Tokyo Filmex closed with this monochromatic, silent (except for the symphonic Mahler soundtrack) vampire ballet movie by Guy Maddin, who came on stage to answer questions after the screening. Before that, there was the closing ceremony and the jury announced the winners of festival prizes. The Kurdish-language Iraqi film Turtles can fly won both the Audience Award and the Special Jury Prize, while the Grand Prize went to Tropical Malady from Thailand.

6 points

I have an Hotmail email address (but do not send things there, I only keep it for my Messenger account and very infrequently read it) and I check it from time to time to make sure it does not reach its limit, which used to be just 2 MB. And in fact, the newest mail (dated three days ago) was a reminder from MSN that the account is almost full. However, the status bar showed my that I am just using 1% of my 250 MB. Seems that Google's new webmail service (which shocked the industry with a full GB of storage for everyone) has forced Microsoft to upgrade all their accounts as well. A 12400% increase in capacity. For free. Thank you Google, thank you Microsoft.

It seems that there is more than one annual film festival in town: TOKYO FILMeX was launched in 2000 as a more independent alternative to the Tokyo International Film Festival. We went to see a symposium on the role of film festivals and their importance for audiences, film makers and the industry. The discussion was moderated by British Film critic Tony Rayns, and the panel consisted of former Rotterdam film festival director Simon Field, Japanese directors Hirokazu Koreeda, Shinya Tsukamoto and Takeshi Kitano, and the Japanese producer Masayuki Mori. As Rayns remarked at the beginning, it was a rather strange setup to have a foreigner lead a discussion with Japanese-speaking Japanese film makers in front of a Japanese audience, and in fact, it turned out to be rather tedious, although the translators did their best.

Perl has a mechanism that lets you intercept calls to undefined subroutines. You just have to write a subroutine called AUTOLOAD, which will be called instead of the missing subroutine. This feature can be used in various ways. You can for example create a customised error message. Or you can implement subroutines that are loaded on demand: the first time they are called AUTOLOAD creates and installs the subroutine, so that subsequent calls will work the same way as if the subroutine had existed all along (this is probably how this mechanism got its name). I started using it to call PL/SQL stored procedures from Perl.

I have a lot of stored procedures that all look like

function do_something ( some_parameter varchar2, another_parameter integer)
    return integer;

I can call this procedure using DBI

my $sql = $conn->prepare(q{
    begin
        :r := do_something(:some_parameter, :another_parameter);
    end;
});
my $result;
$sql->bind_param_inout(':r', \$result, 10);
$sql->bind_param(':some_parameter', $some);
$sql->bind_param(':some_parameter', $another);
$sql->execute();

It is quite easy to make a generic version of that code, which looks at the function name and the parameters it is given to generate the SQL statement and bind the parameters. Using this as AUTOLOAD in the database access module, I do not have to write any more code (SQL or Perl) to access these stored procedures, and can just do

my $result = Database::do_something(
    some_parameter=>'blah', another_parameter => 123);    

If I add another stored procedure do_something_else, it will automatically become available to the Perl program, which speeds up development quite a bit and makes the application code smaller and more maintainable by reducing redundancies.

my $result = Database::do_something_else(funny_parameter => 12345);    

A few years back, the German Post Office started offering a free email service, and they ran a big campaign to promote it as your free life-long email address and the last email address you will ever need. I believed them, and most people know me as planz@epost.de now. Well, it was recently discovered that the area of private web mail unfortunately did not prove to be a business model of sufficient synergy, and the service will be discontinued in February. All users are encouraged to move to Lycos Europe, but there is no way to keep the email address, not even as a forward-only account. I know that running an email service these days must be a lot of trouble, and that you cannot really complain about the loss of a service you did not pay for (on the other hand, they are also shutting down their paid accounts, and those users must be furious), but this is being done in very poor style.

Anyway, from now on, I am thiloplanz@web.de again.

As this blog easily reveals, I let the whole month of October, during which there even was the Tokyo International Film Festival, go by without seeing a single movie (the IMAX 3D documentary about ISS does not count). Not a good development. I will try to make up for it this month.

6 points

Now that the twenty-first century has arrived, Gibson novels do not have to be set in the future anymore.

Cayce Pollard is a freelance marketing consultant. Her special skill is a high sensitivity for logos, and she makes her money by predicting whether a new corporate identity or an advertisement campaign would work. The downside of this talent is that she gets sick when she sees Tommy Hilfiger sweaters or Louis Vuitton bags (her ultimate demon is the Michelin Man). She is also obsessed (hobbies are not for her, but she can obsess) with the footage, a mysterious movie that is being anonymously published on the Internet frame by frame. No one knows what it is about, who created (or still creates) it, how it or where it is made. After her online circle of friends discover some hints in the footage, and she finds herself suddenly equipped with corporate credit card, iBook and flight tickets from New York to London to Tokyo to Moscow, Cayce embarks on a quest to track down the unknown genius behind the footage.

Hard disks seem to hate me (and I am beginning to return the sentiment). This time I am really hit hard. After my iBook's internal disk died months ago, I switched to an external Logitec Firewire disk. It has recently started producing errors, but data loss was minimal and I ignored it. Here is a lesson: At the first signs of disk failures, get a new one. Well, I did not, and the Logitec died on me today. It looks like a severe hardware problem, and chances of recovery are slim. I lost a lot of data today, almost enough to move this post from the /tech to the /life category.

CSS god Eric A. Meyer has created another amazing tool: S⁵ is a slide show system based entirely on XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. The slide shows work in all modern web browsers without requiring any special plugins, making them very easy to distribute. Sure, you do not get fancy fade-ins, but it has keyboard navigation (press space or cursor keys for the next slide) and most browsers can go full-screen, too. The whole slide show is contained in a single file, and if you know anything about HTML you can create slides with your favourite text editor. If you know something about CSS as well, you can tweak the style, if you do not, just use one of the available themes. Go see the introductory slide show!