My first time using a laptop on a train (and quite possibly my last). My main observation so far is that it’s jolly uncomfortable, which is partly a result of having a large laptop, as this is a fairly old model. I know that GNER do provide WiFi Internet access on some of their trains, but (a) this one isn’t one of them, and (b) even if it was I don’t have wireless on this laptop, so as usual I’ll have to upload this entry when I get somewhere with Internet. I can’t even try and do something fancy with GPRS ‘cos I’ve got no way to connect the laptop to my phone. Ah well.

The type of laptop that most appeals to me is the so-called sub-notebooks, which are a little larger than A5 (as I understand it), but still have a ‘proper’ keyboard. So maybe one day, when I’m rich and famous, I’ll get myself such a beast – by then the Internet will be accessible from anywhere anyway. In the meantime I’ll have to keep scamming one from work.

In any case, I would definitely want one with built in wireless and bluetooth. While at the conference, I managed to use my phone to control a colleague’s laptop using bluetooth, which was very cool. Excellent range too; I could control it from the other side of the (large) room, which I would probably put as more than 10m, but couldn’t sure.

Incidently, I am also doing a little bit of work – trying out some visualisation software – and scrawling away which it builds. Think I’ll go and write my Constantine review.

So, away at a conference in Edinburgh. I decided to go the cinema, so went to the Vue cinema here, to see Constantine. Full review of the film in the appropriate place, but it did bring some thoughts to mind.

First of all, the cross or crucifix is fairly universal counter-attack against evil, and particularly vampires and demons. This is obviously representing the cross of Christ as the place where evil was defeated; my question is – what happened before this? Even if you take a literal interpretation of the bible, that still makes the earth some 6000 years old, which means for 2/3rds of it’s existance it hasn’t had the cross. Clearly there was thought to be demonic activity before the time of Jesus, so what did people do? I guess there was holy water in one sense of another, and annointing oil, and incense…

The other question is related, but to do with language. How come exorcisms are carried out in Latin? Ok, so Latin was around at the time of Jesus, but he spoke Aramaic as I understand it, and the books of the New Testament were written in Greek. The Old Testament is in Hebrew. Why then should Latin have a special power? The Rome connection is not too hard to make, thinking of Peter and all that… but if the power is in the meaning why bother speaking in Latin; if the power is in the words, why is it Latin and not Aramaic or Hebrew?

The Harry Potter line of thought (and notice most of the spells are either latin or only slightly unlatinsed) is that the words are largely irrelevant, but it’s the focus of the mind which is important, and this focus is helped by using repetitive words that are well known but which are not used in ordinary life; I suppose not too dissimilar to liturgy.

I find myself in the unusual position of having a laptop computer, as a result of being away at a conference, in Edinburgh. It’s the one that I’m using to run demonstrations, but it means I can blog from bed.

This evening was the conference dinner, at a place called the Beluga Bar (which was nice enough). Just got back from there, and fancied a coffee to wind down before I go to sleep. I actually nearly had a scotch downstairs, but then thought better of it. It’s back on the train tommorow, and I might even do another entry from there.

I do look forward to the day when the Internet is truly ubiquitous. Even if I did have a wireless card, I very much doubt I would find a link up from my room, so this entry will have to just sit on the hard disk until I get back to NESC in the morning, and have Internet once more (woo-hoo). Speaking of Internet, I’ve been looking into IPv6 recently, and the address you get is partially based on MAC address, and partially on your router’s address (as far as I can work out). I haven’t got my head round IPv6 yet, but I was pondering it today… on the one hand, you ideally want a single IP address that stays you with forever, and all your packets get routed to you no matter where you happen to be linked in. On the other hand, this model is a nightmare for both routing tables and security – but what if part of your address was your unique identifier, and the other part somehow encapsulated the route to you? Or to turn it around, part of the address identified the route to your nearest router, and then the other part can be any meaningful way of the router knowing how to get your packets to you. Apart from removing the need for NAT, it would mean you would know, in advance, what your full IP address would be wherever you plugged in your computer, as long as you knew the address of the first router. Indeed, you could do a very minimal sort of security/authentication scheme based on the host-specific part of the address.. and a much fuller one if you know the router part too.

This may not be how IPv6 works at all, and my first ever interaction did not go well (I tried to use ping6 on the IPv6 address that my network connection apparantly has), and it just came up with routing type errors. But I suspect I just misunderstand it somewhere along the way…

Found out yesterday, quite by accident, that Indy IV is apparantly scheduled for June 2006! Apparantly Titled Indiana Jones and the Lost Continent, there’s a teaser trailer available at ifilm.com, together with a brief synopsis that has our Indy lured out of retirement to find Atlantis.

The trailer itself is pretty closed; it’s got the Indy music with the camera panning over the fedora, pistol, and whip, all of which are placed on a map, and then cuts to a sequence of a martial-arts chap doing his stuff with swords, before getting punched by who we assume is Indy (it’s done in a first person perspective, so you don’t see!) The trailer ends wth “06.06”.

Not too tricky to fake a teaser like this; neither Empire nor IMDb have any more details than this, although Empire does list a June 2006 release date, so I guess we just have to wait and see.

Very busy at work at the moment – got a big event coming up in Edinburgh next week where we’re demonstrating our stuff. So I’m going lots and lots of testing and tweaking, but the nature of the beast is that actually I spent a lot of time looking at a piece of code running – and each running typically takes about a minute, which is not enough time to do anything meaningful, but is enough time to get bored!

The obvious answer is to do something interruptible and mindless – like writing this! 🙂

That said, not a lot in the way of news; my mate Penguin has started playing chess with me again (on itsyourturn.com), which is most cool, although the opening game is over and the board is starting to require serious thought.

I’ve decided to start saving up pennies for some new toys too – I think the time has come to upgrade my GPS – I’ve got a Garmin GPS 48, which fundamentally works… but it’s quite an old model – it’s only got one receiver so it’s a bit slow (and isn’t very accurate), it just eats batteries (I find 4xAAs only manage 6 or 7 hours), doesn’t have a lot in the way of memory or mapping, and it’s just big and heavy.
Don’t get me wrong – I really like it, and it’s introduced me to the joys of having a GPS unit, but modern units are just a lot better. Anyway, got my eye on a Garmin Etrex Venture…

Just got back from a trip down to London to see my Mum, and to pick up some of my Dad’s old furniture. While I was there, I also collected all my old school reports that my Mum had been hoarding all these years, and they make for very interesting reading.

My favourites are the Art reports. Art is really not a strong point of mine, but we had to do it at school, and bless the socks of my old art teacher for being so creative in her reports:
“He works with enthusiasm and his drawings show feeling though he runs into technical difficulties from time to time”
“James works conscientiously and tries hard”
“James’ drawing is not of a high standard, but he is always an interested pupil and works hard.“.
“James tries hard in a subject where his ability is limited” (she must have reached the end of her tether at this point!)

The ‘Fall-on-the-floor-in-shock’ report was the following:
“Excellent term. He enjoys the subject very much and shows great enthusiasm in class. A pleasure to teach him…”
… for French!! I think actually remember this French teacher – she was gorgeous and chic in the way only French ladies can be, and she was an inspired teacher; she brought in Joe le Taxi (Venessa Paradis) and Voyage Voyage (Desireless), and gave us transcripts of the songs with words missing, which we had to fill in. This was the time said songs were in the chart, so I guess they were a gift to French teachers everywhere, but still credit where it’s due.

An just so nobody thinks I’m a total swot:
“His classwork has been chaotic this term” (Scripture)
“His work can be quite good, but it is such an effort to get it out of him!” (Music)
“He has wasted some time by silly behaviour at the back of class thinking he is unobserved!” (Geography)

Must remember not to let Ben see these, otherwise it’ll be “but Daddy messed around in class…”

Dreams are funny things – you only remember them if you wake up during them, so almost by definition a dream is never complete. I’ve been having some very exciting murder-mystery type dreams lately, but I never find out what happens in the end!

The other sad thing is that almost within minutes of waking up they start to fade, and what was perfectly clear and made sense rapidly becomes a confusing and often slightly surreal blur.

Mean Girls was actually a much better film than I was expecting – I’d heard all about Lindsay Lohen in the press, but she absolutely nailed her part in that film. Her descent from innocent self-giving all-round lovely person to ‘mean girl’ was played to perfection. A lot of this is of course down to script, make-up, costume, and direction, but she wonderfully underplays the changes in mannerism with the increasingly rare flashes of self-awareness of what she was becoming. I guess she is very sympathetic as an actress – you can tell what she is feeling and going through, and are drawn into caring about her.
The basic premise is that Lindsay Lohan plays Cady, a girl who was brought up in Africa by her zoologist parents, and they move back to American when Cady is 15, and she starts at an all-American High School for the very first time.
I found that film managed to be ironic without any of the characters actually being so, and at times it was quite poignant. Strangely perhaps it’s a fairly dark film, but liberal doses of saccharine and comedy keep it light without making it unbearably sweet. Cady’s dad is particularly good as a counterpoint to some of the heavier themes – after grounding her, she goes out to something or other, and when challenge by his wife says
“Does grounded mean they’re not allowed to go out?”.
Maybe you had to be there.
Thankfully the producers also managed to resist the temptation of having teenage girlies jumping on their beds in knickers and bras (or worse gratutious changing room scenes) which seems to be almost obligatory these days. The same producers unfortunately couldn’t resist playing (almost all) the adults as wooden caricatures (see dad), but I guess it is Disney…
That said, the cast were, as a whole, pretty good – but there’s no doubt in my mind it was Lindsay Lohan who carried the film and made it work for me. So much so that I would seriously now consider watching Freaky Friday and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.
This film is not going to win any oscars, and is unlikely to change your life – but it just might give you a pause for thought, and it certainly provided me with some light family friendly entertainment one Thursday evening. Well worth checking out, especially if you have a teenage daughter yourself.

It’s very hard to start an entry when you haven’t written anything for ages (but have thought of lots of things to write in the meantime – none of which you can remember now, of course).. A bit like writing a letter or making a phone call to a friend you haven’t seen for ages.

Anyway, here I am, back on the web (although I didn’t do very well at staying off it – next year’s Lent will have to be more concrete, I think). Got a shiny new update to my “to see” list – off goes I, Robot, Farenheit 9/11, Shrek 2 – my seen list has extra additions of 50 First Dates, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Mean Girls, and probably some others that I can’t remember just now.

Mean Girls was actually a much better film than I was expecting – I’d heard all about Lindsay Lohen in the press, but she absolutely nailed her part in that film. Her descent from innocent self-giving all-round lovely person to ‘mean girl’ was played to perfection. A lot of this is of course down to script, make-up, costume, and direction, but she wonderfully underplays the changes in mannerism with the increasingly rare flashes of self-awareness of what she was becoming. I guess she is very sympathetic as an actress – you can tell what she is feeling and going through, and are drawn into caring about her.

I found that film managed to be ironic without any of the characters actually being so, and at times it was quite poignant. Strangely perhaps it’s a fairly dark film, but liberal doses of saccharine and comedy keep it light without making it unbearably sweet. Linday’s dad is particularly good as a counterpoint to some of the heavier themes – after grounding her, she goes out to something or other, and when challenge by his wife says “Does grounded mean they’re not allowed to go out?”. Maybe you had to be there. Thankfully the producers also managed to resist the temptation of having teenage girlies jumping on their beds in knickers and bras (or worse gratutious changing room scenes) which seems to be almost obligatory these days. The same producers unfortunately couldn’t resist playing (almost all) the adults as wooden caricatures (see dad), but I guess it is Disney…

That said, the cast were, as a whole, pretty good – but there’s no doubt in my mind it was Lindsay Lohan who carried the film and made it work for me. So much so that I would seriously now consider watching Freaky Friday and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.

Anyway, quite enough for one day – will scavange the above as the basis of a review in the appropriate section of this ‘ere website.

Happy Easter.

Right, this’ll be my last entry for a while! As you know, Lent starts on Wednesday, and this year I’ve decided to give up the World Wide Web, which I reckon extends to me writing Letters from Leeds. I’ve tried out various things over the years – chocolate, tea and coffee; you know the score – and I always think it good to have a bit of variety. So no popping onto Amazon or eBay, or reading BBC News, or my daily Dilbert fix. No discussion forums, or competition sites. No online games…

Actually one necessary proviso is that of course sometimes I have to use the web for work – programming reference, conference information.. and indeed part of my job involves web services. Not to mention my course website that I have to maintain. However, it’s the emphasis that’s important – no web for entertainment or personal interest.

There are also two schools of thought over Lent. The observant will notice that Lent is inspired by Jesus’s 40 days of fasting in the wilderness. However, the time between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday is 6 and a bit weeks, i.e. 42 days plus. The answer is that technically Sunday’s aren’t a part of Lent, so you can eat your chocolate or whatever on Sunday, but not during the week (Sunday is a day of celebration, you see – not appropriate to fast). My brother-in-law holds to this school of thought, and will have sugar in his coffee until 6pm on a Sunday (he also follows the Old Testament thinking about when any given day starts/ends). The catch is that in this model, every Friday for the rest of the year is a day of fasting! I can’t help thinking this is cheating though, and giving something up for Lent means the whole hog!

See you after Easter…