Movie Review : Taken

 Culture, Uncategorized  10 Responses »
Sep 202008
 

A man reluctantly lets his teenage daughter take a trip to Paris. As soon as she arrives she a kidnapped (or taken, if you will) by an evil white slavery ring. Luckily she was on the phone to her father at the time and manages to scream out a description of her attackers. Even more lucky – her father is a retired “fixer” for the US government with the skills to take on a small army. He quickly flies to Paris and sets about finding his daughter using the time-honored shoot-everything-in-sight technique.

A bog standard revenge film, Taken does little to distinguish itself except by being a little more brutal than average. The hero kills and tortures dozens of nameless people to get his idiotic daughter back. Sure, “dey were all bad” (read the previous phrase in an Austrian accent) but half the people killed were only tangentially involved. Of course, the police are no help and are actively working against him – the city of Paris should sue the producers for defamation.

In short, not one of Stephen Seagals best films.

What did you say?

It’s a Liam Neeson movie?

No way!

Not recommended unless you really, really like this sort of thing.

Hitler, the Universal Simile

 Culture  No Responses »
Sep 202008
 

It is a sad fact that in any Internet debate on any topic, one side (or more probably, both sides) will eventually be compared to Hitler. This is often called Godwin’s law, after a man called Mike Godwin who first proposed it in 1990, although another term, Reducto Ad Hitlerum, has been around in since the 1950′s to describe what was even then a tired rhetorical device.

Whatever it is called, it seems to me that half the time the participants in these debates ascribe characteristics to Hitler that he didn’t have in their haste to tar the other side with the Hitler brush. The following is my attempt to list the Hitler “facts” floating around the Internet along with some commentary on the veracity of those claims.
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But who will watch the Watchmen?

 Culture  8 Responses »
Sep 102008
 

I have just finished rereading the comic book graphic novel Watchmen. It’s a cracking read, filled with Big Ideas and it uses the comic graphic medium to great advantage – telling the story in a way that really wouldn’t work in a traditional written novel. The artwork is visually stunning with many pages containing no dialog, content to just let the pictures tell the story.

The producers of the upcoming movie will have had some hard choices to make. It is the density of little details that makes Watchmen so interesting, and any film will have to cut a lot out. I find filmed adaptions of novels interesting for their own sake so I have decided to take a stab taking note of what I would change if I were in charge of production (the following paragraphs contain both plot information and uninformed speculation – avert your eyes now if you don’t want to be spoilt and/or bored.)
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Chrome

 Computer  2 Responses »
Sep 032008
 

So Google is going where angels fear to tread, and has released a browser of their own: Chrome. This is a very interesting move; I can think of a few reasons why Google might think a custom browser might be a good idea:

  • although everyone thinks of Google as a search engine they are really in the cryto-marketing field. Firefox plugins that remove ads must be a worrying development for them.
  • anything that helps people view more web pages is a win for Google, since more pages viewed equals more ad impressions.
  • having their own browser gets them a seat at the table when new web-standards are being created.
  • Google has a vested interest in promoting internet commerce, releasing a secure browser with safety features built in supports that goal.
  • most browsers have a search box that redirects to Google or another search engine. Chrome has a search/location bar that only redirects to Google – AdWords ahoy!
  • perhaps even sneakier, the search bar widget uses Google Suggest, so it is sending back information to Google as you type. I am sure Google can think of useful things to do with this information.
  • the search/location widget is a very interesting idea in its own right, effectively minimising the utility of domain names (which can be spoofed or camped.) Expect to see lawsuits fly when people work that their expensive .com domain name is not worth as much as they thought if this idea catches on.

I used Chrome for a couple of hours today at work (luckily I am in a line of work were this is not considered goofing off.) The interface is very clean and slick, even better than Safari. Having the location bar as part of the tab rather than above it make a lot of sense, and Chrome does it much better than IE, which I have always found visually confusing. I also like the way that Chrome uses the window title bar when full screen, giving you an extra few pixels of vertical height.

Chrome uses the infamous WebKit HTML layout engine, as seen in Safari and various Linux browsers. It is very fast at complex pages and supports all the fancy -webkit extensions to CSS. Sadly it does not include the excellent graphics renderer that comes with Safari, so fonts and images still look jaggy. Also, no support for @font-face – come on!

The network code seems pretty tight. Browsing through proxies worked well (a lot better than Safari) although it never seemed to do automatic NTLM authentication like IE.

There are a few omissions. Weirdly, Java applets do not seem to be supported. I am not sure if that is deliberate, or just something they haven’t gotten around to yet. No Mac version as yet, although it is apparently on the way.

Finally I must observe that commissioning a comic book for announce a product launch is one of the weirdly cool things I have ever seen.