Quarter Life Crisis

December Films¶

This month with Drifting Clouds, 8½, The Seventh Seal, Spur der Steine, Conte d’Automne, Inland Empire, Batman, Batman Begins and the big end of year question.

Kauas pilvet karkaavat

I really need to visit Finland. If only to check out whether all people do there really is drinking shutting up and being depressed. Aki Kaurismäki’s Kauas pilvet karkaavat (a.k.a. Drifting Clouds, a.k.a. Wolken ziehen vorüber) certainly reinforces that impression.

The film may be quite adequate for these days as it tells the story of a couple who lose both their jobs - as a tram driver and headwaitress respectively - in a recession and suffer through the agony of feeling useless, possibly having to apply for benefits, and so on. Instead of discussing their problems they mainly shut up, look tragic or drink. And then, somehow, the film still manages to go for a happy end.

And, yes, there is a distinct lack of headwaitresses in many places these days.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

8½

Fellini’s 8½ (a.k.a. otto e mezzo) was recommended to me a long time ago and finally I managed to see it. Not only is this 1963 film in stunningly pretty black and white with the protagonist played by a grey-headed but charming-as-ever Marcello Mastroianni - it also manages to be wonderfully surreal in the way it tells its story, the allegedgly somewhat autobiographical one of a director in a creative crisis, in a wonderfully dreamy way. ‘Dreamy’ in a surreal sense rather than a kitschy one. And somehow the 2+ hours of the film past in a breeze. I suppose one could studiously re-watch it to discover and grasp all the hints and nuances in there.

[Corridor scenes always make me think of the Coen Brothers ★]

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Det Sjunde inseglet

Remaining in the realm of highly lauded black and white classics with numbers in their title, next came Ingmar Bergman’s Det Sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal). While the whole subject of mediaeval films and knights coming back from crusades isn’t close to my heart, the film was still fascinating in the way it touches a bunch of issues with both religion and social behaviour in a direct and yet reasonably positive way.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Spur der Steine

While there’s no number in the title Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones), the film is old and in black and white as well. Though not quite as gorgeous visually. Which may (or may not) be because it was made in the GDR in 1966. The film deals with the way work was done in the GDR at the time. And it doesn’t put that in the best light by making clear that construction projects could suffer from both a lack of materials and from the people in charge being mainly concerned about whether things went according to the party’s ideology. Said ideology may well require them to highly laud the working schedules they despised last week. It also brings them into a bit of a crisis when one of the female lead engineers expects a child from one of her married colleagues…

While the film was made by the state run film making company in the GDR, they somehow realised that it wasn’t propagandistic enough afterwards and the film was banned later on.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Conte d’Automne

Conte d’automne is the third part of Eric Rohmer’s seasons cycle. Again, it’s full of fancy intellectual talk of book store owners and wine makers discussing in complex terms the tragedy of their relationsships - and the former actually courting some guy for the latter. An amusing film but once more lacking the lightness I sensed in Conte d’Été.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Inland Empire

I really liked some of David Lynch’s old works like Lost Highway, Eraserhead or Twin Peaks. But the guy lost me somewhere along the way. Mulholland Drive was confusing and watching Inland Empire now left me with the impression that things haven’t improved since. There must be some line between films that are too long, ill-lit, without a clear story and those who aren’t. Inland Empire seemed to be on the wrong side of that line.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Batman

I’ve never been a big comic or superhero fan and all the Batman I had seen before was some crappy 1970s TV series or so. Seeing The Dark Knight this year suggested that I might have missed out on some subtle conflicts because of that. And German television deciding to screen a few Batman films between christmas and the new year helped me fill the gap.

And Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman fills the gap rather nicely. And while Heath Ledger made a brilliant Joker in this year’s film, Jack Nicholson was an equally excellent Joker in the older film. Coming to think about it, the Joker seems like the perfect role for the guy.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Batman Begins

The newer, 2005, Batman Begins which was the predecessor of this year’s Dark Knight wasn’t as strong a film. Still, it gave a useful story about Batman’s background and how everything came to be. Not really thrilling, but helpful for ignorants like myself.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

The Big Question

The big question remaining is which films were the best in 2009, now that the time for end-of-year sum-ups has come. Looking at the new films, I’ll point to Waltz with Bashir as my favourite which manages to be animated, very good, historically relevant and with a cool soundtrack at the same time. Then comes the wildly popular The Dark Knight, if only to prove that I can also like mainstream stuff. I still agree with the Joker that the people on the boats should really have blown each other up, though. Good fun could be had with Burn after Reading. An I’ll give an honourable mention to Juno which only came to Germany in 2008, was kind of sweet and had a great soundtrack.

And while not really relevant for the year 2008, I’d also like to highlight the following ‘old’ films which I found rather excellent: Unashamed brilliant Michael Haneke misery in Der siebente Kontinent, fantastic drama of past decades in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, more Austrian drama in Import/Export and rediscovering a film I liked a long time ago: Funny Bones.

There we are. Which films did I miss out on last year? Which ones were your favourites?

22:13 • Feedback (3+0)

Guten Rutsch¶

After a few days of gluttony at my parents’ place - put on a strict four meals a day diet that featured everything from foie gras to Träubletorte -, a nerve-wrecking and successless attempt to buy some new shoes and getting to know a retro café or two in Bremen while catching up with friends, I am now back in Göttingen, waiting to eat some Racelette with friends for the new year.

Happy 2009 to everybody.

19:21 • Feedback (0+0)

Sympathy for the Cigarette Industry¶

German ex-chancellor Schmidt is being pushed to a bit of a pop celebrity by his weekly paper who don’t grow tired of congratulating him. The also made a running gag of his nicotine addiction, stylising it in a way that starts to go beyond pure appreciation.

I had to chuckle when seeing the following congratulatory ads in the special birthday magazine they had for him this week. First, the cigarette industry pointing out that he didn’t hold a ciggie between his fingers at all times:

Admittedly, it’s quite funny. But who - even as a celebrity smoker - would be flattered by having the cigarette industry take out an ad for him? Doesn’t that just feel wrong? And once you flip the page you see the next one, bought by the bastion of democracy that’s the energy industry:

They point out that with all the energy he created in the country he’s allowed a few emissions. Much less funny, even more awkward, I think.

12:28 • Feedback (0+0)

Apple Porn¶

A friend of mine recently brought me a bunch of fresh apples from their family appleyard. Perhaps not the prettiest and shiniest ones but certainly nice and crisp. A few of them came with ‘seasonal’ decorations.

That effect is created by putting stickers on the apple which cover up the image that you see in the end. The lack of light in those locations will cause the difference in colour.

A newer way of doing this uses a laser which simply burns the desired image into the apple’s skin.

While the laser method may sound cooler and be more flexible than the traditional cover-up method, I still like the old method better for its simplicity.

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Bratze Live¶

A bunch of bands played down the road yesterday night. And off we were treating ourselves to a bit of electroclashpop or whatever fancy word one may come up with for this type of music.

First playing were local band The Blue Screen of Death who were actually quite enjoyable. Amusingly their bassist played wearing a helmet. Whether he needs that to operate properly or it was just a precaution for a tall person meeting really low ceiling situation remains a mystery.

Then Juri Gagarin played. Probably to honour the association of their name with the great days of the Soviet Union they opened with that country’s national anthem. And went to to play somewhat boring electronic songs. Once again I am also baffled why people need to jump around so much when their idea of ‘making music’ is pressing plastic buttons on electronic devices. The motionless Kraftwerk approach to making music is much nearer to my heart.

The evenings headliner Bratze came on last. And I managed to take the shittest photo ever of them. While they certainly had a bunch of enthusiastic fans in the crowd there and weren’t bad, their mix of beats and singing isn’t really my thing. A bit repetitive at times as well.

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Versioning Systems¶

The point I’m trying to make is that versioning systems are a good idea but that a lot of that gets buried in geek hipsterism. With all the hip versioning systems around these days, the effort of using them may just be bigger than the convenience they provide.

Where I’m coming from

Versioning systems like the classical CVS or the rather commonplace Subversion are interesting tools for software development. They let you keep track of the changes made to code and thus simplify things like change tracking or collaboration on the same files. They seem to be a sine qua non of communal programming efforts but can also be quite helpful when working on your own.

As these systems come from the developer / geek side of the universe, they are usually non-obvious to use which makes them rather unattractive to the casual user who may only use them occasionally. As always, using a model of ‘read a bunch of manpages and find the relevant two lines in a hundred page book’ rather than one of ‘instant gratification’ is a great way to turn people who might totally appreciate the power of that software into non-users. Chacun à son goût.

The key to making versioning systems accessible is putting a reasonably pretty face on them. A first attempt to do that on the Mac may have come from Apple’s XCode IDE which has offered direct integration with (the now passé CVS) for a long time. And it supported Subversion for a while - even though you had to manually install the Subversion binaries before the developer tools that shipped with X.5.

My first run into versioning system was when I was helping out with BibDesk a few years back. While the first checkout (and even checkin!) seemed scary, it was OK to use through a GUI and the advantages of collecting the effort of many people along with comments on their work seemed obvious soon. I started liking versioning systems back then, simply because they seem to be the obsessive-compulsives’ way of filing their work. Certainly beats a simple ⌘S.

When working on Sandvox Designs with Karelia it unfortunately took us quite a while to figure out that using Subversion for that is the way to go as well. After losing some data over time because the whole zip-upload-unzip-figure out what changed process we had wasn’t the most efficient or controlled one, we switched to using Subversion and never looked back. Not only did this prevent files from going the wrong way by accident, it also established a clear history of what went on when and who’s responsible for it. All that with everybody involved being able to get the relevant information right when they need it (rather than when the person in charge on the other side of the world is awake).

2008

So there I was, kind-of liking Subversion and even starting to use it occasionally for my own local projects as a sort of pimped backup. But generally it still wasn’t all that nice. Because I kept finding the command line interface clumsy, XCode the wrong application for some of my projects and early Mac Subversion GUIs like svnX honourable efforts on the ugly side.

Strangely all that changed in 2008. For some reason the subject of versioning systems - in particular Subversion - became a big one this year. And not only did Coda gain Subversion support in version 1.5 but we also saw the release of Cornerstone and Versions, two polished dedicated graphical Subversion clients. Bliss.

In case you care: My verdict on these is that Coda’s Subversion support is a nice try but mostly useless (in particular as I cannot submit files unless I opened the ‘Site’ belonging to its repository first) while Versions and Cornerstone both seemed fit for the task. I quite liked Cornerstone’s own presentation of Diffs but found its user interface counter-intuitive in most places. While Versions’ GUI rang the right bells for me. There’s still a range of improvement possible in Versions but it’s getting the (little) stuff I need done; In a pleasant way. [And, yeah, I always end up liking the application with the green icon better…]

Problems

This doesn’t mean that versioning systems are without problems now. It’s just that the client side improved significantly. And such significant improvement may mean that you start being inclined to use them more frequently. But other parts of the ‘ecosystem’ haven’t quite caught up. In particular they seem to try hard to remain as user hostile as possible.

And I don’t mean that necessarily as a Subversion specific issue but more as a cultural one. The whole industry of publicly hosted source code lives from the illusion of ‘open source’ software. Anybody can read and use the source code in question. If the projects’ maintainers like him, he can even return his changes to the project. If they don’t there’s still the mysterious process of ‘forking’. Whose main purpose seems to be creating a royal mess (the Cathedral is nice and orderly and has a waterproof roof at least…).

However to me this ‘open’ attitude never came over as a particularly sincere one. My idea of ‘open’ software would be software with readable source code and - if needed - documentation to get it running. My idea of open software also includes single click red-tape-free downloads for people who don’t have or can’t be bothered with versioning systems (even if Subversion became magically more accessible for me this year).

The current situation seems to be far away from my idea. Public hosting sites (Sourceforge, Google Code, beanstalk, …) seem to invariably not focus on these very basic aspects. They may offer bunches of cool (in someone’s opinion, anyway) tools, gazillions of links, statistics, wikis, incomprehensible bug trackers and whatnot. But apparently a readymade link for a single click download of the current source code seems out of question.

Which is unfortunate.

It’s unfortunate because many people may only have a casual interest in programming. Or they may just be curious to know how a certain thing works. And making such simple steps difficult will kill rather than nourish that curiosity. Just as everywhere else there will be many more people watching than people actually creating things. Yet the user interfaces seem to be made exclusively for the minority who use the systems very actively. (And I’m tempted to argue that it’s not even brilliant for them.)

The future is worse

I think this motto of making things easily accessible is an important one. While I am totally not familiar with the intrinsics of Subversion (apart from it having the obvious design flaw that you’ll end up in hell if you dare to do something as outlandish as deleting a folder in a working copy), I am more than tempted to believe that they aren’t technically brilliant in all possible ways. And that there may be better ways to do the same thing - or even more.

And every day a geek seems to get up and have the same thought. A bit later they’ll have created their own brilliant versioning system, and they’ll have found an utterly clever name with a nice and short acronym for it. If they have sufficiently many friends, their system may even make it to a wider ‘public’ and we end up with things like git, bazaar or mercurial with its smartass command name.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they actually do things better than Subversion the issue here is that where we initially had a single (or two if you still consider CVS) problem, we now have three new ones. Because somehow, while living out these wet dreams, the geeks forgot to make their fantastic new systems backwards compatible. Which means that you’ll potentially need to download, install, update, and repeatedly read the man pages of a bunch of new tools just to keep track of a bit of source code.

Of course your main objective was getting that code and using it but now you’re stuck dealing with yet a new layer of software that you installed for a single cause. That just seems to be an incredibly bad deal to me. Because most (sane?) people won’t really appreciate installing what effectively is nothing but a new download tool for a single set of files. Most

Illustration

To illustrate this, look at what happened when I programmed Symmetries earlier this year. Symmetries makes use of two public frameworks. One is the SSCrypto framework. It is available via Subversion. And I quickly checked out a copy and adapted it for my needs which mainly meant turning on garbage collection in the build settings. The framework only handles verifying registrations in the application and with one of the first registrations a subtle bug was revealed: it failed to work correctly if a string passed to it had a certain length. After finding this out, I let the developers know about it and it seemed they had found the problem as well and checked in a fix soon after. It only took me a few clicks to update things on my side after this. All that thanks to Subversion being pretty much a ‘standard’ and can be submitted to convenient GUIs.

The other framework I’m using is Sparkle. While not perfect (where’s the option to update on quit?) it remains the killer of auto-updating solutions (who else matches the nice relaunch of the updated version?). However, it is a rather monstrous piece of software. While I thought I could probably just drop most of its code which isn’t used in my application, actually doing that would have required understanding it, which in turn would have ruined the whole time-saving aspect of using a readymade framework. So I limited myself to obvious things: removing the localisations I don’t need removing the 64bit binaries which would be useless, thinning the nib files and, of course, setting things up to run garbage collectedly.

After doing that my version of Sparkle was quite customised. And this brought me into the situation where not having a version control mechanism makes following updates of the project very painful. The problem about following the project through version control software, however, was that it’s using something called Bazaar. And a bit of cursing later I was sitting there with a freshly checked-out copy of the Sparkle source code using yet another tool I didn’t really understand. Of course I didn’t know my way around it and had difficulties finding out how to actually do what I wanted to do. My aim here was simply keeping track of changes in the framework without losing my custom build settings (is that unreasonable?).

Due to Sparkle’s interminable beta phase (still at 1.5b6 now) I think I shipped something 1.5b4-ish. As apparently the required format of the appcast changed after I grabbed that copy I didn’t even dare checking out a newer version as I feared it’d just unnecessarily break things. And as I moved to a new computer since which of course the 3rd party Bazaar software wasn’t migrated to, I didn’t even bother installing it again until I absolutely need it.

Now guess which of these two cases I preferred?

And one could go on and on. Tom’s Flame touch app for browsing Bonjour services from an iPod touch looks cool and I wanted to fiddle with it a litte because I thought it could give a simple way to push an open Safari page from the Mac to the iPod touch. In fact, that fiddling was successful…

I hacked together a little app which advertises the pages you have currently opened in Safari via Bonjour. Flame touch then picks that up and opens the URL in Mobile Safari. You can grab the source code at Google Code. Which is Subversion based but totally sucks as a website as well. There must be better stuff‽

… the caveat being that the project is hosted on the github site, meaning that ‘native’ access to it requires installation of the git tool which quite likely is another piece of software I don’t know how to use and neither care for. All the while Antonio is working on an interesting project based on hg - err, sorry Mercurial which I don’t even want to think about.

My bottom line

The bottom line for me in this is that while versioning systems can be incredibly useful it’s completely unreasonable for everybody and their dog to invent their own new one; Unless they are all compatible to some lowest common denominator standard. At the end of the day the interesting stuff is happening in the code and versioning systems are not part of it. They should provide convenient access to the code rather than getting in the way. If people claim that their code is ‘open’ they should act in that way by making sure it’s easy to access in practice.

In other Words

Think of Subversion as ASCII. The versioning system you just invented will only be a practical improvement if it has a UTF-8 mode which is indistinguishable from Subversion for the basic features.

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Black¶

Language

One thing that’s been driving me nuts since Obama was elected was the big hubub they made about his skin colour. Sure, it’s a bit of a surprise that people in the U.S. elected a non WASP person as their president, but why they hell do all the media insist on calling him  - and all other people of a similar skin colour - ’African American’?

The essence there seems to be that people still want to point out that a person is dark-skinned, non-white, black. But they seem to think that using a colour word is ‘bad’ while using a different word that’s not colour related on the surface but has exactly the same meaning is supposedly better. That - as most other ways of ‘politically correct’ speaking - just seems phony to me. Which in a way is worse than the original situation as once you’re saying ‘African American’ it’ll be clear that you think ‘black’ and also think ‘uh these poor black people, we can’t call them this way’ which seems somewhat condescending to me. If you consider thinking about people in terms of their skin colour a bad thing, don’t do it.

A little irony in the case of Obama of course is that if the term ‘African-American’ is suitable for anybody, it’s probably suitable for him who actually knows where both continents are, has been there and has pretty direct contacts to both…

Film

And ugh, how the hell do you take a photo of a really dark skinned friend indoors? I’ve heard that film is ‘racist’ in that way - although physics may play a little role there as well - but my results are particularly bad. Light wallpaper, black blob with teeth and eyes kind-of bad. Meh! NEED MORE ISO. And cleverer metering. Which of course is exactly what I didn’t have around in the Yashica.

9:51 • Feedback (5+0)

Cognitive Dissonance¶

Further chapters of the interminable book of things I fail to understand are filled these days. So we’re having a fun economic crisis because some numbers in computers went the wrong way. And apparently this means that people spend less. In particular it means that they spend less on useless crap such as gas guzzling cars. As we all love the environment and are keen to save our wonderful planet, we’ll go and rejoice because of that and start mumbling something incoherent about there being good within the bad, dialectics and all; Right?

Err, wrong, apparently. It seems that the jobs attached to making those cars while avoiding any progress are much more valuable than the planet is. Instead of saying ‘good riddance’ or taking a more cheerful capitalist approach which says that this line of business is at the end and will make for a new, better, one, car manufacturers start moaning and begging. And politicians - particularly those in car country Germany - seem to ‘feel the pain’ instead of being a bit more neutral and shrugging the problem off as one that was foreseen decades ago.

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Another item in the paper that baffled me today was that they thought about raising the minimum wage in some sectors and - reliably - companies ‘threatened’ to lay off people. One wonders what kind of ‘jobs’ people will get laid off there if their business model breaks when they have to pay their people a bit more. Do we really want those businesses around here? Or should we be prepared to pay a bit more for those ‘services’.

Somehow the whole ‘services’ ‘industry’ (heck, I’m running out of quotation marks again!) seems such a big scam at their low end. They underpay people and want them to be flexible and all and at the same time they’ll complain about things being too expensive and staff being too unreliable. At least the latter point doesn’t seem overly surprising, people are just trying to be ‘flexible’ on their own terms. And somehow all of these schemes manage to result in the same thing for me, the ‘consumer’: Even worse service for the same price. I still haven’t understood what the advantage of that is. In theory they’d try to improve their service to please their customers.

But I guess I misunderstood that as well.

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