Posted
on 2 August 2010, 6:35 pm,
by klenwell,
under
Criticism.
Saw Inception recently. First movie I’ve seen in months. My micro-review, originally posted on Hacker News:
The it’s-all-a-dream interpretation is the only one that makes sense from a science-fiction point-of-view, however unsatisfying it is from a critical perspective. The slightly wobbling top at the end points, rather overtly, to the real answer: it’s meant to be ambiguous.
That said: WTF? We’ve got to bring down a company on the verge of being The Most Powerful Corporation in the World. So let’s use this highly radical, unproven and improbable, voodoo-science inception approach. Oh, and by the way, we have to plant a mole within the highest ranks of the multinational beast within the next, say, two weeks, so we can get valuable information that is necessary to penetrate and manipulate the fragile psyche of our target.
Cut-scene: it’s done. This is logic that only makes sense within the context of a dream. The sort of dream Coleridge, or Rube Goldberg, would have.
Science generally favors the application of Occam’s Razor: buy the airline and crash the damn plane with the kid on it. Or just send in the ninjas. The ensuing infighting among the various executive factions vying for the top spot after junior is out of the picture will ensure that any plans Acme Energy Inc had for world domination are put off course indefinitely.
Inception was entertaining. But Memento was a more interesting film intellectually. That’s a film that truly merited this kind of philosophical scrutiny. Remember Sammy Jankis.
This was in support of the basic premise: Inception isn’t science fiction
Posted
on 22 May 2010, 10:12 am,
by klenwell,
under
Typography.
Four or five years ago, this would have been a dream come true. This really is a revolutionary innovation for web designers. Nowadays, I’m more intrigued by the Google Prediction API. Still I couldn’t resist playing around with the new Fonts API and I put together this usage page on my wiki:
Google Fonts API
I have to look at it in Google Chrome to see the effects. Also, don’t forget my old CSS font families page:
Favorite CSS Font Families
Posted
on 24 April 2010, 12:33 pm,
by klenwell,
under
App Engine.
Playing with Firefox Live HTTP Headers and Google’s App Engine, I just noticed the header X-AppEngine-Estimated-CPM-US-Dollars.
An example:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: no-cache
Expires: Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip
X-AppEngine-Estimated-CPM-US-Dollars: $0.000164
X-AppEngine-Resource-Usage: ms=11 cpu_ms=0 api_cpu_ms=0
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2010 20:28:51 GMT
Server: Google Frontend
Content-Length: 299
Very interesting. I have not seen this mentioned before. But apparently it’s been around for a while.
Posted
on 22 April 2010, 9:33 pm,
by klenwell,
under
Miscellany.
Fixed email for this blog using this nifty plugin. Now, let’s see if the recaptcha plugin uses the recommended wordpress mail function.
Posted
on 22 April 2010, 9:20 pm,
by klenwell,
under
WordPress.
My apologies to anyone who has tried to post a comment to this blog over the last two months. The version of the wordpress recaptcha plugin that I installed apparently has a critical bug that marked all comments as spam, even when the captcha was properly solved.
On top of that, I (somewhat deliberately) broke the email on my server, so I wasn’t getting notified of any comments. Still need to configure wordpress to use gmail. But at least the comments appear now to be working properly.