Archive for October, 2005

Three … Extremes

Monday, October 31st, 2005

To celebrate Halloween, saw Three … Extremes this weekend. It consists of three short horror films by three Asian directors (Fruit Chan, Chanwook Park, and Takashi Miike) in one package.
The first of the three is Fruit Chan’s Dumplings. An aging HK actress finds that her husband is losing interest in her. To restore her former […]

Good Night, and Good Luck

Wednesday, October 19th, 2005

Saw Good Night, and Good Luck last weekend. For those who have been living under a rock — the movie is about a TV news host, Edward Murrow, who gets drawn into a conflict with Sen. McCarthy in 1954. McCarthy gets ridiculed on prime-time TV — more by his own words than by Murrow’s […]

MSU gaming aggression study

Thursday, October 13th, 2005

(Via Ars) RenĂ© Weber of Michigan State University, Klaus Mathiak of RWTH Aachen, and Ute Ritterfeld of University of Southern California claimed to have found a “causal link” between a violent video game and brain activity indicating aggression. Their study has not yet been published. However, the press release indicates that the researchers performed fMRI […]

Liability

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

Some people have recently been proposing for software developers to be held legally liable for bugs in their products. They claim that until programmers know that they can be sued, they will continue to write insecure or unreliable code.
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with a given company choosing to accept legal liability for […]

Advise

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

I was reading one of my favorite tech sites when I noticed an unintentionally hilarious Google ad at the bottom of the page:

My free technical advice: get a bloody spell checker for your “plain English” creations before unleashing them upon the Web.

Free as in … ?

Monday, October 10th, 2005

(Via a Machall rant) On September 11, 2005, there was a march from the Pentagon to the Mall, sponsored by the Department of Defense, to show support for victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks and for the US soldiers currently fighting in Iraq. The march had extraordinarily restrictive security — quoth the Washington Post […]

Everything is Illuminated, Mirrormask

Sunday, October 9th, 2005

Saw two movies this weekend.
First, Everything is Illuminated. My first impression — the characters who are supposed to be speaking Russian, are, in fact speaking Russian! And without an accent! And the subtitles translate their speech correctly into English! It is a rare treat for an American movie to do Russian properly. The basic idea […]

Firefox, GAZ-3937, and the end of civilization

Saturday, October 8th, 2005

Now that some massive homework sets are over with, can post again.
First, Firefox (at least versions 1.0x) has the unfortunate tendency to take up all the memory on one’s computer. I have seen instances of Firefox taking up more than 512M. Apparently, this is due to a memory leak in the Flash and Java plugins […]