Seen on kottke.org

I don’t like Hulu’s politics on this matter, but I did find this a little funny, especially because at first I thought it was Jason’s intention to show an error message.

I got a job. All through summer I had been looking for one but without any luck. I had sort of settled for looking for one I didn’t really like (i.e. a non–computer job), but then I got contacted by an old acquaintance of mine. (Everything is relative, but someone I hadn’t spoken with for two years prior to him contacting me, is old in my world.)

He invited me for a job interview at ToonPrint A/S. I went to the job interview on Friday, had a try-out day on Monday, and started full-time on Wednesday.

I have now been there for a few weeks, and it’s a great deal of fun. The co-workers are nice, the tasks are different from what I have previously done — mainly generating print files with PHP.

The only thing that could be considered a minus is the commute. The office is located in Køge, which is about 40 kilometres from where I live. This means that for the first time in my life, I can’t rely on my bike to get me where I need to go — which has been the case with the schools I’ve attended, and the places I’ve worked.

But I don’t really mind. I like riding the train — as long as it’s not too crowded — and I like having an hour to relax before I start working.

It does mean that I have to schedule dentist appointments etc. in the early morning, because I can’t just take a break from work to do it.

I cope with this, and currently enjoy myself a lot. It’s great to be back in employment.

I’m talking incontrovertible, structural damage, Human injury… Well, mayhem basically.

Who’s that hanging from the gallow tree? His eyes are hollow but he looks like me.

I spent some time today writing a port of Gruber‘s Title Case to PHP, but as it turns out, there is already one, which functions a little better, so I won’t publish it.

I’ll continue to use mine though, because, well, I rock.

(The way I discovered this, by the way, was rather bizarre. I had obviously named the plugin Title Case, and then, to my surprise, it turned out there was an update. Apparently, it queries the central plugin repository to check about updates. Very clever, but took me by surprise that I had already released an update.)

Are you afraid to die?

I recently saw both ‘The Incredible Hulk’ and ‘Batman Begins’ for the first time. This will not be a review of either, though I will say this: ‘Batman Begins’ is a masterpiece, while ‘Hulk’ is a decent film.

What I want to talk about instead, is screen-versions, the act of turning a book/comic/play/whatever into a film. (I do not consider ‘based on a true story’ to really be in this category.)

I am of the opinion that very few screen-versions live up to the original they are based on; the only film I’ve ever seen that was than the book is Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’. I hear it’s a similar case with the Godfather films, but I’ve never read Mario Puzo’s books. I once read an article claiming that trivial literature is easier adapted to, and perfected on, the screen — this seems rather logical; it’s easier to improve something that’s not good, than something already terrific. Or maybe, to be fair to trivial literature, to improve something that doesn’t take the full advantage of the media, as such can’t be said to do.

Yet films such as Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ are considered wonderful, despite being based on one of the most popular book series ever.

I think the films are great, but nowhere near Tolkien’s books, and as such, not great screen-versions. (And don’t even get me started on the Hary Potter ones; I’ve seen the first two, and they were so abysmal it made me genuinely angry.)

And this leads me up to the point I’m trying to make: you can only really judge a screen-version on two things.

First of all, you can of course judge it on its filmic qualities: lighting, music, acting, and all that malarkey, as you can with any film.

But then you can only really judge it as it compares to the original, whereas with original films, you judge the quality of the story.

If the story sucks, it is only fair to direct criticism at it, insofar as it deviates from the original on which it was based. I haven’t read either the Batman nor Hulk stories from which these two films originate. This makes it difficult to comment on the story; I could say that I think the beginning of Batman is quite cliché, with him being trained by ninjas, but I wouldn’t know if Christopher Nolan was just being true to the story — in which case it is perfectly legit, of course.

I think Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ is better than Bloch’s, because I think it is more scary — an obvious desirable quality of horror. I could say that the beginning of ‘Psycho’, with Marion Crane’s theft, is irrelevant to the core story, and should have been cut out. (Purely for argument’s sake; I do not think this is the case.) This, however, wouldn’t be fair to aim at Hitchcock, given that he’s basing the story on another story.

Of course, as I said, you can criticise all deviations; this is usually my main concern with screen-versions: all the good stuff they left out. But this still only lets you compare.

This can obviously be both a curse and a blessing for the director. A blessing because if the story is weak, one can always point to the original and blame it on that; a curse because you can’t get praised for your magnificent story — I personally think Hitchcock perfected Bloch’s story, but it was Bloch who came up with the idea of a man who takes over his mother’s personality.

What this all leads to is of course that I think most screen-versions, and the concept as such, suck.

For while the blessing may be such one, all it really does is remove the director’s responsibility for creating a good film, leaving him or her ways to escape.

The conclusion obviously is, you can never be really original with a screen-version — comparison is the only way to win. But if one’s focus really is on the filmic side, then it might just be the way to do it. I personally think the story is the most important aspect, however.

A player of the club I support today transferred to another club. The price was € 1,000,000 — 7,500,000 DKR.

Sporten.dk ran a story on this minimum fee release clause. The URI was as follows: http://www.sporten.dk/fodbold/sas-ligaen-20082009/retov-kan-kobes-fri-75-millioner

This is clearly an unfortunate side effect of automated sanitisation. While full stops shouldn’t be in URL’s, leaving it out in this case clearly is not ideal, and could give fans of the club false hopes. (75,000,000 DKR. is a lot of money for a player in the Danish league — to comparison, the most expensive player ever sold from Denmark, Daniel Agger, was sold for a reported 67,500,000 DKR.)

Play with fire, and you will get burnt. While I tried to make Jonathan Zittrain look like an ignorant jerk, I did that to myself. Apparently, as Andreas Carlsen pointed out to me, there was an Estonian in on KaZaA and Skype, although I am pretty confident he had less to do it than did Janus Friis.

Still, I was put in my place, and an apology to Zittrain is in order. Sorry, Jonathan.

Ever since upgrading to Mac OS X Leopard I have been annoyed with how software updates work.

In Tiger (and Jaguar, if I recall correctly), after doing an update that required shutting down, even though that should never be required, you could choose between rebooting and shutting down. I always chose shutdown, due to a simple behavioural tendency with me: I ignore such updates until I am going to shutdown anyway.

Rebooting thus never appealed to me, and I do think it’s a weird default behaviour. A user may be notified of an update at any given time during the period the computer is turned on. This means that the user could very well be in the middle of doing something, maybe even something important, at which time the update would be de-prioritised.

So they wait. But then, in Leopard, the shutdown-function disappeared, and one could now only reboot. Quite irrational, yes.

The simple solution would be to just put the old button back in. But an even better solution would be automation. I see two possible directions, neither of which preclude the other:

• Put in a button that says “Remind me when I shutdown”. Then, when the shutdown is called in a natural way — that is, not a hard reboot — the user will be reminded again of those updates. After the update, the system would then proceed with whatever shutdown-function the user attempted to do beforehand.
• Have an option in the preference pane that said to only check when the user had shut down the system. Then if there was an update the user could quickly take an overview of these, and decide. And then the system would continue what it was doing.

These seem much more appropriate to me than interrupting whatever the user is doing, and asking them to take a pause of several minutes from whatever important task they have at hand. That’s a bit disregardful of the user, in my mind.