Phlogiston

Like many FOSS advocates, I have tried to encourage the uptake of FOSS software by suggesting users switch to free, better alternatives on an application by application basis: don’t use Internet Explorer, use Firefox instead; use Thunderbird instead of Outlook or Outlook Express; use The GIMP instead of Photoshop. Perhaps most important in this is encouraging users to move away from Microsoft Office and its proprietary file formats and to use OpenOffice.org. This is particularly relevant now that the forthcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0 will use the OASIS OpenDocument XML format as the default file format:

The OASIS OpenDocument format is a vendor and implementation independent file format, and thus guarantees freedom and independence […] The OASIS OpenDocument file format is […] one of the file formats recommended by the European Commision.

This is pretty significant. Finally users have an option to use a full-featured office productivity suite without having their data locked in to a vendor’s closed proprietary file format.

Sadly, as this NewsForge article, Java fallout: OpenOffice.org 2.0 and the FOSS community, points out, the OpenOffice.org developers have shot themselves in the foot by choosing to implement a raft of new features in a way which is unpalatable (at best—at worst unacceptable) to the FOSS community, and makes it harder for ordinary end users to switch to OpenOffice.org.

Although the substantial new parts of OpenOffice.org written in Java are themselves licensed under a FOSS license, most users will need a JRE installed in order to use them:

• Sun’s JRE is not open source, and whilst it may be free to download it is not “free” in the sense required by most FOSS licenses. Many GNU/Linux distributions cannot and will not include it. For many platforms it is not even available. This means that those distributions will be forced to either
  • refuse to distribute OpenOffice.org altogether;
  • distribute OpenOffice.org with the components written in Java disabled;
  • expend many many hours of valuable developer time attempting to compile the Java components into native code so that they can be run without a JRE.
• For end users wishing to switch to OpenOffice.org they now not only need to download and install it themselves, which in itself can be daunting for many users, but also download and install Sun’s JRE. OpenOffice.org is already a large application with a big memory footprint; Sun’s JRE is a notorious memory hog. The consequence of the former now requiring the latter is that OpenOffice.org will simply be unusable on many older low-end machines.

This has to be one of the worst decisions the OpenOffice.org’s project leaders could have made.

Monday night, whilst nursing an enormous hangover from Sunday’s birthday celebrations, I watched a couple of movies: The Grudge and Wicker Park. Both of them are American remakes of non-American films.

The Grudge is a remake of Ju-on: The Grudge, a Japanese horror film; it’s rather bizarre for a remake, as it is directed by the same director, Takashi Shimizu, is still set in Tokyo, is apparently the same story as the original, but the lead characters are now American ex-pats. Given that quite a bit of dialogue is still Japanese with English subtitles, and I thought that American audiences’ dislike of subtitles (or inability to read them) was one of the reasons films like this got remade, it’s curious to me why they bothered. I guess the fact that they made it for an estimated $10,000,000 and it made well over $39,000,000 just in its opening weekend in the USA alone means that “they” know considerably better than I do.

I don’t really “get” Japanese horror films. On one hand there is much to admire in them: instead of the slash and gore—and the oh-so-clever (and incredibly boring) ironic self-consciousness and reflexivity—of much of recent American horror, the Japanese films tend to work on a more psychological level. Instead of dark interiors and frenetic pacing they are often brightly lit, and move at an incredibly slow deadening pace. Many of the characters seem to sleep-walk to their demises. The pace seems to reflect a suffocating atmosphere, constrained and repressed by a great weight of stifling social convention, from under which terrible things erupt. But the actual stories more often than not leave me scratching my head more than leaping out of my seat. The premise of The Grudge is: “When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born. The curse gathers in the place of death. Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury”. Now in Japan this is indeed one of their superstitions. Theirs is a culture in which a multitude of spirits watch over every conceivable thing, some kind and some not so kind. The trouble is that it means nothing to me, and I really couldn’t imagine my way into it meaning anything to me. So to me the film just seemed like a haunted house story. The execution of the film was excellent: the lighting, cinematography, direction, the performances. (The opening scene is particularly impressive.) But the story failed to strike any chord in me whatosever, and as a result didn’t scare me or creep me out at all. Those who know me know I loathe the countryside. So a film about getting lost in the woods, wandering around in circles as increasingly creepy things start to happen, scares the crap out of me. Even more so if I’m lost with a bunch of student film makers. Malevolent spirits infesting a house: not so much.

Wicker Park is a remake of a wonderful French film, L’Appartement. Now with nothing to compare it to, Wicker Park would really be a pretty good movie. But compare it to the original and it fares much less well. Firstly, the original is an incredibly complex and subtle examination of the nature of sexual obsession, and the curious nature of memory; the remake is a fairly traditional love story. Secondly, the two main female characters are transformed in the remake into much safer stereotypes (basically, a goodie and a baddie). Lastly, and perhaps most unforgiveably, the remake changes the ending so that everyone lives happily ever after. Arghhh. But that makes it sound worse than it is. If you watch Wicker Park having never seen L’Appartement then you won’t be disappointed. It really is a good film. But L’Appartement is an amazing film—it’s the kind of film people compare to Vertigo. Wicker Park really isn’t.

I’m sure, like myself, many of you will be greatly relieved to discover that the spirit of enterprise and entrepreneurialism is alive and well in the UK. What should a cash-strapped and in debt young couple do to raise some funds? Why, sell their two year old daughter for £15,000 [dead link], obviously.

“I don’t want her. I’ve never bothered with her really. I won’t miss her,” said heroin addict Stone at the Friday Burger King meeting.

Update: the link to The News of the World article is now dead. Apparently they only leave one week’s worth of news freely available online, and thereafter you’re expected to pay to access their archive. Right, so out of all the World class newspapers who make their content freely available, we’re going to pay to read The News of the World?

Hakon Wium Lie in a public statement has thrown down the gauntlet to Microsoft following their announcement to release a version 7 of their web browser Internet Explorer: Opera lays down Acid2 challenge. This is a good thing, and the challenge is fair and simple.

Sadly, it is already abundantly clear that Microsoft will be paying no attention. According to this article (which is really worth reading, even if you’re not a web developer) Microsoft consider the standards in question (which they were instrumental in drafting) “flawed”.

One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a “flawed” standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it.

Microsoft are a W3C member and were instrumental in drafting CSS 2. They can quite easily implement CSS 2.1, which has been a candidate recommendation for over a year and is as close to an actual recommendation as you can possibly get.

What really struck a chord with me, though, is this:

“You have to write code for IE and then you have to write code for all the other browsers. No sane developer can ignore IE, because it is the dominant browser, but because of the way Microsoft deals with the standards, you have lots of sites that are not standards-compliant,” McLaws added.

McLaws, who runs the Longhornblogs network, said a lot of “extra time and resources” had to be expended to make the site render the same way on all Web browsers.

“What is Microsoft’s job? If their job is to make it dirt easy for developers to create great Web sites, and they don’t support the same standards that other browsers support, they’re making my job more difficult.”

Sean Mitchell, a Web developer and IT consultant based in Ontario, Canada, echoed those gripes.

“I can build a Web site that works fine in a dozen flavors of Mozilla-based browsers, across countless different versions of several different operating systems, but the same page renders differently on different instances of Internet Explorer. That’s always an issue.

“Typically, about 20 percent of my time goes into coding a site to spec, that works in standards-based browsers, and then 80 percent to make it look right in IE,” Mitchell said.

That is exactly the position I am in. Every single CSS job I have done, ever, has at least doubled in cost because of IE’s crap support of standards. You may think that I might be glad of that: more time equals more money. But I’m not: the more expensive I am the less return work I might get, and what costs my clients unnecessary money is bad for them, and what is bad for my clients is bad for me.

Last year the European Commission ruled against Microsoft in an ant-trust ruling. Basically, Microsoft were found guilty of abusing their monopoly. Micorosoft use their position as providers of over 90% of computer operating systems to suppress free competetion by denying interoperability with their software, by refusing to document their closed, proprietary ways of doing things and by refusing to adopt public open standards. What was their response? To propose a license which would make the situation even worse! Thankfully, their response has not only been rejected, but its turpitude has for once been analysed in the media. This BBC article gives the bare outlines, but much better reading is this leader from ZDnet. They also have an article covering more of the details, and an amusing FAQ on the issue.

Having poked fun at science journalism in a previous post, it’s nice to be able to point to an example of how it should be done. This New Scientist article, 13 things that do not make sense, is fun, interesting, and full of the sense of awe and wonder that science can instill.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is starring in Richard Kelly’s new film Southland Tales. Southland Tales, written and directed by Kelly who also wrote and directed Donnie Darko, is described by him as “30% comedy, 30% musical, 30% thriller, and 10% science fiction”. Donnie Darko completely blew me away when I saw it, it’s one of my favourite movies. And of course I’m a huge Buffy fan, and have been a great admirer of SMG’s acting chops. After Buffy ended her movie career has been lacklustre (with the possible exception of The Grudge, which I still haven’t seen but got only so-so reviews despite being a box-office smash). I think starring in this could be the big break SMG has needed. I’m very excited about this. A new Kelly film, and finally a decent role for SMG.

The promotional web site is awesome too. I suspect that it might be a bit painful on dialup, but if you have broadband access or can access it from work or school it is really worth a look. It requires the flash plugin, but 99% of you will have that anyway. (As a web developer I normally don’t like flash-only sites, but this one works very well.) It’s a teaser site for the time being, although Kelly has said that they plan to make the site a proper companion to the film. After a brief intro you have a choice to go “left” or “right”, and both parts are quite different. The left road ends in some cryptic German text (meaning, I think, “roads not necessary”) and the right road leads you to a very cryptic statement about the rotation of the Earth, and a launch button which frustratingly does nothing! It’s really worth trying out as it’s the perfect teaser: it gives nothing much away about the film but really arouses curiosity, intrigue, and a desire to know more.

Reading some comments Kelly made in a Q+A session, it seems the film isn’t a musical (or even 30% a musical) in the conventional sense. Apparently there will be one musical number; I’m imagining something like the scene in Magnolia where all the characters start singing the same song in different locations, a little like the “Mad World” scene towards the end of Donnie Darko. Kelly cites Magnolia as an influence on the film. He does say, intriguingly, that he will be shooting the entire film as if it were a musical! He also describes it as a sprawling epic, well over two hours.

I’m very excited by all this. (But not in a creepy way.)

Damn! I see Hannu managed to blog about this before I did. Still, it’s a story too good to pass over. It’s even better than this one I was going to blog about: Peed-in panties don’t always turn to gold. Well, okay, I suppose I could let you have one short quote from that story:

For the panties alone, you’d get 5,000 yen, but 8,000 yen if you took them off in front of the buyer. If you peed in them first and then removed them in front of the buyer, you’d get about 10,000 yen. That’s a pretty special price …

But this story: Necrophilia among ducks ruffles research feathers, the one Hannu got to before me, is much much better.

Fresh (or, perhaps not so) in from the BBC: Smelly divorce hits Iranian court:

An Iranian woman says she wants to divorce her husband because he has not washed for more than a year, according to a press report.

The 36-year-old woman, identified as Mina, reportedly told a court in Tehran that her husband smells so bad even their children will not go near him.

Wired have a nice article on Wikipedia here: The Book Stops Here (I hate the title, because it misrepresents both the article itself and Wikipedia). For those of you who don’t know what Wikipedia is (are you people living under a rock?), in short it’s a completely free online encyclopedia with over 1.3 million articles in 75 languages, over half a million of them being in English; compare that to Britannica’s 80,000 and Encarta’s 4,500 articles in English. However, that doesn’t really capture what’s truly interesting about Wikipedia, but the article does a much better job than I could here of introducing you to the world of which I’m very much a part: Wikipedia is produced in the same way that FOSS (Free Open Source Software) is, so those of you who’ve wondered what on Earth it is I’m banging on about when I talk about Open Source might learn a thing or two about that too.

Despite not having been an academic for a few years now, and not having been a student for even longer, I still live in a fairly studenty part of town. Most of the time this drives me up the wall. (Bloody students!) But it does have some advantages. My local off-licence is staffed by some student-types who are all big into their music, and the shop lets them play CDs. So I regularly get to hear all sorts of cool stuff that I probably wouldn’t come across normally, and get to ask them about it (and occasionally I get to repay the favour when one of them wants to know something about jazz or old funk and soul).

I do think, however, that the day I find myself standing there—clicking my fingers and arhythmically bobbing my head like only someone’s Dad can—saying “Yeah! This one’s got a real beat to it” then it will probably be time to relocate.

The Go! Teams’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike is a fabulous album.

The Go! Team: Thunder, Lightning, Strike

They’re a wonderful blend of De La Soul, Belle and Sebastian, Saint Etienne, Air, old funk, and Northern Soul, with a few 70s TV theme songs thrown in (I swear I keep catching the theme from The Rockford Files, but then it’s gone again before I can really be sure). Just like The Polyphonic Spree, whose single Soldier Girl The Go! Team re-mixed, it’s just impossible to listen to this album without ending up with a huge grin on your face. Joyous!

Their website has tracks you can listen to, and the video of the current single, Ladyflash, my favourite track from the album, is available from their record company (requires Quicktime).

Ross Burton’s blog brought to my attention this wonderful quote from The Guardian on the state of British science journalism:

Guardian readers can have little idea how dreadful the general coverage of science stories is in the British press. All distinction vanishes between chemists, social scientists, particle physicists, snail taxonomists, people who chop the heads of little chickens with giant scissors—they’re all “scientists”.

All “scientists” have one task. The Daily Mail subscribes to a radically simplified version of the atomic theory and everyone else tries to follow. According to this theory everything in the world is made from two kinds of basic substance: those that cure cancer, and those that cause it. The job of a scientist is to go through the world classifying everything into one category or the other. Every time something is identified as made of one sort of atom or the other, we have a story, preferably a scandal.

As amusing as that was, though, it has to be said that The Guardian is often just as bad. I still remember a story from The Guardian from years ago, reporting on some recent neuropsychological research, with the headline “Scientists prove men and women think differently”. As interesting as the actual scientific research was (based on brains scans of men and women performing the same simple cognitive tasks), the headline was wildly misleading. A more accurate headline would have been “Scientists prove men and women’s bodies are different”—yet another contribution to the science of the bleeding obvious. That too would have been equally unfair on the research being reported on, but would have been more truthful given the spin The Guardian were trying to put on the whole story.

Jef Raskin, the creator of the Macintosh computer, died aged 61: In Memory of Jef Raskin.

He was truly one of the first and greatest experts in the field of Human Computer Interaction. Although I am not a Mac user myself, and despite the behaviour of all the Mac-fanboys out there who drive me up the wall, there is no question that Apple are the leaders in usability and ergonomics by several orders of magnitude. That is due in large part to Raskin’s legacy. They are always my first suggestion to anyone who asks me for advice about buying a computer, and almost all of the reasons I hear for using the PC/Windows platform are inaccurate or erroneous in some way. Whilst my personal preference is for GNU/Linux, and in time I hope that platform will surpass the Mac in functionality and usability, I have no doubt that the right choice for most people today is a Mac. In fact, I really don’t know why people (excluding fanatical gamers) still buy those ugly beige boxes that constantly crash and become infested with viruses and malware within seconds of being used.

Raskin created something truly wonderful. He will be missed greatly.