Soul Kitchen

I enjoyed Fatih Akin’s films in the past, particularly the dramatic Gegen die Wand and from the reviews I knew that his latest œuvre, Soul Kitchen [IMDB, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Website], isn’t quite as great for it has a somewhat non-dramatic story. Yet, I absolutely had to see the film after staying with friends in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg last December and passing the house used as the restaurant in the film in December.

The film centres around two Greek brothers, Zinos and Illias, the former of which runs the poorly going restaurant ‘Soul Kitchen’ which caters to the mediocre tastes of the locals while his brother is in prison. Zinos girlfriend moves to China for her job and Zinos can’t decide whether to give up his restaurant to go with her. With his restaurant becoming better and more popular thanks to a new – and slightly crazy – chef, he decides to stay for the time being and when he finally hands the restaurant to his gambling addicted brother and gets on the plane to China, his girlfriend has found another guy and his brother gambled away the restaurant to a gentrification-loving investor before he returns.

And yet, a new beginning comes along and things may just work out. — A bit cheesy perhaps, but we’ll enjoy the scenery. Be sure to also enjoy the nice graphical closing credits!

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

Cowboy Bebop

A few years back, I enjoyed watching some episodes of the Cowboy Bebop TV series which Dan gave me. A fun science fiction series about freelancing bounty hunters, a.k.a. Cowboys, the coolest of whom is Cowboy Bebop. I tried to indulge in the feature film made of this as well: Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven’s Door [IDMB] , but – despite a great opening and all cool one would expect – I found it lacking. It seemed like they didn’t manage to span the action throughout a full movie’s length. I’m wondering whether the films they made later on (2005) or in the future (2011) will be better. IMDB comments don’t suggest so.

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

Objectified

I finally saw Objectified [IMDB, Website], Gary Hustwit’s design-focused follow-up to Helvetica. I was definitely looking forward to this film, but I also suspected it couldn’t live up to the standards set by Helvetica, a film which treated a very specialised topic – typography – at the example of a typeface that manages to be at the same time one of the most remarkable and most humble ones. It managed to show countless examples, serve as an eye-opener and give a voice to a bunch of widely varying opinions on the typeface.

The topic of design is much broader, people have a bit of an idea what it could be about, and hence Objectified lacks the specific focus of Helvetica, the film. While following the same show-object-show-interview-related-to-that-object scheme used in Helvetica, I couldn’t help thinking that, on average, the ‘object designers’ interviewed in the film were more on the wanker side than their typographer / ‘graphic designer’ counterparts in Helvetica. They seemed to have a much harder time stating opinions and presenting coherent arguments for them. Just as many of them seem to have difficulties talking without waving their arms around all the time.

A big issue for designers is (should be?) that their services are mostly used to support the business of selling stuff. A look around our world suggests that ugly unusable crap is the design that the market-intelligence favours. It sells. Like hell. And it litters our environment ecologically, visually and in all other conceivable ways. The film tries to touch that topic in a few places but unfortunately most of the interviewees fail to grasp the topic or go for some kind of lip-commitment to it before quickly returning to more ‘interesting’ subjects. A shame really.

The interviews with the IDEO guys on the birth of software design were particularly interesting and, surprisingly (?) Dieter Rams [Wikipedia, London Design Museum] didn’t fail to impress [Disclaimer: author grew up in a household with great respect for him and Braun’s design]. Should the voice of such an ‘old’ designer be the most outstanding one in a film like Objectified? Particularly if what he’s saying hasn’t changed too much over the past fifty years?

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

A Serious Man

This year’s film by the Coen brothers is A Serious Man [IMDB] which unfolds the breaking life of physics professor Larry Gopnik. He has problems, he is religious, his wife is leaving him for an older acquaintance, nobody seems to care too much about the leaving but people do feel sorry for him because of the guy she’s leaving him for; a student tries to bribe him, there’s the risk of him losing his job, but he starts an affair with his neighbour. His son is ‘looking forward’ to his religious initiation while developing a healthy drug habit, and yet, the ritual brings the family back together.

While beautifully depressing, I’m not sure the film’s story is my cup of tea. However, as usual, the film looks great and the Coen brothers attempt to capture the style of an era long passed in the film. Both in terms of the visuals and the fears and hopes people may have had.

And if you’re a bit of a physics geek, you’ll have to watch the film for this split-second that’s also available in the trailer (from looking at the trailer, I’d say the 1920 resolution looks a bit like a waste of pixels):

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

• I used two planes, seven trains and a coach in the course of my trip. I think there were five different train operators involved in this.
• Even though the British railway system is notoriously bad, I have to say that none of my trains was actually late or something. Even with my one train from Stansted to London being replaced by a coach service, I made all connections in time.
• The only thing that’s as painful today as it was ten years ago is trying to book a railway ticket. It took me two weeks to do that. Because their railway sites suck so badly. It seems that all the sites actually rely on the same back-end system, but they manage to put extra pain into it.
• The Trainline, for example, with whom I had booked tickets before, think it’s funny to add random extra charges for booking tickets online and for paying with a credit card.
• Interestingly, other railway companies let you purchase the very same tickets without those extra charges. Of course to actually do that, you’ll have to try out their websites. I ended up booking with Cross Country Trains who didn’t even require me to create an account on their site.
• I picked the tickets up at a ticket machine at the airport. You tell them where you want to pick them up when booking, then insert the same credit card into the machine and *almost magic*. As I had two tickets booked, I needed to do two transactions, unfortunately, rather than the machine giving me everything in one go.
• When booking a return ticket going via a specific station, the UK railway booking system only used that station for the outgoing journey. Which was inconvenient to me as I actually wanted to use it only for the return trip. (The German system, in comparison, forces you to use the same via on both trips if you want to benefit from any return trip prices.)
• If you don’t need to buy a ticket but just want the timetable info for all of Europe, Deutsche Bahn’s site remains the place to go. Their iPhone app ‘DB Navigator’ will pick up your current location, help you plan your journey with that and has a display of your connections which is both pretty and useful. It even caches your last search results, so it’s useful for iPod users as well.
• As Dan explained to me, said inconvenience exists because nobody expects people to go by train. [Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for the British because they invented all those things (steam engine, railways, football, rugby, greedy banking) and invariably end up being distant third in all those areas.]
• So my trains were on time, but – like every time I use a British train – I couldn’t help thinking that the experience would be much better if only they bothered to clean the coaches every now and again. Dirty carpets and the areas beneath the seats looking like a landfill do not a pleasant journey make.

• Seen at Stansted station:

  

  … while it was totally appropriate to put up the sign, surely people should be embarrassed about it: You can design a railway station. And doing so will make sure that the platforms are not slippery, even when it’s cold and wet outside. Just sayin…

• Also seen there: A Google chrome ad. Isn’t it wrong to put up a billboard ad for a web browser? And don’t the notes next to it feel completely freaky because it’s none of Google’s business (well, technically it’s all of their business – in a business sense of the word) to creep up on you like that?
• I had to change trains at Paddington station. As a big fan of the bear, I always like that.
• It still strikes me as odd that pretty much every tube station in London also has National Rail services running there. Surely, consolidating railway stations a bit more might streamline things a little.
• I also indulged in low-cost flights with Ryanair once more. Since I last did that they added extra charges for checking in luggage (€15), printing a boarding pass (don’t bring your own and you pay €30 or so) and making you pay a credit card charge for each flight rather than the whole booking. While the prices remain very competitive, it always leaves me with the feeling of being ripped off and makes travelling less fun.
• It looks like Ryanair support mobile phone usage on some of their planes now. One would have hoped that they have different safety announcements for the planes with and without those systems. Instead they use sentences with if.
• While Stansted remains quite a clean and neat airport – the main building at least – Ryanair’s terminal in Bremen really looks like shit. The theory is that they make it look extra cheap so you feel like you got a better deal. I’m not sure that’s working for me. Surely not painting all the walls in yellow wouldn’t be more expensive but would feel better.
• I was lucky enough to get a emergency exit row seat on my way back. Even though I was among the last to board the plane. The flight attendant then told all people about their responsibilities there and asked whether we’re OK with it. It’s nice how everybody keeps a straight face when doing this, so the flight attendant doesn’t need to feel too awkward.
• I wanted to import some Thüringer Mett for Dan. But I with the crazy ‘security’ efforts of these days I figured they’d take it from me at the security check (unless I pack it in 100ml packs and put those in a zip-loc bag, I guess). Unfortunately I forgot to ask the ‘security’ staff/actors whether it’d be OK.
• Rather amusingly, my flight back was twenty minutes late because we didn’t take off on time. So they couldn’t play their little jingle for being Europe’s most on-time airline on arrival.
• … and I missed my train which happened to be the last one that evening, forcing me to stay over at my parents’ cold house.

• Another fun thing is that the Metronom trains in Niedersachsen now ban alcohol. The reason for that is quite likely that you tend to meet quite a few wasted people and football fans on trains during weekends. Which can be considered unpleasant. So they banned all alcoholic drinks last autumn. And they created some hideous signage for it:

  

  Verboten, verboten, verboten!

• Unfortunately Matt Gemmell had fallen ill and couldn’t give his talk on Tuesday morning. A Get Well Soon card made the rounds instead.
• Jeff LaMarche had to take over the early session instead, running it with a lack of sleep and fresh clothes thanks to the less fortunate sides of air travel. He spoke about fiddling with the Cocoa runtime to dynamically analyse classes or to add methods to your own classes while running. I keep thinking this stuff sounds very clever and neat but that I just don’t need it. And - as Jeff pointed out as well - it’s probably bad to use such techniques just because they’re cool. You need to get real benefits from them.
• I tried out Tom and my Flame iPhone Bonjour Browser during the talks. With dozens of Macs and iPhones full of geeky software on the network, it was a great opportunity to see how well the application works there. While doing so, I discovered numerous service names which we had never seen before and which are not in the list at the DNS-SD website (yet). I tried to note all of them and hoped to figure out whet they are about. In case you can offer a description or link indicating what any of the following types is for, do me a favour and leave a comment: qmp4, swblic, rsagent, todogwa, istatrmt, aicheck, scan-target, timelog, friedegg.
• In the next talk, Andy Finnell. spoke about Core Image, going into the details of creating a watercolour brush. The physics modelling of the liquid and pigments in this was quite involved, possibly distracting from the Core Image aspects. OpenCL was touched in the talk which I found particularly interesting.
• I tried to figure out more about OpenCL [Wikipedia] and its capabilities. Andy pointed me to Drew who apparently touched the topic in his workshop on parallel processing on Sunday. And both of them pointed me to the Mac Research site and the tutorials there. A colleague of mine is doing some insane number crunching and was trying to figure out whether it can be sped up by going beyond straight C. Using SSE seemed a bit crazy as it will mainly make the code very incompatible. OpenCL, being both ‘open’ and abstracted from the actual hardware could fit the bill perfectly there. It just seems that it’s so new that people don’t have much experience using it yet.
• In the next session two somewhat ad-hoc talks came on to step in for Matt Gemmell. Dave Dribin tried to earn some more bashing on twitter by speaking about version control systems and pointing out that Subversion is still king because it’s very widely supported while git is the king of hearts, in part thanks to github, but it can still be confusing as hell [I agree, but to be honest I have the impression that git makes a surprisingly big effort to help the user at times - for a tool coming from Linux-land anyway - and even with next to no understanding of git I managed to do much more with it than with Subversion; the Pro Git book is an invaluable resource for that] while Mercurial/hg [Hint: it’s stupid to not name your application and executable the same, no matter how ‘clever’ it seemed at the time] is supposedly cleaner but nobody gives a damn. I think I had seen the slides for this talk before, so I didn’t find it particularly interesting.
• Next, Graham Lee spoke about code signing. I went through the pain of figuring that out for myself when it was new (and there was no neat popup menu in the build settings to do it). But Graham also showed a little demo app (nominate it for an ADA if you can! - Mac software these days needs to be ‘focused’.) illustrating how you can check the consistency of your application’s in-memory code at runtime thanks to code signing. Ultimately code signing is a double edged sword (you may appreciate knowing that an unaltered application is running when processing sensitive data, you’ll hate it if you need to modify someone else’s application to do its job in a way that suits your needs).
• Graham’s talk also came with friendly piss-takes at the name of ‘Jon’ ‘Wolf’ ‘Wrench’, or whatever. The ‘Wolf’ part keeps reminding me of people calling Mozart ‘Wolferl’ (in Amadeus I think), so I’m not a big fan of it.
• Incidentally I went on to discuss some clicktoflash stuff with Jon during lunch. As time was running fairly quickly and the network hated us we didn’t manage to cover everything and perhaps we’ll need to discuss things a bit more until everybody’s on the same page. Which preferably should be my cutting-edge page, that still comes with a problem or two at the moment but could be a reasonable way to go forward. Things we could do with help for are running on X.4 (I don’t really care, but I suspect this might be easy to fix if one is able to run the project there in a debugger) and for figuring out how/why the sIFR code seems to have broken in refactoring.
• Next on stage was Aaron Hillegass who’s known for giving great courses and really does wear a ‘cowboy’ hat on stage. He started off with iPad references and saying that local data is a dead concept and the future is in the cloud with local drives just being caches and pointing out the obvious benefits [no fear of data loss] without going into nasty details [how screwed will you be on network FAIL? what about privacy? (you’ll get over it) or encryption?] while mentioning others [like vendor lock-in, that’s an obvious problem in the Apple universe but frequently ignored my Mac developers]. Aaron then went on to present a persistence framework he has just written which could be superior to CoreData in some way and is designed for both the Mac and the iPhone as well as for being simple and fast. To be honest I didn’t quite get how both parts of his talk matched up apart from being about data. If his framework included things like synchronisation and conflict management, I could see how it’d fit into the ‘cloud’ picture but at the moment it seems to do local persistence only.
• The final session was mysteriously titled Cocoa Rumble which one could enter for beforehand. It turned out Scotty drew our names from a hat and assigned one attendee to each speaker, ultimately creating three groups of six people each. Then he put a bunch of ‘Core’ frameworks in the hat, handing one to each group with the task of using 30 minutes to create a presentation making the point why that framework is the framework of the year. The drawn frameworks were CoreText, CoreAudio and CoreAnimation. Let’s say that was a rather uneven choice as in terms of flashy results and ease of use CoreAnimation should be the default winner. While CoreText will neither be known nor explicitly needed by most even if may play an important role for the Mac’s appearance. Similarly CoreAudio is unpleasant to work with and I remember it as painful - most likely for the good reason of the low-latency they try to achieve.

• It turned out I ended up on the CoreAudio group with Rentzsch, Jeff Lamarche (who had recovered his luggage by then!), Drew, Daniel Tull and Daniel Kennett. We were working frantically to whip up a kick-ass presentation:

  

  … with a great slogan CoreAudio is the API of Rock Stars [Alex Rozanski has a good photo of rentzsch presenting that], proving how it kicks ass because it’s essential for iTunes (of course we knew iTunes existed before CoreAudio as Uli was keen to point out, yet I doubt it’s playing a tone on my machine without CoreAudio), which is essential for Podcasts, which are essential for MDN which is essential for NSConference. A great argument I think. Bashing the other APIs was a good idea as well, even though I still think that the slide saying that CoreText is an API for girly men with Zapfino used to illustrate it is an insult both in terms of sexism and to the typeface. Probably another good indicator that having more than 2% female attendees wouldn’t be the worst of ideas.

  Our presentation finished with all of us waving our MacBooks to create a bunch of sinewaves using SkipChecker. I wouldn’t have guessed that this painful excursion into the world of CoreAudio would make it to the ‘big stage’ one day… incredibly dorky, I suppose, but fun.

• And, yeah, needless to say that the CoreAnimation people won: an originally sealed set of WWDC DVDs from 2002 or so. Congratulations! More generally I thought their presentation was fun, but a bit too long. And I was rather disappointed by the CoreText team because their technology totally has the potential to outdo CoreAudio in terms of on-screen sexiness.
• While we were preparing the presentations, people were invited to share their favourite little ‘tricks’ with the audience. Unfortunately we were too busy pondering our own presentation to follow what was going on and the hints were said to be quite helpful. Notes on this didn’t seem to make it to the SubEthaEdit file, so I’m hoping videos will be available one day. — Uh, and someone please tell rentzsch that there is a difference between giving a short hint and a ten minute presentation of one’s pet project…
• With all those sessions ‘done’, the drinking could begin. I happened to speak to the guys from Shiny Frog who are doing the delicious client delibar. As I contributed code to the much more limited delimport application (actually I have a 64bit capable version of it running here already) which creates a backup copy of your delicious bookmarks and adds them to your Spotlight index, it was cool to talk to them. They’ve put an incredible amount of work into their user interface and, unfortunately, had to report that Yahoo ‘upgraded’ delicious’ API to something using OAuth and being horribly complicated. To make things more fun, it seems that Yahoo preferred not to tell anybody about this and randomly allow use of the ‘old’ API for old accounts. To make things even less worthwhile it sounds like the ‘new’ API can’t actually do more than the old one could (with a particular and very bandwidth-intensive shortcoming of the old API being that it won’t let you do requests like send me all changed bookmarks since a given date but always forces you to download all bookmarks, which can amount to a couple of megabytes if you’ve been using delicious for a while, to achieve that).
• Later we had dinner at the ‘nearby’ Horse & Groom pub (Scotty even claimed one could walk there and lived up to that claim) with some local beers and nice pieces of steak. To the delight of the assembled geeks the landlord brought up some little logic games on the height of coins, turning around glasses and toothpicks which kept people busy throughout the evening. I even remember winning a game of ‘table-rugby’ shortly before we left. I must have been 20 years younger and 10000km away when I last did that.

Thanks

Many thanks go to Scotty and Tim for making NSConference happen. Without doubt they put in some great effort there. Let’s see how quickly they recover from NSConference US to switch from ‘I’ll never do this again’ to ‘When can I do this again?’ mode.

Many thanks also to Mike for being my host in Reading.

Further thanks go to Chris Walters who had done the pub reconnaissance and generously offered countless lifts to us and many other participants in his big car while seeming to survive on glasses of Tabasco (with tomato juice) night after night.

• Too much death and too little beef in Mike Lee’s keynote. While making valid points, I think I’m not American enough to really appreciate this ‘emotional’ address, even in a keynote that’s supposed to set the mood.
• Debugging fun with Wolf Rentzsch, pointing out all (?) the ways to poke a non-running and a running application on the Mac. Probably starting out a bit too basic and thus missing out on some of the good stuff which must be out there but which I don’t know. Including respect for the awesome / magic HexFiend, disassembly using otool -tV, the otool postprocessor otx and the various techniques for getting your own code into other applications.
• People’s notetaking of that in SubEthaEdit is awesome and will be useful to find / use the examples shown in the talks. Thanks to Uli Kusterer for setting all that up.
• It’s probably a given: The hotel’s Wifi with a weird login page that seems super-slow on the iPod and loves forcing you to frequently re-enter of all info to use the network was a bit annoying. As were the common losses of signal. On the other hand, I had expected much worse for the catastrophic scenario of well over a hundred people with at least one wirelessly networked device descending on a venue at the same time.
• Dave Dribin on clean code: Good to be reminded of many of the things there. Again, nothing overly non-obvious but it’s always good to be reminded of a clean style and pointing at the easily made mistakes. Not all of his points were equally good and one has the impression he may be teased about his ‘KVO is evil’ stance and singleton hate, which became a bit of a running gag, for a while.
• I was too busy watching the little lunch-time talks to manage to get a dessert, bummer!
• Drew McCormack about data presentation: Goes through many styles and points out how they’re all lists. Points to the core-plot graphing framework project he helps run. Interesting stuff, even though I currently have no use for it. Having a way to draw graphs and do it performantly will be cool. The talk also pointed out the existence of NSCollectionView to me, but it sounded like it’s not better than a table view if you have a really long table.
• Final talk was by Marcus Zarra on CoreAnimation. Interesting but not overly exciting if you’ve used CoreAnimation before, which he has bunch of posts on on his site. I had to laugh when he said most of the code in his demo app was for drawing the path he’s drawing and that he had to program it from a sketch he made. Totally reminded me of my efforts when creating ESCursors.
• Dinner was fine with special kudos to Tim for having gone through the effort of making sure we actually get good wines with it.
• Now if only I could remember the names of all the people I spoke to…
• Notes with photos by Alex Rozanski.
• There seemed to be many iPhone people at the conference and many who are relatively new to Cocoa.
• One thing I find hard when speaking with iPhone people is figuring out how to speak to them. I have a fairly low opinion of most iPhone applications, a sentiment which doesn’t seem too far off the general perception. And creating them probably is where the money is because people with bad taste and money will hire iPhone developers to create them. That’s certainly not my style of doing things and it’s hard to talk about people (after all they seem reasonable and probably don’t think they’re creating the greatest thing in the world when making some junk advertising app) about this topic.
• Of course the missing semicolon in [[NSConference alloc] init] on the smart banners that decorated the stage made people talk. For my part, I welcome our new semicolon-less-C-overlords. Certainly makes things less painful. [I really recommend compiling with LLVM by the way, because its error messages for this stuff are just much more human-comprehensible].

Read on for notes on the second day…

On Saturday we went to see The Armageddapocalypse at a student theatre which was completely packed despite being a 11p.m. show and was a rather well done and funny, if not particularly clever, parody on action films complete with the director and actor ‘comments’ they sell as ‘extras’ on DVDs. Interestingly it’s hard to find entertainment of that kind in our student theatres in Germany. People just seem to be too serious.

Later, I went on to Mike’s place in Reading to go to NSConference. The initial meetup took us to drinks with everyone and a curry and further drinks with Chris and Graham in the course of the evening.

This week’s iPad announcement may be Apple’s best coup in that respect yet. Pretty much everybody I know who’s remotely interested in tech toys had followed the ‘gossip’ and was anticipating the show. The die-hard Apple-fanboys, the lost consumer souls, even the Linux fanboys (WTF?). And out of that came the so-called iPad, whose name seems like a stupid pun to me - but I am sure people will take delight in telling me that I’m ‘wrong’ about it because the thing will sell like hotcakes.

The device doesn’t look particularly spectacular to me. Apart from its strange aspect ratio [one has to assume that there was a special offer on 4:3 screens somewhere, making Apple want to abandon the whole ‘widescreen’ feature which would come handy for watching films in landscape mode and equally for reading as it’d reduce scrolling / page flipping in portrait mode] the iPad looks like a fairly straightforward development that takes the iPhone technology and merges it with the latest Jonathan Ive Alugasm [heck, I can’t see Ive anymore; also, being unable to talk without constant movement of hands seems to be a déformation professionelle of ‘creative’ types].

My initial reaction to all the iPad rumours was that the device most likely won’t be any good for me. It will marry the portability of a MacBook with the flexibility of an iPod. Which is doing things the wrong way round. Of course nobody really used the iPad yet, but my take is that, yes, just like design books it will be a splendid item for your designer coffee table [and of course I’ll get one, once I have said coffee table along with staff to keep everything shiny all the time], but I couldn’t really see myself using one. I won’t have it at the dinner table when wanting to do a Wikipedia lookup. And it won’t run the software I want to run otherwise.

I can, however, see how people who don’t use their computer for much may be able to use it as a computer replacement. My mum, for example, does e-mail, web browsing and digital photos. And the device may just be perfect for her when she decides to retire her trusty Pismo Powerbook. Whether or not it will be good enough probably depends on how much the on-screen keyboard sucks [the screenshots I saw online looked very similar to the iPod one, i.e. like a loathable mess which makes any non-A-Z character and thus typing a pain]. Apple’s standard decision to offer completely overpriced storage an no way to easily extend it [hello SD card slot], say, certainly won’t help the viability of the iPad for photo or music storage. [I’d also be interested in seeing how backups work for the device when it’s used standalone without being synced to some copy of iTunes.]

Another remaining issue is that the iPad seems to contain all the big Wrongs of the iPhone platform. It will only run the software that pleases Apple, not the software that you make for it. With an even more expensive device which may have the potential to act as a fully grown computer that’s more of an issue than it was for a phone of an iPod-cum-webbrowser. And with a more powerful machine (which people seem to wet their pants over) it would be even more of a loss to not be able to use it in a way Big Brother hasn’t foreseen. I really am curious about the performance of the iWork applications, by the way. Numbers, for example, is slow as molasses on a current MacBook once you try to do anything slightly non-trivial. How will a tablet fare for that? Will it be magically - a word Apple seem to love using for the iPad - fast? Or will they dumb down the applications even more?

Dumbing down is perhaps the main critical point I am seeing here. While the iPhone/Pod/Pad platform may be shiny and nice, so far it has created an environment that favours simple applications. A few features, executed well (if you pick one of the 1% of non-crapp apps), as many people on the internets will be happy to point out. That is nice if the tasks you want to do are simple ones which can be pre-defined by a developer. The class of applications I haven’t seen for the iPhone/Pod/Pad environment, however, are those with a bit of ‘depth’, those which manage to have the ‘advanced’ you may be needing after a while and including them in an elegant way that doesn’t confuse the beginner. That class of applications is what makes computers amazing tools, tools which let you work creatively and go beyond what the programmer and designer of the software anticipated. In my opinion the ‘simple’ application ‘culture’ fostered by the iPhone OS is mainly a simple minded one. One for consumers rather than users or creators and I consider that a bad thing. Some people may call me an Old-Worlder for such an attitude which I consider short-sighted. Technical fiddling is not valuable but depth and versatility is.

Another point I find interesting is the e-Book issue. The iPad looks like its shiny and backlit display is not as nice for reading as today’s e-Book readers’ are. But, if I’m not mistaken, Mr Jobs said he doesn’t believe in the e-book genre anyway (only creates toys for illiterates?), so that probably doesn’t come as a surprise.

A further issue is notetaking. Laptops are becoming increasingly popular in talks for taking notes. In particular ‘netbook’ computers are quite popular for that as they aren’t as huge (although it’s unclear to me how anybody can type on their keybaords…) and I heard many people wanting some kind of ‘tablet’ computer to take notes on - possibly in writing rather than typing. It seems that those people will remain disappointed by the iPad.

I think the site giving the best results back then was called Audiogalaxy - and has duly been destroyed by capitalism since. As far as I can tell, the focus in file sharing then shifted to services/protocols like Gnutella or aMule. It also seemed to shift from the wonderful world of being able to find just that obscure song from the mix tape your friend gave you a decade ago to a world which focused on providing a gazillion copies of the latest Britney Spears album and shitty quality Star Wars recording from a cinema screen. (Plus porn, of course. I think file sharing clients are the first software in which I understood why ‘childsafe’ features may be useful: pretty much any term you can think of seems to have a kinky double-entendre that can be used for a porn title.)

And not only did the content become lame, the software was even worse. There seemed to be an unwritten rule that file sharing clients need to be horrible to use, sport huge windows full of incomprehensible/useless buttons and be obviously ‘cross platform’ in the worst way possible. And that’s before one mentions the cross-platform horror known as Java which successfully mixes mis-sized GUIs with humongous memory consumption. I was not impressed. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t useful.

It was a shame because file sharing generally is a good thing. For some reason (giving them the benefit of the doubt I’ll assume that computer and business people are not smart enough to make this FAIL intentionally but that we’re simply seeing technical incompetence here…) file sharing software has always sucked horribly. Try transferring a 10GB video recording to a friend and unless you have a very good network connection as well as a fair bit of technical knowledge, you’ll find this supposedly simple technical task very difficult. Try transferring a 30MB file to a thousand people and you may need to think a bit about your web server’s speed and bandwidth limitations first. It’s a mess, it’s a lot of effort, it’s potentially expensive.

BitTorrent is one of the technological answers to these kinds of problems, I think. It uses file sharing technology to distribute files while avoiding the shenanigans about searching or hosting the actual materials which may be illegal in a serious or less serious way. I’ve been fascinated by that idea for a while, particularly the community aspect, the idea that many people cooperate and give their upload bandwidth, so other people can get a file quickly without needing an expensive server. And then people who have downloaded the file ‘giving back’ by providing the file to others who want it as well later on. It seems like a smart way to solve the problem.

But the software situation isn’t great either. I think the first BitTorrent client I saw was Azureus (apparently called Vuze these days) which I can only describe as a huge slow Java mess. Someone pointed me to the Bits on Wheels client on the Mac for downloading one of those SXSW torrents (another nice idea which might just be impossible/too expensive without torrent technology) and it had a funky (but I guess mostly useless) 3D display of the files transferred. But development of that stopped.

When looking for another client later on, I discovered Transmission. And I was impressed (which, as regular readers will know, is rare) because it’s a refreshingly no-nonsense piece of software. First and foremost it puts no crap between that torrent-file you’ve got and the download starting. It has a simple user interface focusing on the important points and even containing a ‘simplified’ way of displaying things without all the nasty details, making a torrent download look just like a download from the web. I liked it a lot because it did away with the pain and suffering I connected with GUIs for file sharing clients. Even more amazing: Transmission actually is an open source cross-platform project. Unlike many others, however, it does make the effort of using the native GUI technologies for the platform in question, thus enabling themselves to provide a good user experience.

To give something back to the project, I thought I could provide a German localisation. I thought that’d be interesting, both because the project isn’t tiny and also because file sharing is a strange area with a lot of odd terminology which could be a challenge to localise. As I see Transmission as a BitTorrent client for the technically uninclined, I wanted to create a localisation that’s as un-technical as possible. I wanted to avoid odd file sharing terms and try to find reasonable German expressions for what’s going on.

Doing so proved a bit tricky in some places. Both because I had to read up on some of the technical details that hide in the more advanced areas of the application. And because some terms needed a bit of pondering to find a reasonable solution for them. The most visible one of those is the ‘upload’/’download’ pair. It’s really tricky because it seems that it’s considered all right on the Mac platform to simply use the noun ‘Download’ in German these days. However, the same doesn’t seem to be true for ‘Upload’, nor for using ‘download’ as a verb, as that would end up being a rather strange ‘downloaden’. Hence other terms were needed, and I settled for ‘Laden’/’Senden’, the standard terminology Apple use for network transfers. However I wasn’t sure whether the short form of ‘L’ and ‘S’ for those would have been comprehensible.

My German localisation is part of the Transmission since version 1.80. While I checked and double checked everything there may still be some glitches or perhaps ideas how some terms could be localised more appropriately.

While I found it hard to get in touch with the Transmission people (I’m an e-mail person and they seem to be into that IRC thing which I completely fail to ‘get’ - it seems like twitter with the additional downside that you can miss messages and the upside that it worked in the 1980s), I ended up with a reasonably good impression localisation-wise. Most projects’ efforts on localisation seem rather half-assed, particularly in the open source area (hello Sparkle…). There may be downright mistakes or careless changes of localisation keys and typically there is a real lack of comments for the strings used in the .strings files of the localisation which can make it really hard to figure out where the string in question appears and what it will be used for. The comments in Transmission’s .strings, however, files were very complete and helpful and only a few details needed to be tweaked otherwise, making work very smooth.

While playing in the same minimalistic two-person guitar-and-drums setup of the White Stripes, Japandroids’ music couldn’t be more different. It’s much more noisy and even more so when they played live than it is on the album. Almost a ‘wall of sound’ coming from the numerous amps towards the audience at all times which may make it hard to catch details but is exhilarating and impressive.

Fun detail: They had a fan on stage which kept blowing the guitarists’ hair. Just like in the movies.

XOXOX

The stage was set up with a cool giant bed, housing the hypochondriac Argan who - rather appropriately for the role - gestured in the style of Louis de Funès. His young pretty wife is after his money, his daughter is in love with a guy who is not the doctor he’d like to have as a son-in-law and his housemaid is the only person taking him sort-of-seriously: there we have a little story and a bunch of entertainment.

From Candide, I remember Molière to be more cynical than this piece appeared to me, featuring ‘just’ the fact that most people are liars and that most doctors are quacks. As I haven’t read the book, I can only guess whether that’s a matter of the piece in question or one of the way they performed it.

As you can check on her website (how many authors, let alone famous authors over 60 have this? And isn’t it a really good thing?) her texts are strenuous collections of words without many breaks, packed with what at first sight looks like redundancy but is more an elaborate game with words and thoughts that progresses and develops further and further. I find them quite hard to read because it’s easy to get stuck in there, trying to figure out all the connections implied by the text. As a consequence I was prepared for a somewhat strenuous night at the theatre. Which was somewhat reinforced by me overhearing the box office lady telling a lady at the front of the queue that the piece is good but she prefers ‘nice’ theatre where she can relax.

The show lasted two hours without a break. It was a constant stream of words delivered at a high pace (even though the tickets weren’t cheap, this probably was the theatre piece with the cheapest price per word which I have ever seem) with a lot of momentum and at great clarity. The actors, changing ‘roles’ throughout the piece, delivered text / sentences / monologues with barely a break in between. Touching topics attached to the financial crisis. Companies, banks, names, certificates, small investors, retirement plans, god, nothing, wards, guilt, debt. And taking on the roles of the various participants in the process. From suits to investors losing their retirement funds to deities.

I thought all that was very good and a pretty impressive performance as well. You get sucked into it and it drives you along with the thoughts of the piece. The fact that everything was delivered at a rather fast pace also changed my impression of Jelinek’s writing. While I previously considered it a slow read as it provokes a lot of thought, this ‘turbo’ version just drags you along and adds a lot of force to what is spoken. In addition the fact that things are spoken also highlighted some of the word games which I missed in writing.

Which brings me to the strange audience. Many of them giggled during the word games. I completely didn’t get that and thought it was inappropriate. It was also strange to see that many seats in the theatre were free even though I had difficulties getting three seats next to each other when buying tickets two weeks ago.

All in all a very good experience. As others remarked before me, it was refreshing to see this in our local state theatre.