diego's weblog

Over the last few weeks I've been catching up with some movies that looked interesting back when they came out in theaters but that I didn't have time to go see at that point.

Here's the one-minute summary of each. There isn't much to spoil, but if you're sensitive to knowing, er, "plot" details, well, stop reading.

Okay, so after a few hours of playing around with the Kindle here's some further thoughts on the device, in no particular order. :)

• The display is clearly better than the one on the Sony Reader PRS-500 (first gen): faster refresh, better contrast. I imagine it is on par with that of the PRS-505.
• The navigation metaphor is really interesting, and quite unique. There's this metallic-looking strip on the side that identifies lines/paragraphs/sections (depending on context) and that provides visual feedback of operations that take time. In particular, it seems to draw the eye's attention while the page is "flipping" which as I mentioned before is slightly distracting at first (but then is not noticeable). The strip is probably quartz-based (like the liquid crystal in digital watches) since it updates too fast to be an eink variant.
• Specifically, the navigation metaphor mixes the physical with the virtual in a strange, but appealing way. There's the idea of "moving" this almost physical marker (in the form of the metallic strip) to select what you want and then click or press enter to "activate" it depending on context. This is in contrast to the navigation Sony did in their reader, which uses the ink itself to mark selection and is clunky and slow. I don't know yet if the Kindle's navigation is genius or folly yet, but it's definitely original, and it's worked well so far.
• The purchase system is so simple, it's evil. :) Just click, click, and you're done. The book is there in seconds and you've spent the money (they do have a link in the final page that lets you back out of the transaction if you want, which is great). Between this, the auto-configuration (the device came pre-configured with my account out of the box) and wireless connectivity included and working out of the box, Kindle sets a new bar for out-of-the-box experience, even going beyond iPod (and I don't say that lightly). Great job guys!
• Speaking of out-of-the-box experience -- Mike was wondering what happens if you buy the device for someone else. Well, by default it's tied to your account, but as soon as you buy it you get access to a page that lets you "unlink" the device and then you'd have to "link it" to the other Amazon account (not sure if "linking" and "unlinking" are the terms Amazon uses, I don't think so :)).
• Also cool is that you can link more than one Kindle to a single Amazon account, in effect sharing books across them, say for the whole family.
• Web navigation is decent, if limited. Russ came over and we geeked out with the device for a bit, looking at the user agent (Mozilla-Compatible, NetFront) and other headers it was sending. Amazon is proxying the content, which isn't a surprise. Net access is fairly fast (and free!), and Mowser works great on it! Faster even though in effect it's going through two proxies (Amazon, then Mowser).
• In Default Mode, the browser ignores CSS/styles, and it behaves more like a limited-capabilities mobile browser. But turning on Advanced Mode enables them. Oh, and you can turn on Javascript support too! (off by default).
• Emailing content in works really well: just send an email to your chosen email address for the kindle with an attachment that is the document/images you want to send, and after a few minutes it shows up in the device. It's also available, properly transcoded, in your Amazon online library. Really well done. There's a $0.10 (10 cent) charge to do that, but you can also do the transcoding for free and upload the file manually through USB.
• USB mode is simple: just plug it in, and it shows up as a disk, disabling any other functions in the device. You can dump PRC, MOBI, TXT, and Amazon's own AZW files (whatever those are). As a quick test I downloaded the PRC version of Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" put it in the documents folder, and presto, there it was.
• You can also download the AZW files from Amazon's digital library to your PC and then manage them from there, adding them/removing them to the device through USB. Very interesting. Amazon is acting as a sort of automatic backup, but in theory you could do away with Amazon completely.
• Oh, and yeah, some of the navigation keys in the border tend to be pressed a bit too often by mistake. Probably something I'll snap out of, but if it was me, I'd make them not go all the way out to the edge, which exposes them more.

Sometimes it's hard not to wish that Hollywood would get its act together and produce some actual entertainment instead of drivel, or rather, not hand it out just one movie a year at a time. This year definitely looks like an outlier. The list so far:

• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Come on, admit it. You've been waiting for this for the last ten years. Yeah. Me too.
• Iron Man. Robert Downey Jr., one of the best actors of his generation, and what looks like a killer action movie.
• The Dark Knight. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, once more directed by Christopher Nolan. After the spectacularly good Batman Begins, I have little doubt this one will be the one that finally, finally, let us Batman fans forget about what Joel Schumacher did to the character with Batman and Robin.
• Wall-e. The latest from Pixar. I'd be surprised if the movie isn't as hilarious as the trailer. Fun to watch for the CG tricks alone.
• The Incredible Hulk. Second try at getting the big green man on the big screen. The first try wasn't great but it had some good moments. This time Bruce Banner is Ed Norton, which can summon enough intensity to turn green all by himself (just remember American History X). High hopes for this one.
• Righteous Kill. Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. Need I say more?
• Forbidden Kingdom. Jackie Chan and Jet Li go Kung-Fuing. Much fun is to be had by all.
• Get Smart. Part of what was funny about the TV series was the crappy faux-James Bond tech, but this time it looks like the effects make it perhaps a little too slick. Steve Carell definitely looks like the natural heir for the part.
• Bangkok Dangerous. Nick Cage tries the long-hair-weirdo-distanced-from-society thing again (last time it was Next), as a professional assassin who apparently grows a conscience. Might be a bomb, but willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
• Hancock. Will Smith goes superhero with an attitude, is (apparently) also a bum. What can possibly go wrong?
• Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. After the spectacularly good Hellboy, I hope this one doesn't succumb to sequel-syndrome.
• Wanted. Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman teach some dude that he can curve the trajectory of bullets. A premise this insane has to lead to a fun movie.

In Alan Moore's 1988 masterpiece The Killing Joke we got the clearest vision yet of the Joker as Batman's "dark side," and a Joker that was as vicious and demented as anything we had ever seen.

Until The Dark Knight, that is.

The movie borrows narrative strands from some of the best Batman graphic novels: Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, Loeb's The Long Halloween, and The Killing Joke. One of the core plot elements of the movie in fact (The Joker wanting to prove that everyone can essentially become like him given the right circumstances) is at the center of The Killing Joke, and many story elements and characters in The Long Halloween reappear in both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, most notably perhaps the plotline involving DA Harvey Dent and his transformation.

Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is nothing short of astonishing. In a sense Batman can be defined by contrast with his enemies, and Bale's Batman is better because Ledger's Joker has so much ferocity. Without it, one of the few shortcomings of the movie (that Batman's own latent insanity and his finely tuned detective skills are for the most part conspicuously absent) would be much more glaring.

A review I read somewhere said that The Dark Knight is a "modern bullet train of a movie" and it's true. The last half hour in particular is something to behold. It's one of those movies that really require a giant screen to be experienced in full.

Supposedly this is the second part of a trilogy, and if commercial success leads to sequels then this one is almost guaranteed (it broke the opening day box office record), and hopefully it will be as good as the first two.

In the meantime, we have The Dark Knight to take us once more to Gotham, in all of its bleak, chaotic intensity.

Spoiler warning: yes, this is a spoof, but it essentially contains the whole plot of the movie. Don't say I didn't warn you. :)

Read on after the break...

Anyone that knows me also knows that I am tablet fan. My first job out of college was at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center creating a user interface for a tablet that never shipped (this was 1998!) even though we got it working in prototype form. I have used tablets of various kinds since then -- my main portable computer was a Thinkpad X Tablet until the Macbook Air came out and replaced it. (yep, 1 lb lighter plus much faster wake time is just too much of a difference to ignore, tablet or no tablet)

While much has been said about the iPad, both pro and con, on the negative side the focus seems to be on what it doesn't do. For those that would have wanted to get a tablet mac, as opposed to a big iphone (and I think of the iPad not as a big iPhone, but I think of the iPhone as a small iPad, if you get what I mean), there's no argument that would bring them over. The iPad simply doesn't do what they want, and that's ok. There's also been a lot of commentary on how much of a controlled environment it is, how it can't be hacked, and so on. All of those are in my view good points but somewhat beside the point. Since the thing clearly isn't meant to be a general purpose computer, it is not that helpful to say that it isn't and to want it to be one. It's not a general purpose computer, and Apple never said it would be one. Done. Let's all get over that.

What I find interesting is not so much what it does or doesn't do, but in what it is in terms of its construction as far as bigger devices go, and the consequences for software/hardware interfaces. It seems to me that Apple is on a mission to lead the age of glass -- no mechanical components, or as few of those as you could possibly get away with, and increased control of the physical interactions by the software, to create interfacing modes on the fly.

From its screen all the way to the casing, the iPad is almost a solid block of metallic particles arranged in various ways, glass, and some plastic. If we had molecular assemblers (or maybe when is a better term) this is what I think the a lot of first products would look like.

Arguably, it was the iPhone that really broke ground here, and Apple has really been going in this direction for a while now. Macbooks now look like a slab of metal. Desktops (of all kinds, from the Mini to the MacPro) have this solid look that hides all the mechanisms that make it work. They generally seem to be sculpted, not assembled. Compare that to PCs, which actually do look assembled even if they're now more streamlined.

Apple's products are tightly controlled, but that also means they are tightly integrated. Apple is fusing the software with the device beyond anything else done in the computer/tablet/phone market today. The hardware is an extension of the software, and viceversa. They are one unit.

We have been infusing electronics and software into everything mechanical for decades now, putting software inside straightjackets of metallic hinges and spring mechanisms with rigid I/O interfaces (input through keyboard, output through display, and so on). It is really in consumer devices where interfaces blend more naturally into form and function. In modern cars (particularly mid- to high-end) the integration of software, processing units, memory, and storage, is fairly seamless as far as car functionality goes (the often times horrible integration of touchscreens and entertainment functions is another story). We don't really think about it until something goes wrong.

This is one of the key areas in which Apple has pulled off a significant shift. Microsoft tried, for years, to bolt new form factors and ways of interaction into an already bloated system of concepts, software and hardware approaches (the PC). The quality of Windows aside, that's why Windows tablets don't work -- and as long as Microsoft insists on shoving 40-year-old interaction paradigms and 20-year old software into various devices and form factors, it never will. Nor will Linux, or any other random PC OS anyone can come up with for that matter.

This new paradigm requires a redesign from the ground up. And to really pull it off, you need the hardware to blend into the background, not to get constantly in the way, calling attention to itself, and to become malleable. For that, you need the materials and the design to match them organically. Thinking of the device as a single unit, rather than disparate components to be mixed and matched, is what lets you achieve that. Which in turn allows software to really become the ghost in the machine, and to start to take control of the physical realm of the actions -- creating physical interactions, like swiping, out of thin air, rather than having to rely on hinges and springs (like, say, a mouse or a keyboard) to communicate highly limited interactions.

The Mechanical Age is at an end. The Software Age is just beginning.

Over the weekend I saw Predators (fairly entertaining, if slightly slow in the reveal for some portions of the story). I don't think I'll ruin anything by saying that in this movie we meet a new caste of predators that we've never seen before, a sort of super-predator that kinda slaps around the original predator as if they are oversized calamari with dreadlocks.

All the while, I couldn't help but think that there's a lot missing from the Predator universe. Here's some predator types I'd like to see in a future sequel:

• Insurance Agent Predator. Kills slowly by burying you under a ton of forms. Only wears glasses in the office. For all of the regular predators that go on safari... they clearly need insurance products. Especially in case they need to activate the mini-nuke they have in their funky wristband (What is that thing by the way? And does it support bluetooth headsets?)
• Janitor Predator. Given the mess they make with the skulls and the spines and all the weird creatures they hunt, they definitely need someone to clean up those spaceships. Does not kill, but if you piss him off you'll be cleaning up your own garbage.
• Software Developer Predator (aka Nerd Predator). Can kill with keyboard or strangle with mouse cord. Definitely a necessary addition -- these guys keep hunting stuff, but who is building new versions of the software they use in the spaceships and all their wonderful machinery? who updates the firmware for the ships? do predators have their own engadget? do they have open source? Do their ships run Windows XP?
• Gas Station Predator. Because they must get their fuel somewhere. 
• Celebrity Predator. they must have celebrities, right? right? I mean, they are a natural byproduct of any advanced narcissistic civilization.
• Paparazzi Predator. inescapable followup to celebrity predator. Uses a Nikon to kill its prey. 
• William Gibson Predator. Great predator-writer. Wrote the seminal book in a science fiction genre that deals with a dystopian reality where predators live in peace with the universe and ride little ponies to work, which consists mostly of tending to endless fields of tiny beautiful flowers and contemplating the beauty of the universe.
• James Bond Predator. Has a license to kill. Unlike the other predators, who don't ... but kill anyway.
• Dentist Predator. Flossing optional for these guys.
• Clown Predator. Provides entertainment in long trips, and between orgies of planetary destruction.

Proposed title for next movie? The Real Spacemen Predators of New Jersey.

That is all.