neuro.me.uk

Google Earth has had 3D building views for a while, but I didn’t realise how good the quality of the newer photorealistic buildings were until I decided to recreate one of my favourite skyline shots using Google Earth. At the thumbnail level, it’s hard to tell which is which. Gobsmackingly impressive stuff.

I’ve just finished watching both Friday night’s Battlestar Galactica on Sci Fi — the mid-season finale “Revelations”, the last episode until the start of 2009 — and Saturday night’s Doctor Who on BBC One — “Midnight”, another mid-season episode, but with more to come from next week onwards.

The current productions of Doctor Who suffer massively from some serious problems. Don’t get me wrong, it has its good points: the acting is usually pretty good, with special kudos to David Tennant, the plots and attempts at story arcs have improved massively over time, and its capacity to scare us all behind the sofa is still there. But the problems are still there too, and they stop Who from achieving true greatness in the way BSG has.

The orchestral score, while much more polished than the classic BBC Radiophonic Workshop bleeps and wails, is simply too loud. This week’s cacophony owed a lot to Michael Giacchini’s work on Lost, almost to the point of pure plagiarism.

The visual effects, while much improved over their counterparts of the 1960s through 1980s, still suffer from an at times amateurish feel. Some shots of The Library in previous weeks’ episodes were truly stunning, but this week’s attempt to render a diamond planet were just shoddy. The entire show was from the get-go a “bottle show” — a Star Trek-ism where to keep the budget low, the episode would be set completely within the starship, with minimal use of visual effects and location shooting. Here, the bulk of the show was set inside the Crusader tour bus, thus keeping the vfx requirement to a minimum. I can understand not wanting to blow an entire series budget in one episode, but you’d think they could spend a little bit of time on the vfx, bottle show or not.

The production quality seems utterly dependent on what location they decide to shoot in to — again — save money. A few weeks ago we had a story set in an underground tunnel complex on a far-off planet. Why, on such a planet, would there be a sign printed on a fire alarm control box with pageholder contact instructions and mobile phone number? This wasn’t even hidden in the background in such a way that my geek eyes wpuld catch it fleetingly in a Photoshop-processed still frame; this was clear as day for several seconds in shot. Last week, we had the latest thin Apple keyboards on the terminals of an alien library. This week, while being set presumably in the future, we were in a tour bus fitted out with seats and fittings from an old Boeing airliner, and a coffee dispenser and paper cups very clearly from the present. I know, it’s a TV show, and there’s only so much room to reinvent the present, but it jars when you recognise something so very “now”, and the narrative, however compelling and immersive, is disrupted.

The scripts thus far have been pretty damn good, with few real clunker stories — although the 2007 Christmas special starring Kylie Minogue was absolute crap — and some great comedic moments have been given to Tennant, who luckily has a flair for delivering them. But — and of course there’s a but — there have been plenty of moments with nothing but cheese on display.

The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver — originally a device rarely seen — has turned into some sort of tricorder-cum-deus-ex-machina. Any time the Doctor needs to find something out that he can’t figure out visually or intellectually, out comes the screwdriver. Need to close or open a door? Screwdriver. Darken a helmet visor? Screwdriver. Data storage device? Computer hacking? Screwdriver.

Oh, and Rose appeared yet again, bleating silently from a screen while the Doctor wasn’t watching. The Doctor may not have seen it, but thousands of pasty geeks will have. Cue endless discussion about something we know is happening, namely the return of Rose. Again, this is something US shows — and BSG in particular — do so much better than recent Who has ever done: foreshadowing. Surely there are less blatant ways to do this? I can think of one way not to do it: tell us what’s happening next week. This may work well with soaps and non-episodic drama, but when you’re trying to build an arc, what’s the point in giving us spoilers a week before? I understand the “why” — it gets you all excited so that you can’t wait to tune in next week — but if you feel the need to show the audience part of the next episode, what faith are you showing in the capacity of the episode that has just aired to keep the viewers on tenterhooks for a week? Moving the schedules around doesn’t help either: 7pm one week, 6:45pm the next. Those with PVRs are fine; those wanting to sit down at the same time every Saturday with their friends and/or family and enjoy the show — surely the very raison d’être of weekend evening entertainment shows — are fucked.

This week’s episode “Midnight” has me definitely interested in what’s to come this series, as Who’s current strong points were evident en masse. Yet the problems are still there. And while it was fun to hear the Enterprise bridge sound effects from Star Treks II and III in the cockpit of the Crusader tours bus, perhaps if the Radiophonic Workshop was still involved, the producers could have created some original — and appropriate — sound effects to suit the mood. Perhaps while they’re at it, we could hear less of these irritating stock audio library sirens whenever the slightest thing happens? Please? I guess that even with these issues, the fact that I still want to watch next week speaks volumes. Who is still a great show. I’d just love if it was the real deserved classic it could so easily become.

Then there’s Battlestar Galactica. Over roughly the same time as the newest series of Who, BSG has managed to build a stunning story arc, created fascinating characters portrayed by great actors, and smothered them in music, visual effects, quality production and scripts week-in and week-out that would not be out of place in a movie theatre. Yes, there are unbelievable plot moments; yes, there are similar jarring “now” prop moments, but these have all been noted by the show’s creator, and are all addressable before the show’s end, while Who’s prop faults are harder to deal with on a narrative basis; and yes, sometimes the acting is scenery chewingly over the top. Yet, again it transcends these problems to be massively compelling. The ongoing storylines and the sheer darkness and drama of it all place it that much higher on the “engaging” scale compared to Who, which only occasionally reaches the immersiveness that the BSG universe gives us. The sheer attention to detail alone offers us a vision that Who can only dream to offer. Couple that with the Who producers unwillingness to produce the show in high definition — “cost”, is their main concern for the BBC’s flagship entertainment show, while Torchwood gets the HD treatment without a mutter — and Battlestar Galactica is easily the best science fiction show airing today. Thank goodness there’s at least one.

I’ve decided to take a leaf out of Jemima’s book, and rip and sell all my music CDs. Why? Well, I have the following:

I started collecting CDs in 1990: Christmas, 1990, to be precise, when my parents gave me a Hi Fi with CD player, and a copy of Iron Maiden’s No Prayer for the Dying and Jean Michel Jarre’s Waiting for Cousteau. I may hang on to those, but I’m now pretty intent on ripping and selling every other CD I’ve ever bought, be it album, single, soundtrack, magazine cover disc … you name it, it’s going. I just can’t justify the space they take up. I haven’t bought anything more than a CD or two a year for the last few years, and I definitely haven’t played a CD for just as long a time: there’s a Mac mini plugged into both the TV and the surround system for playing music via iTunes, I have an iPod for listening to music outside the house, why do I need to keep all these CDs again?

I have the odd gem which I may find it hard to part with (for example, a Tupelo pressing of Nirvana’s Bleach, a gold [coloured, sadly] disc version of the GoldenEye soundtrack, and so on), but I’ll take those on when I get there.

Onward, iTunes; onward, jiffy bags; onward, sense of preservation in the face of probable blatant copyright infringement! Undisc!

Talk Like Yoda Day, it is. Talk like Yoda, you must.

First, Rangers get beaten in the UEFA Cup final, then a core of arsehole Rangers fans decide to rampage across Manchester’s city centre, and now news that Celtic legend Tommy Burns has died. These are dark days for Scottish football.

After seeing Iron Man last night, Robert Downey Jr. has firmly cemented himself into the canon of my “mostest awesome favourite actor types”. I’ve always liked Downey Jr. — highlights for me were his roles in Air America, Chaplin, and most recently, A Scanner Darkly, Good Night, and Good Luck and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. There’s a pattern in those roles: he excels at playing complete fuck-ups, mainly because his life in many regards has been one big long fuck-up. He spent most of the 1990s in and out of both rehab and jail for repeated drug use and offences. This guy knows more than most what it’s like to get on, and most critically to get off a substance abuse habit.

And that to me made him perfect to play Tony Stark in Iron Man. The guy goes from arms dealing playboy to armour-clad philanthropist after seeing his life’s work being used by insurgents to kill innocent people (Vietnamese in the comics, Afghans in the movie). Downey Jr. seems to have taken a similar path, seeing how fucked up his life was becoming, and now resuming a successful movie career. For me, starring in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang in 2005, alongside fellow career fuck-up Val Kilmer, was the first big “I’m back” statement he made. Iron Man is his coming out party. Holy crap, is Robert Downey Jr. back.

As for Iron Man itself, there’s a ridiculous amount of stuff to love in this movie, the first to be developed from scratch by Marvel itself: explosions, dogfights, great comedy, pathos, more explosions, no long-winded unrequired exposition pieces and … well, even more explosions. It’s a balls-out, no-bullshit summer event movie, and it doesn’t give a shit about who knows it. In fact, there’s actually quite a few key things that make this movie as great as it is — and it really shouldn’t be as great as it is given that the movie is shallow and predictable in places — Downey Jr. being the primary element both holding the feature together and driving it forward to a satisfactory ending. In a nod to both Downey Jr.’s and director Jon Favreau’s comedy pasts, there was dialogue improvisation on set, partly due to an incomplete script, assisting in making this movie more believable on a human level. Aside from that, a consistently good performances from the rest of the cast, taut direction from Favreau and utterly stunning visual effects from houses at the top of their game (ILM, Pixel Liberation Front, Stan Winston) combine to make this one of the strongest event movies in recent years. And it really shouldn’t be. It’s not a complaint, just an observation: the stars have some how aligned in such a way to make this movie great. In lesser hands, perhaps, it would have floundered.

Combine all this with Downey Jr.’s appearance as Tony Stark in the forthcoming The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton, and the tantalising promise of a series of Marvel Studios movies featuring other members of the Avengers — Captain America, Thor, Ant-Man — all leading to an Avengers ensemble movie around 2010, and you have one of the most impressive and smart ways to build a franchise ever heard of in movies. Good luck, Marvel: surprise us all and keep making these awesome comic-book movies!

Oh! Tip: stay to the end of the end credits. You’ll thank me.

I dropped my dinky Dell Latitude X300 a couple of weeks ago. The whole thing just locked up hard, and wouldn’t recover from a reboot. I ended up claiming for it on my home insurance. The insurance folks got back to me and said it was unrepairable, and they’ve offered me £400 in vouchers for Currys or PC World to spend to get a replacement. Urgh.

I mean, this is the laptop that has survived bus trips, car trips, flights to England, Wales, France, the US. It even survived having a full pint of beer poured over it. Gah.

So long, little buddy. Schniff.

I was wondering why my iTunes Music folder was taking up so much room on my hard disk, and in checking I realised: it’s because I subscribe to the 720p HD Trailer Podcast and I’d forgotten to expire out watched ‘episodes’. It’s a neat way to catch up with new HD trailers without having to keep visiting the Apple or Yahoo! sites off my own back. Don’t worry about the fact it doesn’t look to have been updated in a while from the episode list, the feeds are bang up to date with such awesomeness as the new Indy 4 and Iron Man trailers.

Oh, and is it just me, or does it look like Iron Man is going to kick some serious ass? Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark: absolutely inspired casting.

Some of you who know me may know my fascination and infatuation for SmoothWall, the open source Linux firewall distro. You may be interested to know that I’ve decided to take my leave of the project after just over 7 years. To explain, I need to tell a story of how I got there in the first place.

In October 2000, I moved house. My Internet access changed from using a Nokia 5146 mobile phone making data calls to Freeserve and BT Internet (0800 dialup for a tenner a month), hooked up to a Windows NT Workstation to share to my fledgling LAN (of two machines), to having a USR Sportster 56K modem and “real” phone line. I needed a better way to share the access than a Windows box, and decided to investigate building a router firewall running Debian Linux. I lasted about two days and was getting narked off that I had to read all my personal email at work. Then I picked up the December 2000 issue of Linux Format, which had a free Linux-based router firewall distro cover mounted on the CD. It was SmoothWall 0.9.5LF.

I installed it and it ran just peachy, getting way further than my fudged Debian install in about 20 minutes. Internet access had I. Once I was online, I did my usual: subscribe to the mailing lists, check out the project a bit more. Turns out they were looking for some help with the web interface the firewall software used, and at the time I considered myself a dab hand with Photoshop and HTML, so I threw my cap over the wall and sent some UI mockups to the list. Soon, I was part of the project team, and not only helping Dan Goscomb build out the web interface, but also doing some meagre Perl hacking on the UI rendering code, and fiddling with serial LCD consoles to get status information from the firewall onto. Eventually I found myself involved in redesigning the project website from scratch. In short, I had become a member of my very first Open Source software project. I soon grew to know members of the team very well — they included dang, dan_c, whaletales, bill, rebecca, and I especially got to know Richard Morrell and Lawrence Manning (aslak).

A year later, and the whole thing had ballooned to the point where a company could be formed around marketing, developing and selling the whole kit and caboodle in a more corporate-friendly fashion. In November 2001, I did some contract work for the company to create the very first iteration of the SmoothWall company website, and by January 2002, I was employee #4 of SmoothWall Ltd.; employees #1-3 were (in no real order) Richard, Lawrence and George. George had come from building up IT businesses, and we were looking for someone with biz clout to manage the company while we did all the fun stuff like hacking on cool code, websites and teams. I lasted there until mid-2004. This was a time when the company seemed to be doing well, building new commercial products on the back of the open source project output, and we had nearly tripled in size. Richard had already left by this point, leaving a trail of customers and open source users who loved what he had helped nurture, and some people angry at being sworn at a bit. While I enjoyed the work, we were still a small company and I needed a bit more money coming in. I decided to resign after I was offered a job with an ISP in Edinburgh which paid better, and let me explore system administration as a career as opposed to web development; I had spent a fair while doing webdev at SmoothWall, but I decided that my skills in that area were fading fast, and that I’d need an extensive amount of time to train myself up on newer webdev technologies.

Meanwhile, I still considered myself part of the open source project, and still did some sysadmin and forum twiddling in that regard. However, as time went on, I spent more and more time in my work — especially since some of it had an on-call element — while concurrently, more and more Express development seemed to be occurring in-house, sometimes taking cues — and I assume code — from the corporate products. Now, this is A Good Thing; a corporate entity backporting features and code from its commercial products into its open source endeavours, but there just seemed to be no way for me to do much outwith the realm of the company.

This went on until around 2007, when the smoothwall.org website was redesigned, shortly after the smoothwall.net site was overhauled. The team page had always listed me, and when we had text describing what we did, it always gave a pretty accurate view of what I had contributed. But this new version relegated me to “Moderator and user support”. What? In September, I tried asking why this had happened in the team-only forum:

… and …

No meaningful reply was given, and nothing was done about my entry. At one point, I was challenged to define what I did on Express 3.0 to justify any expansion on my team entry; I replied with this:

My work on the firewall user interface, which was built upon in 3.0, not re-engineered from scratch, was ignored, as was my other work on the website. Sadly, my repeated efforts to engage without threatening anything did nothing. Nothing changed.

A conference call was announced to try and talk through some of these issues, and while methods (telephone? Skype? Gizmo?) and times were discussed, nothing concrete came out and nothing was arranged.

Equally crazy things were done around this time; the administrator’s manual for Express 3.0 was gated behind a signup form, nominally to generate opt-in statistics on SmoothWall usage and hardware configurations, to better understand the population and how to tailor the HCL to increase hardware compatibility. Regardless of the rationale, well-intentioned or not, who hides the freaking documentation for an open source project behind a sign-up form? Meanwhile, a poll was fielded in the public forums to see if Express users would be interested in paying SmoothWall Ltd. for a “features” subscription, including “like anti-spam, web filtering blocklist and settings backup”. The answer was a resounding “no”. These were typical of what seemed to be increasingly odd business decisions, and bizarre attitudes on how to run an open, transparent FOSS project.

So five days ago, I posted to the internal forum explaining that I was considering leaving the project, and asking for comments: not to seek pleadings for me to stay, or to incite insults to force my hand, but again to generate a rational discussion, highlighting my issues:

I made it crystal clear that this was not an attack, that this was not my trying to “get at anyone”, these were observations and my reaction to those observations.

Five days later, and nothing has happened. Again. So I feel it’s time to say farewell to SmoothWall. I’ve no doubt I’ll still stay part of the user community, at least peripherally, and I bear no real ill will to anyone involved. I’m just very disappointed in the decisions made to get where we are today, and I feel it’s hypocritical to stay connected to a project I have misgivings about. This also isn’t to say that SmoothWall the distro and product line aren’t good; they are, and I’ll likely continue to recommend SmoothWall Express where appropriate, although I’ll likely be replacing my own SmoothWall border solution with a Cisco 871-K9 to get my IOS nous up.

So long, SmoothWall. It was fun.