Finally fantastic film.

Like the other FF films, everything is computer-generated. The graphics are just superb. It is visually stunning and the images just keep getting better and better.

(No I didn’t understand the storyline. It doesn’t matter if the story and characters are silly or the facial animation is sometimes wooden.)

You still can’t take your eyes off the screen. It’s almost the pinnacle of artistic expression using three-D graphics.  I’ll write more on this when i have watched the dvd-extras and may be more coherent and less gushing.

It’s not often that your email can make you feel sick but seeing a returned as undeliverable email that was supposed to have originated from my account and which was a Barcalays Bank scam fills me with a mixture of rage and horror.

>:-(

Checking my traffic logs for the past few days I have found a huge pile of IPs with Afrinet domains apparently sending and receiving packets from my coomputer plus a huge number of malformed and bogus packets today. I seem to have sorted that out or its stopped of its own accord.

Any sensible ideas about what I should about it? I have already run a virus checker and I have a firewall and my browser is supposedly so well defended that I can barely view a web page without having to enable a scripts for every dozen words on the page.

The remaining choices seem to be (a ) ignore it – the most likely given my life track record ( b) complain to my ISP (c ) do something else that I haven’t thought of. So – anyone who’s reading this, and has any ideas at all, please tell me.

Don’t read unless you are a cat or dog. Dead rats, birds or other mammals do not make acceptable inter-species Easter gifts.

if you are a dog, feel free to bring home dug-up gold doubloons. If you are a cat, just don’t bother. There is nothing you can kill that will bring as much pleasure from your food providers than you could give by just not scenting every corner of their living rooms.

Interviews with Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, George Lucas and James Cameron – the ultimate blockbuster sci-fi directors – connected 50s movie clips in  “Keep Watching the Skies,” broadcast  in the UK on the Sci-fi channel this afternoon.

This could have been unwatchably dull. It turned out to be an excellent programme. The clips were well-ordered to present a narrative about early sci-fi. The uniformly - if oddly -white-bearded directors discussed the films that had influenced them as children. In the process, they explained a lot about the ideas and references in their movies, as well as contributing to a coherent argument about  how postwar sci-fi films reflected the social and political fears and hopes of the time.

For example, there was a fascinating bit where Spielberg discussed a film in which a group of kids were the only ones to see and communicate with a benign alien, which showed where he’d got the inspiration from ET and explained part of what he was trying to express in it. (Sorry, I wasn’t taking notes. I didn’t catch its name.)

The directors drew parallels between the two movie approaches to aliens – either childlike innocence repaid with evil, as in War of the Worlds, or human suspcion of outsiders, which leads to unnecessary wars against the Other. Inevitable comparisons were drawn with the expansion of Western cultures and the way the West reacts to the Third World .

There were a few unconvincing moments that I’m just putting in here to tone down the effusive raving. It’s hard to accept that even the most obsessive movie-goer could remember so much about their responses from 50 years ago. These directors could discuss scene details that their 6 year old selves allegedly noticed better than I can remember the broad plots of a quarter of the films I saw last year.

George Lucas claimed that his Star Wars robots owed nothing to Robbie the Robot in the Forbidden Planet, despite his admiration of the film, but was based on Fritz’s Lang’s Metropolis. This kept to the film directors’ union rule 43 – “A director must always reference at least one 1920s art film as an influence.”  This reference would be convincing from the director of Tron (a real nouveau Metropolis.) It beggars the imagination to connect R2D2 with the Metropolis robot images I have. Lucas’s words were undercut by being voiced shortly after a clip from the Forbidden Planet, where Robbie the Robot looked and acted exactly like R2D2’s big brother. (My bad here, it has occurred to me too late that he may have been referring to C3P10, which i suppose is a bit like a Metropolis robot. However, I am not going to spoil a good criticism, just because it’s contradicted by the facts.)

The movie clips were great. It had the seminal scenes from  movies which would be probably too boring to watch all the way through – now we’ve got used to better special effects and sci-fi that’s not shot mainly in a studio. They were connected in a way that gave me a deeper insight into the effects of their social context (fear of nuclear war)  than the tiny predictable sci-fi section of a Film course that I did at university x years ago.

Basically, it was a programme that had the acknowledged geniuses of mass-market sci-fi paying homage to their influences. It made you want to look at the originals and to reconsider the sci-fi from the 70s. It being on SciFi Channel, it will be repeated to death – it’s probably already been on a dozen times. It’s well worth watching out for.

1. “Success” here means “success in making up inspirational lists.” The first rule is therefore to make up an inspirational numbered list.

2. Ignore the dictionary definition of secret. Otherwise, by definition, the seven secrets aren’t.

3. Put said numbered list on a web site. Don’t divulge more than a few of the secrets online,  so that you can get subscribers to pay for your book or CD in order to find out the others.

Sorry, folks, there was no room for any more secrets but you can find out full details of the amazing secrets of business success by visiting http://www.compuskills.co.uk.

If you think of Christopher Ecclestone as a present day Tom Baker, this new Dr Who acts more like a modern Sylveste McCoy.

Still, the first programme of the new series wasn’t bad. If he tones down the suppressed hysteria, he should be OK in the part. 

Billie Piper did most of the acting in this first episode. (She has the advantage of  loooking and sounding dumb  – and of even having demonstrated real-life dumbness by marrying Chris Evans. So, when she turns in a competent performance, as she has done throughout Dr Who, the audience is so impressed that she can do little wrong.)  Maybe she should stay centre stage throughout the series or at least until we can get used to yet another Dr Who with an annoying face.

This has got to be one of the oddest but most welcome holidays.

Odd? It doesn’t have a set date. It’s something to do with phases of the moon, I believe. Who works it out? Every year, calendars tell us when Easter is. Who tells the calendar manufacturers? They could print all the diaries and Western calendars in the world by just working out the leap years and setting the length of February – making sure they remember the old “February has 28 days clear… etc saying” to work out how long the months are. They can easily set out the dates of Christmas and New Year and May Day. But when it comes to Easter and Whit and Pancake Tuesday and all those other days (sorry, Days) that depend on Easter – who tells them?

Also odd, because if it’s supposed to be the date of the crucifixion, then why not just set one, as has been done with Christmas? The obvious argument is that it’s the old spring festival and reflects the progress of the northern hemisphere’s yearly cycle. Which is obviously true and fair enough. But why doesn’t this apply to Christmas? It’s always a couple of days after the Winter equinox.

Welcome? Good Friday is the only bank holiday that’s on a Friday, which makes it seem particularly well-named as Good. All other bank holidays allow you to miss a work Monday, but there isn’t that much you can do on a Sunday that requires an extra lie-in on Monday. Bank holiday Mondays turn Tuesdays (so-so) into alternate Mondays (bad). Good Friday turns a Thursday (so-so) into a Friday (good) AND gives you an extra Saturday (excellent). And even gives you an extra Bank Holiday in the next week.

Even better, Easter comes at a time when you have to be clinically depressed not to feel some optimism relating to the next few months of warmer longer days, no need to wear overcoats and boots and tights (this is only an advantage if you’re a woman, normally). This year it was perfectly timed to match the first decent weather seen all year in the North of England.

More good things – even if you have 30 kids, nephews, nieces, friends’ kids, grandhildren and great-grandchildren to buy presents for, you can get them all an Easter egg and have change out of £40. Try doing that at Christmas.

(Buy them Cadbury’s Creme Egg multipacks and you’ll have change out of a tenner, but you have to be on the dole or a pensioner to get away with that, really. Even better, you can get those candy-coated little chocolate eggs that are speckled to look like real birds’ eggs. However giving one of those would probably be worse than just not giving anything. Ideally, you have to put a few in tissue paper in a fake bird’s nest made out of Flakes. )

And you don’t have to go round a million shops choosing things. If it’s chocolate and it’s even remotely oval* – it will do. They’ll not notice any difference after the first one or two anyway, and it’s ten to one they’ll vomit them all up within 3 hours of waking anyway.

Altogether, it’s hard to find anything bad to say about Easter as a holiday season. As a religious festival, it’s hard to say anything that won’t offend somebody in some way, so I won’t.

… Or not much anyway. This is a bit related to its religious side. The music is rubbish. Christmas has fantastic carols. Easter doesn’t have much in the way of songs. “There is a green hill far away” is about it. This has miraculous powers to bring tears to the eyes of any child who’s ever had to sing it in Assembly. However, set it against the full set of carols and Christmas wins hands down over Easter. But that’s probably the only thing its scoresheet is down on.

So, Happy Easter

* A Terry’s chocolate orange will do at a pinch. In fact, a box of chocolates is OK as well, unless it only has square ones, in which case it’s all nougat or toffees and NO ONE will thank you for it.

.net is really good so I don’t want it to seem that this blog is full of  rants about it. This entry is meant to be seen as constructive criticism. On the positive side, it shows that we are paying attention.

However, the expert panels are often quite annoying. Contestants in the weekly challenge tend to be reasonably new web designers who want to get their names known, unsurprisingly. The “expert” judges get their names known, with an “expert” tag attached, which gives them all the publicity adavantage that the challengers get, plus extra kudos. And sometimes, one suspects that they are not so expert after all.

However, it is the whole idea of the expert panel that is the most dubious part of the exercise. For most sites, appealing to experts is of little value. The general public is not concerned about the issues that concern web designers.

As a rule, the internet-browsing public don’t care if the site fits the current web fashions. They don’t care about much except whether a site does what it is supposed to. If they want information, they expect it to turn up in a readable and usable form.  If they want to buy goods online, they expect the process of finding what they want, working out the cost and how to pay and arranging delivery to be straightforward, fast and secure. They will just give up and not purchase anything if it seems like more trouble than going to the shops. So why get experts to judge the user interface of an e-commerce site? Stop a dozen people at random. Choose teenagers, students, pensioners, cleaners, factory workers, bar staff and office workers rather than “experts” and it will be obvious what e-commerce sites work

Sorry I couldn’t resist that. As someone who actually works with statistics, I can confirm almost any statistics you examine in detail turn out to be based on spurious data.

The Bad Science article was particularly effective in uncovering the mythical nature of the doubling (1.4 rounded down to 1 and 1.9 rounded up to 2). Ben Goldacre even managed to explain the impact of clustering in comprehensible terms. Wow.

Rounding formed the basis of the oldest forms of computer crime (Round the results of millions of money calulations down and you can amass and, obviously, remove the invisible money that results. 100,000,000 times .5p is half a million pounds. Nowadays, the banks are wise to it of course – they keep the invisible money themselves)

Statistics are used to support almost any argument. This is not a fault in the statistical procedures. (I am prepared to take their value as given, insofar as I will never understand half of them.) The problem comes from the way statistics are embedded in social relations. Pure research for its own sake is rare. Who would pay for it? So any published statistics are created for some purpose – to direct the use of resources, to evaluate the success of a policy, and so on.

The “so on” includes influencing public opinion. The media are not interested in publishing dull statistics but they are very keen on inflaming public opinion. We have an infinte appetite for hearing that the young people are behaing worse than in the past, so how could a newspaper resist a headline grabbing statistic that involves youth, drugs and things getting worse?

Many thanks to Ben Goldacre for paying attention to a use of statistics and for having the wit to ask the rare questions – what are these numbers? what do they mean? who collected them?

Very good point in post in the entry below about tutorials for beginners that leap from “Hello, world” to how you programme the space shuttle.

It is almost impossible to find an introductory book for “idiots” or “dummies” that doesn’t do this. There are books that promise you can learn to use SQL, PHP AND Apache in 24 hours. I don’t know how much of a moron this makes me. I can’t even read a couple of thousand pages of a novel in 24 hours , let alone read a couple of thousand pages of a book that’s too heavy to lift while actually writing and running the code.

If the Trades Descriptions Act covered these books they would have to be titled “Learn enough of x to be reasonably confident, if you have access to good internet forums and a few mates who know all about x, over the course of 6 months solid effort. Oh, and by the way, you had better be really good with computers to start with”

This would probably shift a few less books. However, when you did the introductory bit that lets you write “My first x application” and display your own name onscreen, then wondered if your book had been sold with a dozen missing chapters because the next page says “Now code the operating software to control a nuclear reactor” you would at least be prepared for it to take some effort.

That Ruby on Rails introduction below is probably one of the worst introductory sentences imaginable. Could anyone read it and bring themselves to read on?

It’s impossible to write about computers without using technical terms but technical terms are not the same as jargon. And there is almost never a good excuse for using the bastardised version of the English language that has become pretty well standard in business.

Business language exists to allow people to say nothing while emitting possibly thousands of words. It has evolved so that consultants can produce content-free reports that still justify generous consultancy fees by their volume. This involves using words like “leveraged” that look like they mean something technical and precise but have no meaning when you get closer.

The average consultancy document is an alchemical spell. It changes words into gold. Therefore it must be composed in an arcane language that can’t be understood by mere mortals. No one ever reads more than a pargraph of the things but that paragraph must be incomprehensible enough to show that the writer has the magic power to write nonsense. (After wearing a suit with conviction) this counts for more than almost every other human skill. Just try getting a business loan or government grant without one.

Maybe .net accidentally got one of their consultants to write the Ruby on Rails tutorial.

From the point of view of getting anything like that to work, in a word NO.

I can’t describe Avebury megalithic landscape without sounding like a lame sap. So before I take issue with the patently bizarre statement on the National Trust website (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ main/w-vh/w-visits /w-findaplace/w-avebury/) I will have to admit to being a complete Avebury devotee. Avebury is a collection of megalithic sites covering a few square miles in Wiltshire. The outer Avebury stone circle itself is the biggest in the world or one of the biggest in Europe according to which site you consult, with a diameter of 427 metres. That’s 1,017 feet for Americans and people who prefer to think in old money. I can’t picture either, to be honest.

There are ditches around the circles that cover a much bigger area and an incomplete “avenue” of huge stones leading to Silbury Hill ( a miraculous thing in itself) and West Kennet Long Barrow. One amazing thing about Avebury is that there is a village with lots of thatched cottages and wierd Victorian buildings and shops and working farms in the middle of it. The complex is about twenty miles from Stonehenge and Woodhenge and Durrington Walls – which are only the most obvious named prehistoric sites – because you can barely put foot in a field for about many miles around without seeing an embarrassment of tumuli, log barrows, round barrows and iron age hillforts. Avebury is a World Heritage site and actually deserves the ranking. Bits of it are about to undergo the dreaded restoration (but that’s probably just my pessimism about archaeologists and restoration and history cash cows See earlier over-long rant on TV archaeology and the heritage industry) Go there if you possibly can.

The National Trust web page on Avebury says that it was “Voted the country’s third most spiritual place.” Voted for by whom? Which place won anyway? What does spiritual mean?

I find it silly that there should be a “most spiritual sites in the country” competition and incomprehensible that the National Trust would regard a vote like that as a good advertising point. It’s gooey New Agey stuff – like advertising conditioner as having some exotic “natural” ‘erbal ingredient. It gives the impression that Avebury is so uninteresting that visitors have to be enticed by a phoney vote. Are there really people who go to places and rank them for “spirituality”? In these sort of contexts, the word seems synonymous with “gullibility”. You may indeed feel moved by Avebury for any number of reasons but its ranking in a spiritual league table is probably not one of them.

(Etrusia’s own advertising. See the second page of the Megalithic sites article http://www.etrusia.co.uk/megal_2.php. This introduces a handful of the pre-historic sites in Wiltshire) send an email postcard photo of it from http://medieval.etrusia.co.uk/postcard.php.)

 

This doesn’t apply to queens sadly (because there’s only a record of one)  but the AngloSaxon kings’ names were pretty good. Better, there were lots of small kingdoms with excellent opportunities for nominal experimentation.   Here’s a handful, that I collected from http://www.britannia.com/history/h6f.html

From Wessex

• Eadwig (Edwy), All-Fair
• Edgar, the Peaceable
• Aethelred, the Unready

Danish line

• Svein Forkbeard
• Harald Harefoot

Anglia

• Wehha
• Wuffa
• Tyttla
• Raedwald
• Eni
• Eorpwald

No sorry, the Vikings win hands down…. but these names have a nice sound.

If you are looking for a name for Dungeons and Dragons Online or off, or any roleplaying fantasy game don’t bother trying to invent a name for a barbarian. Genuine Viking names are amazing. Try Thorfinn Skullsplitter , Eric Bloodaxe or Harald Finehair (Eric’s dad) for a start.

Wow. there’s a Viking name converter on http://gorm.com/name/ Bah. it just gives you a description based on what you choose from a few character traits, none of which sound comically bloodthirsty enough to be interesting.

I just found a list of real Viking first names on http://www.angelfire.com/wy/svenskildbiter/Viking/viknams3.html. Some are good enough to have as real names. All would sound better with a Bluetooth or something as the descriptive bit.