Obligatory End of Year Wrap Up Post

In 2008, I wasn't organized enough to keep a list of which books I read as I did in 2007, but it was probably rather less than 50. But, thanks to Netflix, I am able to easily recover a list of which films made it through my rather idiosyncratic random selection system again. So here they are, along with my sardonic short reviews:

1. Man on Wire: not to be confused with Man on Fire.
2. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer: Completely unmemorable
3. Porco Rosso: You'll believe a pig can fly!
4. The Yes Men: Pranksters take down the WTO
5. Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder: Disc 1: Diminishing returns
6. Man on Fire: not to be confused with Man on Wire
   
7. Wishful Thinking: irredeemable weak rom-com
   
8. A Few Good Men: the truth hurts
   
9. Helvetica: You'll believe a font can love!
   
10. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: can't get you out of my head
    
11. The Cat's Meow: the truth Hearst
    
12. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: and don't come back
13. Collateral: Damaged thriller
    
14. Adaptation: A proper Charlie
    
15. Chasing Amy: If you seek Amy?
    
16. Quadrophenia: Where do the Who live?
    
17. The Sting: Call the police!
    
18. Blade: Good clean Vampire fun
    
19. The Cheap Detective: The Falk Guy
    
20. Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic: Same jokes, different order
    
21. Steamboy: Steam punk
    
22. The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer: Eat my shorts!
    
23. Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man: You'll believe a man can lose an election
    
24. Howl's Moving Castle: More Miyazaki Madness
    
25. King Kong: Gorilla goes Ape
    
26. D.E.B.S.: Oddly positioned lesbian love story
    
27. The Godfather: not the head you want to be given
    
28. Sketches of Frank Gehry: mind the sharp edges
    
29. All the President's Men: the truth brings down the pres
    
30. Street Fight: dirty politics in Newark
    
31. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: best fillibuster in movie history
    
32. North by Northwest: crop-duster
    
33. Lost in Translation: Come again?
    
34. Ocean's Twelve: A sequel too far
    
35. Van Helsing: Mindless action
    
36. Maxed Out: apparently we're borrowing too much
    
37. Why We Fight: to feed the military-industrial complex
38. Silent Running: psychopath murders crew in space
    
39. Starter for Ten: UBris hubris
    

Blimey

It took me a couple of listens before I noticed the rather staggeringly puerile single entendre in Britney's "If You Seek Amy". I must be getting older. I suppose it's destined to remain an album track, unless someone decides to edit it into something else ("If see ukulele", maybe?). You can listen to it care of YouTube, and enjoy the almost witless user comments. Bet Kevin Smith is wishing he'd called his film "Seeking Amy" instead, though.

Talent Shows

Big music excitement in the UK this week, as the nation tries to decide which version of "Hallelujah" is best: Jeff Buckley's soaring version, or a cash in copy from a talent show contestant. The result will be known later today, though it's pretty much a done deal thanks to the popularity of the talent show in question. "Presenting" the Top 40, alleged personality Fearne Cotton rather spoiled the tension by announcing "We'll be talking to the number one artist, whoever that might be." Er, right.

Praying to the Wireless Gods

I have a photo of two frollaborators (pointless portmanteau of friend and collaborator) kneeling in front of a hotel window on the 14th floor, with their laptops on the windowsill. The reason being that in this way they could just about pick up a WiFi signal. I'm now in a somewhat similar position myself: laptop hoisted up on a couple of conference proceedings next to the window, in order to catch the signal of a neighbor whose password I've borrowed. Since they are the only people in the world still using B, the signal is weak and a bit flaky, so I can only pick it up from this one location, so it doesn't really feel like "true" wireless -- it has the same pauses and cut-outs more familiar from dial-up, which was my solution for my Maidstone trips in previous years. It's quite weird to go back to the model of actively having to connect to the internet to check email or look something up, and then disconnecting. I don't recommend it.

XBMC vs VLC vs MPC

AC asks "So XBMC is better than VLC?"

Well, maybe, but it's not quite a fair comparison. XBMC I use in its original incarnation, on a softmodded xbox to stream content off my main server. VLC I've used as a desktop video client, but I got increasingly frustrated with it: it would have problems rendering video occasionally: failing to show anything, but stopping and restarting the video would fix it. It also seemed very slow to seek. So I've gone back to my previous desktop solution: MediaPlayerClassic, plus ffdshow and possibly another codec pack or two ("Windows essential codec pack" seems to do the job, and is not obviously full of adware crap).

Well, you did ask.

Video on Deplane

Continental is proudly trumpeting the installation of VOD on its 757s, about a decade after it would have been cool. This means I will get slightly less work done when I am returning from trips abroad.

The last CO flight I was on had this system, and it's a bit rubbish, actually. It crashed about 3 times during the flight (maybe there has been a "firmware" upgrade to fix this: waiting for a firmware upgrade seems to be the modern equivalent of praying). The selection of content was pretty dire: the press release trumpets "25 movies and 25 TV shows", as if half its passengers aren't already carrying that much with them in their pockets. Any half decent system needs to have at least 50 movies and 150 episodes to have a decent chance of having something worth watching. Lastly, because it kept crashing, I'm now in the position of having seen about three movies most of the way through. Like many other systems, the only way to navigate through the movie is via fast-forward and rewind. Fast-forward on that system I pegged at roughly 8x, meaning that when the system crapped out after two hours of a long movie, it would take about 15 mins to get back to where you were; not really worth it for the last five minutes of, er, "Speed Racer". (don't tell me what happened). I did this for one movie, by going to the toilet while it was running forwards. Still, fast-forward and rewind are terrible ways to seek through video content. As I've probably opined before, but can't be bothered to look for, the main actions I want to take are "Wait, I missed that bit of dialogue -- go back about ten seconds" and "Hmm, I've seen the first half of this already, jump forward in large chunks till I get to something new, then let me go back and forth a bit till I find where I want to be." Modern video clients, such as the superlative XBMC, have lots of options for doing exactly this, but other things seem obsessed with the idea that I want to emulate an almost extinct analog linear tape based system. Ffwd and Rewind are artifacts of tape, and must be destroyed. That is all.

TV on the radio

Daily Mail gets itself into a frothing, incoherent rage... over nudity on the radio.

What should I do now?

As usual, I will be returning to the motherland in December. As a result, I'll be at a loose end (in Loose) from mid-December to the end of the month. Exercise usual means of communication to influence my movements to intersect with your locale, if you so desired.

No2ID3?

I've wittered on about the difficulty of finding the ideal digital music player before, though I'm too lazy to find the link. I recently picked up a cheap 8Gig refurbed player since it was on offer, and the headphone connector on my current model is going again. Unlike the various models that I've owned previously, this one is based on ID3 tags.

Who thinks that this is a good idea? Even assuming that you have got your entire music collection all tagged up nicely via CDDB or similar resource, how is that any way to navigate your files? The whole folders approach has worked reasonably well on computers for the last few decades. It gives a nice flexibility for people to arrange things how they like, according to whatever idiosyncratic hierarchy and arrangement happens to appeal to them. In particular, it's particularly terrible when it comes to audiobooks and radio recordings: I want to listen to one of these at a time. But under the tag system, it's just horrible to navigate through these. Not least because the tags on these things are inevitably buggered, and it doesn't seem worth the fuss to try to fix them.

So I'm not all that thrilled with ID3 tag browsing. Unless anyone can suggest a sensible way to get them to behave, I think I'll stick to file browsing in future.

The internet alphabet

If you have a copy of Firefox, it comes with a google search bar built in. Start typing in this search bar, and "suggestions" pop up -- presumably, the first of these is the most frequent. This changes over time. I didn't pay much attention to this, until I started typing something beginning with 's', and the first suggestion was "Sarah Palin". That's scary. So, here is the "Internet Alphabet" of top suggestions for each letter. Your results may vary based on country, time, history, and other randomness.

A is for Amazon
B is for Bebo
C is for Craigslist
D is for Dictionary
E is for Ebay
F is for Facebook
G is for Google
H is for Hotmail
I is for IMDB
J is for Jennifer Hudson
K is for Kelly Blue Book
L is for Limewire
M is for MySpace
N is for Next
O is for Obama
P is for Photobucket
Q is for Quotes
R is for Runescape
S is for Sarah Palin
T is for Target
U is for utube
V is for Verizon Wireless
W is for Wikipedia
X is for X Factor
Y is for YouTube
Z is for Zip Codes

Van Buren!

I noticed that since Monday evening, I've been getting lots of hits on "Van Buren" "Lowest place in hell". I think it's because at about that time Dorris Kearns-Goodwin sang a little snatch of that song. (Hulu embed probably doesn't work outside the US Empire).

So, yeah, here's where you can get the lyrics, and find out how to get hold of a copy.

More PDF font embedding hijinks

I've complained bitterly before about the stupid requirement of many publishers (IEEE, ACM) to embed all fonts in a PDF document -- including the "base fonts", which any compliant reader must be able to render. Because of this, it's actually quite hard to persuade many pieces of software to embed base fonts, because, why would you ever need to do this? This can lead to quite a stalemate, and a lot of frustration.

I had a nice system all working, but in my latest work I've been using Gnuplot with the PDF terminal. This outputs directly to PDF, and avoids a bug in Gnuplot when generating bar charts. All well and good, except that the resultant PDF does not embed the base fonts. And there's virtually no documentation on the Gnuplot PDF terminal, certainly nothing that talks about this.

So, after a lot of frustration and swearing, I came up with the following ugly hack: run the pdf through gnuplot ghostscript with the pre-press option, and output to pdf. Here's the command line I came up with, though it might be more complex than it needs to be:

gs -q -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=tmp.pdf -dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -c .setpdfwrite -f $1

Where $1 is the name of the input file, and tmp.pdf is the name of the output.

The ironically named "PDF Express" system has yet to verify that the resulting compiled file does the necessary thing, but I'm reasonably confident that it will work now.

Things that continue to annoy me

People who use "epsfig". It's 2008, folks! Use \includegraphics, for goodness sake.

Abs' Hen Party

More from the "mail sent to my email account that was clearly intended for someone else" file. Today's missive seems to concern the planning for a party for some hens, or chickens, or something. Anyway, here it is in case the proper recipient happens to be reading:

Abs' hen party December 6 2008

Hi everyone

Just an update on the hen party front - at this stage we're thinking the day
(Saturday December 6) will go something like this:

Afternoon ice skating at Somerset House (with mulled wine first)

Drinks then dinner at a private room - venue to be decided. We'll make sure
there's somewhere for us to get changed out of our skating threads.

Dancing at the Pigalle Club near Piccadilly, there will be a show and then
live music all night long. It's meant to be loads of fun and we'll all need
to dress up 50s-style!

Remember, all of this is a big secret from the hen!

If you could all let me know asap whether you can make it, and if you would
like to come for the whole thing or only certain parts let me know too, as
we'll need to book and buy tickets etc quite soon.

I'll get back to you with costs etc before locking anything in.

Looking forward to it! Sophie and Hannah xx

Moral Victory

I recently called my credit card provider in the UK to query why I was being billed for a month when I had paid off the balance in full the previous month and not spent anything on the card in the interim (it was something to do with some scam the credit card companies pull by charging you interest on cash balances differently from anything else). The drone on the phone refused to admit fault, but reversed the interest charge of 76p in a show of goodwill anyway.

I just checked my phone bill, and that call cost me $2.79.

But the important thing is that I WON. OK?

When all is sed and done

s/maver/d/ on:

"I've joined this team that is a team of mavericks... I think that's why we need to send the maverick from the Senate and put him in the White House... He has been the maverick. He has ruffled feathers... A team of mavericks, of course we're not going to agree on 100 percent of everything... People aren't looking for more of the same. They are looking for change. And John McCain has been the consummate maverick in the Senate over all these years... Also, John McCain's maverick position that he's in, that's really prompt up to and indicated by the supporters that he has."

Certainly, suspending his campaign was a maverick move.

Not remotely related

Today's two songs that sound vaguely like each other for the first few seconds, if you squint, and then bear no resemblance to each other whatsoever, goes to:


Granddaddy -- Underneath the Weeping Willow


K9 & Company -- Theme Tune