Solid Block of Ise

When I grew up the term “game console” was virtually unknown. I grew up when the NES was king, and back then those machines were simply called video-games. The were primitive, clunky, rather expensive and I wanted one badly. Unfortunately for me, there were no video-games in our house.

Since then I have obviously grown up. I was ten years old in 1988, and for the last twenty years I have become less and less interested in game consoles, while the consoles have grown more and more powerful. In fact, I’d say that the consoles of today resemble full-fledged computers more than those primitive ancestors of yore.

And now is why I’m going to wonder why us who prefer PC-gaming has to wait in favor of the consoles.

See, the original Xbox when it arrived back in 2001 was essentially just a PC in a more manageable case. It had a harddrive, it had essentially the same kind of CPU as in most budget-computers, it had a graphics circuit which was essentially a GeForce3, and it had a network card. The new 360 and PS3 are even more powerful, and are essentially computers in a neat package.

Today it’s unheard of to release a game for consoles exclusively, since the PC gaming market is as huge as it’s ever been. Yet we have to wait for games, for seemingly no other reason than an artificially introduced one.

I’ve been looking forward to GTA4 since I first heard it announced. But it seems I’m going to have to wait until October simply because I don’t own a 360 or a PS3. Why? It doesn’t make sense to me. It can’t be THAT difficult to port a game to the PC, especially since they managed to release two versions of it for two different platforms at the same time. The 360 and the PS3 are (I imagine) as different from each other as they are to a PC, yet no PC version is forthcoming until fall. When GTA: San Andreas was released it was the same thing. In that case it was even worse; the PS2 version came almost a full year before the PC version. Why?

Mass Effect is another example. For the 360 it was released in November 2007, yet it has taken six months to make a version for the PC. That version will be released the 28th of this month.

I strongly doubt that there’s a technical reason for not releasing games for the PC at the same time as the consoles. So why do companies do it? Do they just do it out of spite? Or is it that they have to put tons of (in my opinion) useless DRM/Copy protection schemes into the game, and this is what takes six months or more?

But to me as it stands right now, it doesn’t make sense.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Action/Delusion/Complete lack of grounding in reality/Adventure starring among others Nicolas Cage, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren and others.

—

Benjamin Gates is back. This time he’s knee-deep in a convoluted plot to clear the name of his ancestor Thomas Gates, and apparently this is done by finding a lost city of gold.

—

I kinda liked the first National Treasure. It was somewhat fresh and somewhat exciting. There was no big surprise that there’d be a sequel since it was –as far as I know– a huge financial hit. That’s the way Hollywood works, go where the money is.

So, this is the sequel. Apparently it’s going to be turned into a franchise as well, as is very obviously hinted at through the film.

How to summarize this? Nicolas Cage drones through a confusing and special effects-heavy plot dealing with everything from the Queen of Englands desk to Abraham Lincoln and the statue of Liberty. There isn’t a single stone unturned, for a moment I was expecting Thor, the god of thunder, to make an appearance and help Nic Cage out in his quest for justice and money.

If you liked the first one, you’ll probably get a kick out of this one too. I however think it’s vastly inferior to the spunky tempo of the first one. The plot is littered with really surreal Deus Ex Machinas, subplots run into the sand, the plucky blonde that accompanied them in the first film has in this one been reduced to pretty window-dressing since her only function is to look surprised or hand Cage a keypass every now and then. Riley the computer-geek and general nice guy does the same, basically just performing magic on command. He also got saddled with providing the comic relief for the entire film, and this makes him barely less annoying than anyone else.

To watch this movie you need to heavily suspend your knowledge of how anything works. The laws of physics gets thrown out the window immediately –apparently you CAN crash a car so badly it looks like junk afterwards without wearing seatbelts and yet not getting smashed into a million tiny bits of meat and broken bones. Also, even though the movie is littered with Apple-products none of them actually seem to function like an Apple-product. Every laptop is running the magic Hollywood-OS that chirps and beeps when scrolling text, and hacks into the british department of motor-vehicles at the push of a button. And OF COURSE all the traffic cameras in the UK are tied into the internet, so you immediately can download a photo of your grinning self running a red light. French cops will apparently happily help in translating clues taken from a statue. And a golden city buried underground hasn’t been discovered for hundreds of years, despite the fact that a national monument is built on top of it and every year hundreds of thousands of people stomp the area. And the president of the USA keeps a tiny book in the library of congress, and this book contains every secret and conspiracy theory ever produced. Aaaaand, primitive machinery built hundreds of years ago will work perfectly despite being soaked in water, oil and various other liquids without any maintenance.

This movie tries hard to be a mix between Indiana Jones and Jason Bourne. The first one was fun, this one is a lot more flat and tries too hard to mix too many things into the what-have-you. Top it all off with Nicolas Cages droning voice and expensive hairpiece and you’ve got National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

The only really fun and dynamic scene in the film is when Nicolas Cage slides down a banister and then starts howling absurdities at a security guard.

Other than that, don’t watch this movie if you’re going to pay for it. It’s just not worth it.

… or, how I’d rather have my eyes gouged out by scalding irons than use it again.

I deleted my Windows-partition a few weeks ago when I had finished playing through the games I wanted to try out. Recently I felt another hankering for some gaming-action and decided to reinstall Windows. This time though I went for the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, thinking that I should do it properly. Or whatever. Mostly I just wanted to see if there was such a huge difference in Crysis between DX9 and DX10.

Well, anyways. After moving around some drives I popped the disc in the drive and proceeded to install. The installation is fairly straightforward, essentially as dumb as the XP-install but at least it’s prettier to look at. Partitioning is a bit smoother though, although as usual the way of thinking in Windows is somewhat backward.

After some reboots there was some information that needed to be input. Create a user, etc etc. Then, for some inexplicable reason Windows decided it was time to do the Windows Performance Benchmark or whatever it’s called. Stupid, since I was running on stock-drivers and all that. There’s no way of skipping it though, so I just rolled my thumbs and waited.

Until a minute or so later when it bluescreened. Something about the memory controller. I sighed and waited until it rebooted by it’s own volition.

When it started up again I was greeted by the create-a-user request. However, my chosen username was apparently already taken, so I created another. This time it didn’t do the Windows Performance-whatever thing since I guess it had already been checked off somewhere inside the corridors as “done”. A moment later I was looking at the login-screen. On screen were two icons with my first username and then my second one.

Before I continue, let me say now that I hate that login-screen. First off, it looks like it was designed by Mimi from the Drew Carey Show. It’s garish, it’s loud and it takes itself way too seriously. Secondly, whoever thought it would be neat to have an icon to click on and then forcing the user to type the password is stupid. Logging in takes twice as long since you have to flail your arms around your desk as if you were on fire. And as you will find out, I had to look at it a lot, which annoyed me even further.

I felt adventurous and clicked my original username. You know, the one I created first and then followed with a nice ol’ BSOD. I clicked it, punched the password, was greeted with a message as to how Windows was “preparing my desktop” and then for no good reason the computer rebooted. I sarcastically remarked to myself that it was impressive how Microsoft had managed to emulate the look and feel of a BIOS-bootscreen.

Next time around I clicked the secondary username. This time I was not greeted with a reboot, but instead the desktop appeared. Of course, “appeared” isn’t a proper description. Jerked itself onto the screen is probably a more accurate metaphor. It was in glorious 800×600, and everything was the size of Montana. I downloaded and installed drivers for my Audigy2 ZS and 9600GT and then rebooted. Now the login-screen was in a more human resolution.

I logged in and was greeted with the amusing effect that my monitor went into standby. Weird. It made it rather difficult to troubleshoot as well, since I was effectively blind. After a reboot into Ubuntu and some brief googling I found others with the same problem. Apparently Windows or the Nvidia-driver or whichever sometimes got confused as to what port the primary monitor was plugged in. The work-around was to move the monitor to another DVI-port. I tried it, no dice. On a whim I unplugged my TV-out and after a hard reset (ouch!) I could control my own computer again. Apparently Windows though the TV-out was the primary monitor.

Then the fun really began. I installed some basic applications and for every one of them I was hassled with a barrage of “Are you sure you want to do this?”-type questions. I guess some were UAC-related, others were, well, I don’t know why they insisted on popping up for no good reason. Either way they were extremely annoying. It was a little odd as well when I double-clicked a folder and found myself staring at another bluescreen. This time it was the good old “page fault in non-paged area” which was an old buddy of mine. I think every computer I’ve owned for the last 8 years has seen that BSOD happen.

I wasn’t particularly impressed by Aero either. It felt too frail, and after having used Compiz Fusion for almost a year I wasn’t very impressed by any of the effects either. I felt rather constricted by being limited to one desktop; often I would ctrl-alt-left to try to find another desktop, then remember that yeah, Windows still didn’t have that feature. I felt that the whole Vista-experience must be similar to being at a brazilian carnival for mentally retarded people. Everything is dressed in bright, gaudy colors while loud music and sound-effects play, and everyone shouts stupid and obvious questions at you.

“ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DRINK THAT? YES/NO/CANCEL. DO YOU WANT TO OPEN THIS DOOR? ALLOW/CANCEL”

And so forth, and so on.

Moving right along. I started installing Crysis. It took forever. I swear, it went less than a quarter of the speed that the same install took under XP on the exact same machine.

To top it all off, I got another bluescreen. This time it complained about something else, I really didn’t pay attention any longer. Instead I pushed reset and booted into Ubuntu, laughing at myself for the folly of even trying this. Tomorrow I’ll instead install XP strictly for gaming, and never again bother with anything else.

Bill, let me give you some advice. I know you don’t give a rats ass about me, but let me suggest that you and your soul-crushing company just bury Vista already. It’s been more than a year, and the Wow hasn’t started yet. It’s been more like “Why?” than Wow. Just bury Vista, pretend it never happened, pay off whatever people are going to sue you, don’t listen to the fanboys, and simply stick your head in the sand over the whole dang thing. Bill, listen to what an old friend of mine has to say:

(slightly paraphrased)

“Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Source.”

I’ve just come home from spending a rather interesting saturday pre-noon. Today there was a shindig of some kind downtown, promoting free culture and other such good things. The first half of the day consisted of lectures from Lars Aronsson, founder of Project Runeberg (a swedish project with similar aims as the more wellknown Project Gutenberg, but focusing on swedish literature instead) and Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Pirate Party.

Consisting of the day after lunch was a lecture by Maud Olofsson, and then an open debate where Rick, Lars and representatives of various organizations would be present. I didn’t feel like attending this since I find Maud Olofsson at best to be very annoying, and at worst to be a two-faced untrustworthy person sprouting whatever opinion is currently in vogue. The debate would’ve been interesting, but I didn’t like the prospect of sitting 20 minutes on a bus home to eat something, then 20 minutes back to listen to the debate for an hour and then 20 minutes on the bus home again.

But the first half was very interesting. I’ve never heard of Lars Aronsson before, but I’m a big fan of open media such as Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, and he was obviously very enthusiastic about what he did. He chatted a bit about the process of digitization, the problems that intellectual property-laws posed on his work, and generally held an interesting lecture about thing. Rick held another interesting lecture, although I found it a bit sad that he was essentially just preaching to the already converted. Never the less, he gave me an interesting new angle on the whole thing, and talked at lengts about why patents need to be abolished, as well as the origins of intellectual property and why laws regarding them need to be severely reformed. I heartily agree with Rick on the subject of patents on medicine. Not only are the patents stupid and restrictive - they’re actively harmful and causes people to die! Completely absurd.

On a different note I found it rather neat to find that both Rick and Lars apparently run Ubuntu on their laptops. Good!

Other than that the weather is spectacular here. Thermometer says only 10 degrees celsius, but it feels a lot warmer than that. Compare the photo below with the one I took in January. Same angle, almost standing in the same spot.

UPDATE: Apparently there was some kind of mix-up. It wasn’t Maud Olofsson who was scheduled, rather someone with the confusingly similar name of Maud Johansson. Weird. The sendout that I got said Maud Olofsson. Anyhoo, there’s some photos from the event at Stefan Flods blog.

And this ginormous tractor outside the tractor-place. It’s a humdinger. It has nothing to do with the rest of this post, I just thought it was cool.

Today’s date is Thursday, April 24th, 2008. That means that today is the day that Ubuntu 8.04 is released. At the time of writing this, Ubuntus own page hasn’t yet been updated to reflect that so hold off downloading for a while until it’s been updated.

I’ve been running the 64-bit version of Hardy on my workstation for the past month or so, and it’s the best so far. Because that’s what Linux is, small but steady improvements. I’ve read a lot of comments on the net saying that they’re always disappointed that there’s never any huge improvements in each new version of Ubuntu, and compares it with Windows who introduces a lot of new flair.

Unfortunately, what they forget to factor in is that Ubuntu ships a new version every six months. That is twelve (12!!) releases for the time it took to finish Vista. Consider again that each new version of Ubuntu contains myriads of improvements - some small, some big - and Windows just looks plain silly. The only really new improvement Vista brought over XP was a flashier interface.

I recommend everyone to download it and try it. It won’t cost you more than a CD-R and some time.

There are however a few issues for me left from when I earlier wrote about Hardy. Pretty much all of them have been fixed, except for

* I’m still not completely happy with btnx, and evdev seems to be broken still. After some fiddling with it, researching it a bit more and generally spending slightly more time than ten seconds thinking about it, I discovered that a minor bit of tweaking was needed. Just point evdev at the right device and it works fine. Sidescroll works fine now, but I need to figure out a way to reverse it - right now it scrolls right when you punch left and so on. Btnx is history for me.

(it should be noted though that this might be residual annoyance since my Hardy-installation started life as Alpha6, and it might be some old configuration that lurks beneath the surface)

* Flash has issues. I realized how Flash is implemented in the 64-bit version, it’s simply a 64-bit wrapper around the regular 32-bit Flash binary. This is an ugly hack, and the wrapper has a tendency to lock up every now and again. It should be pointed out though that this is not Ubuntus fault - it’s Adobes, for insisting on not releasing a 64-bit Flash for Linux.

* I don’t know if Ubuntu has updated it’s proprietary driver-manager to support newer Nvidia-cards such as the 9xxx-series. I know the driver supporting them is still in Beta, so it might not be supported by the easy click-and-say-yes method Ubuntu has. This means that owners of 9xxx-cards (including myself) have to visit Nvidias site and install it the old-fashioned method. This is quite user-unfriendly, but again, blame Nvidia and not Ubuntu. I don’t know if the famous Envy-script supports installing the drivers for 9xxx-series cards since I’ve never used it.

Here’s two screenshots for you. The top is a standard desktop, the bottom is the exposé-like view featuring the “curved” option enabled. I think it’s pretty.

UPDATE: The official page has been updated. Grab your copy from the download page.

Aliens vs Predator: Requiem

Action/scifi from 2007.

—

The Aliens and one lone Predator descend on a small village somewhere in the USA, squeezing the local humans between them.

—

Yeah, I guess that’s a pretty good summary of the story. The Predator (or Yautja, as they’re known in the expanded universe) takes on the task of cleaning up after the botched mission in the previous movie. Why? Because that ship crashed, and this lone creature was sent to erase the traces.

The story is a bit weird actually. The Predator first does an excellent job of removing any traces of aliens or Predators using some weird blue liquid that dissolves everything it touches, all the while staying out of most of the action. It gets a little weird after a while when he decides that he’s no longer there on a covert mission and instead goes off and starts collecting trophies instead.

So, the story is a bit iffy. It works, I suppose, but it’s not very logical.

It’s easy to think that this movie is crap. And I would assume that to someone not very into the whole AvP mythos it would just seem like another stupid actionfest. But I liked it. I went in with very low expectations since I thought the first AvP movie did a really half-assed job. So, expectations were low and interestingly enough, I think that if you’re a fan of Aliens, Predators or the concept of them kicking the crap out of each other then this movie might be for you.

Sure, you have to ignore that logical jump mentioned in the storyline, but the ingredients are all there and they seem in my opinion to have been mixed into the right kind of dish. I was annoyed at how stupid the Predators in Paul W.S. Andersons take were, but I can assure you - this time around the Predator takes no crap from anyone. He’s just as kick-ass as Predators should be, and whatever mistakes he does (because he does a few) is simply him being faced with an even more kick-ass enemy - in this case the Predator-Alien hybrid briefly glanced in the first film.

I’d say it’s obvious that Colin and Greg Strause who directed this did some research beforehand. A lot of the concepts in this movie are almost directly lifted out of previous films. In fact, they even pay homage by lifting a few lines from previous Alien/Predator films, most notably the classic “Get to the chopper” but without Arnold saying it. Normally I would wrinkle my nose at such a pathetic attempt to score fanboy-points, but in this case it actually works. Hell, a lot of the musical cues are taken from earlier films (the weird drums whenever the Predator does something, the dark horns when the Aliens do something) and again I would normally scoff at this. But not here, here it helps convey the gravitas behind the mythos.

Now, I understand that making a film out of something like this is tricky. You have to give it enough personal touch to make it “yours” as a director, while not changing too much and thus upsetting the fans of what you’re making a movie out of. This one manages to walk the line, if you ask me. PWSA changed a little too much, while the Straus brothers manage to keep it. Sure, they don’t add much new to the mix, but when the mix as it was is excellent then why bother?

This movie has action, and as far as being an AvP-movie I’d say it’s more faithful to the concept than the first one. The ending is a bit anticlimactic, but it has a very neat minor twist to it. I’m not going to spoil that for you though.

I liked it. If you’re a fan of the AvP-mythos then I think you’ll like it as well. It’s plenty gory, and the Predator is kick-ass. Recommended.

Yeah, keen observers might note that I’ve removed the “Ubuntu Linux” page from my blog.

Why?

Well, I realized that it was futile to try to have a static page about such a fast-moving target. By the time I’m even close to getting around to finishing it a new version of Ubuntu has been released, and the cycle starts over again.

Instead I’m going to write a static page about Ubuntu, I’m going to some day create a static page about my thoughts on Free Software, Linux and that stuff. For Ubuntu-related news you’ll simply have to read the blog instead. Or search it.

In two days Hardy Heron is officially released. It’s a bit obvious saying this, but so far it’s the best yet. I roll my eyes a bit when I read about how people try it and are disappointed that the changes aren’t as big as they expected. Well, that’s how Linux works. Small, but constant and never-ending improvements - unlike Windows who builds a hype-machine for five years and then falls flat on it’s face since it’s essentially the same stuff as before.

The Golden Compass

Fantasy from 2007 starring among others Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Sam Elliott.

—

In a parallell universe young Lyra Belacqua goes on an adventure up in the arctic. Or something. Here, I’ll just steal the summary from IMDB instead of writing my own: “In a parallel universe, young Lyra Belacqua journeys to the far North to save her best friend and other kidnapped children from terrible experiments by a mysterious organization.” Yeah, I guess that works as a plot summary.

—

Okay, back in October when I mentioned this film I was pretty interested in it. Mainly that interest stemmed from the controversy the film (as well as the books it’s based on) was causing among the fundamentalist christians over in the US, but also because I thought it might be entertaining. When I read about it sounded kind of like Narnia crossed with the Lord of The Rings.

So, now I’ve seen it and what do I think of it?

I think it’s a pretty but incredibly dull affair.

Sure, it’s a nice production and visually it looks kind of like a steampunk-version of Narnia. It’s filled with computer-animation and gorgeous environments, and it’s got some pretty impressive actors. Yet it all feels so darn wasted.

The story is filled with incredibly heavy-handed metaphors for things Philip Pullman doesn’t like. It doesn’t really take a big brain to see that the magistrate is in fact the church, and they want to outlaw science (the dust) and free will. But the way these otherwise interesting metaphors are presented is so obvious. The whole world built in this film is just flat, there’s no excitement. It’s wooden.

And speaking of wooden. Let me tell you what else is wooden in this film. The acting. It’s like watching a bunch of planks sprouting ridiculous lines. Even Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman who usually manage to bring some kind of gravity to films fail miserably here. In fact, Daniel Craig barely even makes an appearance in this film, and Nicole Kidman is some generic Cruella DeVil-like villain. Pretty much every character in the film is just some two-dimensional cliché that’s been tossed into the mix to make it seem exciting. Casting Sam Elliot as the swaggerty adventurer with an accent as wide as his cowboy-hat is just too obvious.

Speaking of the dialogue. I mean, seriously, even in an alternate dimension, who the hell speaks like they do in this film?

Let me give you an example:

Normal film: RUN!

The Golden Compass: My young friend, I fear that now is the time where we must apply force to our legs and outrun the foolish enemy behind us. Lead the way and I will attempt to stave the flood of… etc etc etc etc and so forth and so on.

No, I think that the only people who will get a kick out of this film are already fans of the books. We who haven’t yet read them just find that this film is so self-important it’s almost falling over itself, and it’s formulaic and utterly boring delivery just underscores that. I had trouble keeping my eyes open, and I doubt that any kid who’s not a fan of Lyra will have troubles doing it too.

Watch this only if you have nothing else to do, and only if you aren’t paying for it. I don’t care that Phil Pullman is an atheist and is making the religious right nervous - this film is most of the time like watching paint dry.

If you want a fun and exciting film set in an alternate reality I instead recommend you go off and rent Stardust. Now that movie was fun!

Cloverfield (2008)

Action/Scifi/Drama featuring a bunch of virtual nonames.

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A monster attacks New York City and a small group of survivors equipped with a camcorder try to make it out of the city alive.

—

This. Movie. Is. Awesome.

I’ll say it again for emphasis. This movie is awesome. This movie will blow your socks off, rip your shirt to pieces and not introduce itself to your parents.

The story is pretty non-descript, but this is not a story-driven movie. The story rather acts as a frame to the characters. This is a disturbingly realistic and amazingly intense film. It is not your average hollywood-movie, filled with a bunch of overpaid actors hamming it up in front of a bluescreen.

The film is presented as a piece of government evidence, retrieved from a camcorder found in what was previous to the events in the film Central Park. The whole film actually looks like something that was shot by someone holding a camcorder, while being a part of the events.

And in case you didn’t already hear me say it, it is awesome. This is not your average monster-movie. The only thing it raises is questions. The really wonderful thing about it is that the way it’s filmed makes you forget that it’s fiction. You feel as if the boundary between reality and what you’re watching disappears. You have to remind yourself that this, despite appearances, never happened.

This movie is as awesome as Godzilla should’ve been back in 1998.

See it. Even if you’re not into monster-flicks, or action, or scifi. See it because it’s awesome, see it because it’s not cheesy, it’s not cliché. Strongly recommended.

I forgot to mention that yesterday our apartment appeared in all the listings. It is now for sale! So, if you’re looking for a very cozy apartment in Umeå, look no further. Plenty of space, stylish interior, fairly high standards of living, huge balcony, convenient location as well as excellent (i.e. 100 mbit) broadband.

Our apartment at Hemnet.

And some photos. These were taken by our realtor Erica, and she’s been excellent so far. Professional, efficient, easy to get along with. And, an excellent photographer.