Тут пишут что Амон Тобин записал саундтрак для какой-то новой компьютерной игры. Саундтрак вышел отдельным диском на Ninja Tune, и в марте выйдет в формате 5.1 Долби. Спасибо Игорьку за наводку. Там кстати можно послушать этот саундтрак, спосмотреть видео клип и прочитать интервью

Что люди находят в Кысь Татьяны Толстой? Недоваренная смесь Замятина и Bradbury с легкой долей абсурда. Или я чего-то недопонял?

Офисная политика начинает занимать больше времени чем она заслуживает. Иногда даже больше чем собственно работа. Вчера убил пол дня копаясь в старых версиях чужого кода чтобы доказать что эти дурацкие ошибки там были и во времена царя Гороха. Больше времени чем у меня займёт их исправить. Но пойди докажи что ты не верблюд... Отсутствие в старом коде даже намёков на правильность для них доказательством не служит. Как себя вести когда какая-то мелкая и довольно бесполезная сошка пытается пробиться наверх с помощью инсинуаций и обвинений? Вести превентивную войну? Дать в глаз? Искать другую работу?

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

I finally finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars, the last book of Mars Trilogy. What a waste of time this turned out to be. Over 2000 pages to arrive at a pathetic melodramatic ending worthy of a romance novel. Such a letdown... which I should've expected given the size of the trilogy and KSR's inability to bring any thread to a close anywhere in the first two books. Will I ever learn? The third book is hardly even a novel. It picks up exactly where the second one leaves off, with a smaller break in the narrative than between two adjacent chapters. And it ends just like the first two - with another war/revolution. Except this time KSR does not even bother to make it believable and instead goes for some kind of utopia where "make love not war" crowd prevails. The only two characters with some depth, bitter ideological enemies through all of the trilogy, suddenly kiss, make up and jump into the bed for some geriatric sex. Yuck. KSR touched on some very promising subjects, such as the balance between terraforming and preservation, the overpopulation of Earth, the multinational corporations and world government, the integration of immigrants, the role of an individual in history... But all of these topics went absolutely nowhere. Instead, KSR got distracted by weather patterns, geriatric medicine, geology of the asteroid belt, lichens, neurotics, Kelvins, pseudo-scientific gybberish, and lots of sex. Too many subjects, too little depth. Like trying to combine Arthur C. Clarke with Leo Tolstoy and getting the sketchiness of the former and wordiness of the latter. I feel like I watched a week-long marathon of a day-time soap opera. A mindnumbing and completely regrettable experience. It would've been so much better if the contents of the trilogy were packaged as a series of short stories or novels, each with its own theme and story, perhaps sharing some of the characters and time lines. But that would require a talent for making a point, finishing a thought, wrapping things up. The talent which KSR has so far failed to demonstrate. Or maybe he should've just given Red Mars a proper conclusion and stopped to think if he had anything else to say on the subject. He would've ended up with a great novel and lots of free time, and spared the rest of us the effort of working through books 2 and 3. Regrettably, he chose quantity over quality.

DIVX Player

Купил на днях RJ-800DVX - Region-free DVD/DivX/xvid/etc player. Теперь качаю с интернета русские мультики... Кто-нибудь может посоветовать что показывать полуторагодовалому ребёнку? Что-нибудь вроде Baby Einstein, только по-русски?

Кириллизатор

На прошлой неделе разбирался с XULом. Немного разобрался. В результате сделал расширенийе для Firefox и Thunderbird - встроенный переводчик с латиницы. В меню добавляется элемент "To Cyrillic" и горячая клавиша Ctrl+Shift+Q. Печатаешь латиницу где угодно в браузере, выделяешь её, нажимаешь Ctrl+Shift+Q и voila! Главное только случайно не нажать Ctrl+Shift+W, как я только что сделал - это закрывает окно firefox'a, и всё напечатанное теряется в недрах компа. Детали и инструкции здесь Для пользователей IE там есть bookmarklet. Не очень достойная замена но всё же что-то.

La Mala Educación

Вчера посмотрели Bad Education Алмодовара. Потрясающий фильм. Не совсем понятно почему он попал в категорию NC-17. То есть понятно, он про голубых, с сценами голубого секса. Ну и что? Эти сцены сняты со вкусом, ничего лишнего в них нет, никто ничем перед носом зрителей не трясёт - в отличие от большинства стандартных гетеросексуальных эпизодов с меньшими ограничениями. Ну да ладно. Нам-то всем это можно, а детям до 17 это кино всё равно скорее всего не интересно

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Green Mars is the second book in Robinson's Mars Trilogy. It continues right where Red Mars left off and is by no means a self-contained book. The transition from Red Mars to Green Mars (and on to Blue Mars, which I have not finished yet) is seamless, so if the books weren't so wordy they could probably be published as one novel. Yet somehow Green Mars managed to win several awards. I have mixed emotions about this one. On one hand, it follows the story started in Red Mars, which I liked a great deal, further developing its characters and ideas, and so inherits some of the interest generated by the first book. On the other hand, it's really really boring. While Red Mars was mostly about establishing a viable human colony and about the magnificence of the lifeless planet, Green Mars is about building of a fair society and the struggle for independence, and about the conflict between terraforming and preservation. The story follows endless arguments over various topics from human rights to the desired amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. Unfortunately KSR skips over the details of some of the more interesting and ambitious ideas, such as ecoeconomics or gift economy. Instead he gets distracted by minutiae, the daily routine such as delivering coffee, loading up on kavajava, repeating it page after page until the actual issues at hand go out of focus. Without further exploration, these new ideas sound like yet another lame attempt to present communism in a positive way and make the reader believe that it is possible to implement in practice. The Martians and the notions of commune and sharing... Where have I heard that before? Ah! Heinlein's "A Stranger In A Strange Land". Now that was a good book. KSR's style is very repetitious, especially when talking about the planet. He will bore you to death with endless descriptions of geographical features, weather, snow and ice, lichen and algae. Every canyon, every patch of growth, every aquifer and cave are dealt with in detail, over and over again. The temperatures, as he goes over his imaginary weather reports, are always presented in Kelvins, making everything sound more extreme or scientific than it really is, until KSR himself starts getting confused with them. Because of all this, the book is a perfect soporific. Character development is extremely uneven. Plenty of effort is put into every one of the major players, yet most of them come out lopsided. Some are always grumpy or distracted to the point of complete uselessness, others always too optimistic, upbeat and energetic, running around like energizer bunnies without a hint at what motivates them so. Some are wrapped in mystery, others do nothing but struggle for more power. With such a weird presentation of characters, I hardly even questioned the plausibility of bunch of brilliant scientists turning into fantatical worshippers of viriditas or the absolute absense of life. Only one of the characters seems truly multi-dimentional, and he makes the book worth reading. Some of the most interesting passages in Green Mars are about how Mars changes Sax who changes Mars, about Sax's search for understanding of people and their motives and his metamorphosis from a hermitic mad scientist to a leader of the new world. All it all, I found this book to be a necessary evil. If you have not started on Red Mars, think twice whether you want to get sucked into nearly 2000 pages of boredom. If you read it and didn't liked it, don't bother with Green Mars. But if you want to know what happens to the original cast and their ideas, steel yourself for a few really slow hundred of pages and hope that Blue Mars will make the whole experience worthwhile.

Совесть

Начала мучать совесть что не шлю денег в помошь пострадавшим от цунами. Решил что $200 поможет мне с ней договориться. Отправил деньги в UNICEF. Ещё $200 за меня отправит Time Warner. Совесть на время замолчала. Как это оказалось просто. Теперь начинает приставать с тем то что я от неё так дёшево откупился. Уймись, бессовестная!

Транслитератор

Я вчера практиковался с JavaScript-ом и переписал на него свой транслитератор латиницы. Если кто пользуется латиницей, потестируйте его пожалуйста. Он здесь Кода оказалось всего-то несколько строчек. Теперь надо бы сделать из него bookmarklet. Для Мелкомягкого Путешественника это сделать, как ни странно, проще чем два пальца о..., а для Мозиллы пока-что никак не придумаю. Мозиллу тут ругать вроде бы не за что - в w3c спецификациях нет ничего чтобы поменять выбранный в textarea текст. Даже не найти какая textarea или input в данный момент активны. Mожет быть стоит сделать этот букмарклет для MSIE и выпустить его на свободу... Но я так не люблю MSIE что не хочу ничем поощрять тех кто им пользуется.

Ask a stupid question...

In light of the tsunami disaster, The Independent is asking some opinion makers if "2005 might see a new determination to tackle global poverty" Apparently there's plenty of determination. They just can't quite determine what they are determined to do. Most of these opinions are really stating nothing and only reflect on the geniuses behind them. But some are just too good to ignore.

LORD HURD OF WESTWELL, Former foreign secretary The danger is that resources which might have gone to Africa will go to this instead. While huge publicity continues to be given to the tsunami, human beings are killing each other in Iraq, and places like Darfur.

Right. So in order for the world to continue doing absolutely nothing about Darfur, we ought to deny the help to the victims of the quake. Former foreign secretary?

BILL BAILEY, Comedian It was the same after 11 September. Everyone said it was a great opportunity to try to understand the world but it was used by the US as a reason to go on a rampaging adventure in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Oh, great. Is he saying that after the world helped the poor US after the Sept 11 attacks the US went on a killing rampage, and so we ought to be careful who we help?

SIR MAX HASTINGS, Journalist and historian We have to bear in mind that we have been here before. There have been tragedies before, and many fine things have been said, a lot of them by the US. We just have to hope that in this case they will follow through.

There is US again. I must've misunderstood the question.

TONY BENN, Former cabinet minister It may make people realise that the UN needs to be well-equipped and funded. If people diverted money from weapons and war, we have the technology and money to be able to help - if we decide to do that.

The UN diverted plenty of oil money from food - I don't see that money helping anyone fight poverty.

DINOS CHAPMAN, Artist Western capitalism demands that people must be impoverished. I cannot think that anything will change this year, because we are the ones who have made the world the way it is. I don't believe in altruism.

We caused the earthquake, we made the ocean floor deeper so that it did not dampen the wave, we filled it with water. We keep these areas overpopulated and the people poor. It must all be the fault of the US, the Great Satan, the infidels. It's just strange to hear such ridiculous crap from the Brits who are supposed to be somewhat educated. I am surprised it even gets published - I am almost ashamed to reproduce it here!

Если мне когда-нибудь ещё понадобится взять в прокат грузовик, напомните мне пожалуйста что U-Haul для меня не существует. Это такие бляди что я лучше выращу себе горб и всё потащу на нем чем обращусь к ним ещё раз.