I moved my blog to blog.benad.me.

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Everybody that knows me well (and now you, unknown reader) knows how easily I can get lost, without or even with a map. Over the years I did practice reading maps, understanding them and so on, but in the end I just completely lack any sense of spatial direction.

For the past few years though things have been a bit different. Why? Because with my phone I now have a portable GPS and mapping system. Even better, with Google Maps I can use street view to see how the surroundings should look like. While that may not sound like a lot, this greatly helps. Before going some place, I “virtually” drive through the itinerary to familiarize myself with the path and how the destination looks like, so that if I’m in a place that I haven’t seen before I can actually trust my instinct that I’m lost. In which case I take out from my pocket my iPhone and follow the way back on the map.

Now, I’ve heard that Google and other companies started mapping out shopping centers and airports, though as usual they don’t include much in Canada or Montréal. Hopefully it could come soon, so that even indoors I can’t get lost. Well, most of the time.

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I always maintained that to be a good graphical user interface designer, you have to be good at two things: Graphical design, and software conception. I have an odd impression that if it weren’t from my complete inability to draw, I might actually be a good GUI designer.

One of the difficult challenges of software design is to map an inherently complex combination of computing machine states into easy to grasp higher level concepts for end users. And while it may sound eerily similar to making things look simple, it’s actually more difficult since it has to actually still not only make sense (with some kind of internal consistency), but also correctly represent the machine states. Put simply, GUIs shouldn’t (completely) lie and shouldn’t be too hard to grasp. Making things more difficult, to be consistent within a software environment, you may have to restrict yourself to a limited set of widgets, which could potentially make it difficult to fit your own metaphors into whatever tools you’re given.

So, yeah, looking at my own software designs I’m getting pretty good at software conception. If only I could also make it “pretty”.

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The trilogy of games titled “Adventure of Lolo” are very well made puzzle games made for the NES in the early 90s. I played them again recently, and they stood well the test of time. They are essentially Sokoban-like games, but with the addition of various creatures, and that you have to collect all heart items before getting the chest to open the door.

The first game (which wasn’t released initially in Japan, oddly) has a good learning and difficulty curve. At the end though some levels are difficult because they are not too well designed. Passwords are provided for every “floor” (sets of 5 levels), though if you lose all 5 lives the “continue” will let you restart exactly at the level you lost.

The second game is quite more difficult, though it has better graphics, and passwords for every level. The end levels are also more interesting than in the first game.

The third game is more an adventure that will let you chose in what order you challenge each “floor”, so that if you get stuck you can get out of the floor and pick another one. The passwords are then much more complex given the various combinations of how you can beat the levels. The graphics are much nicer, and there are several boss battles.

So, if puzzles are your thing, those games are great. Considering how playable and well-made they were, I wonder why they don’t re-release them on the iPhone and other platforms like that in a bundle.

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Managing large amounts of C code within a single process can be quite daunting. If any single thing breaks, everything breaks spectacularly. It is not surprising that on Unix, the system C was originally made for, encourages modular, multi-process design that communicate through pipes. While this kind of modular design works well for multi-machine, distributed systems, it doesn’t work too well most of the time, since code tends to be monolithic and not necessarily worth the high development overhead of that multi-process modularization.

The trick, of course, is to try to adhere to software design patters, which may help with validation and to avoid bugs as much as possible. Which led of course to C++, UML, and all those half-assed solutions. By that I mean is that what can truly help is some kind of run-time engine closely intertwined with the programming language that not only moves coding complexity to run-time behavior, but also can gracefully handle many types of programming errors.

Oh, I so much miss stack traces…

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A quick post to mention that I’m now a regular reader of the site freeindiegam.es. As its title implies, this site showcases free online of computer games made by independent developers. While they are far from big productions of video game consoles, they tend to be quite original yet still entertaining. I’m often surprised at how clever or “freshly original” they are, and since they’re are (legally) free, what’s to lose?

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This afternoon I was preparing the CSS of my new blog location when I notice how better web design tools are now compared to ten years ago. Firebug, the extension for Firefox has always been a leader, though I often used external software for CSS editing. With Safari came a powerful set of built-in tools that can inspect any page element and show how and why it was styled a certain way. Google Chrome copied that also (since it inherited from WebKit, the engine of Safari).

Today I combined both Espresso 2 from MacRabbit, powerful HTML and CSS with live preview and Firefox + Firebug, both that I haven’t used in a while. Wow. This was so much easier than plain-text editors with the CSS spec open… Maybe it’s time to revamp my web site’s (anemic) style…

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You can look at the new blog at the temporary address http://blog2.benad.me/ . It's on Squarespace, and I imported my full blog archive. For now I'm still using Posterous and autoposting to everything else, but this week I'll finalize the move. I still have to clean up the page style, tweak things here and there, use Twitterfeed to auto-post links to Twitter (using s.benad.me), and so on.

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I was thinking this morning that I could, on a whim, start learning a new language, and for once by that I don’t mean a programming language. The thing is that even if I start doing so on a whim, this would lead to a multi-year effort, so even if learning a new language is a whim, which one to pick isn’t.

So let’s break them down into multiple criteria, rate them, and pick the best. The first would be proximity to Latin or Germanic languages, more specifically French and English, the closer the easier it will be. The second would be how easy it would be to have some kind of cultural immersion, be it with other people or with media (and thus rate the Internet-connectedness of a language). Which leads to another criterion, I’d say cultural variety, because I’d prefer a language with not too many divergent regionalisms. An obvious one but difficult to measure objectively and à priori is grammar difficulty (I assume nothing can be as difficult as French). Which leads to script difficulty, both in terms of number of characters but also how many times writing cannot be inferred by the pronunciation. Finally, there’s simply overall usefulness, be it with conversing with other people or reading things online that would be of interest to me.

I mentioned “Internet-connectedness” because now the great advantage we get for cultural immersion is that as more and more media, be it video, audio or writing, is available online, we do not need to go through the stress of moving to another country altogether just to learn a new language. I say that because I’m not kind of person that has quite a lot of trouble in understanding grammar unless I see it enough time in context until “it clicks”, meaning I depend a lot on immersion to learn.

At any rate, I’ll start compiling the ratings of each of those criteria for a bunch of languages on another day.

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As I’m reviewing the movies made by Stanley Kubrick, I’m starting to get to the point where their visual aspect is important, actually spectacular. It just so happens that there is a collection of Kubrick movies on Blu-ray. To compare, I bought this 9-disk DVD collection in 2003.

Now, I’m normally against buying newer media, and I postponed buying a Blu-ray player for the longest time out of spite against Sony, but this time I might make an exception. My rationalization is that those Blu-rays have far more extra features than my old DVD set. In my DVD set there were no extras or commentaries whatsoever, but seemed to make it up with a feature-length documentary (that’s not available on the Blu-ray set). And the thing is that I will watch all the extras, so that may be well worth the price. So, there, they’ll get my money.

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So I just got by mail from Norway a bamboo USB key from Opera, the makers of the Opera web browser. How? Because I won a contest from their April fool’s. If you signed up to their bogus “we’ll send you data to offload our servers”, you would have gotten an email containing a bunch of ones and zeros. Of course, they were encoded messages. And here’s how I decoded them, using Perl and the pack function.

First, decoding the binary data. That was pretty easy:

perl -e '$_=<>;chomp;print pack(q{B*}, $_), qq{\n}'

That took care of the binary data. Now, the input was actually divided in two parts. The first decoded to a sequence of decimal numbers separated by spaces, the second some binary starting with the “BZh” which indicates Bzip2 data. Uncompress that and you see a message about posting a tweet with the hashtag #operaaprilfoolleet to be eligible to win some contest, which I did.

The first part with the sequence of decimal numbers was supposed to be easier (well, if you can’t recognize a BZip2 header). The big distinction here is that the pack function requires the input to be separator-less, in this case spaces. Since you can’t define decimal input padded as 3 digits, you’re stuck sending the input as an array instead, which works great.

perl -e '$_=<>;chomp;@f=split(/ /);print pack(q{C*}, @f), qq{\n}'

That gave me the first message, this time asking to post the hashtag #operaaprilfools, which I did.

With some luck I won the prize, an Opera-branded wood USB key, as you can see in the attached picture (or here).

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My main annoyance with “entreprise” server operating systems is how much proprietary bloat they have. Up to now, I’ve see it with Solaris 10, RedHat Enterprise Linux, IBM AIX and of course Windows Server. I understand that in the enterprise world there are a ton of requirements, which inevitably leads to feature bloat, but what irritates me is that each time there is bloat it is described with a proprietary terminology. I really, really don’t think that those made-up product names and thingymabob infrastructure crap are even worth the learning curve.

As an example, I did learn quite a lot about Solaris administration. And I can now safely say that most of it was a waste of time because it was too Solaris-specific. Simple things that are somewhat standardized across Linux and even Mac are completely weird in Solaris (like a simple computer reboot), so it felt like they kept this legacy “culture” as an intellectual lock-in.

So, you want to be a sysadmin and not waste your memory on arcane proprietary crap that will be of no use whatsoever outside of your company? I’d highly suggest Debian GNU/Linux, some Apache HTTPD and some Samba. Everything else seems like a waste of your brain cells in comparison.

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Well, the vacation is finished, and now I’m back to hectic work. Finished much too late, and I still have a few emails to send. The net result is that I have to go back to my optimized “media consumption process”, and maybe find ways to optimize things a bit more.

For example, my podcast queue tend to grow too big as the week goes by, meaning I need to trim it down to a more reasonable size. Same thing for reading, be it on my Kindle or audiobooks. Even my Twitter feed needs some trimming down. And now the problem is to find the time to do that trimming…

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This is part 4 of 12 of my retrospective of Stanley Kubrick’s career.

At last Stanley Kubrick was able to independently make a movie on his own. Also, from this point on, all of his movies are part of the Stanley Kubrick Collection DVD Set I acquired many years ago.

As you can expect, he had to do something controversial by commissioning Vladimir Nabokov to adapt his book “Lolita” into a screenplay. How can a movie released in the early 60s in England have as its main subject pedophilia?

Unlike his previous movies, the cinematography is subdued. There are some interesting sets, like the prologue (and conclusion) and the high school dance, but otherwise the imagery is somewhat bland. What shines though is the screenplay and acting.

Given the taboo subject matter, even with the subtle change of age of Lolita from 12 to 14, nothing is explicitly or implicitly shown. Also, everything related to sexual matters are told by double meanings. But this gives a great chance for the actors to play out not only these, but various kinds of misunderstandings and lies.

It is quite clear that the characters are not shown into under sympathetic light. Quite on the contrary, the main character and pedophile Dr. Humbert is shown in a half pathethic and comedic way by the childish way he falls in love with Lolita. And she doesn’t escape either, since she ends up doing the first seduction move consentually. Actually, all the main characters are shown to be weird, messed up and ridiculous. Charlotte, the mother of Lolita, is shown as a controlling mother and desperate at seducing Humbert. Peter Sellers as Quilty is downright creepy.

James Mason does a tour de force as Dr. Humbert, acting as a strange, romantic and nervous writer. While there is some narration done by Mason, most of the acting is done through dialogue, with Dr. Humbert struggling between is inner feelings and what he has to expose to others. A note has to be made of the very good music, which seems to present the inner emotions of Dr. Humbert in many scenes, with undertones of ridicule.

The only criticism I could make is that, while the dialog and acting are good, the movie is a little bit too long at over 150 minutes. Compared to the tight pacing of Spartacus, Lilita felt slow at times. Otherwise, this is a great showcase of good writing and acting that will make you cringe and smile.

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Well, I just finished moving my blog to blog.benad.me. Kind of. It’s still hosted by Posterous, and my web site is still hosted by Fused. It seems that recently their configuration panel now supported an “Advanced DNS Zone Editor”, which let me point “blog.” to either an IP (“A” record) or another domain (“CNAME” record). Since Posterous supports custom domains, this was a breeze to set up.

Now, I’m already halfway ready to move my blog to Squarespace. Painfully (totally caused by Posterous), I finally was able to copy all my posts from Livejournal to Wordpress. I had to manually re-insert tags, remove duplicates, re-autopost missing posts, and so on.

Below is a summary of the current post migration, and the way blog.benad.me will eventually point to what’s on Squarespace. You can see the image also here.

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At times, I drool over some new “indie” games available to download (at a reasonable price) on Xbox 360, for example Fez and Bit.Trip Runner 2. But then I don’t have an Xbox.

So here’s the problem. Xbox starts at $200, and with a decent hard drive at $250 (but that’s a special price, since normally that would be $300). Add also $60 a year for Xbox Live Gold, or whatever that means. It gets worse. I would have to essentially “maintain” this new mini-computer. I’m already annoyed by the regular software updates to my Samsung Blu-Ray player, so imagine how annoyed I would be with Xbox’s ones.

I’m starting to understand why games on the iPhone are getting so popular. Maintenance of an iPhone is easy, and I already own one. I don’t have this $300+ barrier to entry to even start playing games, and what I already have is functional for other things than games. Yes, I know, you can use the Xbox as a media center of sorts, but I already have my Mac Mini for that.

So, I guess I’ll be skipping a lot of good games because I don’t want to bother with video game consoles anymore. Instead, I’ll reduce my queues of movies to see and books to read, and I think that’s for the best.

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I mentioned in a previous post that professional movie reviewers tend to review based on their expectations on what a movie should have rather than its artistic intent. With animated movies, I still contend that due to their different form, there should be more leeway about reviewing them, especially for the potential lack of plot (the movie Fantasia comes to mind).

I recently came across a re-edit for Star Wars made by “the Movie Preview Critic” called “Star Wars The Moviepocalypse Edit”. While it’s considerably shorter than the original, you may want to watch the introduction and the conclusion (at the 1 hour 32 minutes mark). Essentially, it’s Star Wars in the “current” style of movies, meaning with character development and motivation completely missing. One of the point of “the critic” is that good storytelling tends to follow Aristotle’s Poetics, in order of importance: plot, character, thought, diction, melody and spectacle. The thesis of “the critic” is that movies nowadays tend to use a reverse order of importance (spectacle first), killing the quality of story telling.

I tend to agree. Even in cases when the plot is thin because there is a greater emphasis on the other elements (the opera “The Magic Flute” comes to mind), the plot and the characters are still critical to create an emotional bound with the audience. For example, with Redline, we still had to learn why the characters so much want to win. Even in Tron Legacy, with its thin plot, still exposes to a great length the characters and motivations (thought). Their plots are simple, but not all movies need a deep, complicated intellectual plot or one with endless twists and turns to be engaging, as long as characters and motivations are well established.

So, Roger Ebert wrote a scathing review for “The Raid: Redemption”, and had to defend it. Somehow, I agree with him. Why? For three reasons.

First, movies can be forgiven for lapses in plot if they make it up in being art. Not just a spectacle, but something about human nature. Not all movies need to be life-altering, but often times in the stylistic approach and in the way the characters live in those fictitious worlds, it can tell something about what we are or what we should be. It could be as simple as the “coolness” of how JP in Redline doesn’t take racing too seriously, the melancholic computer landscapes of “TRON: Legacy” or the unreal-ness of “A Scanner Darkly”, they all have an artistic point to make, even if clumsily told. (Similarly, badly worded poetry can still be good, as so on.)

Second, you can make it up even with a lack of artistic depth with masterful originality. Not just being original, but being good at what was just invented. Being “same but better” is not sufficient to push the medium to new territories. Again, the many animated movies I hold dear all tend to have that “you’ve never seen something like that before, and we’ll be bold at it”.

Thirdly, it’s about the message. To put it back into context, “The Raid: Redemption” is maybe the best martial arts movie out there. But it’s not art and it’s not much original. But to top it off, it’s about people killing other people and almost nothing else. No wonder Ebert drew parallels between that movie and video games. Even in the highly-competitive Redline, racers don’t actually hate each other. In “Yellow Submarine”, it’s about “peace and love through music”. I could keep on going. The whole movie of “Raid” is akin to “violence porn” (like “Human Centipede” is about “horror porn”), where “porn” means devoid of anything of human sensibility. It could be the best movie of its genre, but if in the end it glorifies meaningless violence, why should I even care?

In the end, Ebert’s criticism of someone’s review (err, lawsuit) of Drive is the same as my criticism of Monji’s review of Redline: you have the wrong expectations for a movie’s genre, but it’s still OK to have expectations about movies in general. Most comments on Ebert’s post are trash, so I skipped them. But on Monji’s post, I loved that “Rubi-kun” drew parallels between Redline and the original cut of “The Thief and the Cobbler”, another flawed animation masterpiece. And that is my point: Sometimes flawed movies can be the most beautiful and touching ones, and absolutely worth viewing.

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A few days ago I feebly attempted to create a live Linux USB for my MacBook Pro (mid-2010 model). And, oh boy that failed miserably.

While there is no issue booting from a CD, this can cause a problem on newer Mac models that don’t have a CD drive at all. In those cases, simply dd-ing the ISO (or converted to DMG) file to a USB doesn’t work at all. Why? Well, I can’t say exactly why, but essentially, Macs do not use BIOS but use EFI.

If you don’t know, the whole reason why Apple made “Bootcamp” was to support a BIOS emulation layer within EFI to allow booting Windows. While there are some version of Windows Vista and higher that can boot on EFI, they don’t tend to be as supported (driver-wise) as BIOS-booting.

The crux of the issue, then, is that if there is such a thing nowadays as “PC-compatible”, it essentially means x86-compatible and BIOS, and Macs are still not PCs in that sense. So a vast majority of Linux distributions cannot boot as-is on a USB key on a Mac.

I found some kind of solution here that allows booting an ISO file from a USB key with no need to burn a CD. It ripped apart the internals of rEFit to do so, but it seems to work. I said “seems” because there were still video driver issues with Ubuntu, and I haven’t tried any other Linux distro yet, but at least something was booting.

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“The Ten…” by (the) Steve Martin is a compendium of some messages he posted on his Twitter account. It is a somewhat small book (unsurprising given that Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters), but it is quite funny and worth the read.

To give you an idea of his humor and style when using Twitter, here’s a recent example: “So beautiful today in New York. Each leaf on every tree bloomed with life. Every person wore a friendly smile. I wish I had been there”.

In a way, the short form of Twitter fits Martin’s humor style, and this is why after he found how to use Twitter he is now using that as a new comedic platform. At times, even the replies are as funny (or funnier) as Martin’s messages. So, two things: Buy his book, and follow him on Twitter.

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Running at over 57 hours, I listened to the audio version of “The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany” by William L. Shirer. By covering the history of Germany from the end of the first World War to the end of the second through the peculiar Austrian Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist political party, the book covers two world-shaping parts of history I knew little about. And it does so very comprehensively.

At first, when I started listening to it almost 6 months ago, I was expecting it to focus almost entirely on the millitary aspect of the war, like the History channel used to do so much on cable. Instead, Shirer is a journalist and he focused mostly on the political aspect, following the stories on individual people, mostly Hitler. Also, his focus is almost entirely on Germany, and not the global war that included Mussolini and Japan with the rest of the world. That helped a lot, especially since the scope of the book was already gigantic.

Also, the narration, voiced by Grover Gardner in 2010, was really good at saying all those foreign names properly (not perfectly for French, but close enough). For an audiobook of this magnitude, they could have cut corners with a sup-par recording quality and narration, but I was surprised by the quality, accuracy and un-monotone reading.

One thing that’s special about the history of that war is that not only the author retells some of his experiences as he lived through Nazi Germany as a journalist there, but also that the Nazi’s thorough documentation was almost entirely captured intact at the end of the war. More than that, but the documentation was cross-referenced during the trials that followed. I fear that sadly this will not repeat itself, since secret documents may never be captured (with the rare exception of what Wikileaks achieved), and of course there are no trials of war crimes anymore since they are simply branded “terrorism”.

In the end, I may remember only half of all the facts, names and events presented in the book, but the author successfully captured in a kind of historical microcosm the horrors in which a population can be captured in given the right combination of cultural past, xenophobia, propaganda, and a few insane people with too much power that a population was too much willing to give up for a cause. I can recall Hitler’s meetings to prepare the invasion and killing of millions, done with the same ruthlessness as I would manage writing computer code. It is too easy to lose compassion and humanity given power, and the horrific story of Hitler and his Third Reich will keep reminding me of that.

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