You hear that, Mr Andersen?

The map is not the territory.

Yesterday, Hix and I saw The Twins Effect (which seems to have been renamed The Vampire Effect for the American market). All we knew was that it was a Hong Kong movie with western-style vampires with fight coreography by the same guy who worked on Hero, vampire hunters who are Cantopop stars in real life ("The Twins", Gillian Chung and Charlene Choi) and a Jackie Chan cameo - but that was enough for Hix to declare it was right up his alley. Even though there were times where it didn't seem to make a lot of sense, it was really good fun to watch. (Hix claimed to have been inspired for his Buffy game, which I guess is a good thing... :)

If only our pop stars had the martial arts skills of the Chinese - imagine Carly Binding laying down a can of whupass on a bunch of, I don't know, evil Business Roundtable zombie ninjas. Okay, maybe that wouldn't work quite right... regardless, I may have to think seriously about buying that movie at some point.

***

Rebecca Borgstrom's Hitherby Dragons is something that I've recommended before, but the latest entry, The Invisible Killer, is an awesome wee sci-fi piece that reminds me of the best of the golden-age short-story collections. Yay for the mighty interweb, who gives me these things for free! :)

***

I'm about half-way through reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I've enjoyed what I've read so far; the footnotes, in particular, remind me of a bunch of books that I actually own. It is a very large book, but that seems to be the fashion these days... I remember these kind of doorstop-sized books being called "airport novels", so it's kind of weird that this format is gaining such popularity when alternate in-flight entertainment is becoming more and more common. Heh, "alternate in-flight entertainment" - the flight attendents enacting Hamlet reinterpreted as a Mexican soap opera for salami puppets. :)

***

I've spent all day, it seems, colouring in maps and updating our databases to deal with our new rooms. It's something that needs to be done, but I'm not sure why I've ended up the one doing it. Probably because I'm the one who first did it, and I haven't successfully handed it off yet.

Only tomorrow to go before my break! Hoorah! :)

WYSIWYG

A friend at work bought a passel of t-shirts from ThinkGeek recently... and I saw him having to explain the shirt on the right. (You can click on the shirt to get their blurb about the phrase.) It reminded me of the whole "I'll always look this good" tagline - except in a much geekier way, obviously.

It got me thinking about our old BBC model B, and the word processor that came with it - I still remember having to type in Mode 7 (the teletext-like mode), and preview what your text would look like in Mode 3. (Not that you were going to get a proportional font when you printed things out; no, it was because Mode 3 let you show 80 characters across the screen, which is what your daisywheel printer was going to write.)

Anyway, I was trying to remember what the word processor was called. I remember that it came on a separate chip, but I couldn't remember the name until the mighty web provided the answer - View. And when I looked at this 'BBC Lives' site and saw the old rainbow-coloured "Welcome" book and graphics from Repton and Chuckie Egg... ah, sweet nostalgia. :) It was interesting poking around some of the hardware descriptions of the old BBC - weird sensations of "oh yeah, I remember that feature... so that's why it worked like that."

But even while I was at university, people were coming into computer science who had never seen a command-line in their lives. I think it's a much more difficult transition now than it used to be, and I suspect it means that mark-up languages are that much less accessible. After all, if you've endured the horrors of LaTeX (a mark-up language for writing papers with complicated mathematical formula in a text file), HTML is a doddle.

***

A friend of mine pointed me at some lovely music: page 1 & page 2

Kids, don't play this at home.

***

In answer to the questions about The Great Mite-Off - when I revisited to contestants, they were having great difficulty with tabulating the results, because they hadn't devised a suitable form for people to fill out before starting the mite-off. (Learn from their mistake!) Also, there were apparently insufficient samples for all the participants to assess all the possibilities, and they've discovered that there are Australian and NZ versions of vegemite. So they are preparing for: The Great Mite-Off 2: This Time, It's Organized!

Based on a Jane Austen pizza.

Friends pointed me at this comment by Ursula le Guin, about the upcoming Earthsea TV adaptation:

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Earthsea.html

It makes an interesting contrast to the Hellboy commentary. I mean, there are some substantial changes to Hellboy continuity in the movie - the whole "sand-filled clockwork Nazi ninja" thing, for instance, or the addition of psychic powers to Abe Sapien. But Mike Mignola seems happy that the movie is a different entity to the book, and that the essential message hasn't been lost. There's also the fact that Mignola wasn't shut out of the process.

I don't think her announcement necessarily tells me whether it's going to be any good or not - but it certainly doesn't bode well. I'm not sure that I understand why you'd buy the rights to a book or short story, and then want to shut the creator out of the process of making the movie or tv series. Except - I remember watching a documentary on P.L. Travers, and having some sympathy for the people trying to make the Mary Poppins movie. (Then again, what would a movie that she would have approved of looked like? You probably wouldn't have Dick van Dyke trying to be Cockney, for a start... :)

I quite liked Ella Enchanted, though it was another case where the book was obviously a jumping off point, rather than a bible to be written from. From reading the book, you might well expect something along the lines of The Princess Bride (or maybe The Neverending Story?) - a fantasy world that's not Ladyhawke or Willow gritty, but is taking folk tales as its main reference point. Ella has a lot of "modern world through a fantasy lens", and so is much closer in feel to something like Shrek - indeed, some reviews have described it as a live-action Shrek.

I think I'm going to have to see Ella Enchanted again before I decide what I think of it. Some of the things that I like most are the throwaway visual gags - the heroes are at a medieval mall, and get on a set of (obviously wooden) moving stairs. That would be a "heh" moment, but what made me actually smile was that you could see the people underneath the stairs, hauling the wheel that made the steps move. On the other hand, it has tonnes of really good actors who aren't really given anything to do - the excellent Parminder Nagra is pretty much relegated to a "look at how mean the stepsister is" character, for example. On the gripping hand, while there are flaws, I still think it's a pretty fun movie.

***

Someone at work is asking who would win in a fight - a horse-sized duck, or the equivalent weight of horses that were duck-sized. (Consensus in my office is that that the HSD would be able to gobble up the wee horses like so many party snacks.)

This led to discussion of swan-related deaths, and ostrich-related fatalities.

I guess this is what happens when it's so close to Christmas.

***

Is it worrying that I get some of my actual news from The Onion? I mean, I doubt I'd know that Americans are marrying at a later age, on average unless it turned up there - as the article says, "Thank God there's a greater trend I can look to when I ponder my lonely, loveless existence in the midnight hour." ;)

***

Only four days until I take a break, hooray! Mum asked for a link to a page of possible Svend presents, so here it is.

Wiki wiki wild wild west...

First off, an observation of wierd - I realised that I was getting account notices from Telstra-Clear, from whom I get cable modem access. One of them was in credit $170, and had a direct debit attached to it; one of them was $212 in debt, and had a page about my cable modem.

Now, let me make this clear - they were both for the same person (me), and the same address. So I rang up to clarify what was going on. After negotiating the voice-activated section, and several chapters on hold, I got through to an actual person, who grasped the problem fairly quickly... and then put me on hold for another half-chapter or so while they found out what they could do for me.

Which was, as it turns out, send me another direct debit form.

What they had been enquiring about was whether they could transfer the direct debit authority between accounts belonging to the same person. Apparently the answer is "no", which is understandable. I did ask whether the debt and the service could be transferred over to the account with the direct debit already set up - but no, apparently that account was deactivated, and reactivating it would be very hard indeed.

So - I'm waiting for (yet another) direct debit form to arrive, which I will then fill out and send off to them, at which point they'll start letting me pay them.

***

David asked a question about how we use Wiki at Weta. The answer, I guess, is - sporadically. ;)

We're in a slightly different situation from many organizations, in that the majority of the company is fairly computer-savy. There are some exceptions, particularly on the more administrative side, but the bulk of the artists have a fair bit of computer nous, since many of them have to do at least some simple scripting for their toos. In fact, the first Weta wikis were set up by one of the departments (Compositing(, to keep better track of their internal documentation.

IT followed suite[1] some time after, and we now offer a wiki to any department that wishes to keep track of their documentation this way - some are using it; some aren't. I think one of the drivers has been that the other option has been sets of web pages, and people see wikis as a simpler option. Some of the other departments have been using other solutions, such as... um, I think one of the departments used doxygen? Within IT, we're strongly encouraged to have highly structured page names, and heirarchical page structures to help with navigation. And when things change, I know I do a full text search for relevant keywords to try and catch all references to the script or server name that I'm changing. I think that's one of the big wins for me, at least - I'm not having to switch contexts to update the documentation.

Comparing and contrasting my experience with using wikis for roleplaying game background - players tend to update pages much more than creating new ones. So maybe providing a skeleton of pages may help to encourage people to use a wiki? (Having plenty of content would probably help as well.)

I'm afraid that I'm not sure I can offer any insights into ways to encourage non-technical users to get into wikis. I suspect that the non-wysiwyg paradigm means that it's always going to be a bit of a tough sell to non-technical users. It would be interesting to see if making a bunch of macros to let Word users edit and save out the document would make it more acceptable? I wonder how difficult it would be...

Of course, the problem may not be with the interface, so much as with the difficulty of getting anyone to do any documentation at all. :) If there's a bunch of documentation already extant, converting it to a wiki (and having a good search function) may be sufficient to give it the boost it needs, since they're getting something useful out-of-the-box. If the way to search the documentation you have at the moment is sufficiently bad (and the conversion step is sufficiently easy), then this might be the push you need - it also depends on how much a win the people using the wiki see being to update the documentation on-the-fly is.

Anyway, I hope that there are some useful thoughts in there somewhere.

[1] Or is it "followed suit"? Googling, there are plenty of pages who use both forms in the same page, but none that give guidance as to usage. Bah.

Adjectives on a typewriter

I watched the directors commentary on Hellboy the day before yesterday; very enjoyable. Thanks, Matt & Debz, for lending it to Puggle - I suspect the wealth of material on the disk will defeat my attempts to watch it before we should give it back to you. Another DVD for the "to acquire" list, I think.

I often find it interesting to listen to the director's comments, since they'll often point out things that I noticed without realising, or that went completely over my head. (For example, one of Hellboy's first fights has an obvious to the fight between King Kong and the Tyrannosaurus - well, obvious once it was pointed out. :) However, another thing that these commentaries makes abundantly clear to me is that, just like writing a novel, making a movie is one of those things that sounds like a good idea in principle, but in reality sucks away years of your life. I've read various quotes about only writing if you can't imagine doing anything else - while I think I've caught glimpses of that while programming, I don't think I even want to strive for that. Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind about that. ;)

Another thing that came up for me while watching Hellboy was the whole controversy about use of CGI in movies. I've read a number of different complaints about CGI - some people feel that only practical effects should be used for aesthetic reasons, while others simply feel that they still look good enough. Another complaint is that it encourages laziness - if the director can show it, they don't have the same pressure to cleverly imply it. Brian Carrol who's currently writing Instant Classic's Genrevouz Point, has strong views on the subject.

My general feeling is - it's a tool, just like silvery boards to reflect lighting and fake blood. It can be done well, it can be done badly, and if it becomes the focus of the movie, the movie tends to suffer - just as if the focus of the movie becomes the landscape, or the lighting, or the props. (It can be the focus for a while, and I guess you could have a movie that was all about the CGI in the same way you could have movies that are all about watching a construction site, or watching a car race around and around... but I'm not likely to buy that movie on DVD.)

***

I got in on Tuesday at about quarter past eight, and left at quarter to nine last night. Wednesday was more reasonable, though I left about an hour after I meant to; and tonight isn't going to be any better. The thing that I find vaguely scary is that I could quite easily do that every day for the forseeable future if I wanted to - and I would still have plenty of things that need to be done ASAP. (And then there's the whole "but you're not doing the thing I want done"; I do sympathise with people whose jobs molder at the bottom of my priority pile, but becoming surly isn't likely to encourage me to try to bump those jobs up the list.)

And don't talk to me about documentation and wiki maintainence. Bah. :)

The thing is, hardly any of it is tedious slog or repetitive - most of it is relatively interesting and engaging. There's simply a lot of it.

I'm looking forward to the 20th, when things close down for a while.

***

I enjoy giving cool stuff to nice people - which is one of the reasons I like Christmas. The fact that I'm not a poor student anymore doesn't hurt, either. I managed to get a number of nifty presents from the Thorndon fair, as well as a number of bottles of interesting Celtic fruit wine. I've tried one of the black doris plum wines - it was interesting, since the Country Harvest version is a dessert wine, whereas this described itself as being close to a pinot noir. (It was nice, but more of a "unusual" than "wow, really good".) I've actually given Dad a bottle of it, but as far as I know, it's still in his wine cellar. :)

Anyway - I'm pretty sure I've still got a fair few family presents to go, as well as not a few friend ones. And at least one birthday - hi, Ming! I'm pretty glad that I've got a few weeks to go. :)

The mechanic that would perfect his work...

My workmates are going to be having a "Mite-Off" tomorrow; there's already NZ Marmite, Promite, and a jar calling itself "Our Mate". One of our English staffers will be bringing in British-style Marmite, and someone else will be bringing in some Vegemite. There was a lot of discussion about what to spread this stuff on - there seemed to be a general agreement that dark breads are a better substrate for this kind of spread, but they'd use the blandest of white breads, so that the spreads will be judged on just their taste, rather than how well they compliment the dark rye or sunflower & barley.

Okay, on reflection I guess we're taking this a bit more seriously than it really deserves. :)

In other food related news, our Sushi Guy is giving out small pottles of saki as a free bonus with lunchtime purchases, as a kind of end-of-year celebration thing. Talking to someone who claimed to know about these things, it's apparently not a bad saki, either. It's probably just as well that this insn't widespread a tradition - a shot of bad bourbon when you buy your MegaCombo, or Southern Comfort with your KFC? Ouzo with your kebab? What would be next, tequilla with your burrito? Oh, wait...

***

Went to a really interesting interface design talk at the university by Dr Ben Bederson. The guy had done a bunch of research that was actually pretty relevant to the work we're doing at Weta, such as the problem of browsing huge photo archives. (His tool, PhotoMesa, looked pretty nifty - though we'd have to mine it for ideas, rather than use it directly, since it's a Windows tool, and we'd want a way to access the movies that the pictures would be proxies for.) He had some really useful things to say about designing tools so as not to interrupt the flow, and to make it possible to transition from a novice user to an expert - and why mouse-based menu interaction intrinsically requires the user to concentrate on the interface rather than the task. In fact, an immediate consequence has been to make me rethink some design decisions I was in the middle of meeting - which is an indication of a good, useful talk to me. :)

One of his areas of research was presenting children's books from around the world in an online format, the International Children's Digital Library, so that children could to access books that they'd otherwise never see. The site is www.icdlbooks.org, and he talked about some of the neat things they'd found - for example, children tend to classify books by their physical characteristics, like the main colour of the cover. They'd also done research to show that to get the same error rate as adults clicking on 16x16 pixel buttons, 5 year olds needed 32x32 buttons, and 4 year olds needed 64x64. The interface also includes some attempts to limit the "zero or mega" problem of searches - that is, searches that produce no results, or far too many. In this example, once an option is chosen, it stays clicked in, and any of the search buttons that wouldn't produce any results in conjunction with the selected options are greyed out - effectively, you can't make a query that returns zero records. Nifty stuff.

Plus, it has "The Black Sun":

A small black rabbit was born and because he was black he was seen as different from the other rabbits. The rabbit became eccentric and disliked bright colors. The black rabbit dyed the uncle of the sun black. Then the earth had no sunlight, no daytime, it only had the dark. The black rabbit regretted this decision and made the world bright and colourful again.

Now all I have to do is learn to read Chinese. :)

Reading, wRiting, aRithmatic

I'm not good at not finishing things. Well, that's a complete lie, so let me rephrase - if it's something like reading or watching, I find it very difficult not to try and cram it in as quickly as possible. If I discover a new webcomic, for example, I will find it hard to spend time on other things until I've finished reading all the back-issues. Or if I'm foolish enough to open a newgroup browser, and I start reading a thread like For All Nails... and then it's suddenly 3am, and I know it's going to be really hard to do work tomorrow, instead of finding out how it finishes.

One of the problems that on-line stuff has is that it's got that addictive quality common to slot machines and other powerfully conditioning systems - intermittent reinforcement. Every time you pull the lever, there's the possibility that you might get something really, really cool... and it feels like there's a certain amount of once-only opportunity, since if I don't look at it now, I'll probably never get round to it, and might in fact forget that it's there at all - so I better read it now, and do my actual useful tasks just a little later.

This isn't helpful from a getting-work-done perspective.

Reading normal material doesn't have quite that quality, though if I were getting more books out of the library, that might not be as true. DVDs are more passive books, so it's even easier to just sit and absorb several hours worth of material - but I seem to feel more pressure to watch series than movies, for reasons I haven't entirely examined.

Thinking about it, I'm wondering whether there's a synergy happening between the "hypnotic TV" syndrome (where a television can drown out all external stimuli, causing the victim to come to a halt in the middle of the room or corridor) and the fact it's really hard to see letter shapes and not turn them into letters, words and sentences.

***

What did I do yesterday evening? Well, I got called over to my former flatmate's place to help her and a colleague write a song for their school's staff Christmas party. I had helped them with another ditty while I was flatting with them - a farewell to a friend of theirs, sung to the tune of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". This time, we went with "Walking in a Winter Wonderland", with a little drop-in from "A Day in the Life". One of the interesting constraints is that we were limited to songs that my former flatmate could play on the guitar.

I tend to look down on filks (parody songs), even though there's some evidence I'm not too bad at writing them. (It's flattering, but a bit unnerving, that some people still remember some of the stuff I wrote with Erik for the live Vampire game's Malkavians.) The trickiest thing with this song was that I didn't know anything about the stuff I was writing - basically, they just told me some of the funny or notable stuff that happened at school, and I tried to tie it together in comedic musical form. As it turned out, that wasn't a big problem - we managed five verses, plus a bridge and a drop-in. I quite enjoy the kind of constraints that this sort of writing imposes - it's the same kind of fun as writing in a tightly constrained poetry form.

They seemed pretty pleased with the result.

***

I asked Mum whether I could just give her all my earnings, and she could handle my finances. She was underwhelmed by the idea. So I suppose I should get an accountant instead. Bah. (It was weird reading Debbie talking about the Japanese tradition of the woman of the household controling the money, though I had heard of it before.)

Yes, I suppose I could try to keep track of my own finances - Norman has offered to show me his System - but it's the kind of thing I'd be happy to offload on someone else. And there's always the nagging thought that I may not be claiming a bunch of stuff that I could be. I should clarify - I really don't mind paying tax, and would even pay more tax to stop people studying stuff like medicine having the spectre of their debt hovering over their study. But if I had a mortage, i.e. actually owed someone money, wanting to pay that off would be strong motivation to make sure I was only giving the government what I was actually obliged to.

Which reminds me - I should try and find three years worth of financial records... ;)