like a Super Bass-o-Matic '76 commercial. But actually does work as described. Honest!

Within its vaguely gun-shaped package is a bulb remover, a 60 Hz hum tracer, a bulb tester, a fuse tester, storage for spare bulbs, and a flashlight.

But wait! There's more!

The real magical feature is the piezoelectric light string repair device. Just remove any bulb from a dark segment, plug the gun in where the bulb was, and pull the trigger. After a couple of pulls, the string is likely to just turn back on. All except the bad bulb, which you can then replace.

Now how much would you pay?

Remember, all this can is done with the string installed and power on. And with only one short trip up the ladder to the top of the eaves.

MSRP is $25, but it can be had for $20 or so in stores like Amazon, Target and Lowes. Even if you don't need one this year, grab one in the post-season sales and add it to your toolbox. You'll thank me next year when you pull the lights back out of storage.

Comics that remind me of a certain someone

One art form that seems specifically designed for the world wide web is the comic strip. A daily three-panel strip at a legible resolution fits neatly on a page, and even a Sunday special rarely requires a scroll bar.

More importantly, the web permits an artist a degree of editorial freedom that can never be had from formal syndication. It also has a potentially world-wide audience, and with a loyal, multi-lingual fan base can even end up translated into multiple languages. This might be the earliest media product to demonstrate that self-publication is practical and that the old distribution channels may not keep their monopolies forever.

Independent music is following a similar path, podcasting has already had a visible effect on radio (although in that medium it seems like the old distributors are embracing the new channel from the outset), blogging has visibly impacted the traditional print media, and there have lately been several attempts at film and video production targeted specifically at online delivery.

Here are a few comic strips I've noticed, some of which have characters and settings that strongly remind me of people I know.

Specifically who these remind me of is left as an exercise for the reader...

Girl Genius

Adventure, Romance, Mad Science!

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

A steampunk manga written Phil and Kaja Foglio and drawn by Phil Foglio. You might recognize Phil as the artist behind the covers for the first editions of all of the Myth Adventures books. Many of the pages are full of background details and inside jokes that probably are best appreciated in the print editions. Six volumes are available as graphic novels, and volume seven is currently in progress.

Narbonic

The dreams that we have had
Are gonna prove that we're all mad
And that's okay

http://www.narbonic.com/

The story of Narbonic Labs by Shaenon K. Garrity ran from mid 2000 through the end of 2006. It is formatted as a three to five panel daily strip, and Sunday specials.

It is presently being rerun as a Director's Cut with commentary from the artist about each strip, and a weekly podcast. The entire run is also available without the commentary, and four print volumes were issued.

User Friendly

Impairing productivity since 1997.

"Tech support, ghost in the machine speaking."

http://www.userfriendly.org/

An inside view into the workings of a (fictional) small ISP called Columbia Internet. It is written and drawn by J.D. "Illiad" Frazer, and much beloved by working geeks. It is notable for its long run, with new strips appearing seven days a week (at midnight, Pacific time since Columbia Internet is located in Vancouver, B.C.).

xkcd

A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

http://www.xkcd.com/

Stick figures and geek humor written and drawn by Randall Munroe. It starts with scans of art drawn when he was supposed to be taking notes in classes, much of that early art is reminiscent of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Le Petit Prince. Most of the later art is in a minimalist stick-figure form which allows the absurdity to shine without distraction.

From the site: "Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."

Mooning Again

Since I last mentioned the Lua programming language in these pages, it has seen a surge in visibility. Yes, I know that is a coincidence, because I am pretty sure I don't have enough readers of my random musings to have had an effect.

But it is interesting to see that it has sustained its place in the TIOBE top 20 at the respectable position of #15 this month. Since TIOBE doesn't appear to keep an archive of each month's scoreboard, here is the list as of August, 2007:

Rank	Language	Ratings
1	Java	21.768%
2	C	15.699%
3	Visual Basic	10.646%
4	C++	10.111%
5	PHP	9.696%
6	Perl	5.320%
7	C#	3.987%
8	Python	2.749%
9	JavaScript	2.575%
10	Ruby	1.906%
11	PL/SQL	1.833%
12	SAS	1.389%
13	D	1.251%
14	Delphi	1.222%
15	Lua	0.645%
16	COBOL	0.600%
17	ABAP	0.587%
18	Lisp/Scheme	0.585%
19	Transact-SQL	0.549%
20	Ada	0.537%

A couple of things struck me about this list of languages. One is the absence of FORTRAN despite the continued presence of COBOL and SQL, both more venerable. This month, FORTRAN is found down at #21, or just pushed out of the top 20. The presence of D in the ranking at 13 (D is the 13th letter for the numerologists in the audience) is amusing at least partly because Walter Bright, D's creator, is a friend of a friend. I am sad to see that Java continues to dominate, but heartened to notice that the C/C++ family if counted as one language would both push Java down a notch, and allow FORTRAN to return to the top 20.

The real surprise is Lua. A year ago, TIOBE had hardly heard of the language. Last December, Lua just slipped on to the top 50 list, at a position quite near to Objective-C (near and dear to Mac OSX developers--interestingly, Objective-C hasn't budged much at all since December, since it is sitting at #50 exactly today). Lua crossed into the top 20 list by landing at 18 in July, and clearly it is on track to improve its current standing again for September.

The full story on what the TIOBE index is calculated from is found here. In short, they run hand tuned queries against all the major search engines for each language, count the significant hits, and do a lot of statistics to arrive at the score for each language. The final ranking is then simply the list of languages sorted by their scores.

In case my biases aren't clear, Lua is my new favorite language especially when combined with just enough C to get the job done. The majority of my productive work is done in C, Lua, and Perl, with the occasional diversion to C++ and on rare occasions, Java. Although I have not personally used any of the .NET family, I firmly believe that .NET is to be preferred to Java any day.

And Now, in Cat News

I haven't written much in this space before about the cats that actually own my house and run my life. That is mostly because I have been more interested in technical topics or entertainment. The existence of cats and that they are in charge was generally not germane to either of those topics.

Lately, our oldest cat Rory (short for Rorschach for the perfect ink blot mark folded along his spine) has himself become the source of technical musing. He went lame, and the lameness developed into mild paralysis of his hindquarters. Concern for his health resulted in a trip to the vet, where attempts to cure the immediate problem revealed deeper problems and resulted in a lengthily stay. He returned home for a week, but has had further difficulties and had to return to professional care.

Because of these difficulties, we have had the opportunity to see more of the inside of a well-run veterinary hospital than we ever had before.

Some background might help here. All of our cats have been seeing the same vet since they were found and adopted. All three were originally strays that volunteered for the strenuous post of indoor cat with a small household staff to keep in order. Their vet is Dr. Sylvia Domotor who now operates Dr. Domotor's Animal House in Monrovia employing several other vets and a sizable staff. She has been their vet since well before she founded her own practice. The cats remained her patients because we have always approved of her handling of them. For that matter, we have had nothing but good experiences with all of her other vets and with the rest of her staff.

And as we go through these difficult times with Rory's health, we are touched again and again by their kindness and professionalism.

Rosemary's, Mac King, and Spamalot

We just returned from a short jaunt to that great blinding spot in the desert, Los Vegas. The trip was designed to let us stuff ourselves silly, and see some silly shows. It was a complete success.

We had a phenomenal dinner at a small restaurant well off the strip called Rosemary's. The whole experience was wonderful, with just the right combination of good service, great food, and good beer. We both had the night's five-course tasting menu, including matching beers in my case. Every detail of the service, presentation, plating, food, (and matching beer selection) was perfectly executed. My only note for a return visit would be to go easier on the early beers... four 150ml servings and a smaller dessert beer do add up, especially when cleverly served in half-full 300ml mugs. The dessert course for two was a sampler of half-servings of pretty much the entire dessert menu which itself is a menu item they call their Dessert Storm. It is highly recommended if you manage to have room for dessert and can't make up your minds.

We had a very fine lunch at a hard to locate Thai restaurant called Lotus of Siam (known to foodies as LOS). It too is well off the strip, although in this case you could easily drive right past it due to the mini-mall it sits in having its face turned away from the street. Those in the know order lunch off the menu, although their buffet certainly looked and smelled good.

For entertainment in between sessions of overindulgence in food, we managed to see the classic cars at the Imperial Palace, Shrek 3, Mac King's afternoon show at Harrah's, and Spamalot at the Wynn. 

Each of those probably deserve separate reviews, but...

Mac King is a friendly down-to-earth guy who's performs as a bit of a hick in an ill-fitting plaid suit. The show is fun, and in between bouts of silliness he does some seriously good magic and gets really strong reactions even from the relatively jaded (and quite often slightly tipsy) Vegas audience. Be warned, however, that his style is not the classic gentleman magician...

Spamalot is the Vegas version of the Broadway Musical (somewhat loosely) derived from the classic Python film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For Vegas it seems to get an extra dose of showgirls, is cut a little shorter, and runs without intermission. Fans of the film are pretty certain to find most of their favorite bits and lines preserved, although some of the longer sequences from the film have been simplified. The result was a very effective translation of the experience of the film into the completely different medium of live theatre.

Back at home, we find ourselves in need of a vacation from our vacation...

MOOve over business cards

Long-time users of Flickr have probably already heard of MOO, but since the short-lived free promotion has long since expired I thought I would share my experience with them and one of their products. The executive summary is that I am very happy with their product and service.

Moo is a printing company in England that is providing a novel service. They make custom printed social cards and invitations using photography and text of your choice. But, that doesn't really sound all that novel, does it?

The difference is that they have optimized their print workflow to permit many different photographs to be used in a single print job, with printing on the reverse side that relates to both the user and the photograph itself.

They have also chosen two unusual formats for their products. Their oldest product is a kind of social card with a photo on the face and writing (up to six lines of text) and logos on the back. The text can be fixed (name, URL, phone number, email, address, or whatever else seems appropriate) or derived from the photo itself (title, date, and similar). The card is nominally 1:2.5 in aspect ratio, and my box measures 2.8cm by 6.9cm (which works out to 1:2.47). If you are keeping score, this is somewhat less than half the size of a standard US business card (5.1cm by 8.9cm, 2" by 3.5" or 1:1.75 aspect ratio). The paper used is a heavy matte-finish coated stock so the cards don't feel flimsy at all. Boxes of 100 run about US$25.

Their new product is larger, at 10cm square. It seems to be aimed at invitations and announcements, and is significantly more expensive than the classic MOO card.

They are particularly well integrated with Flickr. It was extremely easy to create a MOO account, connect it to my Flickr identity, and select an entire set of photos as the starting point for my order. Since I selected about 25 photos, the minimum order of 100 cards got 4 copies of each photo.

Their automated workflow emailed me to confirm the order within minutes, and again to confirm that it was in the hands of the Royal Mail about one week later. It arrived in my mailbox in California only five days after the email. For my US$25, I received a very nicely printed stack of cards. Since I didn't happen to include any text that was derived from the photo itself, I didn't test its ability to make the fronts match the backs but all the cards do have my info and none have anyone else's info on the back. They even included my Flickr avatar on the back!

I've given away a handful already, and expect to hand out more in the days to come.

Raving about a moon

Several months ago I tripped over a little language called Lua. It seemed like a novel idea, but its absence of curly braces and lack of ++, += and similar operators felt uncomfortable after years of C, and I didn't look very close. Then I started to notice it hiding in the most unlikely places, culminating in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom where the development team claims that over 40% of LR is implemented in the Lua programming language. It seemed like it was worth a second look (along with SQLite, the database engine behind LR, but that is another subject altogether) so I started to play with it.

In a word, "wow".

Lua is a scripting and extension language designed to be easily embedded in a host application. It has a simple C language API that permits the application to easily call functions and manipulate lua values. It also makes it easy to call C functions from lua code, and to add those functions by dynamic linkage to a running program from shared libraries (DLLs on Windows).

Lua was invented by a resourceful group at a Brazilian college to serve needs they saw for configuring and extending applications. Since it was a successor to an earlier language called Sol (Portuguese for Sun), it got named Lua (Portuguese for Moon).

As I see it, several properties of the language have contributed to its success. First, the Lua team has chosen to use the MIT license which is an open source license that also permits effectively unrestricted use in commercial products. This has made it legally possible for commercial developers to consider using the language in their products; and probably as a result of this leniency a significant number of commercial product teams are regular contributors to the lua programming community.

Second, Lua is implemented in standard C, sticking to the subset of the C language that has identical semantics if compiled as C++. The Lua language itself is compiled for a virtual machine and can be saved as (non-portable) bytecode before execution in the VM. Since it is possible (and encouraged) to write lua programs that don't need to compile new code at runtime, it is easy to separate the compiler from the interpreter and distribute only pre-compiled byte code files. Because of this, it is amazingly portable. It is found inside a shocking number of game consoles, PC games, more general products like LR, and even a wide array of embedded systems. In an embedded system, it is most likely to have the compiler stripped off to reduce the amount of code and data space required in a limited environment.

Third, and certainly not last, lua is a very expressive language. The designers have emphasized mechanisms over policies, and as a result although lua is not an object oriented language, you can use its core metatable features to implement object oriented features such as single and multiple inheritance, private data, and object and class methods. Functions are a first-class value, and hence can be stored in variables, passed as arguments to functions, and even be generated (as closures) as the return values from functions.

The core language provides numeric and string data types, along with nil, tables, functions and threads, and two kinds of data wrappers for opaque data belonging to the C side of the fence. The language provides an incremental garbage collector that can be tuned to avoid long stalls for collection.

The C API makes it easy to provide wrappers for third party libraries and system calls that can be loaded on demand. By putting the most demanding inner loops and algorithms into C libraries and leaving the overall program structure to lua, powerful utilities can be built quickly.

My first project in Lua was a serial protocol debugger for a new feature for one of Cheshire's projects. In about 1500 lines of lua and another 1500 lines of C (and only a couple of days work) I was able to build an interactive serial port debugging tool that could log traffic, load and save the logs, send arbitrary data to the device, send random data to the device, and play saved files at the device at an adjustable rate. Building something like that from scratch with C++ and MFC would have taken a lot longer and may never have been as feature rich.

Since then I have built a protocol analyzer for an unrelated Cheshire project with a much more complex packet based protocol, and even built a live status monitor with meters and displays. I have created my own generalized C language host application so that I can deliver an installable windows application as an executable, a few DLLs, and a nest of lua scripts. When my host engine is ready for public view, I will be releasing a version of it back to the Lua programming community as my thanks.

Learn more about Lua at www.lua.org where you will find links to the language itself, its reference manual, books published by its authors, and of course links to the most prominent bits of the lua community: the lua wiki and luaforge.

The tools I've built for Windows would not have been possible without some of the other work contributed by people associated with Lua's creation: IUP for portable user interface design, CD for 2-D graphics, and IM for image processing.

How not to salt your popcorn!

Apparently someone thought it would be fun to synthesize NaCl (Table Salt) directly from a bowl of molten Sodium bubbled with Chlorine gas. Imagining that this would be photogenic, they decided to have both still and video cameras at hand for the demonstration. The link is to the story at PopSci.com, the web version of Popular Science Magazine.

Lots of white smoke consisting almost entirely of NaCl evolved, engulfing a net full of popcorn and presumably salting them nicely.

Then the net holding the popcorn melted...

The photo they got for the mag is impressive enough, but the video is scary.

Now you are going to wonder how I found this... I was looking for a source of interesting looking math puzzles and found www.mathpuzzle.com, where a recent posting mentioned this exercise in absurdity. Lots of good stuff to be found on line ;-)

Just don't even think about trying to duplicate this at home!

SSSnakes...

I don't know if there is anything to really add to the great blogosphere about the film Snakes on a Plane, and yet here I am.

We saw this B-Movie gem the other night. As B-Movies go, it was exactly what you want out of the genre. Screams, slithers, laughs, and bad acting raised to a level that can only be reached by really good actors enjoying themselves. The audience screamed at the right moments, and then laughed at themselves for screaming.

Naturally almost nothing about the plot (there is one?), the situation, the snakes, or the resolution is plausible.

But it shouldn't be. This is a B-Movie, not grand cinema.

To the critics that reviewed it as art, hissss.

The paying audience wasn't hissing.

 (Well, except possibly in an Arizona theater where some pranksters let loose two live diamondbacks during a screaning, which quickly was shut down by screaming but luckily not by any snakebites.)

π (pi)

We watched a very strange film tonight. Pi. It was released in 1998 after winning awards at Sundance.

It has a surreal, stark, grainy, high-contrast black&white look with gritty sets and locations. It was shot in a lot of New York subways and streets.

Its billed as a SciFi/Thriller, probably based on the heavy math content mixed with two independent groups attempting to get inside the head of our anti-hero. Alongside the elements of a thriller, it is also a chance to watch a mathemetician descend into insanity while getting involved in the stock markets, kabala, go, computer hardware seemingly inspired by Brazil, and quite a few ants.

I liked it. But then I liked Ishtar....

Long time with no ranting

I have no excuse.

Sometimes, the real world just has to have its share of attention.

Lately, it seems I've been spending a lot of time with photographs (both my own and others) shared at Flickr. Haven't heard of Flickr? Well, you should check it out over at www.flickr.com/photos/rberteig/. Ok, so I am engaging in a cheap plug for my own photos, but hey, this is my own blog which no one else reads anyway!

Flickr is an interesting object: a purpose driven site with emergent purpose. On the face of it, it is just a place to host and share photography. But if you get immersed in it, it becomes so much more. It is also an opportunity to learn, and to teach others. It is a place to find interesting images, many of which are available for reference from blogs just like this one.

In fact, that is exactly how I came to Flickr in the first place in what turns out to be Flickrs early days. I needed a place to drop the occasional photo for a club's blog, and Blogger doesn't provide hosting for anything more than the text you are reading. But they recommended this new thing from Canada whose price and policies seemed to be a good fit.

About a year and a half later, Flickr hosts over 96000000 photos from over 1000000 members. Members post photos for a wide range of reasons, but most seem to make their work freely searchable and viewable. Many even use license terms from the Creative Commons that encourage reuse (with credit) of their work.

The group discussions operate like a traditional BBS with pictures to support interests as wide ranging as cats and sunsets, not to mention photography technique and specific cameras. Groups serve to gather photographs by topic across a broad range of users. They also serve to collect people with common interests and can be more social than photographic.

More important than groups, however, are the interlinked systems of metadata about the photographs. Flickr provides a great deal of support for EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata stored directly in the JPEG files by your camera and software. It also provides tags which can be added by you and by people you designate to describe the photo. Tags can be searched across the whole site, for specific groups, and for specific users. This makes finding all photos that were rated exactly 73/100 by the 100 points group as easy as finding square format pictures of circular clocks. In addition, photos have a title, a description, and an unbounded number of of comments from other users.

In short, I like Flickr. I like it a lot.

A break from the pattern

<rave>

When I find something done right, I have to mention that too, right?

First, a movie. Commentary on the Star Wars cycle can certainly be found in quantity on line and off. I do see the occasional film (note understatement) and read the occasional work of fiction (ditto), so I feel qualified to make a couple of observations. (I am not one of those fans who you will find in local news coverage or mocked by a late-night commedian. I merely enjoy a good, well told story and have never gone to a theater in costume. Well, not often, and only when its legitimately part of the story...)

Episode III is a masterful film. It manages the nearly impossible task of fitting seamlessly between penultimate Episode II and the original Episode IV. That is not as easy to do as Lucas makes it appear.

Lucas did succomb to the temptation to redo the F/X and tweak some details of (again, with the understatements) Episodes IV through VI. But that gave him the opportunity to get better continuity with Episodes I through III.

The cycle is now a complete story, and tells in grand epic style the of the rise, fall, and redemption of Anikin Skywalker. Luke and Leia become supporting characters, and Yoda remains, well, Yoda.

Second, a book. My latest acquisition is the just released first novel by Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian. At 625 pages, its certainly not a casual night's reading...

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