• The Life Aquatic is a unique movie. Not quite comedy, not quite drama, it still manages to be interesting, never dull, often hillarious and even moving at times. It tells the (fictional) story of oceanographer Steve Zissou (played by Bill Murray) in his last great adventure: trying to find and kill the shark that ate his life-long friend Esteban. Although this may sound like a modern-day Moby Dick, the rest of the movie certainly isn't. With an insane cast including Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Anjelica Huston, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum and Michael Gambon this movie seemed to have faded into obscurity simply because it is so odd and unusual most people simply can't figure it out. Recommended.
• Versus is a Japanese action flick which includes Yakuza, zombies and supernatural forces. Despite terrific action scenes and some amusing characters (particularly the, er, protagonist) it completely fails to mesmerize; unlike some of its Chinese counterparts (such as Black Mask) the movie doesn't flow, it just drones on and on into monotony. Stay away.
• Four Brothers is the story of, well, four unlikely step-brothers (two white, two black) whose mom is shot down by gangsters and they seek revenge. Although the base plot is pretty standard fare the movie itself is very well made; it reminded me strongly of The Boondock Saints (itself a highly recommended movie). Four Brothers isn't quite as good but still works very well and manages to combine comic relief with some drama and lots of action. Recommended.
• Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story is a hillarious movie with Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller. I usually dislike Stiller intensely, but in this particular case it works very well. The (relatively stupid) plotline pits Peter La Fleur (Vaughn) as a proprietor of Average Joe's Gym, a gym for people just like you and me (well, not really - I hope I'll never be as pathetic) facing foreclosure, against White Goodman (Stiller), owner of Globo "We're better than you, and we know it!" Gym who's trying to take over Average Joe's. Fast forward a bit, you got the guys at Average Joe entering a dodgeball tournament to win a reprieve from Average Joe's mounting debts; Rip Torn in one of his most bizarre and hysterical roles yet; great actor chemistry and goofball humour which all adds up to a really fun movie. It's not quite as good (or satirical) as BASEketball but it's great fun never-the-less.
• I saw the first two episodes of Planetes and couldn't figure out what the big deal was; my brother (who usually knows his stuff) spoke very highly of the series but the episodes I watched bored me so badly I stopped watching in the middle, instead preferring to finish playing The White Chamber.
• In other news, Serenity will be coming to Israeli theaters sometime in mid-November. Hoozah! Since the tickets to the screening at Icon were long gone by the time I tried to order this means I might yet get the chance to watch the movie, and might even do some catching up on Firefly beforehand.

Development

• Here's a bizarre trick (via Ayende): apparenly when binary-searching an array (via Array.BinarySearch) if the specified value is not found, you can get the index of the next largest value by bitwise-complementing the result (index =~ index;). Convoluted, but useful.
• Here's a cool shell extension improvement from Jeff Atwood called Clean Sources Plus (based on the original codebase by Omar Shahine); it allows you to "clean up" a VS.NET solution from intermediate files and source control bindings for sharing with other developers. Dead useful.
• Fascinating discussion in response to Jeff's post about eliminating the user field from login screens. Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with the current system (I read the post too late to participate meaningfully in the discussion), but there's a lot of interesting stuff to read there.
• Nifty demonstration of basic CSS 1.1 and JavaScript. It doesn't work in Internet Explorer because IE does not support alpha in PNGs (a very annoying limitation in itself) and does not fully implement DOM events.
• I stumbled upon an old article by Joel, which states something so absolutely obvious most people completely fail to realize it: people (and programmers specifically) are only very good at doing one complex thing at a time. Giving a programmer (even a good one) more than one project, or alternatively interrupting his project for "right here, right now" kind of work, is hazardous to his or her productivity. It reminds me of Fred Brooks' excellent The Mythical Man-Month; in retrospect the conclusion is just so obvious it seems almost impossible that people didn't realize it at the time.

  Stuff

• DARPA challenge finally beaten! This is a huge event for robotics fans, which I'm not - however I recognize that this is a landmark in AI and robotics. Impressive stuff.
• My next keyboard is probably going to be the new Microsoft Natural Ergo 4000. I intensely dislike most keyboards out in the market these days (still use a Microsoft Natural Elite or IBM Model M) and it would be a nice change of pace to get a new Natural with added features (padded wrist-pad, standard page-up/down cluster etc.) which doesn't suck. I hope the tactile response is at least as good as the Elite's. I was looking to get one of those, but apparently only Dagesh carry those in Israel so far (for 380 shekels, shipping included ~ $75 + VAT); I would get it from eBay, but it won't cost any less and it's a warrantee nightmare. Guess I'll just wait.
• Here's an interesting concept: labs.zarate.org allows you to create passwords on a per-site basis by providing a master password and target URL. It works by MD5-hashing the master-password with the site URL. Cool idea and seemingly quite secure (assuming the hashing function is strong enough; considering the general quality of passwords people use, I'd say it's about 1,482,918 times better).
• The Flying Spaghetti Monster is apparently old news, but completely hysterical never-the-less, particularly in today's age of religious zealots and their "intelligent design" dogma.

  Politics

• Assuimg this article is to be believed, post-Taliban Afghanistan is about to put a journalist on trial for charges of blasphemy. You'd think that the US with its self-proclaimed desire to bring democracy to the world would not have left a radical Islamic government in Afghanistan. You'd be wrong.
• UK Labor party member Walter Wolfgang, 82, was forcibly ejected from a conference for heckling the foreign secretary. This in itself is common in stupid political strife; what worries me is that a second delegate (Steve Forrest) who protested the treatment was also forcibly ejected and then denied access to the venue under the powers of the Terrorism Act. If said act can be used to circumvent lawful political activity by democratically-elected public officials, I cringe at the thought of what kind of power it gives the police over, say, an ex-Israeli army officer visiting London.
• A Delaware public official lost in court against an anonymous blogger who posted what said official perceived were defamatory comments against him. The court ruled that the blogger's ISP may not expose his identity, which I consider a major win for free speech. Too bad other courts are not quite as sensible.

General Stuff

• The Deer Park (Firefox 1.5) beta has been out for a couple of weeks now and is very stable and fast; beta 2 is due to come out any minute now. Despite the lack of a compatible Noia 2.0 eXtreme (my favourite Firefox theme) I highly recommend the upgrade.
• Fasterfox is a major performance tweak for Firefox. We don't have the fastest internet connection here so it's difficult to tell how effective it is, but I'll try and gauge it over the next few days anyway.
• Metal Gear Solid fans owe it to themselves to hear virt's remix titled My Frequency Is 140.85.
• Martin of Tipmonkies (heh. Tipmonkies. Heh.) published a list of free disposable e-mail address services. My personal favourite is DodgeIt.
• Finally, Serenity seems to be doing rather badly financially. I haven't seen the movie yet (and I doubt I'll get to see it in the Israeli theaters, with all the crap movies taking valuable theater space) but I have a very good feeling about it, and I hate to see anything original, interesting or (in Firefly's case) underdog do badly.
• Mystified by Virgill is awesome. For that matter, so is elements. The guy knows his shit.

Politics

• It bothers me a great deal when American agencies (or goverment agencies in general) presume to tell me what I'm entitled, or not entitled, to. As far as I'm concerned the default should be "I can do whatever the hell I want as long as it's not declared illegal", not "I can do whatever is declared legal". Very important distinction. So it's no surprise I was really pissed off to read an FCC document in which a statement began with "consumers are entitled to run applications and use servics of their choice". Thanks! I always wanted a government to officially allow me the liberties I've always taken for granted. But that's nothing compared to the rest of the statement: "... subject to the needs of law enforcement." You know what? To hell with the needs of law enforcement. I won't have police/FBI/shabak/whatever goons telling me what programs I can or can't use. I realize that it's like that in practice (the old issue of >128-bit RSA encryption not allowed outside the US, for one), but it's no excuse to make it official policy. I'll run whatever the hell I want on my machine. If it's illegal, have the police come up with sufficient justification for a search warrant, signed by an independant judge.
• The US Patent Office upholds a patent owned by Eolas, which has bearing on their case against Microsoft. I don't know the details of the patent and don't care. Ideas and thoughts should not be patentable, as simple as that. As Florian Mueller puts it (direct quote from the linked article):

  Pro-patent politicians told us that broad and trivial patents can be invalidated. If even Microsoft with all of its resources doesn't always succeed in that, what can smaller companies do?

• Apparently a single, disabled mom has found the strength to sue the RIAA back for wrongful legal practices. Any dent in the RIAA litigation behemoth is a good thing in my book.
• An ISP owner from Oklahoma wins a $10M lawsuit against a known spammer. It's doubtful he'll be getting any of his money, but the precedent-setting case is good in the long run anyway.

• Ilya linked me to this newsgroup discussion which is something of a revelation.
• During the QA cycle for a product I'm working on I got a request to limit the logs for just the last 10 days. I use log4net 1.2.9 incubation release, which is an absolute pleasure to use (even the documentation is up to snuff these days); however I've found that there is simply no way to do that using the stock RollingFileAppender when you roll by date (as opposed to by size). Since I didn't have time to research creating scheduled tasks using the godawful Visual Studio 2003 Setup and Deployment Project I just hacked a RollingFileAppender-derivative, only to find that most of its protected methods are not declared virtual - meaning I had to copy the code for the class in its entirety and hack away instead of just inheriting and overriding behavior. If anyone's interested in the hack let me know, but be advised that it's probably not very stable nor particularly elegant.
• I was looking for a way to execute an interactive process remotely (which can't be done easily, certainly not with my original research subject, WMI). Apparently the only practical way to do this under Win32 is to use a remote service with administrative privileges; security was a workable issue in this case, so I was left with having to research and write the service and deal with all the bugs, which given the project schedule was not an option. The first obvious option was to use SysInternals' PsExec tool; this would've been perfect except that PsExec's license forbids redistributing it without a license, which we were very inclined to purchase had there not been easier (and cheaper) options. BeyondExec is an equally solid solution that's distributed as freeware and is therefore useful for commercial purposes. Lastly, Jim Wiese has an interesting article up at The Code Project which might've saved us a great deal of time had BeyondExec proved irrelevant.
• John Wood's SafeInvoke is a very elegant solution to the classic GUI thread invocation issue when programming for Windows Forms. He's not the first to utilize .NET Reflection for that purpose, but his solution is extremely elegant as well as performant (since his helper class caches the generated code, a performance hit is incurred only when a delgate is first used, and System.Reflection is supposed to be dramatically faster in the upcoming CLR 2.0). Two thumbs up.
• One of my favourite writers, Reymond Chen over at The Old New Thing, wrote an insightful little tip on why you should never use sleep(0). The comments are equally informative. On a side note, I've recently become a very big fan of java and C#'s Monitor synchronization primitive along with its signalling capacity (in java it's part of the java.lang.Object API
, which is much more elegant than C#'s Monitor class and its static members).

• Finish Fallout 2 again (I'm at about 15% - will probably be done in a week or two, what with the holidays and all)
• Serious Sam II demo
• Fable (apparently there's a PC version now)
• Indigo Prophecy
• American McGee's Scrapland (the demo was friggin' awesome)

• Add [TARGETDIR] to the CustomActionData property of your custom action
• The property is accessible with Session.Property( "CustomActionData" )