Caffeine-Addicts unite: We are not alone!

There is a website called CoffeeGeek with every information one needs to make a really good cup of coffee. Sometimes they are going to extremes, but hey, so do I!

Movies: Even more of the same?

The last year sported a healthy dose of part twos or remakes and not so much new, original material in regard of the movies shown in theaters. The year we just entered looks pretty much the same. At first I thought I might get picky or that I was just cranky, but most of my friends agreed with me. John August, he wrote the screenplay for "Big Fish", by the way, has a good article on the subject called What’s with all the remakes?.
The fact that I got a clearer picture now, does not change my resolve that I will watch many of the new releases this year on video or DVD instead of going to the cinema. There is not too much in the pipeline that convinces me to shell out the money at the ticket-booth.

PodCasts: Three I can't do without

My list of PodCasts I listen to on a regular basis is much longer, but here are my favorites:

1. NIGHT PASSAGE JAZZ PODCAST
   A great PodCast from Rome, Italy featuring all types of fantastic jazz music. I really like Renato's taste.


2. Daily Sourcecode
   The PodFather[wikipedia] himself. Nothing to add.


3. From our own correspondent (BBC)
   A very interesting and very personal look of the BBC's correspondents on the regions of the world they are in.

Web: I knew 'slashdotted', 'boingboinged' next?

One of my favorite sites, Boing Boing, seems to have raised its power to the likes of slashdot. A website its pointing to loads really sloooooooooooooow. The bad thing about Boing Boing is, so much to see, so little time. The site in question is Pictures of Pennies. OK, that's not the homepage of the site, but this is where Boing Boing points to.
Your site might have been boingboinged has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
Come to think of it, it could be the cache-policy of my ISP as well, but I don't think so.

TWM: "Brothers Grimm", "Big Fish", and "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

TWM (This weekends movies), in order of appearance:

1. Brothers Grimm[imdb].
   Based on what I've been told by others about this film: Did we watch the same movie? I really liked it. I have to think really hard to find a Terry Gilliam movie I didn't like, though. Nope, couldn't find one. The story progresses just in the right pace to enjoy the scenery of the movie, never boring and always amazing to watch the sets. It just works. The story goes, that the parts of Heath Ledger and Matt Damon were planned the other way round, but I think the way it ended up is one of the reasons this movie is so much fun to watch. Interestingly a comment on imdb links this film somewhat to the next and I kind of see the point here.


2. Big Fish[imdb]
   Awesome. If you haven't seen this movie, try to watch it ASAP, you won't regret it. This is how movies should be done. A fascinating story, wonderful sets and great acting. Seriously, read the rest of this post and try to see this movie. Tim Burton did it again. I liked the story so much, that I'm inclined to get the book, just to see if John August had a hard time adapting it to the screen.


3. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy[imdb]
   My girlfriend didn't catch it in the theater and I don't mind watching it over and over again. Just a question: What about part two?

Before someone starts to blame me not to criticize, but to simply hype things here. I usually don't comment on movies I didn't like for a simple reason: maybe they weren't made for me. Means, either I didn't get it or my mindset is just not compatible with the film and/or the story. This stance might change occasionally, but not today.

Telling convincing Stories

I happened to catch the movie "The Woman in the Window" [imdb] yesterday. I think it is brilliant. It is a thriller, it is shot extremely well (sadly it was the colored version, though), and it gripped me right from the beginning. Colored version? I hear you say. The movie was shot in 1944/45. It was colored in 1996, as far as I know. Not that the company did not an excellent job in painting over the grayscale, but some movies should be left as they are shot and not altered later on. (Do not get me started about the color-version of "Casablanca"!)
The Woman in the Window does not need splashy special-effects or too much blood. OK, someone dies, but this murder is not the fifteen minute blood-fest we are so used to from current films; the murder happens and that's it. This movie is about what happens after it.
If you should have the chance to catch it somewhere, take a look. I don't want to tell anything else about the story, it would spoil the fun.

When should a DVD be released?

After reading the article Fixing broken windows (and the comments, of course), a couple of thoughts popped into my mind.
If the DVD would be on sale in the theater, then I could make a decision right away. I would ask if I'd be harassed by either one of the ridiculous You paid to see the movie, you must be a pirate commercials or by some person nagging me about my cell, if so – and I'm still interested to see the movie – I'd buy the DVD. If I happen to be in a bad mood, then I could do the same thing I do with DRMed CDs, ignore the movie and do something else.
Let's face it, going to the movies with my girlfriend and/or a couple of friends is not the same experience it used to be. Especially if I'm not in the country the movie is shown first. If the film should not be available in theaters in the country I'm in at the moment, and won't be so within a week or two, then I prefer to watch it on DVD in the week it came out instead of getting the plot spoiled via TV or any other medium. Secondly, an evening in the cinema usually costs the same amount I'd have to shell out for the DVD anyway, and I'm talking the first couple of weeks the DVD is available.
I understand that theaters have to make money, but do the have to bombard me with commercials for a solid twenty to thirty minutes? I don't think so. I skipped some movies in the theater for that very reason.
BTW: I'm BFC (before first coffee) right now, I might add some more thoughts later.

Scriptwriting: The Sequence of Buttons

While watching "When Worlds Collide (1951)" [imdb] something odd struck me: why do all controls in the space-ship have to be pressed in another sequence than they are built into the console? Every time, if I'm not mistaken.
It could be for the dramatic effect, some idea of the director (Rudolph Maté), or something completely different, but still …
My theory is: it is done this way to demonstrate that not every ordinary person would be able to press the right buttons in the right sequence. This very behavior sticks with the genre and always puts a smile on my face. The sheer thought, that an engineer would create a console with the controls out of a meaningful sequence on it, seems to be a bit far-fetched, don't you think?
On a related note, the story is in production again. Script by Stephen Sommers [imdb]. I hope the spirit of the original will stay. I really like the movie, you know.

grep with color?

I just found this on Robert's Blog, grep understands the --color flag. So, no Robert, you are not the last to know, and, yes, pretty much live-changing. Best of all, it works on Linux and OS X, that's all I need at the moment.
One has just to use:
grep --color <search_pattern> <files_to_search>
<shameless_plug>BTW: I had the honor to do the German translation of his book.</shameless_plug>

The BBC should be taken as an example

…not only for being a credible news-source (some say the only one), but for demonstrating how to give something back to the people who paid them. (The people in the U.K. have to pay a fee for getting the program. Or should I write programme in that case?)
A disclaimer first: if you are not in the U.K., you are not allowed to play (I know it rhymes, so what).
The BBC, or the Beeb, how they are called sometimes, opened up their archive of news footage a while ago. If you are in the U.K., you are allowed to download the material in the Open News Archive under the Creative Archive Licence and use it according to the set terms. A real case of putting your tax-money to work.
Keep up the good work, ladies and gentlemen.
BTW: Check out my favorite station BBC Radio 4, they even have PodCasts. News can be interesting and fun to hear.

Mac: 12" inches its way back to trusty, but isn't there yet.

For those who want to know: I was able to start the 12" again, no coffee-grinder sound-effect so far. Actually, the bugger acts as if nothing has ever happened. Not that I would store anything important on it before swapping the hard-disk, but it seems to be willing to work again.
Kudos to Apple for coming up with Target-Mode, means press down t after the startup-sound and make a Mac behave like a firewire hard-disk. It made the recovery of all the data not included in the last backup a breeze.
I'm trying to figure out what happened for the time being. What seemed to have helped was storing the 12" in a pretty chilly room in the apartment. I'm not sure if the unexpected resurrection is related to that, though.

A Happy New Year

to all readers. Sorry for not writing so long, but the incident with my 12" (described here, actually one post below) took a lot of time to resolve. The usual holiday-turmoil didn't help to speed things up either.
Again, I wish you a healthy, successful 2006. May the backup be with you, just in case.
;-)

Mac: It could happen to YOU, as well!

How's your backup? It's current, right? Well, let me tell you a story:
It happened during the silent days before Christmas. Life was good. The last backup a couple of days old. Nothing new here. My 12" PowerBook rested next a really noisy SUN-box (with noisy I mean Gee, are we that close to the airport? You get what I mean.). The resting place of my 12" (you notice that I omit the word trusty, do you?) was, as already mentioned, next to that SUN-box. It has been sitting there, peacefully, for about two weeks. To be precise, I sometimes lifted it to my lap (hence the name Laptop) to do some typing, next to the SUN-box, mind you.
While doing a print-run, three days before Christmas, it started to act up. The RAM was maxed out, according to Apple's specs, but some of the programs cannot get enough of it, so I thought that I had taxed it a tad too much. Acting up means that I had to see the Spinning Beachball of Death more often than usual. I closed a couple of programs, we are talking *NIX here, after all, to see if everything else starts to run more smoothly. Things simply got slower. Now I got suspicious. Caches to full? /tmp directory overflowing? I fired up a terminal-session to have a look. I watched the program jumping in the Dock merrily, but no window appeared. I tried to launch Safari, out of curiosity, same thing here. Let's reboot.
It took ages until the PowerBook came up again. A quick check in the /var/log/system.log showed no errors. But it felt different. Something emitted a strange noise. I unplugged the PowerBook to take it someplace else to investigate.

Imagine your favorite suspense music, now!

When I left the room with the SUN-box, the PowerBook emitted a noise similar to a coffee-grinder. It came from the front-left corner of the case (the home of the hard-disk, for non-Mac-users). I placed it on my lap, thus in a slight angle (Laptop remember?), the noise intensified. I tried to hold it straight, the noise changed, but did not disappear. Neither Terminal nor Console displayed any errors, none, zilch, nada. Enough joking around, reboot to Verbose Mode, this mode, in a nutshell, makes OS X behave like any other *NIX system, means you get a lot of diagnostic messages. Nothing to see here. Still grinding. All right, Single User Mode. No errors reported, according to the logs. What is going on?
I rebooted the system using the DVD, DiskUtil told me, that I am not in possession of a hard-disk, great. I mean, it made its presence heard, believe you me! I zapped the PRAM, booted from DVD again and, tadaaaa, a hard-disk. You guessed it, noise but WITHOUT ERRORS.
According to Apple - Support - Discussions - PowerBook G4 12-inch I'm not alone, not that I felt better, though.
I bought a Mac mini to have a backup system and I will try to repair my 12", giving it a chance to earn trusty again.
To be fair, it helped me in the writing of three books and a lot of consulting stuff, but it was always treated with respect.
I'll keep you posted.

*NIX: SUN bashed in Survey

The Register comments on a survey about *NIX vendors called Sun ravaged, IBM lauded in Unix server study, which makes SUN look kind of bad, compared to IBM and HP.
There is one fact that needs some extra consideration IMHO, though. Solaris 10™ is a fantastic OS, but it has two drawbacks:

1. It does some things differently


2. It does require more recent hardware

Number one is some kind of drawback because there are usually more flavors of *NIX in a datacenter, means the admins (FYI: those are the overworked, time-starved folks trying to keep everything up and running) need time to integrate it and will only do so if it really pays off in the not so distant future. There is a solid share of machines still running Solaris 8, believe me. The usual practice to install every new incarnation of an OS, so prevalent in the other OS-camp, does not exist in the *NIX world. It even changes, albeit slowly, among the MS-Windows™ user-base, as well. So, *NIX admins have to switch modes, we are talking of the never touch a running system ([my take:] if it does what it should) world, mind you.
Number two is even harder to tackle, most sys-admins do have some kind of staging system for the various *NIX flavors in production, but more than often not the kind I described in my book (in a nutshell: the little brother/sister of the production system). Means they are not able to test-drive and evaluate the OS. Then there are the–smoothly running–production-machines not capable of running Solaris 10; an upgrade would essentially mean getting new hardware, doing burn-ins, testing, installing the software (maybe doing an upgrade), testing again, and, in worst case, rewriting all kinds of scripts and programs to deal with the changed software; think about time-starved and on a low budget.
To cut a long story short: switching to Solaris 10 would mean a lot of effort and re-learning. These are things sys-admins like; it's the reason they took the job. Provided they have the means, budget and time. Go figure!
The fact that most respondents think that SUN will be the dominant supplier of *NIX systems in five years time shows, that the sys-admins would be willing, if supplied with the two things which are usually cut first: man-power and money.
Just my two cents.

A Writers Wish-List

There is one omission in the wish-lists of Fun Joel, the book is called What just happened?. Maybe it is taboo in Hollywood, but I found it at a local bookstore and read it in an afternoon. My verdict: very entertaining.
Check out the other lists here, here and here.

Links: Ken Levine

I added a new link to my list on this blog, By Ken Levine. He worked on some of my all time favorites like Becker, Frasier, Cheers and M*A*S*H.

(Screen)Writing: Writer/Re-Writer

I found some very interesting thoughts in the article The Myth Of The First Martyr...I Mean...Writer at The Artful Writer.
The article deals with the writer/rewriter myth. IMHO: yes, it is much harder to do a re-write than creating an original manuscript; been there, done that (I might expand on this at a later date, but don't hold your breath).

Musings: Programs are the Means to an End

I wrote the section Which Editor to choose? in the Unix/Linux Survival Guide based on discussions, flamewars and the rest of the whole shebang. But I recently discovered, that this type of discussion seems to spread out of the realm of computers. Sure, everybody thinks that the e.g. car that one owns is the best, or the computer, the T.V., you get the picture. But this is not what I'm talking about at the moment. I'm talking about an unsuspecting customer confronted with We are using [insert your favorite operating system/software-package here] and therefore the end product is far superior to what you can expect from [insert the operating system/software-package you really hate for whatever reason here].
Reality-Check: A customer does not, I repeat, does not care about how something is created, most of the time, that is. The German version of the aforementioned book was written in XML using Emacs (no, I won't tell you which flavor [if you really don't know why I won't tell, look here and here]) and the American version in MS Word. The publishers couldn't care less about the program used to create the manuscript, all they were interested in was to get it in the right format, period. The editor used was a tool, the result was a manuscript.
On a side-note: Try writing a text about *NIX commands like date, apropos, etc. and run Word's grammar-checker on it ;-)
Back on topic, as long as your customer wants an end-product, means no further processing on the customer's side, do not bother, or worse, annoy, him/her how you will create said product. It really does not matter if we are talking graphics, layouts, photos, manuscripts, movie-scripts, buildings, cars, airplanes, or cookies (the baked variety). (Try to avoid the if all you got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail trap, though.) The worst thing that could happen is an—for whatever reason—annoyed customer.
Quick example: I don't feel that good going to the ATM since I learned that most ATMs are running some kind of MS Windows ™ these days.
:-)

Writing: Setting the right Mood and stick to it!

This is something I found out while working as a programmer, but it applies to writing as well. If you are listening to music while doing one of the aforementioned tasks, there will be a noticeable influence on your writing/coding style. DUH!, I hear you say? Right, but sometimes this fact can be used to your advantage.
Let's say you are supposed to work on something really wild and adventurous and you are actually feel a little more mellow than the work at hand allows – or the other way round for that matter. My cure are specially crafted playlists in Apple's iTunes (also to be found on my iPod, of course). That way I have a weapon against my current mood and, especially effective, against the background music in the different coffee-houses I'm writing in.
Too simple? You bet. Give it a try.
BTW: Regarding coding style, check your variables. Mine were called damn1, damn2, etc. for debugging when I was in a very bad mood, looks ridiculous when doing a code-review later, believe me.

Blog: It's nice to be mentioned

Fun Joel added this very blog on a list of blogs he reads, thanks a million El Duderino.
The downside, there are so many blogs in this list I did not know, that the next couple of days will be hard on my usual schedule.
;-)
Thanks again.