man daviesh

So I have been to see the latest movie that has bolted out of the Wachowski stable and I have to say………I liked it! This is totally a Wachowski film, with a lot of really vibrant, stylistic colour and amazing effects. It is pretty obvious that most of the movie was shot in front of a green screen.

Spritle Racer and Chim Chim (pictured above) are well used in the movie to provide the laughs every time them movie heads into ’serious’ territory or starts to slow down. Those guys pop up EVERYWHERE, and whoever trained the chimp deserves major kudos. As a whole, the movie is great with stacks of action sequences and crazy racing. John Goodman is a great Pops Racer and Roger Allam has been given a great role (the Wachowskis must have loved working with him for ‘V for Vendetta’).

Don’t expect a high class movie, go to see it expecting a fun romp through a fantasy world and you won’t be disappointed. It is an appropriate homage to the animated series, and the remix of the original theme at the end of the movie is kind of catchy.

It’s been a while since I have done one of these, but I guess there has not really been a lot to talk about. I’ve been playing a bit of golf (badly!) with the guys from work, but mostly I have been in the routine of going to work, then catching up on all my domestic stuff on my days off. I have been to see Ironman at the movies, it is really awesome, anyone vaguely interested in action/comic book movies MUST see this, Robert Downey Jr really is great as a smart-arse Tony Stark.

Lately I have been playing a bit of Mario Kart Wii. If you have played a Mario Kart game before, you pretty much know what to expect. The new tracks are even more outlandish and change slightly on each lap. The ‘retro’ tracks are great blasts from the past, especially the old SNES battle mode course. One of the bigger changes is upping the number of competitors in each race from 8 to 12. This makes it more likely that you will suffer a CASCADE of adverse item effects sending you rapidly from frontrunner to distant last in a race. The online modes are the biggest new feature, the Nintendo WiFi Connection is implemented seamlessly and playing against ‘real’ people is so much fun.

Another game I started playing a day or so ago is Penny Arcade Adventures - On a Rain-Slicked Precipice of Darkness: Episode One. Short title there. As you may have gathered, it is based on the characters of the Penny Arcade web comic and is very true to the humour and animation style of the comic. Very funny game, and at roughly $20 it’s a real steal.

OK, I haven’t done one of these in a while. I’ve just been too busy!

Darwin is coming out of the wet season now and becoming a much more comfortable place to live. You can comfortably breathe the air again instead of drinking it and the nights are getting colder. I went on a round of golf with some of the guys from work, and the daytime heat was not that oppressive, showing that the large drop in humidity makes a huge difference. With the weather clearing up, the markets are starting up again at Mindil Beach again next week, and the Deckchair Cinema has reopened.

Just came across a really good cheap game on Steam called AudioSurf. Basically you can pick any music file you like on your computer and the program turns it into a puzzle game where you have to collect coloured blocks as you race down a track. The blocks are proxies for notes in the song, the track undulates to the beat and as the song builds up or winds down, the track goes up or downhill. Depending on the car you use, you have different powerups, some of them are an easy mode where there is only one colour of blocks, others have the ability to scramble up blocks or delete certain colours. It is a GREAT way to listen to your music and is only US$10. I created a short video showing how AudioSurf interpreted ‘Your are a Pirate’.

Anyway, check it out, it’s a great break from Hellgate and will tide me over until MarioKart Wii comes out!

…Blu-Ray! In a statement released by Toshiba today, HD-DVD is the new Betamax video tape.

Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders….”We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation.

The interesting thing about this is that HD-DVD is actually the official successor to DVD, with the standard ratified by the DVD Forum. HD-DVD devices were cheaper than Blu-Ray devices because much of the tech was lifted out of conventional DVD players. Goes to show what marketing can do for you. Sony ‘won’ with Blu-Ray because it negotiated with movie studios and made the cheapest Blu-Ray player (the PS3). Stunts like throwing in a free PS3 with a big Bravia screen over Christmas also helped.

What does this all mean? Hopefully, it means that as the market concentrates on one format, the consumer install base hits critical mass and everything can become cheaper. At the moment, the price of discs and players is similar to what DVD was in the late 90s, this needs to change for the format to gain traction. Also, this will probably motivate fence-sitters to go out and buy a PS3.

On a seperate, but not totally unrelated note, I got my Austar PVR called ‘MyStar’ installed last week. It was pretty glitchy the first couple of days, but has settled down now that I know when I need to baby it. The series link function is great for automatically recording a whole series and the 2 free-to-air tuners are pretty good. Hopefully the firmware updates keep coming, I am still having to whack the reset button every couple of days. It would also be good if access to Foxtel’s HD channels will be enabled via firmware update. My only real gripe with the unit is the lack of outputs, but it has component connections, so the quality isn’t bad.

Let me put it this way. Spamalot is INCREDIBLE. It is a very tough call to say if it exceeds ‘The Producers’, but I would happily go and see either of them over and over again. There are a lot of Python in-jokes, but 99% of it works even if you haven’t seen a bit of Python material in your entire life.

Lucinda Shaw as the Lady of the Lake is incredible, I have no idea how she has any voice left after a show! Bille Brown is a great King Arthur. Together with the rest of the cast they keep the charm of the original movie while adding their own unique spin to it. The songs are incredibile and fit beautifully with the storyline and the song and dance sequence at Camelot is just crazy fun. They have also stretched out parts of the movie that people loved so much, like the French taunting.

Anyone who has the chance to see the show I STRONGLY recommend it, it’s in Melbourne for a while longer and is also still playing in the US on Broadway and in Vegas, as well as in London.

About this time last month I posted a gut reaction to Kevin Rudd’s grand plan for mandatory internet filtering. I was reminded of this on the Whirlpool forums today after reading some posts from one of the guys from Internode (a large internet service provider). This one in particular addresses things well: Data Blocking

Essentially, the point is that copyright holders have a vested interest in keeping their material off the net, yet with billions of dollars, fairly uniform copyright laws across the globe and complete cooperation from ISPs everywhere, they have been 100% unsuccessful in stopping the flood of pirated movies, music, etc. Now with adult content, you have no uniform standards of what is acceptable around the world, different personal standards and far less in the way of monetary resources to ‘clean’ the internet. No filter is going to work on that basis, and we haven’t even looked at technical issues yet (which are discussed here).

I still stand by the position that it is not the job of government to force ISPs to play parent. Parents should be responsible for monitoring what their kids do online. If they want a filter, fine, download the free one from the government you can install on your PC, but don’t force me to deal with slower internet and subsidise ISP filtering for you.

For more on Comrade Kevin’s rise to power, watch this video:

So I am currently in Melbourne taking a break from the tropics. On a professional level, Darwin is great but for me it can get physically draining, so I am glad of the break. Yesterday I wore long pants for the first time in nearly 3 months, and today I am in a warm polar fleece jacket! It’s a long way from 33 degrees in Darwin to 21 here! I took the Virgin Blue direct flight on Monday night which was a good experience, but I am not looking forward to the Jetstar return leg on Tuesday as much.

There is only so much you can try to cram into a week, I am not getting to catch up with as many people as I probably would like to. I am heading to Spamalot (the Monty Python musical) tomorrow night at Her Majesty’s Theatre. I am really looking forward to it, I regret not seeing ‘The Producers’ when it was in town and I am not going to let this show slip by. There are a few other bits and pieces planned for the weekend which will fill up my time here pretty well. Wednesday next week will be busy, it’s my last full day of leave and I look like I will be having a parade of tradies through the house to fix up various things. Thursday back to work on nightshift, so it really is a whirlwind holiday!

Finally, I should mention that I saw the movie ‘Juno’ yesterday. Incredible is all I can say. It is very charming in a Napoleon Dynamite kind of a way. The script was great with very real characters and dialog and Ellen Page is brilliant as th titular character. It is a must see that really defies any attempts to plonk it into a simple genre.

OK, this thing is so outrageous that it has got coverage on the mainstream Australian media (here, here, here and here), it has also made it to the BBC, the awesome videoblog WebbAlert and cause the Electronic Frontier Foundation to issue a press release. What could be so outrageous? MANDATORY internet filtering.

Congratulations guys, we now live in China. What is SO wrong about this proposed system is that it is mandatory, you have to ask to opt out. Senator Conroy says that if you oppose the filter it means you are you are pro-kiddie porn. That is just trying to inflame the media, if the intent of this is really to protect kids, then it should be opt in for parents, not opt out for adults. Kiddie porn is already illegal in so many levels (rightly so) so in my opinion it is a moot point.

Lets say I don’t want the filter because it will slow down the internet. This is a valid concern, imagine a big ISP that is supposed to filter each and every one of its clients. It has millions of queries every minute which is has to check against a massive hash table of blacklisted sites. This all takes CPU grunt, which costs money and inevitably you have to wait for the request to go through before the ISP even starts grabbing the data. This will make the internet slow and expensive and suddenly you are on some government list of people who rejected the filter. Way to go K Rudd, you really thought this through completely before making an announcement.

Of course, the filter is going to be ineffective anyway. Anyone with any experience with a filter at work or school knows that all it does is make it painful to get at the information you need and does a lacklustre job of keeping inappropriate material out. All you would need to do is change domains for your content to sidestep the blacklist generated by Rudd’s ‘what is appropriate on the internet committee’ or access the information via means other than the world wide web (ftp, scp, p2p, there are plenty of choices).

If the announcement had been ‘we are going to force ISPs to do ISP-side filtering, which you can opt in to when you sign up’, I would have siad that his intent was good, but I doubt it would work. This hare brained scheme is an insult to adults and an ineffective barrier for children, and will do nothing more than lull parents into complacency and stop them keeping an eye on their kids online.

So now that I am finally ’settled’ I guess it is an appropriate time to say something about the last couple of months.

The Met Course Graduation was back in mid-November, where we all were presented with our Graduate Diplomas and went our seperate ways to our postings. The ceremony was good (Adam’s speech was a highlight. really summed up the year), especially at the end when the Pacific Islanders put on a bit of a show for us.

After the ceremony, we had lunch and drinks at Fed Square and said our final goodbyes. The meal was awesome and an excellent choice of venue by Amber and Pete.

I flew up to Darwin the next day. The trip was probably not the optimum route, I had elected to fly via Sydney. We were delayed taking off at Melbourne due to congestion and delayed landing in Sydney due to a couple of thousand feet of stratus pretty much covering the sky. By the time I got to Sydney, I only had time to walk to the next gate to board the Darwin flight. I suppose that is just as well, I hate Sydney airport.

Upon arrival in Darwin, I was met at the airport by Bodo, who had come to Melbourne to teach the Tropical Cyclone course earlier in the year. He took me to the hotel via the scenic route showing me along the Nightcliff/Rapid Creek foreshore. By that time I had a message on my phone and once I was dropped off at the hotel I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my car had arrived in town and was waiting for me, so I took a taxi and picked it up. It was in pretty good nick, but the customer service skills of the staff were not the greatest. The car turned out to be really handy that weekend as everyone else arrived in town, it gave us options for where we wanted to go and when.

We started at work on the Monday with an orientation/OH&S spiel from the admin people, then the rest of the week was re-visiting the people we had seen at the start of the year. The next week we started dualling properly on the forecasting bench.

Dualling is both helpful and frustrating. It’s helpful in that you see someone else’s way of doing the job and pick up tips, tricks and shortcuts. On the other hand, it can be frustrating if your way of doing things is significantly different from the person you are dualling with, as it starts to feel like you have to justify everything you do. The upside now is that I am starting to get confident in most of the tasks I will need to perform. My drawing of streamline charts still needs a LOT of work, but that is why we dual for so long compared to other regions.

I now live in Rapid Creek, about 5 minutes from work and about 10 minutes from the city. I am in a pretty decent 2 bedroom unit a street away from the foreshore and behind the Beachfront Pub. The Wet Season has properly arrived in the last couple of days, had about 120mm of rain last night (about 4 and a half inches in the old scale) and the winds are now quite squally from the west.

I had a bit of spare time (and bandwidth!) last week, so I downloaded the latest version of the Ubuntu linux distribution. My old Fedora Core 4 setup was really getting a bit old and needed an upgrade, and I wanted to do some experimentation for some future ideas. I didn’t have enough time to muck around with re-partitioning and the preparation that would involve, so I just installed a virtual machine under VMWare as I didn’t need hardware accelerated 3D graphics.

This first thing I noticed was how slick the entire install process was. When you boot from the disk, it loads up a ‘live CD’ environment which is virtually a clone of what you are going to end up with at the end of the process. At this point it has not touched your hard drives, so you can play around as much as you want as a sort of ‘try before you buy’. If you don’t like it, you can just reboot the machine and take the disc out, you are back where you started. If you do like it, you just double-click the ‘Install’ icon on the desktop. You get asked maybe 4 questions total, your name + password, your keyboard layout, your timezone and if you want to manually partition your disks. Everything else is automated. This would have to be the slickest install of an OS I have ever encountered, certainly beating my Windows and Fedora experiences (I have had issues with the anaconda installer for Fed Core). All my hardware was detected correctly and set up perfectly, even the sound card which is a first for me, normally I have to manually set up sound.

My experiences with the system so far have continued to be good. The package manager presents itself as an ‘Add/Remove Programs’ much like what windows has, so you don’t need to be a geek to drive it. Some packages you want can be hard to find though (you need to figure out what category it falls under), if you know what you want you are still better off using apt-get. It took me a while to find some things (like the terminal window!), but that was simply because I was used to the way Fedora behaved.

My only gripe is one for the advanced users. There is no immediately obvious way from the GUI package manager to install all the libraries and things needed for all the programming compilers and interpreters. Indeed, it is not until you manually try and install something that you realise that something as basic as the standard C libraries were not installed. The solution in the end was to use apt-get to install the package ‘build-essentials’, but it took some digging around for me to figure that out.

I strongly recommend everyone at least download Ubuntu and give the live CD a test drive, you will be pleasantly surprised at how the non-windows people live. Linux has come a very long way.