UK/USA

"We're lookin' for people who can contribute to wot England has given the world: culture, genius, sophistication. Bit more than a bleedin' 'ot dog, know what I mean?" -- Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins), The Long Good Friday.

The world's first MMORPG novel

Conor Kostick's MMORPG novel Epic is finally on sale in the UK. If you've played a MMORPG then you will like this book; you can read the first two chapters here. Another interesting piece of MMORPG fiction is Anda's game by Cory Doctorow.

Trans fat

Great New Tork Times article on Trans fat which explains something I saw this week. At work we have supplies of various snacks and I was looking at the Pringles to see what was in them. The seal proclaimed 0g trans fat in huge letters. I read the ingredients and found that one of the flavours (sour cream and herb?) had some partially hydrogenated oils, in other words it did contain trans fat. I was gobsmacked. But the Food and drug administration allows a product with less than half a gram per serving to claim the product has no trans fat. So even when new labelling laws force companies to list trans fat explicitly we will still have to keep reading ingredients lists if we want to avoid it.

Proverbs

In Blueprints for High Availability: Designing Resilient Distributed Systems by Evan Marcus, Hal Stern, there is a quote credited to Scott Russel, Canadian TV personality:

Tell me a fact I forget it; tell me the truth and I learn something; tell me a story and I remember.

I couldn't find this quote in Google, instead I found an ""Indian proverb":

Tell me a fact and I'll learn. Tell me the truth and I'll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.

Which is better?

Neil Goodman on system design

Neil told this to Bryan Pendleton, who told it to me. When you are planning a system, design startup and shutdown first. Everything else is easy. It seems to me that if we design Crash-Only Software then we only have to do half the work.

Jim Gray interviews Tim Bray

In ACM Queue Jim Gray interviews Tim Bray. Here is an extract which has been slightly edited (because I hate to type). Jim Gray: It seems that XML and, to some extent, RDF have been fairly successful at electronic data interchange where OSI and ASN.1 failed. Why? Tim Bray: Two huge lessons come out of ASN.1. What it does is tell you all about data types. If you have a stream of ASN.1, it says, "Here's a 35 character string, and here's a 64 bit IEEE double precision float". XML says ""Here's some text called label, here's some text called price". Historically it appears that it's more valuable to to know what something is called than to know what data type it is. That's an interesting lesson.

Hayao Miyazaki

There's a great article in the New Yorker (17-jan-2005) about Miyazaki. I have watched Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service many times, and I am happy to watch them any time. I think these are the best movies for young children ever made. I didn't like Spirited Away so much, but I have only seen it once. Some extracts from the New Yorker article: In a 1993 televised discussion between Miyazaki and Akira Kurosawa, Kurosawa mentioned how much he admired the sweetly surreal cat bus (in Totoro). Toshio Suzuki: "When silents moved to talkies, Chaplin held out the longest. When black-and-white went to color, Kurosawa held out the longest. Miyazaki feels he should be the longest when it comes to computer animation" Miyazaki: "I like Ireland, though, the countryside there. Dublin has too many yuppies, computer types, but I like the countryside, becasue it's poorer than England" John Lasseter says that when the animators at Pixar get stuck on a project they watch a Miyazaki film.

For the in-house theatre, which shows short films that he makes especially for the museum (including a sequel to “My Neighbor Totoro”), he hired an acoustic designer to create an uncommonly gentle sound system. Miyazaki wanted the opposite of the “tendency in recent Hollywood films,” which is “to use heavy bass to try to pull the audience into the film.” He thinks that movie theatres can be claustrophobic, even overwhelming places for young children, so he wanted his theatre to have windows that let in some natural light, bench-style seats that a child can’t sink into, and films that make them “sigh in relaxation.” Miyazaki fondly remembered the days when cigarette smoke in a theatre could draw your attention to the beam of light stretching from the projector, so he placed the pro­jector in a glass booth that protrudes into the seating area. “I want to show children that moving images are enjoyed by having huge reels revolving, an electric light shin­ing on the film, and a lot of complicated things being done,” he explains in the mu­seum’s catalogue. Colleagues told him that projecting the films digitally would help preserve them, but Miyazaki relished the idea that, eventually, viewers might see “worn film with ‘falling-rain’ scratches on the screen.

Ramotswe on existentialism

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another—not even for his wife—would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls—young existentialist girls—you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.

2004 releases that were most played in 2004

My album of the year was Thunder Lighning Strike by the Go! Team. Apart from that, my most played tracks that were released in 2004 (according to ITunes) were (in order) as follows: You have to scroll down a long way (weird blogger bug) ... [update December 2005: fixed]

Track	Artist	Source
Comfortably Numb	Scissor Sisters	Scissor Sisters
Munich Air Disaster 1958	Morrissey	Irish Blood, English Heart - EP
First Of The Gang To Die	Morrissey	You Are The Quarry
Cinnamon Girl	Prince	Musicology
Darts Of Pleasure	Franz Ferdinand	Franz Ferdinand
99 Problems	Jay-Z & Beatles & DJ Danger Mouse	The Grey Album
It's Hard to Walk Tall, When You're Small	Morrissey	Irish Blood, English Heart - EP
The Never Played Symphonies	Morrissey	Irish Blood, English Heart - EP
If I Thought You'd Ever Change Your Mind	Agnetha Faltskog	My Colouring Book
Come Home Billy Bird	The Divine Comedy	Absent Friends
Teenage Dad on His Estate	Morrissey	First of the Gang to Die - EP
It's a Pose	Nellie McKay	Get Away from Me
Inner Peace	Nellie McKay	Get Away from Me
Who the fuck	PJ Harvey	Uh Huh Her
No Child Of Mine	PJ Harvey	Uh Huh Her
Laura	Scissor Sisters	Scissor Sisters
It Cant Come Quickly Enough	Scissor Sisters	Scissor Sisters
Can't Stand Me Now	The Libertines	The Libertines
Uraqt (Diplo Mix)	M.I.A.	Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1
America Is Not The World	Morrissey	You Are The Quarry
She Wants To Move	N.E.R.D	She_Wants_To_Move-(Promo_CDS)
Don't Let Him Waste Your Time	Nancy Sinatra	Nancy Sinatra
The Slow Drug	PJ Harvey	Uh Huh Her
Cat On The Wall	PJ Harvey	Uh Huh Her
Music Is The Victim	Scissor Sisters	Scissor Sisters

If I had to guess what I listened to I would also have mentioned The College Dropout by Kanye West and A Grand Don't Come For Free by The Streets. And Bjork. And Liz Phair was 2003. But this was what I really listened to. You can't argue with the data.