Caboose

On Tuesday night I went to see Solaris, since then I’ve not had a chance to write about it.

My main impression of the film was that it was trying too hard to be arty and mysterious. Everything about it seemed slightly forced. It probably wasn’t worth going to see, there are better ways to spend the time.

I liked the design of the space station though, it avoided the sci-fi cliche of spacecraft always being dark and gloomy with all the walls painted black and lots of flickering lighting. There seemed to be a few nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially the scene where Gordon is about to reactivate the station’s AI.

There was of course some of the usual pseudo-scientific babble, beams of Higgs bosons featured. They also managed to come to the conclusion that the apparations were composed of sub-atomic particles. Nobel prizes all round for the scientists of Solaris!

The best thing I can say about the film is that it’s better than the Seventies Russian effort, which is even more deliberately bewildering and dull.

My Movable Type upgrade seems to have broken the macros that handle automatic acronym definitions and dash conversions. Must get round to fixing it.

Update: now fixed, I had forgotten to add the required bits to some tags in the new templates.

Phone manufacturers, police forces and various other people have got together to create immobilise.com, publicising the shared database used to lock out stolen mobile phones.

This is a great advance over the previous failure by phone companies to share the IMEIs (the unique identifying number of each handset) of stolen phones.

However this still isn’t a guarantee that stolen phones can’t be used again. With most phones reprogramming the IMEI is trivial — if illegal — and the manufacturers’ attempts at preventing it are usually feeble.

A quick internet search will reveal lots of sites providing information on reprogramming phones. The manufacturers’ idea of IMEI protection often only seems to consist of such advanced techniques as storing two copies, one of them obscured in some trivial way.

The front tyres on my car were getting a bit worn so I decided it was time to replace them. I phoned around a few places and ended up going to EMG Ford.

Of course I had forgotten the first rule of cars, any time you go near a garage you end up handing over at least twice as much as you originally though you would. It turned out that one of the rear shock absorbers was buggered, so in addition to £100 for the tyres I had to cough up £130 for the shocks.

They also tried to tell me that my front fog lights wasn’t working but I wouldn’t let them do anything with those and when I checked later they worked fine. I suspect the guys at the garage didn’t realise that you have to turn the headlights on first…

I’ve finally got round to upgrading to Movable Type 2.63. Now I just have to update the site templates to make use of the new features.

Let me know if you find anything that’s been broken by the upgrade.

[via kottke] a U.S. Diplomat’s Letter of Resignation.

I know once you start picking at films you can keep going and the whole thing unravels, but I like this list of things that only happen with Computers in Movies.

Al sent this link to me this morning: Ben Tripp: Vote for Glitch. The article would be funny if it wasn’t so frightening.

There is a tiny little ray of hope in there, at least the Australians are trying to do things right with their electronic voting system.

The problem is that the British government is much more likely to follow the example of the Americans.

Yippee! At my appointment at the Fracture Clinic today I was told I don’t have to wear the sling any more. I can type with two hands again. I can eat food that needs to be cut up. I can drive.

I’m much happier about this than seems reasonable, I think I had got so used to one-handedness that I had forgotten how much I hated it.

I still can’t lift my left arm higher than my shoulder. Physio begins on Monday…

My housemate Al and I went for a spin in his Triumph Spitfire yesterday, from Cambridge along the smallest roads we could find to Long Melford.

After a pleasant pub lunch in Long Melford (mmm, mixed grill!) we drove back via Saffron Walden.