After three films shot in London, Woody Allen continues his European tour in Spain with his current muse (Scarlett Johansson) in tow. It is the story of two young American women (Johansson and Rebecca Hall) on a two-month summer trip to Barcelona, where their encounter with a charming local artist (Javier Bardem, who is quite handsome without Anton Chigurh makeup, in fact, he looks a lot like Robert Downey Jr.) has a lasting impact on their outlook on life and love, especially when he is later joined by his mentally unstable ex-wife (Penelope Cruz).

7 points

Choice quote from an Alan Kay interview:

If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort — but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

About a dozen guys (no girls) with serious camera equipment have gathered downstairs at the railway tracks. They have been at it for quite a while, and I do not think that JR has arranged anything special for them today. It is starting to rain now, but they show no signs of moving, just spanning umbrellas over themselves and their tripods.

My mobile phone provider (au) has recently announced the 2009 Summer Collection, and it includes the Sharp Solar Phone, a handset that self-charges using built-in solar panels. An hour of solar charging gives you six minutes of talk time or six hours of stand-by. It is also water-proof, potentially making for an ideal beach phone.

Where can I sign the petition for making a full season with this team? I am ready to pre-order the DVD boxed set unseen right now.

8 points

It was love at first sight.
The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn't quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn't become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.
Each morning they came around, three brisk and serious men with efficient mouths and inefficient eyes, accompanied by brisk and serious Nurse Duckett, one of the ward nurses who didn't like Yossarian. They read the chart at the foot of the bed and asked impatiently about the pain. They seemed irritated when he told them it was exactly the same.
"Still no movement?" the full colonel demanded.
The doctors exchanged a look when he shook his head.
"Give him another pill."

This classic novel of wartime madness goes through three very different stages, and each of them holds up very well.

It starts out as a comedy, filled with clever wordplay, puns and hyperbole similar in style to, say, Douglas Adams. Two particularly amusing patterns that Heller constantly employs are funny non-sequitur lines of reasoning that fly straight into the face of convention or common sense, and conversation threads that abruptly jump around in time, location and participants, which makes for nice momentary confusion.

After a while, it develops into social satire, commenting on the madness of the military machine and war itself. That part probably gained Catch-22 its status as a subversive counter-culture classic in the sixties, but it is still relevant today.

Towards the end of the book, humour makes way for tragedy as the horrors of war are suddenly shown in grim detail: Many characters that have been previously established as comic relief are killed, and the plight of the Italian civilians also becomes apparent in a depiction of Rome that has completely changed in tone from previous chapters.

While Dan Brown's book Angels and Demons relates Robert Langdon's first high-speed murder-mystery chase across important cultural and religious locations in European capitals, and is hence the prequel to the Da Vinci Code, the timeline has been reversed for the movie. Some of the more outrageous stunts that Brown pulls in the book have been scaled back, too, and Ewan McGregor's character is no longer Italian, but Irish. Other than that, this is a very faithful adaptation, which unfortunately took away the suspense for me (Cissy had forgotten who would turn out to be the bad guy and was genuinely surprised at the end).

Discovery of the day: Nikolaj Lie Kaas as the assassin.

6 points

• Siegestones (four times!)
• Catan: Seafarers

If you want to make fun of MS Windows stability issues, you bring up the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD, although, to be honest, you hardly see them these days). When the Windows folks want to fire back, they point at the spinning beach ball that indicates an unresponsive Mac application. So these two design elements have negative connotations prominent enough that other system vendors should not want to copy them.

Today on the train the person next to me was using a Samsung Windows Mobile phone which displayed a spinning beach ball. In the four Windows logo colours. Weird.

PS: I also saw a guy with an iPhone and an iPod touch.

• Wings of War - Famous Aces
• Worm up!
• Money!
• Gem Dealer

I took two steps towards cloud computing this week.

Now that Google's AppEngine can be programmed in Java I opened an account there. That will be a story for another day (you can follow my initial experiments here and here).

The other thing is that I started using drop.io, the simple private real-time sharing and collaboration service. Now that we have a steady stream of baby pictures (and videos!) to share, sending them out by email does not cut it anymore. The files are just too big. I want to host them on my server, but I could not find a good software package to provide something like a personal Flickr or Youtube.

So I went with drop.io, and I have to say, it is an amazing service.

• You create so-called drops, which are storage areas for files. They are accessible as http://drop.io/name_you_choose, and you can put 100 MB there. Provisioning is instantaneous and free.
• In addition to being free, the service is also completely anonymous: You do not have to create an account with them, not even give them your email address. Your drop will not be indexed anywhere, it is up to you how you share the URL. You can set a password to protect it, and specify what guests can do (add files, delete files, leave comments).
• Files that you upload are automatically presented on a web site. This includes generation of thumbnails and embedded viewers for media files: Video gets converted to Flash videos, just like on Youtube. PDF and Word are presented using iPaper.
• You can get notifications for new uploads via email, RSS, SMS, Twitter, or Facebook. You can download the whole thing as a zip file.
• The drop comes with an email address (name_you_choose@drop.io). Sending files to this address is equivalent to uploading.
• The drop comes with a (US) telephone number. It works like a voicemail box, recording incoming calls as MP3 files into the drop. It can also receive fax messages. Again, apart from a free phone number, that is also an anonymous phone number. Such a thing still being possible today gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling.
• The web site includes a chat room (which can be accessed using standalone chat clients as well), so that you can have ad-hoc online meetings. There is a call-in conference line, too.
• You can charge for access to the drop (using Amazon's payment system).
• You can get statistics using Google Analytics.

In true cloud computing spirit, the company running drop.io operates not a single server. Everything is running off Amazon's storage and hosting services (which by the way seem a little slow from Japan latencywise).

I am not sure what the business model is: There are no advertisements in there, and with their focus on anonymity they cannot be gathering personal information. There is a paid variant (upgrade to 1GB), but for 10 USD/year that cannot create much revenue. Maybe it is the enterprise options, which allow for bigger drops with more customisation, branding and management features.

Let's just hope that their funding does not run out anytime soon.

Another little feature request (along the lines of cleverer clippings) that for some reason is missing from OS X, even though it seems both obvious and trivial to implement:

Quick Look for plain text files.

Now, Apple claims that Quick Look works with nearly every file on your system, including images, text files, PDF documents, movies, Keynote presentations, Mail attachments, and Microsoft Word and Excel files , and it does work for some files (maybe those that end in .txt, although that would be very un-Mac-like), but most of the time I just get this:

I am pretty much against big government spending to bail out collapsing businesses or to compensate for declining consumption by the private sector. But that does not mean that I won't take money thrown my way, of course. And that just happened.

The Japanese parliament has decided to hand out 12.000 yen in cash to every resident, including foreigners. Children under 18 (that includes Kai) and people aged over 65 even get 20.000 yen.

A few weeks back the British press was ripe with indignation about the perceived lack of respect that Prime Minister Gordon Brown was shown by US President Obama on Brown's visit to Washington, exemplified in the thoughtfulness of the gifts that the two exchanged.

Mr Brown handed over carefully selected gifts, including a pen holder made from the wood of a warship that helped stamp out the slave trade - a sister ship of the vessel from which timbers were taken to build Mr Obama's Oval Office desk. Mr Obama's gift in return, a collection of Hollywood film DVDs that could have been bought from any high street store, looked like the kind of thing the White House might hand out to the visiting head of a minor African state.

Tim Shipman, Telegraph.co.uk

As it turns out, the presidential present was not properly thought through from at least a technology standpoint: Because of the DVD region code, the discs only work in players sold in North America, and in order to enjoy them at Downing Street, Gordon Brown would have to resort to the same circumvention techniques that both his and the US government work so hard to criminalise.

It should be obvious by now that there are no longer any technological difficulties or even mentionable costs associated in distributing information; that it is futile to try and prevent the free exchange of digital content in this environment; that any measures to that end only hurt the legitimate consumers (such as Obama and Brown) and further encourage piracy. Business models that rely on restricting the dissemination of data by means of technology, as opposed to trusting the fact that most people will not make illegal copies even if they could (or going even so far as to allow copies and re-distribution and derive income from ancillary sources instead), will find it very hard to survive in the twenty-first century.

More importantly, here is the list of titles:

• Citizen Kane
• The Godfather
• Casablanca
• Raging Bull
• Singin’ in the Rain
• Gone with the Wind
• Lawrence of Arabia
• Schindler’s List
• Vertigo
• The Wizard of Oz
• City Lights
• The Searchers
• Star Wars: Episode IV
• Psycho
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Sunset Boulevard
• The Graduate
• The General
• On the Waterfront
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• Chinatown
• Some Like it Hot
• The Grapes of Wrath
• ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
• To Kill a Mockingbird

42.195 km, 06:14:31 (gross time).

Point	Split	Lap	Time
5km	00:50:33		10:00:33
10km	01:23:44	0:33:11	10:33:44
15km	01:58:56	0:35:12	11:08:56
20km	02:38:22	0:39:26	11:48:22
25km	03:27:55	0:49:33	12:37:55
30km	04:16:03	0:48:08	13:26:03
35km	05:07:13	0:51:10	14:17:13
40km	05:56:20	0:49:07	15:06:20
Finish	06:14:31	0:18:11	15:24:31

• Evo
• Dominion

For the first time after what must have apparently been many months, I dropped by Shibuya after work today, intending to pay a visit to the imported comic book store near Tokyu Hands (I need some Watchmen and some more Sandman). Unfortunately, the store was no longer there. Next stop: the fancy superhero collectibles boutique near the Apple Store, only to find out that it has been replaced by a fancy regular boutique. After that, default to the landmark Bunkamura-dori Book First, one of Tokyo's largest bookstores. Guess what, the whole building has been torn down, and big posters there are announcing that H&M will soon make Shibuya truly fashionable.

So on the way back to the station, I paid more attention to my surroundings and found that about half of the shops are not what I remember them. There is a huge eight-floor electronics store halfway between the remnants of Book First and the 109, and I had not even heard of that chain before (LABI).

Feeling old now...

This question is more or less directed directly at Charles Hodgson, even though (or especially because) he has already discussed the adjective vertical.

Business types in their presentations like to talk about their verticals, by which they seem to mean industries. Where does that come from, when did it start, and are there horizontals (or diagonals), too?

A couple of years back at university, I attended a class called "Advanced Object-Oriented Programming" (or something to that effect), in which Design Patterns were discussed as well as the short-comings and limitations of unmitigated object-orientation. Or maybe just the short-comings and limitations of the popular Java-brand of object-orientation (the lecture was held by a Smalltalker, after all). I cannot remember all the topics presented there (it included dynamic typing, multi-method dispatch, composition as opposed to inheritance), but I suppose the gist of it was to raise an awareness that OOP as taught in Programming 101 may not be the perfect fit to all problem domains and is beginning to show its age, just like the methodologies it has replaced.

Recently, I find myself making less and less use of two concepts that I had previously thought to be fundamental to OOP: Mutable properties and subclasses. The interesting thing about this is that I do not think I am defecting OOP, but rather that these two concepts are more marginal than they are introduced as.

As for mutable properties, Functional Programming (where there are no variables at all) has recently had a bit of of a comeback, for example in the form of Haskell, Scala or Erlang. Unfortunately, I have so far utterly failed to wrap my head around the idea (and the same goes for Logic Programming). I guess, I am more of a procedural guy that needs to tell the computer what to do, and how to do it (including it what order). However, I have come to see the enormous benefits that arise when you can assume/assure that things never change, especially when it comes to asynchronous execution, shared state, or memory management. So while I still cannot grok Haskell, I totally understand why java.lang.String is implemented the way it is (and want more of that, for example for arrays).

Subclasses always seemed to be the most important feature of OOP: You can subclass an implementation to inherit most of its features and change only a few. Instances of your subclass can be used in all places where the original class was expected, and the calling code does not even need to know what is going on.

As it turns out, this replacability (called polymorphism) can be achieved by means other than a class hierarchy. In Java, the obvious alternative is an interface. Keeping interface separate from implementation seems like a good idea. And Java interfaces also have the advantage that you can have many at the same time, whereas you are left with a only single superclass.

There are other ways to reuse code than subclassing, too. A good one is using delegates. Delegates are objects, so you can still get the benefits of encapsulation and polymorphism. In fact, even more so than with a superclass, because you can switch one delegate implementation for another one (even at runtime), whereas you cannot change your superclass. And since you can obviously have many delegates for the different tasks, you can "inherit" code from multiple places, something that you cannot do with a single superclass. I also find that delegate classes are extremely focused in doing just one thing and of a high reusability across the code base, whereas an abstract class using the Template Method pattern can end up as an unwieldy assortment of utility code not really related to its core "interface" -- coode that no one else except the subclasses can make use of, and the which is being forced unto those subclasses even if they wanted to do things differently.

So at this point, I consider the two main features of OOP to be encapsulation and modularity (the unit of which should be a package in Java rather than a single object), and polymorphism. Everything else (subclassing, the ability to have classes in the first place, strict typing...) are just implementation details.