Compliments

I guess I'm never going to get the whole idea of giving good compliments. Twice this past week I've failed miserably at giving them, and to the same person at that.

I was walking past a workmate's desk and noticed that she had a very old scientific calculator. I was impressed that it was so old and that she was still using it. I commented on the age of her calculator and she took it the wrong way, saying things like, "Whoever told you that saying that something is old is a compliment?" and "Why would I want to replace a calculator that is still working?" I really genuinely was trying to say a nice thing about the calculator but failed to do so, as only I can.

Later in the week, she was showing me pictures of a trip that she had taken to Europe last year. There was a picture that she was in. So I tried to compliment her by saying, "Wow, you look so much younger in that picture than you do now!" I figured if being old wasn't a compliment then surely saying that she was young looking must certainly be a good thing. But apparently I worded this one wrong as well. Oh well, live and learn.

Once in a Lifetime

This week's film brings us to the heady days of the late 1980's with a made-for-TV film. But it's not just any film. It stars Christina Applegate (from 'Married with Children'), Tracey Gold (from 'Growing Pains') and Alyssa Milano (from 'Who's the Boss?'). They were the three reigning teen queens at the time. On top of this, you also had Alan Thicke and Kelsey Grammer. And don't look now, but is that a pre-Friends' Matthew Perry? A cast like this only comes along once in a lifetime and what a cast it was.

Dance 'til Dawn first aired in 1988 at a time when sitcoms ruled the airwaves and the cast in this film were the crème de la crème of the sitcom world. The plot is pretty basic. Hoover High School is having it's prom night. That's the whole plotline. Seriously. It's filled with so many clichès, you could pretty much take a ticksheet and mark them off as you come across them. There's the snobbish girl who gets her comeuppance, the nerdy boy who gets the popular girl, the bookworm wallflower who gets the popular guy, etc. The whole film plays out like an extended sitcom show, sans the laugh track. And that's a good thing.

But what makes this film so fun is that it doesn't take itself seriously at all. It makes no apologies for being what it is, and that is just to have a good time. This film won't change your life nor will it cause you to have any grand epiphanies, but then it's not trying to do that. It is just mindless entertainment, which it's very good at being. So we at FilmQuest are giving this film a rating of 6 out of 10, which is extremely high for this kind of film. And did we mention that spectacular cast?

The End of Communism

Back in the late 1980's, a company called Aldus redefined desktop publishing (dtp) with their software package 'Pagemaker'. This was at a time when some companies had their entire business model built on designing and developing fonts. It was also a time when a little software company had been trying to release a new graphical interface for the burgeoning PC market. The first two versions of which had failed miserably.

The software company in question was Microsoft and the failed software was Windows. But during the development of their third incarnation of this new graphical interface, one of the people in Microsoft approached the head of the company, Bill Gates, and suggested that they include 11 fonts for free with Windows 3 in order to make the user experience more pleasant. Bill Gates immediately turned to the guy and said, "What are you, a communist?" This was one of Bill Gates' key phrases and every important person at Microsoft had at one time or another been accused of being a communist by him whenever they suggested something that is counter intuitive to the capitalistic business model.

Of course, Microsoft did give away free fonts with Windows 3 and jt became an instant success. This in turn led to the collapse of the entire font market almost overnight. And the rest as they say is history. Bill Gates has arguably changed the world in so many ways through the software developed at Microsoft. Next Monday, the 30th of June, will be his last day as an employee of the company that he helped cofound with his pal, Paul Allen. His guiding presence and business acumen will no doubt be sorely missed at Microsoft. And so this week's TechWatch bids a fond farewell to one of the most instrumental personalities in the computer world. We in the TechWatch offices consider it an honour and a privilege to have been witnesses to a personality the likes of which we'll probably never see again in our lifetimes.

A Large Moon

Last Wednesday, for those of you who were fortunate enough to see the moonrise in the evening, you saw an exceptionally big moon. This is due to two factors. The first is that the moon is very close to the horizon (which you would expect with a moonrise) and the second is that it's a full moon (though technically you can never have a full moon, because then the moon would be in the shadow of the earth and therefore it would be in eclipse).

The moon doesn't change in size. If you think about it, you'll know this to be true. So why does the moon appear to be larger when it's near the horizon than when it is in the sky? Well, there are a couple of theories proposed. One of the previously widest accepted theories was that it is an example of the Müller-Lyer illusion, being closely related to the angular size illusion. However, in 1986, an exciting new theory, known as oculomotor micropsia, came onto the scene. Currently this is the theory that seems to make the most sense.

You can read more about it here.

Musa

In the late 14th century, when the Yuan Dynasty was fading and was quickly being replaced by the rising Ming Dynasty, there were plenty of intrigues afoot. There was a small envoy sent from Korea to present a gift of horses to Hongwu, the Ming emporer. No one knows what happened to the envoy as it was never seen or heard from again.

Enter Musa, a warrior. He is a slave who is set free when his owner (a member of the Korean peace delegation) dies. He helps the envoy battle through a fierce and inhospitable land as they struggle to make it back to their homeland. On the way they find Bu Yong, a princess of the Ming Dynasty, who was being held captive. They decide to try to curry favour with Hongwu by returning her back to the palace.

Musa (aka 'The Warrior') is a stunning piece of Korean cinema. It is beautiful and cinematic. The storyline is captivating, even if the characters are difficult to connect with in any real emotional way. The one thing that I found truly disappointing about this film is the complete under-utilisation of Ziyi Zhang (who starred in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' and 'House of Flying Daggers'). It is also very violent and bloody, so it's not for those who have squeamish stomachs. Nevertheless, I would still recommend watching this film if you ever get the chance.

Firefox 3

Back in the early days of 2004, I started using Firefox 0.6. Even in it's earliest incarnation, I had fallen in love with it. I have used it as my primary browser for the past four years and have found that it does everything I need it to do. Or course, back before it had hit the release milestone of 1.0, it wasn't recognised by most online banks as a secure browser, so I still had to rely on Internet Explorer for those times when I needed to transfer funds into my off-shore accounts.

Today marks the release of Firefox 3. Over this weekend I had upgraded my operating system from Windows Vista 32 bit to Windows Vista 64 bit. Knowing full well that Firefox 3 was being released today, I held off on installing an older version of Firefox. Subsequently, I had to use Internet Explorer for the past couple of days, which wasn't a pleasant experience.

Anyway, the folks over at Mozilla want you to download a copy of Firefox 3 before 18:00 tomorrow evening. They are trying to set a record for most downloads of a software in a 24-hour period. This should be fairly easy for them to achieve, if for no other reason than because no record currently exists. Of course, because of this, it did take me almost half an hour to get through to their website, but it was worth it.

Laminin

I often get annoyed when Christians try to over-spiritualise things and see God's work in places by using a mallet to force things into their world view. One of the more recent offenders of this is Louis Giglio. He speaks about laminin, which is a small protein that binds the organs together. Laminin is a cell adhesion molecule that pretty much holds the body together. A scientific drawing of laminin is as follows:



Does the shape look familiar? That's what Giglio thought as well. And he drew the obvious analogies with Christ being the glue that holds our body together, even quoting Colossians 1. The problem is that in real life, laminin doesn't actually look like the scientific diagram, as is witnessed by the following:



While I do believe that God has made our bodies down to the minutest detail, I have problems with respected preachers building whole sermons out of suspect items. I mean there are already so many things about the human body that attest to the glory of God, that we don't need to rely on things such as laminin to force God into the human body. After all, He's already there without us having to do this.

D.A.R.Y.L

In 1983, John Badham released a film that changed everyone's perceptions of computers. It starred a young Matthew Broderick who managed to hack his way into NORAD's computers and almost started a global thermal nuclear war, which would have eliminated all life on this world as we know it. The film I'm speaking about is of course 'War Games'.

Two years later in an attempt to capitalise on the paranoia that was created by this seminal film, Simon Wincer released the film 'D.A.R.Y.L.' Where 'War Games' was primarily focused on the dangers of entrusting the whole of the national strategic defence system to a single computer system, 'D.A.R.Y.L.' was more about the human element of computers. Barret Oliver stars as Daryl, a young boy who has no memory of his past but who is gifted with intelligence beyond genius. The film centres around his attempts at trying to adapt to a normal family household.

While 'D.A.R.Y.L.' is rather less ambitious in scope than 'War Games', in a number of ways it was the more prescient of the two films. It has a warm storyline that has a number of good moments. While the writing is a bit uneven at times and some of the humour is forced, it is still an enjoyable romp through 1980's paranoia. If you get a chance to see this film, by all means do it, if for nothing else, but to see one of the first references in film to the 'Turing Test'.

Flying Down Main Street

There is an apocryphal tale about the time that Deep Blue (a huge super-computer built by IBM) first beat Garry Kasparov (the world's foremost chess champion) back on the 10th of February 1996. This was a historic and momentous event in that it was the first time that a machine had ever beaten the best chess player in the world. What was neglected to be mentioned at the time was that Deep Blue was specifically designed to play against Garry Kasparov's style. Where the apocryphal tale comes in is that after the match, it was reportedly asked of Deep Blue what he's going to do now that he's beaten Kasparov. The reply by Deep Blue was, "I'm going to go to www.disneyland.com."

This brings us to today's TechWatch topic: Google Earth. It has recently been announced that Google and Disney have teamed up to bring a 3D version of all four of Disneyworld's theme parks in Orlando, Florida to Google Earth. Now you can see this magnificent structure in all the glory that a virtual world can provide. It can also help you plan your next vacation there. This is truly what the world (at least the one represented by Google Earth) has been waiting for. Read more about this here.

Yama

The Chinese have a belief that if you die, your body must be given a proper burial before the angel of death comes to claim your soul. This angel of death is known as 'Yama'. If Yama comes for you before a proper burial happens, then you will go to naraka, the Buddhist version of hell. This concept of hell differs from the western world in a couple of fundamental ways. The most significant being that if a soul goes to hell, then it is not for all eternity, but for a set-length of time (however, this is usually a very long period of time).

The Buddhist Yama (which is the predominant version in China) is actually a derivative of the Hinduist Yama. While they are similar, they are not the same.

I find the concept of Yama to be interesting in that all five of the major world religions believe in the 'Angel of Death' in one form or another. Why do you think that is?

Crystal Skulls

Back when I was just barely a teenager, I had read about a crystal skull that was supposedly cursed. This particular one was known as the Mitchell-Hedges skull. Though there was much controversy surrounding the exact origin of the finding of it, there were two things that everyone can agree upon. The first is that it is carved against the natural axis of the quartz. Even today, using the most sophisticated devices, attempting to carve crystal against its axis will result in it shattering. The second is that no mechanical tools were used in carving it which resulted in a smoothness of the polishing that is so great that it cannot be duplicated using modern methods. They figure that the skull would have taken some 300 years of man hours to carve and polish, which would effectively have made it impossible to create. Quite simply put, the skull should not exist.

And this is the backdrop for the latest Indiana Jones film. The first three films (okay, really only the first and third ones) were known for simply being about having a good time and a good source of entertainment. Also, while they were a bit far-fetched and stretched your ability to suspend disbelief, there was some line that they didn't cross. This is not the case for this latest film. I found that this one didn't seem to care about that line at all and that there were some hearkenings back to the earlier Steven Spielberg film, A.I. This is not a good thing. The film at the beginning was entertaining, if a little slow at times (but this could have been due to Harrison Ford being 20 years older and not being able to run quite as fast). But the last half of it really ruined it for me. I can't honestly recommend this film unless you're just looking for escapism and have no expectations for it whatsoever.

Kindle

Back in the late 1990's, there were a number of companies that were betting that the next 'killer' gadget was going to be an eBook reader. Franklin was one of the first off the block with their eBookman. It was basically a cut-down PDA (which is really saying something given the fact that back in those days PDA's were severely underwhelming to begin with). What marked this apart from all other PDA's was that this one had a special proprietary (read DRM-plagued) eBook reader. What it didn't have was any marketing support. This caused any effort at getting momentum behind it nigh on impossible. Add to this the fact that there was also a glitch that caused it to lose everything in memory every time the batteries needed to be replaced (which was literally every couple of hours) and it's no wonder that it was such a spectacular flop.

Since those rather inauspicious early days, things haven't really changed much. A proliferation of proprietary formats practically guaranteed that no one reader would be able to succeed. Is it any wonder that even now a decade later when tech companies come back to the idea of an eBook reader, that customers would yawn if only they could wake up long enough to do so.

But now Amazon thinks it can finally do the eBook reader idea properly. Last November they had released the Kindle, which was received to mostly favourable reviews. However, I suspect it's not doing as well as Amazon has hoped due to the fact that they won't release any sales numbers about the Kindle itself or about any of the eBooks available for it. But it is slowly garnering more and more support. Case in point: Simon and Shuster just released another 5000 titles for the Kindle, bringing the total number of avaible eBooks to 125,000. If you combine this with Amazon's knack for tapping into consumer zeitgeist, the Kindle might just be the spark required to set the world of eBooks ablaze.