Danny's Weblog

2008 Sep 11 [ Thu ]

Movie review: Brotherhood (Taegukgi), 2004

This is a movie about the Korean war, made in Korea. It is basically an antiwar movie, showing how North and South Koreans were driven to kill each other. The American involvement is minimized. Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taegukgi_(film)]

I just want to make one point. In one scene, South Korean soldiers approach a village, and see that all the peasants have been slaughtered. They start to deal with the bodies, and then there's an explosion: apparently the bodies were booby-trapped.

I don't think I'm boasting too much when I say that when that scene started this very thought ran through my mind: *why* would anyone bother to kill the peasants? I was thinking the sergeants should order the men to search for boobytraps, and indeed they should not have entered the village in a clustered group.

Perhaps actual soldiers of the period would have been warier, or perhaps I'm just paranoid. Actually, I think I'm just an old guy: I've seen a lot of movies. So I ask myself questions like that. I also ask myself a question which the makers of the movie perhaps did not intend: since the result of the encounter was to transform the surviving South Korean troops into pitiless killing machines, who benefited from the atrocity? So who had an incentive to carry it out?

But a *lot* of questions like that could be asked. For instance, I have seen a lot of reviews of Saving Private Ryan which saw it as an account of the "last good war". But it clearly shows Axis captives being shot out of hand by the invading US troops, and seems to suggest that it was necessary. How could people avoid seeing that? What has been done to western society that almost everybody who watched the movie could be so brutalized? Even US Army commanders have complained that the casual use of torture in the TV series "24" has made it impossible to teach soldiers to handle prisoners without brutality.

This is why I believe we are living in Orwell's 1984. We have *always* been at war with Eurasia.

2008 Jun 27 [ Fri ]

CHDK, new firmware for my Canon A630

This is free software for many Canon digital cameras: chdk.wikia.com [http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK_for_Dummies]

It only installs till the batteries are removed, so it's safe to play with.

This is my experiences with installing it under Ubuntu Linux 7.1. Most, but not all, this info is from the CHDK website.

The docs say you need to check the firmware rev of the factory firmware in order to choose the correct download. I was able to get my original firmware rev by putting an empty file called "vers.req" in the root dir of the SD memory card. I had also to delete all photos/movies on the card, as otherwise when you put it in the camera it just shows you the media when you press FUNC SET. Press and hold FUNC SET, and press DISP. The first time, it shows you the version for a few seconds. If you immediately press FUNC SET again once, it shows something else. If you press it again, it shows the picture count, although for me it displayed only 223 - way too low.

Then I formatted the memory card in the camera. (I'm not sure that's really necessary but the web info told me to do it.) Then the general guide info to CHDK suggests using a special Windows utility to make the memory card bootable. The following guide includes Linux info so you can use hexedit to set a bootable flag: chdk.wikia.com [http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/A560] as part of the setup info for an A560 (but it seems to be valid for my A630 and presumably others).

Then I plugged in the SD card using a USB adapter. Ubuntu, and presumably all other modern Linux distributions, will mount a USB SD adapter automagically, but you don't want the SD card to be mounted while you're setting the bootable flag. The web info suggests using umount /dev/sdb1 (you can check if that device name is the same on your box by running dmesg), but this did not work for me: umount complained that /dev/sdb1 was not in /etc/fstab. The same thing happened for /media/drive. However, r-clicking on the drive icon and selecting unmount worked.

I was then able to run hexedit (at least after doing apt-get – it went fast). Unfortunately hexedit expects to use various keys like F1 which are grabbed by Gnome Terminal. I was able to turn them off with gterm Edit - Current profile. Then I was able to use F1 to get help on hexedit commands like Tab (to swap hex and text entry modes).

Then I downloaded the zip file containing the new firmware (two files). The CHDK site: chdk.wikia.com [http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Downloads] has links to various different "builds" with different features. The download I actually got was the "allbest". It turned out there was only one version for the A630, ie the original firmware version is irrelevant. The download location is grandag.nm.ru [http://grandag.nm.ru/hdk/autobuild/download.htm] (this is the latest, somewhat experimental version; you may prefer a more conservative one).

The main setup page does not specify where to put the two files, but I presumed the root dir. I unplugged the SD adapter and plugged it back in (so that Ubuntu would automagically remount it), and copied the files over.

I unmounted the adapter and unplugged it, pulled out the SD card, set the write switch to protected (write disabled) per the notes, and put it back in the camera. Then you enable the software just by turning on the camera. It starts up with a splash screen: it then shows a little rectangular area at the bottom left. You can then access most of the setups by pressing what the docs call the "Alt" key, ie the one at the top R of the "Func Set" button with a picture of a printer next to it, and then the MENU button.

Result: it works! There are indeed a bazillion features. However, I'm not sure how useful it is. The menu access is a little clumsy, it interferes in some ways with access to normal features, and it caused at least one lockup in a few minutes playing. However, it does provide one feature I desperately wanted: a battery status display. Apparently the camera has an actual voltage sensor: all you need to do is specify the voltage levels you consider as 0% and 100% (if you aren't happy with the default). I had no idea the camera had the hardware to do this. (OTOH, I just noticed that the battery level seems to go up as well as down... hmm.)

Another handy feature is to enable optical zoom during video recording. When you do so, it mutes (if you want) the microphone to avoid picking up the whir of the zoom mechanism. It refocuses after the zoom.

You can also download and run scripts, although I haven't tried that yet.

Other builds have extra features like remote control via the usb port.

2007 Nov 11 [ Sun ]

Review - hardware - Motorola V360 cellphone - update

A few months ago I produced a review of my Motorola V360 phone: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Reviews/Hardware/motorola-v360-01.html]

It's one of the most popular pages on my site (meaning someone reads it now and then) so I hope people will be interested in a little update on a few points.

1. Perhaps as a result of getting the phone reflashed with a random flash file, I noticed a peculiar problem with the camera's color balance. Now, when you select "indoor" balance it works until you take a shot, and then the viewfinder shows an odd purplish low-contrast color cast. It's a little clumsy to check whether this also affects the resulting image files, but one test I did seemed to show it doesn't; still, it's irritating.

2. I have now got it set up for MMS and internet, but it was interesting that it was such an effort. I don't have good notes to describe what I had to do, but I remember that the support from the service provider was really half-bottomed. The website, for instance, had instructions specifically for my V360, but referred at several points to the name of a different service provider, suggesting a stealthy cut-and-paste which inspired little confidence. Several prompts did not correspond to those on my phone, although conceivably that was due to the particular software load on my particular V360.

The main thing I remember is that the software said something like "OK! You've now installed the internet!". But in fact what had been installed was the *setup* for the internet; I still needed to set the phone to actually *use* that setup. I consider myself a propellerhead but even I find it hard to deal with prompts which are definably *wrong*. It would have been a lot easier if they had just given a list of individual setups and said "ok, now you figure out how to enter this stuff".

Incidentally, "installing the internet" doesn't do anything about setting up email, either.

3. The Apple iPhone was recently launched in Europe. Its main claim to fame seems to be that the user interface allows the user to figure out how to use features without effort. The reason I mention that is that I *only now* figured out how to do something on my V360 which has been a problem for me for several months.

My service provider in England makes direct calls to Cambodia incredibly expensive. So I use a phonecard from the Post Office which allows calls to Cambodia at about 30 p per minute, plus airtime. The problem is that to make a call using this system you need to dial their port number, then enter the PIN of the card, then the destination number. That's a lot of numbers, with a huge potential for expensive and time-consuming error. What I wanted was to be able to dial a series of touchtones while inside a call, but although you can access the phonebook inside a call it didn't do what I needed; it drops the call (although I imagine it would do something more useful if I had 2-way calling on this account) and starts a new one. Result: I was afraid to make calls.

Just yesterday I was randomly pushing buttons on my phone and decided to click the menu button while entering a phone number into the phonebook. This shows three interesting options: insert "pause", insert "wait" and insert "n". I gambled that "pause" meant "delay a short period and then continue" and "wait" meant "provide a prompt to the user and wait for confirmation before continuing". I put a new number in the phonebook consisting of the PO's port number, w, PIN, w, destination number (in Cambodia). Bingo!

What bugs me is that I had *already tried* to do something similar way back when I first got the phone. But the entry mode when you're keying numbers into the phonebook is *locked* to "123" and allows only number characters. I had no idea that the way to access this was via the menu key. Those bozos at Motorola must have specifically disabled switching modes at that point in the menu tree, breaking the user interface for no good reason, while allowing the needed control characters via a completely different (and inferior) paradigm.

Incidentally, I still don't know what "n" does. Perhaps it's documented for a Hayes 9600 modem.

2007 Jul 09 [ Mon ]

Review -- Movie: Shooter (2007)

This is a generally competent thriller with Mark Wahlberg in the title role. As usual, my comments refer to numerous plot elements in detail, so if you haven't seen the movie yet STOP READING NOW.

SPOILER ALERT

1. There are many shortcomings and blunders in the movie, but it does one very significant thing: the bad guys are not "rogue" elements in the federal government, but clearly in control of it. In that respect it differs from all other similar movies that I am aware of.

On the other hand, one of the weak points in the plot is that the FBI is depicted as independent of the bad guys. This seems quite implausible to me, and it seems doubly implausible that the hero, who vows vengeance for being set up as a patsy by one branch of the Feds, should casually assume that the FBI would be anything different. At the very least, the hero should be much more cautious with them.

2. I watched the deleted scenes on the DVD, and I can certainly see why they were deleted. In many cases the hero waffles on ponderously to explain elements of the plot, and one wonders why this university lecturer type didn't put two and two together a long time ago.

Indeed, do special-forces types really get inserted in a country, kill some people, and get pulled out without ever wondering who they're killing and why? "Need to know" is certainly a very big phrase in government operations, but don't these guys ever go "hey, waitaminute" *before* their best buddy gets blown away and their exfiltration vanishes?

3. The lead character really progresses too fast. Assuming he starts off with no suspicion of how the Feds really work, he should have been much more tentative throughout the movie. Like the point about the FBI above, he should have spread his bets more. For instance, the bad guys *could* have been foreign agents of some kind, with only limited contacts in local uniformed and secret police.

But in general, he is depicted as having had previously no doubts about the Feds. Even by the end of the movie, he should have been still wondering whether he was completely nuts. It took me thirty years to get from supporting the US (when it was unfashionable) to opposing it.

4. Likewise, he recovers too fast from the shoulder wound. It is not easy to aim a rifle accurately, even when you are in perfect health. For *months* after a shoulder wound, especially if you get no physical therapy, you have weakness and tremors.

5. OK, I know you can buy gunpowder at a lot of supermarkets in the USA. But can you really put together radio-controlled booby traps? That work with complete reliability and effectiveness?

6. The hero's actions, while generally in the realm of the possible (unlike Die Hard, etc) generally rely on the bad guy doing one particular move. For instance, the hero waits in a gully, and knifes a patrolling guard when he leans down to take a look. The hero has to be in exactly the right stance to execute that move; if the bad guy has his gun ready when he looks in, the hero has "brought a knife to a gunfight" as the saying goes.

7. The assault on the assassin's house, which occupies a large part of the running time and presumably budget, was utterly ridiculous. It wasn't clear exactly what kind of troops made up the attacking force, but what kind of halfwit advances slowly towards the enemy in broad daylight without cover in tight groups? They were depicted as having no comms, no surveillance equipment, no snipers, no armored vehicles, no flash-bangs, gas, or respirators, no command and control... They would be lucky to get a 1:1 kill ratio against Somalis.

Furthermore, the hero's plan relies on the attacking force being exactly that stupid.

8. The FBI guy who becomes the hero's buddy also gets effective too fast. Now it's true that if a highly-trained guy sets up the incident for you, you can be very effective with minimal training. (Indeed that's how special forces work in general: each individual is not Rambo, but the entire team works together so that each individual is maximally effective.) But this guy apparently had not seen a man die before, and in real combat people fall apart under much less stress than this guy was under. And in the meantime he learns to calmly execute well-aimed shots under fire... not to mention a lot of special infantry tactics and vocabulary that I really, really doubt are stressed at Quantico.

9. After the assault on the assassin's house, the bad guys managed to clear away all the bodies – and all the other evidence like a crashed helicopter, presumably, but left the cartridge cases? Like they have a union or something?

10. The bad guys instantly get the hero's phone number from a call he makes to the FBI, but never noticed his calls to the FBI girl who is working with them. Hmm. I don't know if that makes much sense, but I'm pretty sure the hero shouldn't have relied on it.

11. It was really dumb of the hero not to figure that the bad guys would make the connection to his girl (ie his buddy's girl). They should have had some sort of plan, if only that she lies low instead of staying at her place.

12. It was a bad decision to give the Senator (the bad guy) a Southern accent. He was already a caricature, but that was going too far. Wouldn't it have made more sense for him to be a Yale type?

13. The whole scene towards the end where the hero demonstrates that his rifle, collected from the alleged assassination scene, is still in a state incapable of firing a round, was utterly ridiculous. No manager has ever behaved like the FBI director. No murder suspect would be allowed close to a weapon (unless it had been previously disabled... hmm).

The gambit rested totally on the bad guy stating confidently that the weapon had not been touched since the assassination, but even if he believed it, would that really prove anything? And are murder suspects really released, and allowed to accumulate weapons, without a lengthy public trial? And the hero allows himself and his friends to be captured (on the snowy mountain) saying that they would not survive if they ran, but what makes him think they would survive if they were caught? The FBI office scene certainly didn't convince me of it.

2007 Jul 07 [ Sat ]

Review -- hardware -- Motorola V360

As usual with my hardware reviews, I'm not discussing a new item so that you'll rush out and buy it. Instead, I'm talking about a product which I bought for myself and have had a lot of experience with.

The Motorola V360 was introduced nearly two years ago, so it's just about at the end of its shelf life. However, I think a lot of my comments will continue to apply to new cellphones for years, and not just in Cambodia.

As usual, I concentrate on problems. Actually I had no reliability problems with my V360; I quite like the phone and would recommend it, although there are now some Nokia models with similar features in my price range that I would prefer.

1. My big reason for changing phones was that I was tired of my Nokia 8250 dialling people by itself in my pocket. I tried to remember to lock it before putting it away, but I'm pretty sure it was activating itself anyway. I tried carrying it in a case on my belt, but that didn't help much, even when I fitted a plastic cover over the buttons. (I couldn't find anything designed for the purpose and had to use stock plastic which was obviously not a good fit.)

A slight reason to change phones was that the Nokia 8250 had started draining the battery fast, but I had gotten that fixed before and could probably have fixed it again.

2. So I really, really wanted a flipphone design. Unfortunately, at the time Nokia had few flipphones, and the ones it had were either out of my price range or had rotten features. So I was happy to find the Motorola. Additionally, it had fullsize keys with some travel, which more expensive – slimmer – models no longer offer. The extra thickness of the case, it seems to me, makes it considerably more resistant to flexing; particularly important to me because I like to carry it in my pants pocket with other stuff.

Incidentally, it seemed to me at the time that the Nokias had aggressively awful styling – as if someone's boyfriend was making the design choices. Older models like the 8250 were fine - I didn't buy it for its looks, but when I first saw the keypad light up at night I really thought it was beautiful. But for a few years, almost all the Nokias that came out were truly ugly. More recently they've improved a lot.

3. The V360 is a flipphone with a color screen, an external BW screen, a fullsize keypad, a Micro SD slot, a still and video camera, and MP3 player.

4. I paid 145 USD for it (funny – I could have sworn I paid less than that, but that's what the receipt says) at a store at the southwest corner of the O Russei market square. (The receipt does not really give a name – it just says "NOKIA Mobile Phone Shop". No names, no pack drill.) (These days, the price is 120 USD or so.)

The store was OK, but I got the impression that they were trying to sell me a used model at the new price, because when I asked them for the accessories they said "oh, if you want one in the box that'll be 10 USD more". Hmm. You should check that the phone displays the same IMEI as the one shown on the box (although it is often possible for the dealer to *change* the IMEI, depending on the model).

Also, bear in mind that most Cambodians routinely get their phone wrapped in plastic (less than a dollar) so a used phone may show no signs of wear at all.

I wound up with a reasonably full set of accessories: manual, earphone, USB cable, AC adapter. I think the Micro SD card I bought was extra – yep, 128 MB for 13 USD.

A friend later bought a similar model, the V361, which did not come with a manual. Also, the AC adapter was inferior: the AC pins did not fold into the plug like mine, which is much easier to pack.

5. I have started storing all the accessories for each such item of consumer electronics that I buy in a plastic zipup bag, available from local stationers for less than a dollar. It is much more space-efficient than the original box, which is also clumsy to open, search through and close. I cut the major information off the sides of the box and put it in the bag as well (IMEI etc).

I also put in the receipt.

6. The Nokia range is far more popular in Cambodia than any other brand. At the time I bought it there was what appeared to be a real Motorola brand store on Monivong, but it has since vanished and the phone number doesn't work. However, it seems to be possible to get repairs done (see later).

In particular, Mobitel, I believe still the only service provider with internet features, at the time supported only Nokias for even MMS (except a single Sony model). A few days ago I checked, and Mobitel do now support several Motorola models, in particular the V3X, but no longer offer MMS/internet for prepaid customers; you have to open an account, with a deposit of I think 150 USD and a regular monthly bill. (On the upside, they seemed to be saying that you could do any amount of MMS or internet browsing for free. Can that really be true?)

I was aware of the issue, but didn't really worry about it for several reasons; one was that I knew nobody who had MMS set up, so I couldn't send to anybody anyway.

7. Unlike other countries, cellphones are never sold in Cambodia locked to a service provider. I think this is because Cambodians do not trust the service provider to bill them honestly, so only a tiny fraction signs up for postpaid accounts at all.

On the other hand, almost no phones are manufactured for the Cambodian market, so you often encounter phones which are more or less branded for a certain service provider – in Spain, or Hungary... Thus the features which are available may vary.

8. With the exception of internet features, there were no major problems with the setup. However, I list a few issues below.

9. The space key is not zero, as on the Nokias, but the star key. This took a surprising amount of time to figure out, as I had no idea companies would choose to switch such a basic part of the user interface.

10. I hate the idea that every time you enter a name in the phonebook it is automatically assigned a shortcut. Indeed, the first ten you add, whatever they are, get single-digit shortcuts! This is completely ridiculous, and one can only assume the "feature" is provided at the insistence of service providers who want to encourage misdials. There is no way to turn it off, but I made ten fake numbers which cause an error message instead of a dial charge, and assigned them to the single-digit quickdial numbers. Now numbers get assigned speed-dial numbers like "1205". Hah!

11. Instead of using preset speed-dial numbers, I use another feature of the phone: when you press the dial key without entering a number first, it brings up a list of previously-dialled numbers, which usually includes what you need.

12. Alternatively you can bring up the phonebook, but the default setup is very poor for me, and the menu options are poorly arranged. For instance, the default search method for the phone book is first-letter only. Ie if you want to find Smith and try and key S, M, it shows you Martin, May, Meckler...

So you change the search method from "Jump to" to "Find" (not entirely clear to me and probably a nightmare for translators). But now you discover that these helpful guys at Motorola have set the default text entry to iTAP, ie the godawful predictive system for which somebody should burn in hell for all eternity, so when you try to find Sok Py the phone cheerfully makes wrong predictions six times, even if Sok Py is the only entry under S.

Conceivably I'm biased because I need to enter a lot of non- English place and personal names, but is that so unusual?

Worse, the default text mode choice is not made under phonebook setup, or Settings; it's actually under Messages, and *not* in message setup; you have to *open a new message*, and then go into options, where you'll find "entry mode" and "entry setup" (wtf? again the translator is driven to drink); you want "entry setup" to change primary mode to "TAP English" (TAP being the term for non-intelligent, or to put it another way non-stupid text entry). It just took me about 15 minutes to find this again, by the way; it took me *months* when I first got the phone. Of course it's not in the manual.

"Entry mode", by the way, seems useless: you get to choose the default mode as numeric or symbol (instead of ABC2... etc), but who would want that?

Another irritant about the phone book is that it does not quite do what you need in handling entries stored on the SIM and the phone. I want to keep most of the contacts on the SIM card, but this means that a lot of features, like photo call, don't work. It would be best to copy all the SIM entries to the phone and then view only phone entries, but this is not allowed. You can view only entries in a certain category, eg Personal, but that doesn't really fix the problem.

Likewise, if you *do* put someone in the phone memory so you can add a special MP3 ringtone, that ringtone is *also* used for SMS messages from them. Dagnabbit.

13. The camera feature works amazingly well, despite my complaints below. I did not investigate it prior to sale as I expected that any camera feature in my price range would be miserable.

One problem is resolution. It is rated as 640x480 although the true resolution is closer to the screen resolution of 176x220. (I cannot find any confirmation of this on the web, but it seems to me that all cameraphone manufacturers use interpolation to artificially increase the apparent resolution of the camera.) However, the color response, especially in normal indoor conditions, is the best I've seen in a cameraphone, and actually better than my old Minolta camera under typical conditions.

I really wish the manufacturers, or at least honest review sites, would actually measure some of the basic properties of the products, like resolution, or usable exposure range, or how long it takes to save a shot.

There are several stupid misfeatures in the user interface. For instance, the default behavior when you press the shutter button is to ask you what you want to do with the shot, apparently in the hopes that you'll send it via your service provider's cripplingly expensive MMS system. Yeah, right – without checking it. Why not silently save it and let you take another picture immediately? Having to negotiate another menu makes it much harder to take a succession of shots.

Something really astounding is that when you press the shutter button the viewfinder image freezes and you can look at it and think "that looks great! I'll send it!" but it's *not actually the shot that gets stored*. *That* gets captured a *second or so after you press the shutter*. That's right, when your subject is just turning away, or you start lowering your hand. Another good reason not to immediately send it as MMS.

A less important niggle, but one which seems very easy to fix, is that it is absolutely essential to pick the right kind of illumination (sunny, cloudy, indoor etc) but this is slow to find in the user interface. It should be on the number keys, as you often need to experiment back and forth to figure out the optimum choice. Ideally, of course, a true white balance feature would be better, especially if it also set the white *level* for exposure, because the plus and minus exposure controls don't really work: they seem to make the picture brighter or darker *after it's digitized*.

An even less important feature, but one which could presumably be fixed very cheaply, is that no useful EXIF information – date/time, exposure, color balance) is written to the file.

14. The photo display feature works, but is sluggish and limited. Because the camera does not really provide a filesystem interface, it has to search every folder for images, and then presents a list in chronological order, rather than by folders. This makes it slow to start up, and then makes it very hard to keep a bunch of good shots available to show off separate from your most recent shots.

The viewer does have both "categories" and "albums" available but they were very clumsy to use so I have never figured them out. I have to admit that they might be usable for what I want. Perhaps if they are accessible from a PC the user interface might be more practical.

It would be really nice to be able to flip the orientation of the images, considering the camera images are horizontal and the display is vertical. It would also be nice to use the entire screen for images.

15. The video recorder works. I was surprised to find quite recently that if you change the lighting setup in the still camera mode, it also changes it in the video mode; I suppose that's reasonable.

The video images of course are very grainy and blurry. The sound, however, is surprisingly good, despite the fact that the mic is pointed away from the subject. Since the video files are fairly small, the video mode is actually quite usable as a voice recorder, for instance for recording snatches of a foreign language, although the irritating restriction on recording length to 45 s or so is a problem. (Don't judge the sound played through the builtin speaker; transfer the file to a PC and listen through headphones.)

16. A couple of days after I bought the phone I went back to the store and asked where the software CD was. I was aware that the software CD is often not provided with the phone (although it usually is with Nokias) so I was not surprised when they affected not to know what I was talking about. Eventually someone produced what appeared to be a kosher Motorola Phone Tools (MPT) CD, but when I got it home I found that the plastic sleeve was stuck to the CD and it was unplayable.

Later I found what appeared to be a genuine MPT disk. I had the same problems as another review site: it seems to fail to find the phone at least half the time, so that superstitiously I now reboot before trying to use it.

In addition – and not related! – it is a pain to have to switch the phone from disk emulation to software link every time.

17. MPT has rather limited features. For instance, you can't back up or even read SMS messages. It's also just incredibly slow, and it doesn't warn you before getting locked into a long operation. Why in heck should it take several minutes to load the address book? I get the impression from the (arcane and doomily described) driver setup that Motorola standardized on a serial interface protocol years ago and is now working via some sort of incredibly kludgey emulation. It is almost unbelievable that Motorola, one of the biggest phone marketing companies in the world, should still be trying to foist this travesty on users.

18. On the other hand, you can use a sort of video editor to turn your video caps into little movies. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to import or export anything standard, so it's only useful for phones of the same type. Whoo-hoo!

19. A fundamental problem with the product is that Motorola does not provide clear specs to end users. For instance, what are the restrictions on the still photos that it can display? It turns out that there is a filesize limit on jpegs, for instance; I think it's fairly small, around 100 kB. But what are the details of the video format? The sound format inside the video? Can it use VBR for MP3s? What should I look for on a Java game or other software to see if it will work on my phone?

Actually, you can get more information if you sign up at the Motorola developer site. Unfortunately, I haven't actually seen software advertised as meeting those specs... presumably because not many users sign up for the developer site.

20. And of course many, many of the issues that I complain about above are because the phone is infected by DRM. Motorola can't just publish straight specs because the customer might start complaining about all the features that his supplier has locked out. It can't provide easy access to utilities because then end users could easily unlock their own phones. It can't put time into fixing user interface issues because it has to deal with 372 different versions for different service providers.

In an ideal world the software interface for mobile phones would be standardized and we would all be able to easily select and add features. And the directors and major shareholders of mobile phone service companies would be lying in pools of blood.

21. I tried downloading various utilities to try and fix problems – I thought I might be able to access the disabled voice recorder, set the record length to infinite, connect up the camera lighting settings to hotkeys etc.

One small success is that I was able to set the phone to load new Java apps from memory. Previously, it just refused to see them. Apparently, even though the phone was unlocked in the sense that you could use any service provider, the feature set had still been crippled.

However, as soon as I tried to edit the menu, the phone locked up, and refused to start up to a menu. I guess the bootloader would still have allowed me to try loading a new flash file, but I had lost confidence. Embarrassingly, I had to take it to a shop, who fixed it for 13 USD.

I didn't get a chance to talk to the tech directly, but I was told they had to replace a part. I'm guessing they swapped the entire program memory from another board. (I was also told they fixed something with the hinge, and since it's been back I've noticed that the phone doesn't activate for no apparent reason in my pocket any more, so presumably there was a problem with the hinge sensor that detects the phone is flipped open.)

The phone is still able to load Java apps, so either that setting survived the chip swap, or the software package had not been crippled on that feature. (However, there is still no voice recorder.)

I was also surprised to find that the Java apps I had installed from the Micro SD were still in the installed apps menu and runnable. Apparently settings and Java apps are kept in a "flex" file which is separate from the program setup, and presumably the menus. Still, I would have thought it would all be in the same physical chip.

22. As basically the utilities I tried caused problems, I am not going to provide direct links. However I think anyone interested in modding a Motorola V360 should check out this guy: yuetblog.blogspot.com [http://yuetblog.blogspot.com/]

The above site is absolutely amazing. The guy most spend all his time fiddling with phones and keeping his site maintained. I don't know if his ads are keeping him alive: maybe they're enough where he lives, in China, or maybe the Chinese secret police pay him to put bugging software in the flash files he provides.

A general problem with other modding sites is that most of them cover multiple kinds of Motorola phones. A very interesting howto page may have a reference to some spec which defines a range of phones including the V360 (or your model), but the reference means nothing to a tyro like me (or presumably you).

If you can manage that, check out motomodders.net. After you sign up you can go to the info for V360 *and similar* phones, ie apparently the "R47" range, eg this: www.motomodders.net [http://www.motomodders.net/Default.aspx?tabid=55&view=topics&forumid=15

] 2007 Jul 03 [ Tue ]

Review: TV series Alias

This is about a young woman (Sidney Bristow) who decides to start working for a completely secret spy organization, and then finds she has to spy against that organization even as she carries out missions for it.

As usual, this review refers to many specific plot points, so if you have not finished watching the series, you should *stop reading now*.

Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alias_(TV_series)]

SPOILER ALERT

1. The setup for the show is that an evil mastermind has set up a vast secret headquarters in the USA and recruited Americans by telling them that it is a super-secret US agency called "SD6", but in fact they are working for an international terrorist and arms- dealing conspiracy.

I was very attracted to this premise. The general term for such operations is "false flag" and they are completely routine in espionage. For instance, the FBI agent who was arrested a few years ago for spying for the Russians was caught by US agents who approached him as Russian agents.

For some reason however it has rarely been used in movies and TV. Conceivably this is because it would slow up every scene if the characters had to go through a laborious protocol to establish bona fides. But anybody with any sense would do so. For instance, if the secret police approach you and ask you to spy on a neighbor, ask yourself who else might like to spy on that neighbor, and take corresponding precautions.

For instance, a few years ago a buddy needed another security clearance, and one of the elements of that is to for the DIA to check out his buddies... ie me. So he told me to get ready for a phonecall. But when the DIA officer called, I told him I'd call back on a published DIA number. The guy was stunned, like nobody ever did this before. I must have sounded pretty paranoid, but the fact is that *anybody in my buddy's circle of acquaintances* would have found out about these calls and could have presented themselves as a DIA agent. And I didn't really want to stress to the officer that my buddy was currently going through a messy divorce and his wife had already tried various dirty tricks.

Another reason I liked the premise was that it reminded me of the element of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (later filmed as "Blade Runner", although the element was dropped for the movie), where the hero (an android-hunting police detectoive) finds that an entire police department has been set up by the androids themselves for some reason, including a human who thinks he's an android hunter like the hero.

Still, it's a little implausible, isn't it, that such an organization would survive for long without being uncovered.

On the other hand, for me Sidney's experience mirrors that of the American people. "There are many things that I hate about Arvin Sloane. But the thing I hate the most is that he wraps his criminal activities in the flag."

2. A very important, and little-stressed aspect of maintaining security that made the premise more plausible was that SD6 demanded that anybody, including innocent civilians, including SD6 employees' loved ones, who found out about SD6 would be immediately eliminated, *and that the SD6 employees went along with this*. I don't think enough was made of this. The heroine was several times shown as reluctant to kill or torture captives, yet she accepted without question that her boss was justified in eliminating her fiance when the fiance found out about SD6. (Well, she wasn't overjoyed about it, but she didn't plug Arvin Sloane the next time she saw him either. Don't people ever say "Hey, waitaminute! If someone does *that*, doesn't it make him a bad guy?")

I really want to stress this, because it fits in with what seems to be a pattern of encouraging cruelty, brutality and obedience to the state on US TV. Even US Army officials have protested, for instance, that TV shows like 24 hours, which show the hero torturing captives on many occasions, cause their soldiers to be ready to torture captives, whatever they are (ostensibly) taught about acceptable procedures.

On the other hand, in "Alias" the heroine discovers that the secret organization which is routinely torturing people and murdering innocents is actually *not* a US agency. I often wonder whether the most important ideas in TV shows are those which are never specifically addressed.

On the other other hand, Sidney becomes more and more willing to kill and torture as the series wore on.

3. The makers of the show say explicitly (in one of the extras on the DVDs) that one of the intentional elements of the show is the relationships inside a family: for instance, inside Sidney's own family, where she does not even know that her father has been working for SD6 until she has been working for it for years. (One wonders exactly how SD6 arranged that their paths never crossed.)

Indeed, the arc of the show is that Sidney's life starts out completely distorted by her father Jack Bristow's involvement in intelligence work; in particular it has driven the two of them apart. As Sidney finds out more and more about her own past in the series, she is continually shocked, but she also realizes that a further element which has been blocking her relationship with Jack has vanished. At the end of the series, Sidney kills her own mother, and Jack sacrifices his life to protect Sidney and to make up for all the pain he has put her through.

This idea of the shattered family seems a peculiar ingredient to mix into a spy story. The makers do not actually explain *why* they wanted to concentrate on it. It may be that they were trying to emulate the success of Star Wars, which seemed to resonate with postwar generations in which the children are alienated from their parents by family trends like both parents working and frequent divorce. It may also be that they were trying to exploit the idea that we do not become adults until our parents are dead.

4. A weakness of the concentration on family relationships is that members of the family could be kidnapped to coerce their relatives; whether the victims were spies or civilians. It reminds me that the stated policy of SD6 – to liquidate anyone who found out about it – is actually logical assuming that their opponents have the amazing capabilities to track people down and extract them in broad daylight that were portrayed. (Actually, it is very difficult just to get three separate people at the same place and time, even when they don't have to communicate in code and so forth.)

This makes me wonder what happens in reality. Maybe the CIA is not a front organization simply to confuse the masses; maybe the *real* intelligence organizations *have* to operate completely undercover to protect their own family members. Perhaps the CIA functions *only* as a money-laundering cutout between the Treasury and the *real* intelligence groups.

5. A tiny grammar point caught my attention: at one point Sidney and her father are referred to as "the agents Bristow". Is this some sort of standard locution? Does it really come up often enough in the FBI or whatever, that two members of the family are both agents, that Americans would remember this arcane piece of grammar?

6. Again and again in the series our heroes would set out to capture something referred to as the "book" of an opposing spy agency: that is, identities and locations of all their agents and contacts, and so forth. Often this would be held on a computer, and some cockamamie scheme would be devised to get into the impenetrable computer.

On the other hand, it seems to me that spy agencies would not merely try to defend this data, they would compartmentalize it so that it was never in one place to be accessed. I wonder if this is how intelligence organizations really work. Certainly the peons are affected by "need to know", but are the bosses too? All these TV series show the hero sitting down at a computer, typing in a command, and getting a list of all current operations, or whatever. But surely such searches are just *too much of a security risk* to *ever* enable them. The Germans invented the cell system, where the central only communicated with other cells via cutouts. Did intelligence agencies ever really give it up?

7. Assuming the above is true, then you could say that all US intelligence activities are by definition "rogue". "Your mission, should you choose to accept it..."

8. A major weakness of the show was that it went on longer than they planned. This necessitated a "retcon" where the vanquished Arvin Sloane implausibly was put back in charge of our heroes, and old plots were recycled.

9. Much worse, the main "mcguffin" of the series, the works of the genius Rambaldi, never amounted to anything. Initially I really hoped that Rambaldi would turn out to be a fake – something like those scientific brainteasers which the Brits invented in WW2 and smuggled to the Germans in the hopes that they would waste the time of their best minds. I really hoped that it would turn out that Arvin Sloane had created all these fakes and had quietly created the entire trade in Rambaldi antiquities.

But no. Slowly it became clear that we were really supposed to believe that some shmuck in the 16th century had not only dveloped all this amazing tech, but had chosen to wrap it in layers of mystery for no apparent purpose other than to provide a plot for the latest episode.

So, with the secret of immortality, the ability to see the future, levitation, genetic engineering and everything else, Rambaldi's grand scheme was going to be revealed in the final episode...

But all of those weird machines and intricate coded messages under the arctic ice and whatnot turned out to be just an immortality drug. Fpetesake, I vaguely remember that at one point Sidney sneers to a henchman "What are you doing all this for? Did Arvin tell you he had the secret of immortality?" and the henchman sneers right back "You fool, it's so much more than that." Well, it wasn't.

I can just about accept that someone in the 15th century could have invented all that stuff, and seen the future, and whatnot. What I cannot believe is that his plan would be such a convoluted nothing, like a Rube Goldberg contraption that whirs all over the place for several minutes before finally, proudly producing a boiled egg.

2007 Jan 01 [ Mon ]

Intelligent chargers are available in Phnom Penh

In my previous posting on issues with NiMH rechargeable batteries, I described the problems that can occur if you do not use "intelligent" chargers, and mentioned that I have never seen such chargers in Phnom Penh.

Today, browsing at the "K-4 Group" store in the Sorya Mall, I found multiple models in several brands which appeared to have some degree of intelligence. One boasted 3 modes: dV, ie delta-V (probably the best if it works); overheating; and timer (what do they set the timer to?).

They were a little pricey at around 25 USD for the offbrand models up to 60 USD or so; the store – the big electronics store on the southern side of floor 3 – has the highest prices in Phnom Penh. Still, it may be worth it if it makes your batteries more reliable.

2006 Dec 03 [ Sun ]

Review: NiMH rechargeable batteries

In my previous posting review of the Canon A630 camera I referred to a problem with the standard AA NiMH rechargeable batteries that can be used with it: NiMH batteries tend to have a high self-discharge rate, higher than other batteries and much higher than non-rechargeables.

Here's the Wikipedia article on NiMH, which estimates a self-discharge rate of around 0.5 to 1 per cent per day: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_metal_hydride_battery]

That article however mentions that Sanyo has introduced a range of NiMH batteries with a significantly lower discharge rate of around 15 per cent per *year*. Assuming this product works the way Sanyo says it does, this makes them *much* more practical for photographers who tend to use the camera intermittently over several months before fully discharging the battery. I have seen these "Eneloop" batteries on sale in PP. www.sanyo.co.jp [http://www.sanyo.co.jp/koho/hypertext4-eng/0511/1101-2e.html]

The Wikipedia article also refers to the difficulty of recharging such batteries correctly. The Wikipedia battery charger article: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_charger] mentions that the products sold as sets, with a charger and batteries together, do not properly charge batteries that do not match the original batteries. Apparently there are "intelligent" or "delta-V" chargers available which monitor the paradoxical *drop* in voltage across the battery when it reaches full charge, but I have never seen such terms on chargers in Phnom Penh.

Simple chargers usually work by providing a semi-constant current for a fixed amount of time after being plugged in. It would seem that chargers should normally state the "constant" current and run time, but this is not usually available. The instructions may state something like "charges our 2100 mAH batteries in just 16 hours" from which one can guess that the charge current is around 150 mA. Often it is not at all clear whether the charge time is set by a fixed timer, or whether the unit really works by detecting the sharp rise in battery temperature at full charge – probably a better system as it should work for any variety of battery.

Incidentally, the instructions – even the very abbreviated ones – should be much clearer about how you have to use the chargers. For instance, they are designed only to recharge fully-discharged batteries, not to top up partially-discharged ones. Additionally, it is not at all clear that many products have an LED which comes on as soon as you plug it in, and which goes out when the batteries reach full charge. One's natural reaction when you see the charger plugged in with the light off is to assume it's fallen out of the socket slightly and jiggle it – presumably resulting in a new, unnecessary and harmful charge cycle.

I have seen a "fast" charger at Phnom Penh Electric for 13 USD (that can charge 8 AA cells simultaneously) but I am a little wary of it without a much fuller description of the way it works. It says it can charge batteries in just one hour, but that implies that any error in detecting the full-charge state must cause damage much faster.

What I would like to do is actually *measure* the current into the batteries; this would allow me to use any charger and know how long to leave any battery on charge. However, it is frustratingly difficult to connect up test leads to the charger and batteries. (I have never found battery holders for sale in Phnom Penh.)

Another issue in Phnom Penh is the wonky state of the AC supply. Just last night the power went out for about ten minutes while I was charging some batteries. Conceivably when the power goes out it causes any timer-operated charger to reset the time, resulting in up to double the desired charge time for *each* outage.

2006 Dec 02 [ Sat ]

Review: Canon A-630 digital camera

A couple of weeks ago I bought a new camera. The selection in Phnom Penh is not great, but there were a couple of features I really wanted that narrowed down the choice to just one: the Canon A630.

I had considered getting a DSLR, but couldn't find one for sale without the stupid zoom lens which negates most of the advantages for me. Additionally, the extra weight and bulk are especially important in this climate.

The features I really wanted were a foldout screen and non-proprietary batteries. I detest having to pay an inflated price for proprietary batteries, but that's not the only problem.

1. In a year or two they can go completely out of production

2. The manufacturer never updates the technology – batteries have been improving steadily but if your camera is four years old so is your battery tech

3. If you realize your camera mfr makes lousy batteries there's no second source

The Canon A630 has the additional feature of being able to use regular alkaline cells if necessary – great in emergencies.

Another issue that becomes important on a trip is that if all your portable items use the same standard cells you only need to lug one charger around.

The other thing about the Canon is that it has a foldout screen. I don't understand why this feature is routine in video cameras and rare in still cameras. Why do advertising shots promoting cameras always show a cute couple smiling into the camera, when they had to hand the camera to a stranger to make the shot?

Even more significantly, the foldout screen makes all kinds of shots possible that were impossible otherwise. It's easy, for instance, to take a shot when you're standing in a crowd. It's also easy, or at least possible, to take a picture with the camera right against a wall, or from the viewpoint of a computer screen on a crowded desk.

The one on the A630 has the feature of being rotated through 180 degrees so that it's safely on the inside against the body of the camera until you open it up to shoot. That's a huge advantage if you carry the camera in a pocket.

I've started to worry that the screen makes the camera less reliable, but a cursory search of the web did not show that as a particular problem (although people grumbling about camera failures can be found for any model).

Oh well. Let's move on to things I discovered after buying.

The big issue with the batteries is that there's no battery level display. All you get is a warning light saying it's about to die – like an oil level warning light, instead of a gas gauge. This is really disappointing. My 6-year-old Canon camcorder has a wonderful display that continuously shows hours and minutes of operating time remaining. I know that as the camera can take any kind of AA battery it can't really be sure what any voltage level really means, but how tough would it have been to build in some sort of voltage readout? Failing that, how about a running count of exposures, on-time, zooming etc, so that you could figure out that after about 12,500 "blr units" it'll probably die?

Another mild issue with rechargeable batteries – not really Canon's fault – is that there seems to be no agreed system for *topping up* NiMH batteries. The available chargers just force a somewhat constant current in for a preset amount of time, and then stop (if you're lucky). Since you can't top them up, you have to run them down to zero and then put in a spare set. This is not too bad because I can buy a spare set for 7 USD, but is certainly extra weight and bother. Additionally, NiMH batteries tend to self-discharge rather fast, so unless you are using the camera to take hundreds of shots per month you'll get distinctly less than full life out of each replacement set.

The Canon has much better controls than my Minolta Dimage X (which has started burning out batteries, one reason why I was so eager to find a camera that you could get generic replacements for). It has, among other things, manual focus and spot readings for white balance, which would have made most of my shots on the Minolta better.

A big issue with the Minolta however was poor access to the options it *did* have. For instance, not only was it fiddly and non-obvious to set the camera to timer, but it went back to non-timer for the next shot! Combine that with my tiny, wobbly tripod chosen to match the camera's size and any chance of fixing a problem by repeating the shot vanishes.

The Canon has similar issues with its menu system (compared to a manual camera where all the settings are displayed and changeable immediately), but I was gratified to find many nicely-chosen convenince features. For instance, many settings are retained even through poweroff. Another great idea is a menu option so that after you take each shot the camera sort of goes to display mode for that one shot, so that you can zoom in, check focus and whatnot, as long as you like; then you can just partially press the shutter button to go back to shooting mode. It really cuts down on the stress on the shoot/display mode switch (I'm surprised the switch on the Minolta lasted so long with no apparent problem).

Likewise, if you set manual focus, the display changes to showing the center of the screen in a zoomed-in mode to help you check focus, but reverts to normal when you gently press the shutter button.

A mildly worrying point is that I forget how many auto features have been turned off in my current mode. Not only is white balance retained, but also manual focus, which is harder to see immediately on the screen (until you zoom in). Perhaps, every time you turn such a camera on, it should mildly point out that some settings have been retained, list them, and ask for confirmation.

Another problem with the menu system is that I somehow managed to set the camera to 640x480 resolution when I had intended to do a spot white reading. OK, I concede I must have done this myself, but I don't remember ever making a similar mistake with a menu system.

Another issue that is not exactly Canon's fault is that I need to think about a lot of auto settings every time I start shooting. For instance, I have several times forgotten that in sunlight I can lower the "ASA" setting for better shadow noise.

When I carry the Canon I use a regular canvas bag, not emblazoned with a logo, that snaps onto my belt. This would be fine except for two things: the stud that snaps on the belt, and the stud that snaps the cover of the bag closed. Both of them are rather small and hard, and to make them work you have to press strongly agains the body of the camera. This is quite worrying on the display side even when the face of the display is folded on the inside, and is even more worrying on the lens side, because the system which closes the lens is made of very flimsy strips of plastic. I really wish Canon had provided some sort of manual sliding lens cover that could have been made much stronger. (Incidentally I have not seen kosher camera bags which included significant padding or other features which you would think would help protect the camera. I'm referring to bags for point-and-shoots like the A630, compared to the full-size "gadget bag" style that you'd lug an SLR, flash and lenses around in.)

I did not install the software for several days after buying the camera because I gloomily assumed it would be terrible, and it turned out to be indeed that. For one thing, the driver never seemed to do anything useful – this may be because I tried to run the install from a copy of the software on the HD and said "wtf?" instead of complying when it demanded I put the CD back in after a reboot, but even when I installed the driver manually it was useless.

Additionally, the camera stores videos in motion JPEG format, but the sw does not have a utility for converting them into anything else, and Quicktime (provided with the software) doesn't work either. I have quite a lot of sw, none of which understands motion JPEG. (That's not quite true. I do have some, but it managed to repeatedly drop frames during the conversion, even though it took about 20x real time. Sheesh.) (On the good side, the audio was not at all bad, although of course there's nothing useful like a mic socket.)

And this is a small point, but intensely irritating. If the camera can't display shots unless they were taken on that camera, and not edited by any other software, why the heck doesn't the utility sw include a function to convert shots *back* to a format that the camera can display? That omission was bad enough on my old Minolta – why is it *still* a problem 5 years later?

2006 Jul 11 [ Tue ]

Movie review: "Starship Troopers"

This is a sf movie made in 1997 by Paul Verhoeven. Ebert review: rogerebert.suntimes.com [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19971107/REVIEWS/711070305/1023]

(I now think his review is inaccurate, but it is still a useful reference.)

Wikipedia (which I had not read when I wrote the rest of this article): en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_%28film%29]

SPOILER ALERT

Don't read the following unless you've already see the movie, or are determined never to (in which case why read this?).

I'm writing this review because I saw the movie again a few days ago on Cambodian TV, in Cambodian without subs. I have several times seen people suggest that it's a useful exercise to watch a politician speaking with the sound turned off, because while he's concentrating on the words you can clearly read his body language. Anyhow, watching the movie while understanding little or nothing of the dialogue (I did catch a few things, like the hero used the polite word "tian" to an officer, whereas my dictionary calls it antequated) seems to have given me an insight into what the *significance* of the movie is.

When I first saw the movie I was impressed by the special effects but disgusted with the way it travestied the original novel by Heinlein. Ebert asserts that he has read the novel many times as a child and indeed that it was intended for children, but he calls the movie a faithful adaptation, which astounds me. In the movie, most things about the aliens just make no sense, and the soldiers are issued with the ludicrously ineffective rifles (which Ebert does point out as ineffective) instead of the "power suits" which made the soldiers in the novel so effective (and interesting).

There was a lot of similar criticism at the time, and I never read a coherent response from the director Verhoeven. The movie certainly seems to be a satire of fascism, so I wrote it off as a juvenile exercise in propaganda that was too incoherent to be worth further consideration.

My insight now is based on an opinion which I heard when the movie was released: that the movie simply had *no* relevance to the novel except for a few superficial elements, and Verhoeven wanted to make a completely separate movie. I now realize (I think) *what* that movie is.

It is simply another version of "Phantom Menace". Lucas recently stated specifically that the plot of "Phantom Menace" is intended to refer to the way the USA manufactured a pretext for starting the war in Vietnam (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which was apparently just a gleam in Bush's eye when "Phantom Menace" was being planned). I'm sure Verhoeven wanted to present the same idea: that an evil government manufactures a war in order to seize absolute power. See what this explains:

1. Many, many scenes show that the government and society are completely callous about their own citizens: for instance, a drill sergeant breaks a recruit's arm and sends a knife through another's hand for no particular reason. (Medical technology seems to make repairing those injuries a more trivial matter than today, but certainly the pain would be the same.) In other words, the government would be entirely capable of creating a war that would kill millions gruesomely to achieve its ends.

2. The ludicrous discrepancy between the guns and the starships which according to one diagram allow the Earth forces to reach a star on the other side of the galaxy (and come back with no pesky special-relativity issues) in days is explained: the government *wants* its soldiers to die, so it gives them a weapon which seems no more effective than an M16 (which was also surprisingly ineffective, although not so blatantly).

3. This also explains the utter lack of military planning. If I had been in charge of an invasion from space, I would have wanted to know about those blasterbugs (my word) that could hit my battleships in space first. And if I had seen them for the first time after the invasion started, I would have pulled out immediately and shot my intelligence officers. (Incidentally, when I first saw the movie the scenes where crippled battleships drop out of formation seemed ludicrous, but I now realize they were probably not in orbit, but "hovering" at a fixed location relative to the surface using some sort of drive system, so as soon as their drives were out of action they would start to fall under gravity. But I digress. The real question is why the battleships were in such close formation, even after they came under attack.)

Indeed, it makes me wonder how the government actually implements such an incredibly incompetent invasion. Although up till recently there was no public criticism from military officers about the fiasco in Iraq. Hmmm. But what about the commanders of those sacrificed space battleships? Perhaps the government deliberately picked chowderheads for those positions, much as the medical schools pick dull normals. The hero's girlfriend, for instance, seems to be a clever and competent pilot but ludicrously reckless. Hmmm.

4. Despite the ability of the bugs to attack spaceships above the atmosphere, the initial meteorite attack on Buenos Aires seemed like a doubleplus-implausible form of technology. It also seemed to be a dumb thing to do. What would the motive of the bugs have been, just to poke us in the eye with a stick? ...Etc etc. So many parallels to 9/11.

5. Notably, racism and sexism appear to have completely disappeared by the time of the action. For instance, there's a shower scene with naked men and women together, and they simply make no reference to it. This was one of the things that surprised me when I first saw the movie, because I assumed that Verhoeven, in making an antifascist movie, would have wanted to associate the society in the movie with classic fascist methods. I now view this as another reason why the government chose to invent an *alien* message: it was *easier* than creating an internal enemy, once people had lost the habits of racism and sexism. (Including anti-*male* sexism; I don't know how a young straight man could see a dozen young pretty girls naked and not get an erection, but presumably nobody would pay attention to an erection if they don't pay attention to naked girls.)

Incidentally, I actually saw the first few seconds or so of this scene on Cambodian TV, replete with naked breasts and buttocks, though not penises. Apparently they do not create a censored copy of a movie before the broadcast: they just pay a guy who flips to a promo when a nude scene comes on – or several seconds after it starts.

6. In the movie, mutilated veterans are commonplace, even before the bug war. In the book, the human race has been involved in many conflicts, and the bugs are just one of the enemies. I don't remember any discussion of previous enemies in the movie. Maybe they were all crippled by their drill sergeants (as has always been common in the Soviet Union). I think Verhoeven just wanted to show that the government had had a continuous policy of conflict, despite the apparently peaceful society on Earth itself.

2006 May 13 [ Sat ]

Movie review: V for Vendetta (2006) (Long, anarchist viewpoint)

As usual in my reviews, I will not provide the usual plot and actor listing. For that you can refer to Ebert: rogerebert.suntimes.com [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060316/REVIEWS/60308005/1023]

Or here: www.popmatters.com [http://www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/v/v-for-vendetta.shtml]

Here's a review that makes the interesting observation that Meanwhile, government security personnel surrounded the production at all times . some of whom were identifiable to the cast and crew, and others who maintained anonymity within the crowd to ensure the security of everyone involved.: www.scifislacker.com [http://www.scifislacker.com/films/v-for-vendetta.shtml]

Here's the Wikipedia article, which I did not read until after I had written everything else below. It addresses various questions I raised about the relationship of the movie to the original graphic novel: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta]

SPOILER ALERT

Don't read any further unless you have already seen the movie. If you haven't seen it what I say probably isn't going to make any sense anyway.

1. A large part of the plot is that the British government secretly created a deadly virus and caused an outbreak killing thousands in order to create a terrorist scare which would allow them to suspend civil liberties. You can see that this might be near and dear to my heart. (Heck, my father and brother-in-law both *worked* at Larkhill, the research center which in the movie developed the virus.)

On the other hand this is a mass-market movie, and I could find no mention of the implied criticism of the Bush/Blair axis in Ebert's review.

Also, I have to wonder what the actual *effect* of this movie. It seems to be saying: yes, the government can seize absolute power without anyone suspecting, and retain power for decades until a superhuman hero turns up by accident and saves the country without the citizens needing to do any actual hard work. I do not like that message. Would it not have been a more interesting movie if it had shown *real* people and how they might *really* organize to overcome the dictatorship, preferably *before* it gets started? Why exactly did the creator of the original graphic novel, Alan Moore, wash his hands of the movie project?

Also, I haven't read that graphic novel, but does V really torture the girl he loves for no particular reason in that, or just in the move? Are we really supposed to learn that the end justifies the means?

Or are we just supposed to feel sympathy for a terrorist, so that when the British government tells us that the people identified as the London tube bombers, who never had any history of violence or extremism, decided to blow themselves up to kill a lot of innocent people, we can say "gosh that sounds plausible"? Actually V's actions in the movie do not seem to me to be terroristic in the sense of intended to cause terror in the citizenry, although they did cause terror in the government, and the government chose to present them as terroristic in its propaganda. Hmmm... Why would the movie choose to blur that issue?

I am reminded of the movie "Red Dawn", a much more realistic depiction of citizens resisting a totalitarian takeover (although still not very realistic: it did not address the large fraction of people who will collaborate with whoever is in power; the people who say, when I complain about the Bush administration's refusal to accept the rule of law, say things like "well if you're not a terrorist you don't have anything to worry about"): it is much more interesting, and artistically powerful, to present realistic protagonists who are successful using methods we can believe in.

Bush's "signing statements" in which he declares himself above the law: www.boston.com [http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04/30/examples_of_the_presidents_signing_statements/]

2. The technology is surprisingly unadvanced considering the movie is set around 2035. Computer equipment especially is clearly labelled Dell, for instance, and is not given any patina of age.

...Hmmm, it has just occurred to me that the original graphic novel was created in the 80s, and may have been set around 2006. It would have been much more interesting if the movie had been set in the present, using Blair instead of Sutler. Yes, much more interesting.

3. Weapons likewise do not seem to have advanced, although that has been true for a long time – basically since the AK47. V restricts himself to throwing knives, for no apparent reason. Someone who can tunnel new sections of underground line alone should have little difficulty acquiring a firearm, or indeed making one from scratch.

Incidentally, V chooses knives which work very poorly as throwing knives. With their design, they will tumble end-over-end in flight, as indeed shown. This is lousy for penetration, and of course needs supreme skill – or luck – to ensure that they reach the target at a point-forward phase. Real throwing knives have all the weight at the head, to minimize tumbling.

4. Although early in the movie we see that (of course) the government has set up a surveillance state, Evie manages to wander around later with no apparent difficulty and explains this (perhaps in a late-added scene after screening audiences complained) by saying "fake ID works better than a Guy Fawkes mask". Now I know that facial recognition systems don't really work very well at all right now, and I know that criminals rapidly adapt to identity-card systems, and I know that fascist governments don't *really* care about catching criminals but only about oppressing the average citizen, but would it *really* be that easy? For someone who had no money, and no contacts? When there are *retinal* scanners on every street corner?

Likewise we do not see how people actually *behave* after living in a police state for a while. For instance, Evie tells us she stood right next to a close colleague in a store, and the colleague said nothing. This is wrong in so many ways. For instance, the secret police in such countries occasionally do "sting" operations where someone is noisily arrested, and then noisily escapes, and then asks all his old colleagues for help. Any that do help him find out they made a serious mistake.

It is just conceivable that her colleague recognized her, was sympathetic, but hoped that if necessary she could get away with not immediately denouncing Evie by saying that she didn't recognize her. That would be why she said nothing: plausible deniability. In a real police state, Evie would have thought of that possibility. She would also have thought of being careful not to *confront* her colleague, to allow the colleague to *retain* that plausible deniability.

5. For some reason Evie retained her shaven-head hairdo for several weeks after her release. None of the crowd shots showed that such a style was in fashion: it was a sore thumb.

6. I've read reviews that liked John Hurt as the dictator, but I thought he was just over the top. It is a fundamental lie to tell the viewer that bad people look evil. The dangerous ones are charming and convincing. You have to do boring things like study logic and rhetoric to try to analyze their arguments and the actual *results* of their actions, rather than just wait for a close-up view of the spittle flying from their lips.

Indeed, *most* evil people take care to present themselves as likeable and trustworthy. People have to pay a lot of money to buy those suits and keep them pressed, and build those impressive buildings with the classical columns and the exhaustingly high entrance steps: they take the trouble do that to make weak people believe in them even though their real aims are fraud, blackguarding and murder.

7. As part of V's campaign to involve the citizenry (at last) in a (largely pointless) demonstration, he has 500,000 mask-and-cape outfits resembling his own sent out to random citizens. V does many unbelievable things in the movie, but this one seemed utterly preposterous. Such an operation would involve thousands of people. Where would these items be manufactured? Where would he get the money? Would a surveillance state really allow anyone to send anything without intrusive, time-consuming and probably humiliating procedures?

Eric Frank Russell wrote a much more credible sf story called "Wasp" about a government agent who is trained and equipped to bring down an enemy totalitarian government by small, clever, direct attacks on the enemy government's dignity and credibility. Why do we get a movie like V for Vendetta, whose appeal (at least to the Wachowski brothers) seems to have been the excuse to have slow-motion knife battles and black swirling capes, instead of "Wasp"? Algis Budrys's "Falling Torch" is also better-written than this movie, although more depressing.

In this review of "Wasp", they quote Terry Pratchett saying re this newly reprinted novel, "I can't imagine a funnier terrorists' handbook.": www.infinityplus.co.uk [http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/wasp.htm]

See also: www.sfsite.com [http://www.sfsite.com/06b/wasp83.htm]

8. Evie's accent is really excellent. It manages to be faultlessly English without having any regional, class or period overtones – at least to my ear. Perhaps that means it sounds oldfashioned and transatlantic. As far as I can see young English people are no longer taught to use any standard accent, so for Evie to show *no* accent is now impossible.

Here is a really excellent interview with Barbara Berkery, Portman's (Evie's) dialog coach: vforvendetta.warnerbros.com [http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/cmp/interview_barbara_b.html]

Apparently the director told Berkery to aim for an accent slightly off RP. It's interesting that he was clueful enough to say that. ...Hmm, it also says that the director decided she would not have a regional accent because her parents had moved around a lot. Good.

The article also addresses Weaving's (V's) accent. This was fine too, but as he's Australian I was somewhat less impressed: one imagines they would train in RP.

Berkery's filmography at imdb: www.imdb.com [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0075373/]

9. The numberplates were of a new design, although the cars were not. US movies, especially Universal, tend to have extremely poor signage, using typefaces and other elements that scream "USA" even to people with only a casual awareness of the issue. Most of the type elements used in the movie were adequately credible, although one would expect type usage to shift over the decades. The Nazis were certainly very aware of typefaces and made a huge shift in the middle of WW2 away from Blackletter faces, proclaiming (after mandating them for years) that they were jew-influenced! I would have thought the Sutler party would have made some similar effort, although perhaps technology would have shifted and they would mandate that all video must be .WMV and not .OGG.

Rather flabbily, the movie uses Gill Sans as its "official" typeface. That's just too easy. Also, the layout was a little slack: it looked like the posters had been laid out in MS Word. Real posters are designed by experts and hand-kerned.

10. At one point V survives being shot at by using some sort of crude metal breastplate, after surviving similar weapons several times earlier in the movie by deftly dodging the bullets. I thought this scene was all wrong in several ways: it makes his earlier abilities seem confusing; it is dramatically crude; V should have been able to steal or even make a much better bulletproof vest; the people shooting at him might well have expected him to be wearing body armor – considering his previous escapes – and would have aimed at exposed extremities, especially after the first few rounds had no effect. And finally, his armor just didn't work very well. A man who can steal an underground train and hide it while he builds sections of track for it making armor like Ned Kelly? Hmmm.

11. Several soldiers were wearing berets that were not properly folded. Well, things can change over the decades, but to me they looked like berets that had been snatched off the prop-department shelf and dropped on the actor's head. I noted a red and a black beret that looked wrong. Alternatively, as a British-German coproduction, they may have been using a prop department unfamiliar with British military clothing (Studio Babelsberg/Medienboard).

12. When V tortures Evie, not only is he behaving like the kind of totalitarian nutjob he seems to want to eliminate (I believe that torture should be confined to the bedroom, where it belongs, in addition possibly to the Ramada on I-495), his plan rests on her not recognizing him as he assumes the persona of several motley guards, interrogators etc. I began to suspect when the camera repeatedly did not show the audience a clear picture of these stooges' faces, although I found it hard to believe that the movie was making such a dramatic blunder. It is even sillier if we are to suppose that Evie was unable to see their faces because they were always in shadow to Evie as they were to the camera.

13. All the troops had M16-type weapons. I think that's extremely unlikely in the political/world scenario of the movie. Conceivably, the USA, having collapsed in the movie, might have sold off its weapons, but it was shown as still involved in various civil-war-type conflicts; I don't think a state sells off its small arms in that kind of circumstance.

I am reminded of a Dr Who episode in which he and his lovely sidekick return to a parallel England which is some sort of fascist or communist dictatorship (cleverly they don't specify which, and anyway how much does it matter?) and tellingly the troops are all carrying AK47s.

14. A Brit in the movie tells V to keep his hands off that "levver" – ie pronouncing the word "lever" with a short "e" in the first syllable. I was very surprised. Conceivably minor roles in this Brit-German coproduction were filled with German actors, with good but rather transatlantic accents.

It's also possible that this was intentional, suggesting that American English has made further inroads into British English by the period of the movie, but I don't think so, and it's not logical. Sutler's "Norsefire" party would more logically have insisted on purging neologisms. Still, it's nice when a movie can contain little Easter eggs that one can spot. The only fan letter I have ever written to a TV show was occasioned by an episode of "Alien Nation" (a series about a near future in which a race of alien slaves flees to Earth and has to adapt to human culture): we happen to see a movie theater in a "Newcomer" ghetto which is playing a cowboy movie dubbed into Tenctonese (the alien language) but amusingly the Tenctonese is being spoken with a cowboy accent!

15. Likewise, a soldier, on seeing something that induces shock and awe, says "Jesus bloody christ!". Something struck me as wrong about that phrase. Solely from Sprachgefuehl, I would say it is much more likely as "Jesus fucking christ". It looks as though someone originally wrote the latter, and then decided that Brits say "bloody" a lot, and decided to change it. (I think the actor was one of the soldiers whose beret looked wrong, too.)

Additionally, although soldiers do indeed swear a lot, the circumstances called for a bit of British understatement, not Teutonic/American panicking. To me it would have been much more believable, as well as funnier, if he had simply said "Cor.".

16. Although I have no complaints about the acting in the movie, it seemed to me that many of the lines were just very difficult to give a credible reading to. The only such line I scribbled down was "He is you, he was all of us.". The fake-Shakespearean stuff was OK in context: it was playful and humorous. I liked the little glance aside from Evie at one point where she seems to be saying "I am about to be raped by a *boring* nutter". The kind of thing that bothered me was where the actors had to deliver lines containing real emotions: they were just badly written. Maybe they were verbatim from the graphic novel.

17. At the end of the movie, they play a section of the Rolling Stones track "Street Fighting Man". For some reason however they miss out the "here comes the new boss – same as the old boss" line which I think is one of the best things in it. I wonder why?

2006 May 10 [ Wed ]

Movie review: "Puerto Vallarta Squeeze" 2003

Although made in 2003, this has never been given a theater release in the USA. It was apparently set to be released on DVD in 2006 April.

Original novel reviewed by Amazon: www.amazon.com [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/044651747X/002-6293079-1250414?v=glance&n=283155]

Movie reviewed at filmthreat: www.filmthreat.com [http://www.filmthreat.com/index.php?section=reviews&Id=8678&archive=&match=&page=0]

As usual, I will avoid recounting the entire plot, and focus on details which caught my attention. You will need to check the above reviews – or even the movie itself – to see what I'm referring to.

SPOILER ALERT

1. I was particularly charmed by the choice of name for the ineffectual, paunchy, middleaged white hero who is slowly running out of money with his native girlfriend: Danny.

2. I was very surprised that all three major characters – Danny, Price and Maria – were depicted in such a physically unattractive way. Camera angles seemed to have been deliberately chosen to maximize Danny's paunch, and Maria was almost always shot closeup with a wide-angle lens, magnifying her full cheeks and jaw to make her seem almost troglodytic. The lighting angle was often from below, like a creature feature. (Maria is played by Giovanna Zacharias, who only has three hits on Google, so I couldn't find her actual age. The film does not specify the character's age.)

As for Price (Scott Glenn), his face looks more lined and aged than people who are *dying* usually look in Hollywood. Similarly, his hair is greasy and thin, and his shoulders are slumped as if he were a resident in a nursing home. (Physical strength is quite important for accurate shooting, especially with a pistol.)

I wondered if the director made a conscious attempt to avoid Hollywoodizing the novel. For instance, I was surprised to find that in the novel Maria is 22: in the movie she looks perhaps 35-40. This is not too old for a bargirl, and makes it more likely that she has actual romantic feelings for Price, who as a Vietnam vet has to be at least 53 in 2003 and looks like he's 65. (Apparently Glenn's DOB is 1941, so he would have been 62 at the movie's release.)

3. The naval officer who Price shoots at the beginning was his CO, so presumably older than Price, but he appears to be a fit 25.

4. The assassination itself struck me as unlikely. Is this the first time Price encountered the officer in all that time? Wouldn't Price already have grumbled about him, so his superiors would have been aware Price was his deadly enemy? Do people plan assassinations in crowded places anywhere except in Hollywood? Can even the most skilled shootists actually plug someone through the eye at 25 yds with a pistol held at the waist? (This is feasible with a laser sight, although there was no evidence of one, and it still would be a stupid idea.)

A better movie might have developed the idea that someone *deliberately* brought Price and the officer together again, in order to wipe out the officer. For instance, suppose the officer had been discovered to be *actually* selling secrets – but by a source they didn't want to compromise. But they also wanted to get rid of Price, so they killed two birds with one stone.

5. I noticed the Thai subtitles gave Price's name as "raakhaa" – the Thai word meaning "price". Maybe it's an actual name in Thai, too. The name given to Maria was strange – I couldn't find it in the dictionary. Danny was thaiized as "dairn-nee". I think "Puerto Vallarta" was thaiized as "puerto".

6. Much is made of a captive ocelot, which at the end Danny pays five thousand dollars to buy and liberate. Personally, I would have tried to haggle, starting at ten dollars. That shack didn't look like they made a heck of a lot of thousand-dollar deals.

I would also have wondered if they trained the ocelot to come back at night, same as the birds that Buddhists buy and release.

7. What was Price's *plan* in setting up the meet at the abandoned chapel? If he had any feelings for Maria, why let her get in the line of fire? Why did he expose himself at all – surely he would have been expecting a long-range sniper hit, so why not wait behind cover until the two US agents show themselves? Did he really believe the line that the murder had been written off as an accident? How did he know they would show up without the Mexicans? (If I had been the Mexcian honcho, and my two US agents had suddenly peeled off from the convoy, I think I would have wondered what was going on.) Come to think of it, how did he *know* about the abandoned chapel (and how did he find time to get her a new dress that fit her?).

8. I liked the happy ending of the movie better than the novel. On the other hand, I wonder how Price got Maria back in the USA. They didn't have a vehicle or money. And is a bargirl – even one who isn't really that kind of girl, and stap me if when you talk to them *not one of them is* – really going to love being alone in the wilds with a 65-year-old?

9. Overall, I didn't like the way Maria treated Danny. He was doing his best – taking a big chance to try and make enough money to stay with her – and she got in the way and then complained about him endangering her. Perhaps Danny's role was just better written, so that I could see his point of view more. The author probably knows more about ageing American writers than about Mexican bargirls or assassins.

10. On the other hand, despite all my criticisms, I quite liked the movie. The basic plot, of course, could take place in Thailand or Cambodia as well as Mexico (except that they don't border the US – although if I were on the run from US agents I think I would run *away* from the US). I think it's a pity it didn't get a bigger release.

2006 Feb 02 [ Thu ]

Movie Review: "The Incredibles" -- and the issue of originality

SPOILER WARNING – do not read this before seeing the movie.

I've been thinking about how to write this for a very long time, because I'm really trying to address a very slippery concept: originality in art. I don't know if I really pinned it down.

Several months ago I had my first opportunity to watch "The Incredibles", an animated feature movie released by Pixar/Disney in 2004. User comments on imdb were almost without exception extremely positive: www.imdb.com [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317705/usercomments]

I absolutely loved the movie myself. Since getting the DVD, I've probably watched *each of the comment soundtracks* at least twice, never mind the movie itself.

But even as I watched it I was getting more and more concerned over the issue of originality. That's actually referred to by one of the comments on imdb:

My only concern is that there is so much similarity to The Watchmen that those who haven't read the graphic novel will be saying "That's the Incredibles movie" when Watchmen finally comes to fruition.

Yes, I thought about Watchmen. The premise of "Watchmen" – an "illustrated novel" with the premise that costumed avengers have been forced into retirement – is very similar to the premise of "The Incredibles". And the problem is that "Watchmen" is *very good indeed*. Many might say it was the high point of achievement in comic books, not to mention a compelling and affecting story that stands comparison with any ordinary novel in novelistic terms. But it hasn't reached the stage of movie production yet (despite reports as long as ten years ago that Terry Gilliam had been lined up to direct). And now that "The Incredibles" has "used" its premise, how *can* it be brought to the screen?

On the other hand, a similar idea, it turns out, was also used by DC Comics (as I found in the imdb opinions link above):

Several years ago, DC Comics issued a mini-series that attempted to explain the demise of the Justice Society by claiming that the group was forced to disband after their loyalty to America was questioned during the 1950's.

Perhaps, indeed, the idea was not original to "Watchmen".

But "The Incredibles" stole ideas, style, music, etc from *so many original works*. People in the imdb seem happy with these "homages", but when you re-use James-Bond badguy secret bases and TWA's terminal styling and the "Fantastic Four" superpowers and the tank/deathray scene from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" – and on and on and on... where is the originality? And what has Pixar done to the value and meaning of those works?

I don't have my copy of "Watchmen" handy to check, but I found one guy who said that the "dangerous capes" sequence in TI was a direct steal from "Watchmen". So not just ideas, but actual *gags* were stolen.

On the other hand... it was all done *so well*. For instance, the bad guy's base looked far better than the originals in the Bond movies: more beautiful, more logically designed, even more realistic than they were ever able to create out of plywood in Pinewood Studios. Elastigirl's animation in the sequence where she sneaks into the base – despite her limbs being trapped in several automatic doors – is amazingly believable and still very funny. The sequence where the "manta ray" aircraft plunges into the lagoon is exciting and truly beautiful.

At an earlier point, Bob Parr throws his boss through several thicknesses of drywall, and corporate drones pop their heads around the edge of the array of holes: it's funny, fast, and achingly skilled.

That's what makes this movie *important*. This isn't a bunch of porno investors deciding it'd be funny to make a video called "Bareback Mounting": the people who made this were *good*. They *could* have created their *own* stuff, couldn't they? In fact they *did*, with "Toy Story" – or at least I thought so until I saw TI.

In my usual paranoid way I even wonder about the theme of being forced to deny and stifle superpowers. That – aside from being another steal – sounds a lot like individualism, which the PTB have been trying to demonize and eliminate for years. *But the movie is actually crushing the careers of the individuals who created the original ideas that it stole*. It makes me wonder: did the designers of the movie consciously want to oppress people with talent? Is there something so subversive about "The Watchmen" that a mass-market movie version has to be stifled?

Still, I don't exactly know where I stand myself. It's a bit like moving to Asia, where all of a sudden none of the brand names mean anything. Rolexes are 20 USD, Cartier belts are 2.50 USD, Cipro is 1.50 USD for ten days... The other day I was looking at a watch branded "Seiko" for 15 USD, and I was grumbling about the price. The assistant brightly pointed out that I could get the *exact same watch* – ie from the same mfr, presumably somewhere in China – for 12 USD, if I would accept a less prestigious *label*. I've been in Asia for a while, but that one made my head spin. And the really funky thing was *I wanted to spend the extra money*. I guess I wanted to have something that *pretended* to be the best, *even when everyone who sees it* (at least here in Phnom Penh) knows it can't possibly be real.

So I guess I want to *think* that "Watchmen" is original (to the extent it can be, as an elegaic alternate view on the entire history of superhero comic books). And I feel that "The Incredibles" – despite being a *wonderful* movie – is depriving the creators of "Watchmen" both of their deserved fame and the chance of seeing their work on the movie screen.

On the other hand, I didn't pay a lot for my copy of "The Incredibles". Hmmm.