A motley crew of explorers (two human, two alien) is sent to the mysterious ring world to find out if the unknwon, yet unbelievably advanced Ringworld Engineers who built the place are friendly. Unfortunately, their spacecraft crashes and leaves them stranded on what seems to be a mostly deserted world, whose inhabitants are few, far in between, and, having devolved back to a pre-technological stage, unable to help them to get back home.

There is this big new Hollywood movie whose main attraction seems to be Angelina Jolie in IMAX 3D. Turns out that the Tokyo IMAX theatre closed in February, 2002. Hello? Is this not Technophile World Capital, nirvana for digital entertainment enthusiasts? Very disappointing.

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• Gangster
• Before the Wind
• Battue: Storm of the Horse Lords

I started using Apache Maven and am really impressed by it. At first I was suspicious as to why we need another build system when we already have Apache Ant, but as it turns out Maven is doing much, much more than Ant, and is also easier to use. No wonder that basically all popular Java (it does seem to be limited to the Java world) projects are using it now.

First of all, it has a starter command that generates the project definition XML files, which defines what kind of project you have and how it has to be built. With Ant, you have to manually create a build.xml, which requires you to get down and study a little first. Plus, an initial build.xml probably does not do very much, whereas the initial pom.xml can even create a nice looking web presence.

Secondly, Maven seems to believe in Convention over Configuration. There are sensible defaults for everything, so if you adhere to established directory layouts and such, you can get results without any fiddling of parameters. A good example are the various reporting plugins, that create JavaDoc, or coverage reports, or dependency listings. Just drop in the plugin and without the need to specify source or output directories, or even to activate the new build step, you get the extra side-menu items in your report page.

Thirdly, and probably most importantly, Maven takes care of dependencies for both your project and itself. It automatically locates, downloads and installs all those extra JAR files, and makes sure the versions match up. If it is not already bundled with your OS (comes with Leopard for example), then installing Maven could be the last Java-related download you need to do yourself. When I decided I wanted Cobertura coverage reports yesterday, it was just a matter of adding two lines of code to pom.xml. Maven immediately downloaded the Cobertura plugin for itself, plus all required libraries. I remember it being much more work when I integrated Cobertura in our Ant build chain. The same goes for the dependencies of the project that is being built. Need Hsqldb for some junit testing? Just add it as a Maven dependency (using a convenient package name search dialog in Eclipse), and that's it. No need anymore to either put big third-party JAR files in your own project's version control system or have all developers find and install them manually.

Oh, man! I was so looking forward to my patented Van Hallgren nickname, but apparently Sam just googled me.

After a week of usage, Leopard is starting to break down.

• After waking up from sleep mode, the connection to my Yamaha USB speakers is lost. Have to manually unplug and re-plug the cable, and then open the Audio preference panel to activate it again.
• Parts of the keyboard do not work in Eclipse anymore sometimes. Such as Undo (Cmd-Z). Still works from the menu, and after having used to menu, the keyboard shortcut also works again for some time.
• Most annoyingly, window switching stopped working with Spaces at some point (it worked in the beginning, and I am confident that a restart will fix it): I can click on the application icon all I want, or use Cmd-Tab, and this will switch to the application as it should, but only as far as the menu bar is concerned. It does not take me to the Space where the application lives, so that there is no window. The only way to get to the app is through the Spaces dashboard.
• CamelBones, and by extension PerlPad, are broken again, of course, but that was to be expected.

Two years of the very successful first part of this nostalgic trip to post-war Tokyo, Always 2 brings back all its characters. The plot is similar, too, with basically all story-lines revolving around lost friends and family members. If the melodrama is too much for you, you can still enjoy recreations of an early shinkansen, airplanes, street cars, street scenes and even Godzilla.

This was my first Japanese film without subtitles on the big screen. There may have been some finer points that I missed (there could not have been too many of them, it's a straight-forward tear-jerker), but I got most of what was going on, I think.

The IMDb page is horribly empty. I might have been the first one to cast a vote, there are no comments and no poster, and only Koyuki has a picture. I was surprised to find out that the posters are apparently not user-contributed content, but part of the movie's official promotion. I tried to upload one, but would have had to pay 35 dollars for the privilege.

7 points

There are millions of surveillance cameras with embedded web servers. Some of them are completely unprotected and even show up in Google seach results (where they can be easily identified due to their fixed URL patterns). Surveillance Saver turns this into a reality show screensaver. Looking forward to geolocation (Google Maps?) integration.

As I write this the Mini is downloading the latest episode of Tekzilla and the latest Ubuntu disk image. Those are big files (300 and 700 MB), but a direct HTTP download would be a matter of minutes. Trying to be a nice guy, I chose the torrent link instead, and I am willing to wait, say, a couple of hours. But at rates of 600 bytes per seconds, there is really no end in sight. I do not even know what 63:38:46 hours remaining means in real life. I think organisations that can afford to host direct HTTP downloads should also make sure that their torrents are adequately seeded, otherwise it is just totally useless.

There is talk on the Internets about a scary network that uses millions of malware-infected PC to send out spam mail, and how those guys could probably bring down the whole net if they wanted. Apparently, the botnet is also available for rent to third parties interested in running denial-of-service attacks or other nefarious co-ordinated effort.

If I had a botnet, I would start my downloads on 5000 machines at the same time. That should provide for acceptable transfer rates.