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Katyń

February 22, 2008 Film / Media / Real Life™
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Caught Andrzej Wajda’s Katyń this week as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival and have to say I was fairly impressed. It will probably be the only film I’ll see since the prices go up at this time of year, and indeed I was quite lucky to catch this one since the first showing sold out with over a week to go, no doubt in large part due to the significant number of Polish people living in Dublin. Sadly, being sat right at the front didn’t give a particularly good vantage point for flicking between the pictures and the subtitles, and this is one film I’ll have to watch again on DVD before I can fully make up my mind, but the screenplay was well written and easy to follow despite the amalgam of different plotlines. Unfortunately, some of the character portrayals were rather wooden and to some extent detracted from the film’s message, if there is one beyond the plain Rankean historical analysis.

Nevertheless, Krzysztof Penderecki provides a beautiful score to underline the images, with a smattering of Tchaikovsky and Chopin thrown in during some of the propaganda scenes. As a piece of cinematography the film probably deserves its Oscar nomination, though it is difficult to tell whether it will be remembered more for that or its political implications. That the film does not get caught in a loop of nationalist propagandism is important in light of the tendencies in Moscow and elsewhere. Power is not what comes from the end of a gun but the ability to make people believe ones lies. Certainly disturbing news from Putin’s Russia.

The film’s climax is a rather visceral, and to some extents shocking visual of what the film is after all about. However it does offer an interesting juxtaposition for those taken by the irrationality of mankind—as officer after officer is dispatched in the name of political idealism, these same go to their deaths with a prayer on their lips. Absurd or simply tragic? One thing however is for certain, and that is that my quest for the non-melancholy Polish film continues…

Katyn
For a brave new future.

Domesticating zebras

October 1, 2007 Biology / Books / Science
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Noble—but undomesticable?

How do you domesticate a zebra? You can’t, or at least that’s the justification put forward by Jared Diamond in his Guns, Germs and Steel for why these wild beasts were never used as draught animals or cavalry in sub-Saharan Africa. Much of what Diamond writes has a logical ring to it, and whilst the evidence is sparse and in places contradictory, his conclusions fit the necessarily teleological approach. Others have accused him of too much geographical determinism, and perhaps they have a point, but the one thing which struck me as being peculiarly out of place in Diamond’s writing was his treatment of Africa’s wild animals as being unsuitable for domestication. He argued that it was only by chance that Eurasia benefited from having suitable species such as goats, sheep, cattle and horses, and that the native varieties of these animals in sub-Saharan Africa were inherintly unsuitable.

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Company of Heroes Review

August 29, 2007 Games / Media
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Company of Heroes

With some of the highest scores awarded for a real-time strategy, being one of the Top 20 Metacritic All-Time High Scores, Company of Heroes ended up being one of those games I had little excuse not to try out, given that my PC could (just about) run it. Admittedly I’m unable to comment on the graphical splendour which seems to have charmed so many gamers’ hearts, as every setting on my screen reads either ‘low’ or ‘off’, but I’ve played a fair few strategy games over the years, and despite my early cynicism, Company of Heroes has warmed to me after a little experience on the online battlefields.

Whenever a game is released with a major historical theme, such as the ever popular World War II era, cries go up about the loss of realism to the gaming gods. Such and such would never happen, this and that never existed. Of course, many strategy games don’t even attempt to pander to the pedants of realism, and have been all the more successful for it (take the recent Supreme Commander, or any in the Command and Conquer series). Company of Heroes is no saint in this regard either, but its efforts to create a game at once realistic and fun have to be admired. There will always be players who complain about how developers could have stayed truer to real life, but Relic have done a good job in creating a game which at least seems realistic enough, and in ways which make the game fun to play. Shells fired at tanks have a chance of only glancing off the armour, and depending on the situation might even miss altogether; units under heavy fire become surpressed, limiting their movements and actions, or even pinned, leaving them helpless unless pulled out or relieved; and the variety of weapons and vehicles keep the tactics fresh and varied.

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Problem installing Altiris SVS

April 8, 2007 Computers / Technology / Windows
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After reading a review over at freewaregenius.com, I thought I’d check out this neat little program, free for personal use. It offers a way to install programs as a ‘layer’ on your system, transparently noting all changes and additions made in the installation, and enabling you to turn this layer on or off, or seamlessly delete it without worry. Although not limited to creating layers for installations, this would seem the perfect solution for people who wish to try out different versions of a software package without them interfering with one another, or simply test out some software without the hastle of worrying if its installer left anything behind.

However, I came across a problem during the installation that seems, ironically, to be caused by things being left behind. The installer would fail and blurt:

There are file operations pending on this machine. The machine should be restarted, and setup can be run again.

Whilst a reboot should fix the problem, this was not the case for me. Your natural recourse to a problem like this might be to delete everything in your C:\Documents and Settings\your username\Local Settings\Temp folder, as detailed here (in Chinese), however this brought no joy. Instead, some erroneous registry entry was to blame.1 The solution is to delete the entries and restart, thus:

  1. Click Start > Run… and then type regedit.
  2. Find the following branch in the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager.
  3. Double-click the PendingFileRenameOperations entry.
  4. Delete any entries and click OK.
  5. Close the registry editor and restart the computer.
  6. Run the installer again.

If this does not work, another solution would be to export the above registry branch, delete the PendingFileRenameOperations registry entry altogether, run the installer, and then reimport the saved file.

  1. Note that these entries are probably only erroneous if they are still present after restarting Windows. Ensure this is the case. [↩]

Audiobook showcase

March 20, 2007 Books / The Web
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Another site for those lovers of audiobooks. Podiobooks offers a way for authors to showcase their talent for free, parcelling up their work into episodes which can be delivered via podcast or downloaded manually from the website. Whilst listening to the books is free, the website recommends users to donate, as 75% of donations goes straight to the authors themselves, which they regard as a much more equitable way for authors to market their abilities. It also offers something of a return to the serialisation of novels so popular in the past; subscribe to the book(s) of your choice via RSS and listen to the podcast via your favourite media player, or upload to an mp3 player to listen on the move.

Other ways to read

March 16, 2007 Books / The Web
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Just a late addition to the recent list of book-related websites, for those who enjoy audiobooks the LibriVox website offers readings of books in the public domain, read by volunteers. A few problems with the online catalog system when I checked it meant that it was difficult to simply browse for titles, but there appears to be plenty of variety in what’s available, and probably most of what’s available on Project Gutenberg will end up there.

New ways to read

March 2, 2007 Books / The Web
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Books

Books

Amongst the plethora of new and interesting websites which crop up every month, there were a few which caught my eye recently that weren’t related to the usual photos, videos and blogs. Instead they were related to books, and whilst no doubt most of the websites won’t take off, there were some interesting ideas among them.

British Library – Alright, so the first link isn’t exactly a new idea, but the British Library have recently unveiled their new website, with a particular emphasis on its new search capabilities to retrieve results from its increasing online resources.

What Shall I Read Next – This website does exactly what it says on the tin. Type in a book title or author you read recently, and up comes a list of recommendations based on what titles others have read together. However, the system relies on a wide range of users for offering recommendations beyond the most popular titles, and as is mentioned here, the chances of catching up with the years of data a website like Amazon have accumulated in order to provide reading recommendations is quite slim.

BookMooch – BookMooch offers a different approach to ‘peer-to-peer sharing’, and takes what some might consider a logical step. The idea is that readers can swap titles they’ve read with other users, paying only the cost of postage, whilst simultaneously being able to search for titles they would like to receive. A points system is in place to assure the credibility of its users, and to help readers find worthy homes for their old books. Whilst there is still room for abuse, the system employs some safe guards regarding ratios and feedback comments to prevent fraud. Overall a pretty interesting idea, the basis for a small book-bartering economy.

Full Books – On the other hand, if you can’t wait for the postman to deliver your next read, you could always head here for something to tide you over. The listed titles are quite varied, some might say even random, and the website seems quite sparse otherwise, with titles published in standard HTML format. Probably not the best place to go first if you’re looking for a work that’s out of copyright.

Bookalizer – The final site on this list isn’t technically to do with reading, but instead a method for making a little money out of readers! Essentially it offers an easy way to generate Amazon book adverts for your website according to either page content or your own criteria, by specifying key words or product IDs. Using Amazon’s associates programme, the clicks generated can give your website a little bit of income, or else go to some predetermined ‘good cause’.

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