Watching this reminds me what a great film Aliens turned out to be and how Avatar (by the same director) pales in comparison. It’s not that Avatar was terrible but nobody is going to be making 10 minute rap songs about it in 25 years.

quick update: Hey, they’ve done Terminator 2 as well!

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The planet of Pandora (Who names these planets? What were they thinking?) has some stuff that humans want to mine. Unfortunately, the best place to get it is right on top of where the indigenous population (8 foot tall skinny blue people called the Navi) live in harmony with their world. The Navi are distrustful of the humans, so in order to investigate the Navi a bit more, the humans create the titular avatars – mindless Navi bodies that certain individuals can “drive around” remotely. The main character is just such an individual, and he (or his avatar) quickly becomes involved in the local tribe. Although the humans would prefer that the Navi move on without violence, it is clear that a military solution, led by a crazed marine, might be more expedient…

It is almost impossible to spoil anything about Avatar’s plot, no doubt you have already guessed the direction it which it unfolds. It is a shame that for all the risks involved in making what is apparently the most expensive movie ever made (it certainly looks like it), the story is as safe as an after-school special. The film could have made some interesting points about colonialism, or environmentalism, the military, or even feminism, but instead chooses to unspool a conventional yarn where the good guys are selfless and the bad guys are crazy and evil. It is not that is it a bad story per say, just something we have all seen many times before.

I saw Avatar in 3D, it is by far the best 3D experience so far. The lush jungles and mist-shrouded peaks of Pandora look amazing – Avatar is simply the greatest visual treat I have ever seen. The contrast between the sharp grey lines of the human base with the colourful, glowing environment outside is very well rendered. James Cameron has always been interested in portraying technology and Avatar is no exception – a nice touch is that all of the displays that the humans use during the movie are also in 3D. There are a thousand little details like that I loved about Avatar, it is just a shame that the whole thing isn’t as great as the sum of its parts. However, anyone who shares Cameron’s love for helicopters and giant robots and things being blown up by helicopters and giant robots will be thrilled.

Highly recommended if you can see it on the big screen in 3D. Otherwise only recommended if you like this sort of thing (but who doesn’t?)

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Anyway, I haven’t given The Phantom Menace much thought since it first came out but this guy certainly has:

Even if you ignore the affectations of the reviewer, he has some pretty insightful points about how TPM fails as a movie.

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This is all very good, prevents a lot of runtime errors, and generally makes C++ a great language if you care about correctness. But sometimes, very rarely, you actually want to store a whole bunch of messy, unrelated types in a container without trying to ram them into some sort of class hierarchy. Parsers are a good example of this. It is often convenient just to chuck tokens of various types into a data structure for later processing without worrying too much about the specific type (string, int, float, etc).

boost::any is a small class that can hold values from almost any type, designed for just such messy applications. Using boost::any is very simple:

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boost::any a1 = std::string("Moose");
boost::any a2 = 6;

Of course, getting the values back again is a little harder.

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try
{
	std::string v1 = boost::any_cast< std::string >(a1); // this works, a1 is a string
	std::string v2 = boost::any_cast< std::string >(a2); // nope, will throw an exception at runtime
}
catch ( const boost::bad_any_cast& e )
{
	// tried to any_cast into something that wouldn't go
}

Of course, you can query a boost::any for the typeid of the stored object. Just don’t do it when Scott Meyers is in the vicinity.

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std::string v;
if ( a1.type() == typeid(std::string) )
{
	v = boost::any_cast< std::string >( a1 ); // this should never throw, since we checked first
}

A single boost::any is perhaps not that useful, but a container of them can store almost anything we want:

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typedef std::vector< boost::any > AnyVector;
AnyVector values;
 
values.push_back( 5 );
values.push_back( std::string("Hello") );
values.push_back( 5.3 );
 
try 
{
	for ( AnyVector::const_iterator p = values.begin();
			p != values.end();
			++p )
	{
		if ( p->type() == typeid(int) )
			cout << "Int = " << any_cast<int>(*p) << endl;
		else if ( p->type() == typeid(std::string) )
			cout << "String = " << any_cast<string>(*p) << endl;
		else 
		{
			cout << "Unhandled type: " << p->type().name() << endl;
		}
	}
} 
catch ( const boost::bad_any_cast &e )
{
	cout << "Bad any_cast<>" << e.what() << endl;
}

Any type that you put into a boost::any must be copy constructable (the any makes a copy, not a reference). You also have to make sure that its destructor doesn’t throw (but of course you do that anyway!)

Although I wouldn’t recommend boost::any for everyday use, it does come into its own when the only alternative is a huge class structure or (even worse) void *s.

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The other big advantage of Python is the useful utility libraries that come with it as standard. Want to send twenty thousand emails? Just import smtplib. Want to generate code based on data from a spreadsheet? Import csv and away you go. Need a file that is exactly 32Mb is size? No problem. These are real examples from my job where Python has saved me many hours.

The most recent use I have put Python to is a slow server. For various murky and uninteresting reasons I need a rate-limiting HTTP server, one that I can easily control the speed at which it sends data. Enter Python’s very handy BaseHTTPServer module, which allows you to create custom HTTP servers with only a few lines of code by subclassing a request handler. Although the BaseHTTPServer is fairly useless for serving real files, it is perfect for this type of thing since it does all the boring work of parsing headers and returning status codes.

I don’t care about the contents of the data, just its size and how long it takes to serve. Since I will be varying these parameters a lot, I decided to make them part of each request so that each request could take a different amount of time – this means I don’t have to restart the server between each test run. Modifying the code to serve actual file data would be very simple.

I enjoyed writing this server so much that I regret that it didn’t take longer. Now I actually have to use it for its intended purpose, which I can assure you is not going to be as pleasant.

Here is the complete Python source:

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# A very simple HTTP server designed to for testing situations where the data returned
# is not important but the rate at which it comes down is. This server can be started
# using the command: python delayserver.py
#
# Once started, it will listen for requests on port 8000
# Requests should be of the form http://<address>:8000/size=<bytes>,duration=<seconds>
# where: <bytes> is the size of the response data
# and    <seconds> is how long you want it to take (at minimum, it may take longer)
#
# Notes:
# * The timing is pretty inaccurate for small byte sizes, this isn't a problem for
#   what I need it for
# * Press ctrl-c to stop serving
 
 
import time
import BaseHTTPServer
 
class MyHTTPRequestHandler(BaseHTTPServer.BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
 
	def do_GET(self):
		request = self.path.strip("/")
		duration = 1
		size = 1024
 
        	validRequest = False
		params = request.split(",")
		for p in params:
                    temp = p.partition("=")
                    if (temp[0] == "size"):
                        size = int(temp[2])
                        validRequest = True
                    elif (temp[0] == "duration"):
                        duration = int(temp[2])
                        validRequest = True
 
                if (validRequest == False):
                   self.send_error(404)
                   return
 
                self.send_response( 200 )
                self.send_header( "Content-Length", str(size) )
                self.send_header( "Pragma", "no-cache" )
                self.end_headers()
                self.slowWrite( self.wfile, size, duration )
 
 
        def slowWrite(self, output, size, duration):
                bytesWritten = 0
                startTime = time.time()
                while ( bytesWritten < size ):
                        now = time.time()
                        if (duration != 0):
                                desiredBytes = ( (now - startTime) / duration ) * size
                        else:
                                desiredBytes = size
                        desiredBytes = min( size, desiredBytes )
                        if (desiredBytes < bytesWritten ):
                                time.sleep(0.2)
                        else:
                                while (bytesWritten < desiredBytes):
                                        output.write('A')
                                        bytesWritten = bytesWritten + 1
                                output.flush()
                now = time.time()
                self.log_message( "Request took %f seconds",   now - startTime  )	
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    http = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer( ('', 8000), MyHTTPRequestHandler )
    print "Listening on 8000 - press ctrl-c to stop"
    http.serve_forever()

I should point out that I am by no means an expert at Python, so take this code with a pinch of salt.

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Remember kids – winners don’t do drugs.

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The app plays a pretty good game, the interface is fairly straight forward and trading between players is handled well. Some rule variants are supported, like starting with a city instead of a settlement or different point targets. There are even different ways of distributing the resources for wusses who can’t take random chance. The computer players put up a fair challenge, and you can play hot-seat multiplayer but there is no internet play – an obvious omission.

Unfortunately, Catan also has some fairly annoying flaws. Firstly, the game is buggy. On both my first two games the computer player refused to finish its turn, leaving aborting the game the only option. The other 3 games I have had have worked smoothly so I still don’t know what I did to trigger that bug. Loading a saved game also sets some of the options back to the default, which is a pain but not game breaking.

Speaking of saved games, Catan does not automatically save your progress when you dismiss the app to go back to the iPod main menu. When you re-enter Catan it pops you back at the title screen with no way to resume unless you manually saved the game, something you can only do during your turn. This is intensely annoying, not to mention against Apple’s App guidelines and I hope the fix this if nothing else in an update.

The graphics are just OK, they get the job done without being very attractive and the board animation looks terrible. The whole package seems just a little unpolished – it works but needs just a little more attention to detail. The only thing that really saves Catan as an App is the mechanics of the game itself, which still shine. Perhaps after an update or two “Catan – The First Island” will reach its potential, but right now it is only for die-hard Catan fans.

A disappointment, only recommended if you like this sort of thing.

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There is more information at the associated Wellington Podcast Blog, but the daring amongst you can just downloaded it directly (16Mb mp3), or subscribe to the Wellington Podcast using iTunes.

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This guy is incredible, how does he do that?

Also worth watching, from the same guy:
Wolverine in 30 Seconds
Unemployed Hitman
Terminator Salvation in 60 Seconds
StarTrek in 47 Seconds

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Hardly ideal working conditions, but if that wasn’t enough real-time communications with home have been cut off. Sam is only able to exchange short, recorded messages with his wife and mining company superiors, and the isolation is beginning to get to him. The good news is that he only has a few more weeks to go before his three year contract is up and he can return to his family. But even a week can be a long time for a man in such a fragile mental state…

For a low budget sci-fi film, Moon holds up very well. The tone is more reminiscent of more thoughtful films such as 2001 A Space Odyssey rather than the more usual alien infested fare. The plot moves at a fairly slow pace, but the lead actor (Sam Rockwell) and spectacular effects (the outdoor lunar surface looks particularly good) go a long way to make up for it. The one thing I thought was a little grating was that Sam was a fairly unlikable character to watch at times, stubborn and a little dim, but that can be explained by the tense situation – the film does a good job of putting you inside his one-note life.

Apparently Moon cost only 5 million dollars to make, but manages to both look more impressive and tell a better story than its blockbuster siblings. Highly recommended if you like this sort of thing.

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