Beowulf, the movie

Not bad at all. The movie retells the ancient legend and remains surprisingly close to the original saga. Beowulf comes across first as a true hero, strong, brave, and wise, in the prime of life, out to win glory by slaying a dreadful monster. Then in the second part, Beowulf is older, a successful and beloved king faced with a second coming of monsters. Despite loyal followers, wives, and mistresses trying to talk him out of it, a graying Beowulf pulls on his mail shirt, picks up his sword and goes to protect his people from a dragon. It's well done, and we left the theater with a warm spot in our hearts for Beowulf, a tough guy who never flinches from the path of duty.
The movie is three D (they issue glasses). The 3-D is used for spectacular effects which do get your attention. Spears and arrows and suchlike fly right out of the screen into your face. The rest of the flick is mostly CGI. It's well done, looking at the lead actors, Beowulf, Grendel's mother you almost think they are live. Some of the supporting cast do show their CGI origins, but all and all, its a big step forward for computers, another few years and we won't be able to tell live actors from CGI. Angelina Joli as Grendel's mother is very successful. She has Angelina's face, and some CGI bodily inhancements and I couldn't tell just how it was done. Did they digitize Angelina's face and create the actress entirely from pixels or did Angelina act the part live and the CGI wizards souped it up afterwards? There are some things I would have done differently, but all in all it's a good action adventure flick.
Any student assigned Beowulf as classwork should see this movie.

Who to vote for? NH primary is getting closer

Let's talk Republicans today. All my Republican friends really want a candidate who can win the election, i.e. beat Hillary. NH Republicans assume Hillary will get nominated, 'cause the polls say so, and because she seems the toughest candidate to beat. Most of us New Hampsters are waiting for Iowa, so we can see who is electable and who is not. None of the Republican front runners is irresistable. McCain's record commands respect, but his involvement in McCain-Feingold and last summer's immigration bill plus his age are negatives. Romney has good name recognition, but his lack luster performance down south in Massachusetts, and some well publicized policy changes on hot button issues raise questions. Guliani's performance in NYC during 9/11 make him seem like a good man in a storm, but his personal life and support for gun control and abortion don't make anyone happy. Huckabee was an also ran just a few weeks ago and no one up here sees any reason to change their minds on that, unless he should win in Iowa. Then Huckabee would be formidable. He is conservative as they come, and lacks the worrisome negatives of the other three front runners. On the other hand if he loses in Iowa, nobody up here will vote for him, who wants to hand the election over to Hillary?

Christmas Tree raising

Stopped at Corey's Sport Shop (used to be Corey's Gun shop, but we have to be politically correct now a days) to buy a Christmas tree. This year, instead of lashing said tree to roof of DeVille, I merely popped the trunk lid and stuffed the tree into the trunk. Drove home with a bungee cord keeping the trunk lid from flapping too wildly in the breeze. Deville showed the "Trunk Open" warning all the way home.
This Christmas we have improved upon past tradition. I now have a reciprocating saw with a pruning blade to cut the tree trunk and trim low flying branches. Used to do this with a hand saw, now we are mechanized. Placed the traditional green plastic trash bag on the floor, and adjusted tree stand to get him straight up.
Now the fun begins. First string the lights, including the infamous bubble lights that my mother has detested for 40 years. She thinks they are too plastic. Shake each bubble light to make it bubble again. Then, what's a Christmas tree without an electric train running around it?
Pull out the Hogwarts Express train set in bright red. Connect up the track, the power pack and sure nuff, it runs. Now the fun begins for the cat. She crouches on the floor, tail lashing back and forth, trying to summon up the courage to pounce on the moving train. But the train's confident whirring noise puts her off. Hours later, cat is still watching train intently, looking for a chance to pounce.
Then we invite my brother's family over to help with the rest of the trimmage. After doing beers, and a bit of stronger Christmas cheer, we are in the proper mellow mood. Glittery glass balls, santa clauses, candy canes, trumpets, and more. Cat is still watching the train. No attention deficit disorder in that cat. As the ornaments, and the beers finally run out, we declare the tree to be properly trimmed.

National Intelligence Estimate totally confuses Aviation Week

Last week's NIE, the one that says Iran isn't building a bomb, provoked a full page editorial in Aviation Week. Headline is "NIE on Iran and Nukes offers New Chance for Diplomacy". Oh really? This I need to see. US diplomat, "We will do this good thing and that good thing if you stop building a bomb". Iranian diplomat, "We are not building a bomb, you Yankees said so yourselves. And no way will you Yankees be able to sanction us or invade us, your Congress won't permit such things now."

Buying a laptop, withOUT Visa

It can be done. But it ain't easy. The major objections to Visa are extreme sluggishness, easily seen in the store, and extreme copy protection making it difficult to impossible to download music, copy CD's or DVD's, upload and download from your I pod. Advantages to Visa have not been reported by anyone.
Reloading XP over Visa is possible, but tricky. First you need a real XP CD. Those cost $200 at Staples. Then you need all the "drivers", bits of low level software that operate your hardware gadgets, disk, display, touchpad, wireless card, modem, LAN adapter, printer, DVD drive, USB gizmo's. The purpose of drivers is to make all the hardware look the same to windows. When windows wants to operate some hardware, write a pixel on the display, read the touchpad, write a block to disk, it sends a message to the driver, and the driver does what ever is required to make it happen. This allows windows to operate different brands of hardware that may not work the same way, even though they do the same thing. In principle all the drivers are available for download in the net. In practice finding them, and getting the driver that matches your computer EXACTLY, can be a nightmare.
All is not lost yet. Few to no companies are running Vista, so the "business" outlets still have laptops with XP. The "white box" people still do XP. We did encounter some web dealers with slogans like "Tired of Visa?".

Shooting yourself in the foot, the CIA way

Seems like some extra dumb agents video taped the interrogation of one or two Al Quada suspects back around '01 or '02. These clueless agents apparently forgot how much trouble tapes can get you into. Just ask Richard Nixon about tapes. Then they kept the tapes, and even dumber, let other people know the tapes existed. Interrogating an unwilling terrorist isn't a pretty thing, with or without waterboarding, and showing live action tapes is going to make the audience unhappy. Better not to videotape in the first place, and failing that, keep them secret and destroy them quietly.
Long about 2005, Jose Rodriguez, Chief of the CIA National Clandestine Service figured out that the tapes were nothing but trouble, especially for the CIA guys doing the interrogation. He had them destroyed. Mr. Rodriguez is an old CIA hand who plans to retire this year. According to some sources, he was able to get some CIA lawyers to OK the tape destruction in writing. If so, some CIA lawyers had best get their resume's (and alibis) in order.
Coming on top of the "Iranians aren't building a bomb" paper of last week, you begin to wonder whether we would be better off shutting down CIA. Can we believe anything coming out of Langley now?

The many panes of Windows Pt 3

Microsoft used to sell a client windows and a server windows, but they gave up the client version. (Client is personal computer, Server offers disk, print, and other services to other computers) Back at the beginning of the '90's the first Windows to hit the big time was Windows 3.1. The hardware was less powerful back then, and just getting the simpler client OS to run was a real trick. For better speed and smaller code size, important parts of Windows 3.1 were coded in assembly language. Coding in assembler is a pleasant pastime (I have done a lot of it), the resulting code is very fast and very small, but it is very tricky to understand. Even the original programmer may forget how his code works after a year or two. If the original programmer leaves the company, the secret of the assembler code may be lost forever. The company can keep shipping it, but no one knows how to modify or fix it. Windows 3.1 begat Windows 95, Windows 98, and finally Windows Millennium Edition (ME) .
Given the howling success of the client Windows, Microsoft started a project to create an all new from the ground up server operating system that would do all the client things and offer services to other computers too. This product would sweep away the last of the mini computers still running company networks. Microsoft hired a bunch of experienced systems guys recently laid off from Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) to pull this off. The DEC guys wanted to do it right, the DEC way, and in one way the succeeded. The new Windows NT was written all in C, was modular and readable. Unfortunately it was also slow and fat. Windows NT begat Windows 2000, Windows XP, and finally Windows Vista, the slowest and fattest of them all.
For some years Microsoft was shipping and supporting both the client Windows 9X and the server Windows NT. Support is a crew of programmers fixing Windows bugs. Microsoft had two such crews, a 9X crew and an NT crew. Since NT could do everything 9X could do, and NT was easier to understand and fix bugs in, Microsoft decided to cut support costs in half by dropping 9x Windows. That is why we all are stuck with slow, vulnerable, bug ridden and fat old Windows NT and it's descendants.
Many of the vulnerabilities of Windows would go away if the server features were removed. The viruses do much of their dirty work by asking a server to perform some service (such as loading and running them). Pure client operating systems don't offer services, which blocks a lot of viruses, and contain far less code than servers, 'cause they don't do as much. The number of bugs is proportional the the number of lines of code, so smaller operating systems have fewer bugs than big ones. Small is beautiful in the software world.
There is a market for a good client only operating system out there. Maybe some company will take advantage of the opening one day.