Jaap van der Velde

Nuclear vs. democracy

With the Fukushima situation in Japan still slowly growing further out of hand, discussions about the pro’s and cons of nuclear energy abound. Whereas some governments like the one of Angela Merkel in Germany take the opportunity to shut down the local nuclear industry, others like France can’t wait to assert the safety of their plants, even though he declared nuclear dead some time before.

What’s frustrating in all this, is that it’s really hard to get any good facts to base an opinion on. Am I pro or con? Not quite sure. But very recently, I read an interesting editorial (Dutch paper newspaper, NRC Handelsblad) with a viewpoint that changed my outlook.
Continue reading Nuclear vs. democracy

Too busy!

You know how people always tell you they don’t have time, or they’re too busy to do something with/for you? This is what they’re really doing. Oh, and perfection matters, don’t try telling me otherwise 😉

Fight flames with Unix and Firefox

Thanks to my colleague, who went tripping around Andalusia in the south of Spain and spotted several of these fire extinguishers. Finding the Firefox alone would have been awesome, but the Unix one takes the cake. Between these and the ubiquitous “Bimbo”-brand bread (which is originally Mexican), the Spanish seem to have a knack for branding that raises some eyebrows and lifts some corners of mouths in Anglophone countries.

Pix in space!

The first photograph of earth, taken from space dates back to October 24th 1946. The actual image reminded me of frequent recent news stories featuring hobbyists sending camera’s into space (if you take the definition of space as starting at 100km above sea level not too strictly). In the past few years, a British IT Director, a family from New York, a group of Spanish teen students, a pair of MIT students and probably quite a few more all created low budget craft that went high enough to shoot images showing the black of space and the curvature of the Earth – though only Robert Harrison can actually claim getting to ‘space’.

First photo of Earth from space

Geordi and Picard prefer Android

If you’re still on the fence on which smartphone OS you prefer, maybe this will swing you towards Google’s Android:

Geordi Laforge and Jean-Luc Picard are talking on a phone, conveniently housed in the innards of the popular android Data. (Note how I didn’t mention their respective ranks, to avoid coming across as too much of a geek – or worse: a Trekkie)

The shot is from “Phantasms“, an episode (#158) of the TV-series “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. And in case you’re wondering: no, I did not shop the phone in myself, it’s the actual shot from the series. And yes, the lousy shopwork with the mismatched placement of the phone is in the series as well. In the scene itself it doesn’t show as much, since there’s another shot of Picard talking inbetween.

Getting out of Redirect Hell

Recently, many redirect services have been popping up. From my perspective, it seemed to start out with the success of TinyURL.com which saw a lot of use in newsgroups, instant messaging and e-mail. The main advantage at the time was the prevention of problems with clients and servers adding linebreaks to long URLs posted verbatim, breaking the links in the process. With the advent of microblogging and Twitter in particular, TinyURL got more popular and other services started popping up like the popular Bit.ly.

Now, people are voicing concern about Redirect Hell, since services have started creating redirections to redirection services. How does this work? Well, a service like Bit.ly is fairly simple. It allows you to enter an arbitrary URL. It quickly checks if it has seen it before and tells you its short version for it, if it has. If it hasn’t, it generates a new and unique short URL – often a random arrangement of characters like http://bit.ly/d30KsT, which happens to link to this page. Whenever anyone clicks a shortened link, their browser tries to get them that page (starting with bit.ly) and the Bit.ly service just tells the browser the original address, sending the browser there instead (this is called redirection).

If this ‘original address’ is yet another service like Bit.ly – say TinyURL – it will tell the browser what it thinks the original address was and send it there, i.e. redirect it again. Try this one http://bit.ly/cST1h0; did you enjoy the confusing page inbetween? Now Twitter plans on adding another service on top, changing all links to links starting with t.co. So, you could end up clicking a t.co link, getting sent to a bit.ly address, then getting sent to a tinyurl.com address and finally ending up at the lolcats.com address you were interested in.

Now I am wondering: what is stopping a service like t.co from resolving all known redirectors like bit.ly themselves and directly redirecting the user to the non-redirecting result page?

Instead of the user going down the t.co >> bit.ly >> tinyurl.com >> lolcats chain, Twitter could do that in it’s own spare time and update the initial t.co >> bit.ly link to t.co >> lolcats. They would still get all the information they want (i.e. “how many people link to what” and “how many people clicked this link”) and their users get snappy performance. As a bonus, the full redirect chain only happens once. Everyone we care about wins.

I can see how bit.ly c.s. wouldn’t be amused about getting cut out of the loop, but there’s really no stopping it. Unless of course they fight back and block any requests from known t.co ip ranges, but there’s ways around that too…

La Horde

La Horde (2009) – [rate 3]

In recent years, some excellent horror has come out of France (Inside and Martyrs were shown at previous AFFF editions) and I suppose it was only a matter of time before a typical zombiemovie was added to the list.

La Horde is likely to feel as a fresh take on the genre by those who don’t play a lot of computer games. It pits a number of highly unlikely heroes in an urban environment against an unstoppable horde of zombies. It offers no explanation for the source of the sudden breakout, nor does it offer any particular background as to why and when this is happening – to its credit in my opinion.

But considering the typical demographic this type of movie will reach, assuming they don’t play a lot of videogames is a bit of a stretch. And those that do won’t be able to watch La Horde without Left 4 Dead popping into their minds every couple of minutes. It’s definitely an original story that has little to do with that game, but the styling, the setting and the flow of the movie all reminded me of L4D.

And although the movie has great sound design, is properly scored, looks good in every way and has all the right actors in all the right places, it’s not really about anything. Sure, the cops have to work with the robbers and that yields some results, but nothing much beyond the predictable. Most zombie movies have an agenda, but in La Horde, it’s either absent or too subtle for yours truly.

Still a good watch if you really like zombie flicks in general.

The Seventh Circle

A Hetedik Kör (The Seventh Circle) (2009) – [rate 3.5]

On my festival voting ticket, I scored this movie a whole point below it’s value, at least as I perceived it. The main reason being that this isn’t really a fantastical movie at all, unless you feel that any movie involving religious influence deserves that label. I’m not quite that cynical yet. Nor do I think that anything fictional deserves the label ‘fantastical’.

It’s a tale of a group of early teen friends in a small Hungarian village. All is well for these kids doing typical kid stuff, until a red haired, limping boy arrives on the scene, apparently out of nowhere. His influence on the children slowly turns the story to an inevitable conclusion and you’ll have a hard time hoping for the best, especially if you know that the seventh circle of hell is reserved for the violent against others, self, God and nature.

So, even though I felt it was a bit of out place at this particular festival, I would still recommend you go and see it if you like intense psychological drama without gore against a backdrop of catholicism.

Dark and Stormy Night

Dark and Stormy Night (2009) – [rate 3.5]

A black and white, cliche-filled, overacted, lousy effect-filled murder story in a supposedly haunted house – riddled with revue-type jokes. Why exactly give it 3.5/5 then? Well, because this is a tribute to exactly those movies that made them cliche and it gets it exactly right.

Dark and Stormy Night succeeds in remaining funny and heartfelt all the way through to the end. And there are many small tributes in there that aren’t overly exposed, but sufficiently visible for those who already have a warm place in their heart for this type of B-movie. For those that don’t, this movie could change it and if it doesn’t you’ll be sure to laugh at it, inspite of yourself.

European Shorts #2

More shorts and, in my opinion, the better block of the two. Though I agree with most that Logoland from block #1 is the best overall short in the festival, this one has better looking, smarter, funnier and more though-provoking shorts. I particularly liked Fard and Lebensader and the Little Dragon looks amazing.

If you can find these shorts anywhere on the web, they’re all well worth a few minutes of your time.

Fard on indieClickTV