Rob Hague's Blog

When I first published the previous entry, I’d mistyped the quote in the title as “You Killed Anne L. Retentive With A Type?” I corrected this, but then an alternative script for the comic in question popped into my head. “Hang on,”, I thought, “hasn’t Dilbert just grown all sorts of groovy, funky Web 2.0 shenanigans that allow you do do those ‘mash up’ things the kids are talking about these days?” (Free tip: if you want to read Dilbert without all of the extraneous bells and whistles, try http://dilbert.com/fast/.)

It turns out that you can produce modified versions of comics, but only in fairly limited ways. However, I do still have the GIMP:

(Original strip at Dilbert.com)

Tori and Ellie both warned me off it, which pretty much ensured that I would end up read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. I’ve not found it nearly as heavy going as predicted, but I did notice a couple of, well, idiosyncrasies that grate after a while. And I don’t like grating. Fortunately, at the pub on Sunday, we came up with a solution.

Even more fortuitously, an interesting way to implement said solution drifted across my radar a few days later. AppJet are a start-up that produce a really rather good web application platform. They’ve recently come to wider attention with their real-time collaborative editor EtherPad, but I thought I’d start with something more modest. So, without further ado:

The Comma Appeal

Read on for my thoughts on the AppJet platform itself.

“Once”, which I saw last night on DVD, is a musical. I’m probably as fond of musicals as any straight man is allowed to admit to being in polite company, but I recognise the problems of the form. Chief amongst these is the violence done to suspension of disbelief when people burst into song for no apparent reason. This just isn’t a normal reaction to, say, unwanted pregnancy, hanging, or Nazis. Passers-by spontaneously springing into oddly well-choreographed dance doesn’t help matters.

Once dodges this particular bullet by framing the songs in a story whose protagonists, being musicians, actually have plausible context for song-bursting-into. Films like The Blues Brothers and The Commitments have pulled this trick before, but here it is taken further, as the characters are singing about their situation in the manner of a traditional musical, but always in a way that doesn’t rip you out of the narrative. Even when the nameless female lead is wandering down the street in her pyjamas and in song, it’s done in such a way that you could almost, almost believe it might actually happen. Not quite, though - it is, after all, still a little bit of a fantasy.

The film as a whole is enjoyable, touching, and on a small, intimate scale. It feels more like a long TV drama than a feature film. As such, even though I’m not sure it would seem right on the big screen, it works very well on DVD. And very few bystanders dance at all.

Tori and I have bread machine and, contrary to the stereotype, we actually use it on a regular basis. Several people have asked for the recipe we use, so I thought I’d put it somewhere that Google could find it.

• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 teaspoons salt
• 2 tablespoons (30ml) olive oil
• 300ml water
• 300g strong white flour
• 200g strong wholemeal or granary flour
• 7g (1 sachet) yeast
• 2-3 dessert spoons of seeds (optional)

We get fairly consistent results on the wholemeal (4 hour) programme, or, if you preheat (but don’t boil) the water, the rapid (2 hour) programme. That said, different machines do slightly different things, so experiment. As far as seeds go, we’ve used sunflower, poppy, flax, linseed and alfalfa - they’re all good, so you can mix in a few different types.

Enjoy.

When I started the new-look blog, I was aiming to update at least once per week. A cursory glance at the timeline will tell you that, for the last few weeks, I haven’t managed it. I do have an excuse, however - the hard drive in my laptop died a sudden and inexplicable death. I’ve actually been quite lucky in this respect - in the twelve or so years that I’ve had a computer with a hard drive, I’ve only had one other fail on me, which I believe works out at well below the failure rate you’d expect for consumer hard disks - but it’s still a bit inconvenient. While I do have other devices that I could in theory use, you really need a proper, decent-sized keyboard if you’re composing text of any length. That eliminates everything but the desktop PC, which would’ve meant sequestering myself away upstairs instead of being sat on the sofa, still connected to other people. Well, at least it gave me a chance to read more, and get marginally less bad at the guitar.

In any case, I’ve now got and installed a new hard drive (at 320GB and 7200rpm, it’s substantially better than the 80GB/5400rpm one it replaces). Fortunately, I finally caved in and upgraded to OS X 10.5 a few months ago, so relatively recent Time Machine backups meant bringing everything back was a piece of cake.

Now I just need to think of something to write. Damn.

We caught another premiere at the Film Festival on Friday. Well, I say “premiere”, but the stars and red carpet all seemed to be in London a day before. And I say “caught”, but due to a slight mix-up with the time, we arrived half an hour in. On the plus side, they had author Toby Young and producer Stephen Woolley for a Q&A afterwards, and we got to find out that cinemas still have people with torches to show you to your seat.

I have to confess that the trailers didn’t fill me with confidence. However, with a reasonable cast, headed by the excellent Simon Pegg, we decided to give it a shot. I was pleasantly surprised; it’s by no means a classic, but definitely worth the price of admission. The main issue won’t be a surprise anyone who’s familiar with the book - the main character isn’t exactly what you’d call sympathetic. In fact, and it’s a little difficult to figure how to bring this up in a Q&A with the real-world counterpart sitting right there, he’s pretty much a grotesque. They’ve softened him up to allow the narrative to work as a romantic comedy, but as a result, he seems to veer wildly from loveable loser to contemptible creep. Pegg, and to a lesser extent his co-star Kirsten Dunst, save this from disaster with likeable performances, but it still sits slightly uncomfortably at times.

Than again, perhaps I’m being harsh. Maybe the first thirty minutes is pure gold.

Last night we caught the UK premier of The Understudy at the Cambridge Film Festival, and - assuming it gets a more general release - I’d thoroughly recommend it. The basic story (the tag line, “Dying for stardom she finds a role to kill for”, tells you pretty much all you need to know) could have turned into a schlocky car crash if given the standard Hollywood treatment. However, even though it was filmed in New York, it’s written and directed by a British couple, which might be why its both subtle and very, very dark. The only fault I might find with it is that the plot never really surprises - however, that doesn’t particularly detract from a great film. Highly recommended.

I was intending to start writing up films I’ve been to see, with an individual entry for each. I haven’t quite managed that, so here’s a grab bag of things I’ve seen recently.

I recently read a talk by the founder of GitHub saying that I (and everyone else) should start a side project. I’ve been thinking that I should do this for ages now, and the author made some good points that provide me with even more reasons to do so. One of thing things that he points out is that you need to allocate a chunk of your free time to working on your project. Fine; that isn’t the problem.

The problem I encountered was when I tried to implement one of his time-freeing suggestions, which was to stop reading RSS, and instead keep up with things on Twitter. This sounded like a good idea, and I’m already on Twitter, so I decided to give it a go. I started to follow John Gruber, author of the excellent Daring Fireball, and ran into the problem of the title. John lives in Philladelphia, which is on the east coast of the US (I admit I had to check this on Google Maps). This means that he’s five hours behind GMT. Given that Twitter is a more-or-less real-time service, the difference is immediately apparent. He doesn’t get up and start twittering until fairly late in the day where I am, and he carries on way past my bedtime. The upshot is that I get up and have a bunch of unread tweets, which isn’t all that different to my usual habit of reading RSS over breakfast. I’ll give it another few days, but I suspect I’ll be back on RSS before too long.

After bashing out a little HTML and CSS, and tweaking Apache config files a bit, www.rho.org.uk has a new front page, which points (amongst other places) here, so this site it now visible to the outside world. I’ve also created an archive of the previous (Blosxom-based) site on the off chance it’s of any use to anyone.

Now all I have to do is write some blog entries about something less tedious than configuring blogging software. Hmm…