Avatar

I've just been see Avatar. This is an unbelievably awesome film. Intensely immersive. It's all filmed in 3D which adds to the immersion, and most of it is computer generated, although the  actors' performances are mapped directly to their digital avatars, so it is entirely believable. The filming technology has been described as a huge directable game engine. It's completely amazing and engrossing.
The film is essentially humans taking resources from aliens. The alien world is a beautiful, holistic, sensual place full of wonder, and nasty creatures on an almost Asher level. The humans are stereo-typically corporate driven and military supported, but their environment is in its own way awesome, with fantastic hover ships, and exo-skeleton infantry. The conflict is epic, and I found, deeply moving.
Again, the effects and sound are amazing, produced by the likes of Weta Workshop, Skywalker Sound, Industrial Light and Magic, a group called The Pixel Liberation Front, and many others.
The acting was generally pretty good I thought. Sigourney Weaver really likes her SF. James Cameron wrote and directed the film, and has been waiting for a long time for the tech to complete his vision. Brilliant work.
The avatar concept in the film, where humans can tele-operate a vat-grown alien body isn't entirely new, (usually done with a synthetic host), but works really well as a device for connecting both the viewer and the film humans with the aliens. It is beautifully done.
Go see this film. See it in 3D too. It's completely amazing.

Virtual Inheritance.

I found a bug recently that was causing a crash only on a Solaris 10 build, but the same code was fine on Win32. I eventually tracked it down to the Sun compiler not generating the correct code for a virtual inheritance situation. It was a multiple inheritance situation, and one of the parents was a pure abstract interface class, so it's not like the design was really ugly, or the situation was particularly complex. There was only one implementation of the virtual method for the class, and the abstract interface was derived virtually. Calling the method on the class worked fine, but calling the method on a const abstract base class reference (where the method was declared) returned fine, but the returned object caused a crash as soon as it was used. The method was there, but the compiler didn't hook it up in the virtual method table. It hooked something up though. Bizarre. I removed the virtual keyword, and everything worked fine.
The Sun compiler is Flakey.

Misspelling: jewlery

This one annoys me. Not only do people often say jewlery (say with a course aussie accent), but they spell it like this as well.
Lets have a look around for this. Here, here, here, here, here.

Idiots!

Climategate

I sure hope we're not overly reliant on the models or data from CRU for our picture of global warming. Because it seems they are both complete crap. See here, here.

[update Dec 2]  While this looks very very bad, it's possible the science coming out of CRU isn't all crap, but there should definitely be some sort of review of their results.
Also there are other sources of good science on this, so lets not lose the plot on climate change altogether.

Crunchpad dies!

So close to going retail. the CrunchPad is dead. It looked exactly like what I'm after.
*sigh*

[update Dec 8] Its back, under the name JooJoo. Pricing set at US$500. That's probably over my threshold. I'm not getting into the politics of who owns what, let the legal action settle first.

[update Dec 14] And the legal action starts.

CERN geeks play D&D

Of course they do. Some interesting tid-bits in this interview with a CERN geek.

Sun C++ compiler precompiled headers implementation sucks.

I'm using the Sun C++ compiler (Sun C 5.9 SunOS_sparc Patch 124867-01 2007/07/12) on Solaris (5.10 Generic_141444-09 sun4v sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5220) for work.

I noticed that the compiler supports precompiled header files recently, and thought, great, this is going to speed up compiling enormously. For a given C++ package, compiling on Windows under VC9, the time taken decreases from 55 seconds to 22 seconds when precompiled headers is enabled. That is a significant difference, and well worth the effort of setting it up to work for you.
On Solaris, without precompiled headers, this same package takes 2:30s to compile. OK, it's an older machine, but when precompiled headers is turned on (-xpch=autofirst), the time taken, incredibly, increases slightly to 2:40s. I mean, seriously, WTF!?
With some more digging, I work out that the Sun compiler's implementation of pchs is infantile. They just collect up the postprocessed code from the headers and lob into one large file. There is nothing precompiled about Sun's precompiled headers, If anything, it's preprocessed headers. And it has to be implemented badly to take longer! Sheesh! Even the link above shows a minimal improvement for a really simple case.
Get it together Sun! Oh, right, Oracle is buying, and they probably care less.

Primer

Speaking of Time and Space, you seriously have to watch the film Primer. Don't read the plot on the wiki page before you see the film though, you should watch the film totally flat.
It's about time travel, and is incredibly complicated. Even after watching it twice, I still hadn't worked out the last 13 minutes. "What the bloody hell just happened?". And this is the point of the film, to feel very confused. And the last 13 minutes is the explanation, if you don't get it, you've missed the depth of what has been going on. But that's ok, you're not supposed to understand the first time. I think re-watching the film to understand the events nicely mirrors the time travel in the film.

Watch the film, maybe a couple of times, and then go and read the timeline explanation here.
Brilliant.
Like many things, this came to my attention via XKCD.

Splitting Time from Space

Here's an interesting article discussing a recent theory of gravity by Petr Hořava. I particularly like the way it can explain dark matter and dark energy without requiring some new exotic particles that we can't prove exist. I've always been very sceptical of dark matter and dark energy, particularly the latter which looks very much like a problem with the model.
More here.
His home.
Another article.
Hmmmm.

D&D campaign progress

Ive been working on my D&D adventure recently as Andrew will finish running Call of Cthulhu soon so I need to be ready to start probably in February, it looks like. I've finished plotting all the levels, rooms etc and have written basic flavour text for all of them. I've just started working on mechanics and details for traps and required skill checks etc. I've recently received my copy of the Pathfinder Bestiary too, so I can start filling the place with wildlife as well. That's always fun. Then I need to add the treasure and magic items etc. Some of the later stuff can wait until the adventure is underway of course. Hopefully the players will find it fun. Mostly that means a decent challenge and believable. Hopefully.

LHC completes full beams

The LHC team just completed testing of the circulation of a beam in both directions. Apparently it looks good. I think the idea now is to slowly ramp up in speed and duration of beam to make sure everything is going well.
More detail here.

Stupid Impact

I watched what is perhaps one of the most stupid science fiction films of all time last night. It was on commercial television, so I suppose I'm really just asking for it.
It was called Impact. I don't care if it is just low budget and made for telly. There is no excuse for plain stupid science mistakes. The main premise of the film is that some super dense asteroid hits the moon, and lodges inside it, making the moon weigh twice as much as the Earth. This asteroid was later shown to be a piece of a brown dwarf. Seriously, there are so many problems with this it is in the same realm as Space 1999, only this was made in 2008! Complete and utter bullshit.
Most obviously to me, anything that weighs around twice as much as Earth and is the size of an asteroid, hitting the moon is just going to punch straight through like it's made of cheese. Conservation of momentum isn't going to see this chunk of superdense rock travelling at interstellar speed slow down anytime soon hitting something one twelfth as massive, especially when it's so much smaller than its target. Bullet through cheese.
Secondly, a brown dwarf is something half way between Jupiter and a star. It's not even a star. I think they probably meant a white dwarf. At least it has a super dense core, and could at a stretch be responsible for the thing in this film. This shit reminds me of Jennifer Anniston in a hair product advert saying "Here comes the science!". Hey, Writer, you suck!
The film progresses from here downhill with random gravitational fluctuations, "like electrical storms", where gravity is practically reversed on the Earth's surface in selected small areas. That's just plain crap. I can't be bothered going on any more. Of course it ends with them trying to blow up the moon, *sigh*, splitting it in half, allowing the super dense asteroid to escape to the Sun, and the two moon halves magically going back into a proper orbit. Oh yeah, I didn't tell you about the gross abuse of orbital mechanics in the film either. Watch it if you want.

Really old whiskey.

They're going to dig up some really old whisky from under the ice in Antarctica. After a hundred years, frozen, in glass, I doubt they'd be that interesting to drink. Probably hasn't changed much, and it isn't clear if its a single malt, a blend, or how long it was aged in the barrel.

Dollhouse is done.

It's all over folks. It's done. Nine episodes to go.
Ah well, some of it has been really good, othertimes just a little bit crap. I'm looking forward to see how Whedon finishes it off.

How to Survive a Robot Uprising

Just finished reading this.
Very Boring.
Half the book(let) was robot facts, the other half was how to thwart an imaginary aggressive robot using said facts. The book is interleaved, fact, followed by attempted humorous discussion of thwarting robot knowing this.
For example, a robot using a thermal imager to seek and destroy you could be thwarted somewhat by smearing cold mud all over yourself as you flee for your life.
The book is supposed to be in the humour genre, however, its really of the roboticist-telling-you-about-robots-and-trying-to-be-funny-and-failing genre. Which sucks. Quite frankly.