Email and Beyond

1994. That's a little over ten years ago. The web was barely anything in those days. Free email was fairly uncommon. I used to find it peculiarly funny to overhear others talking about email, because it seemed like something academics and geeks used. But it didn't take long before email has become so ubiquitous that no one bats an eye at it.

Email and IM away messages have become a peculiar way to advertise something to friends. For example, consider this
site. If it persists that is. I found this off someone's away message or their personal info from their IM. It's a video of Christmas lights synchronized to music. Whether it's real or not is up to debate, but it seems plausible that someone could do it.

A while back, I saw something called Ping Pong Matrix, which had two guys "playing" ping pong. In fact, the ball was held on a stick and made to move as if the players were hitting it. The two players were lifted and moved around by people dressed in black and it created a funny effect. This video has made the rounds, as has one by Sony where four robots to a robot dance (Sony's robots, I guess).

In the past, such oddities would hardly be seen. Maybe you'd read about it in a newspaper, but these days, you can just get on the web and see it. It's really become an amazing way to transmit information, even if it's usefulness is rather dubious.

I've also noticed that, although technology moves quickly, not everyone is ready to keep up. OK, so there's email, there's web-browing. Lots of people buy stuff online. But how many people are still running Windows 98? How many people are perfectly happy with dial-in. How many people don't want or need wireless access?
Clearly, the issue is money and interest.

My parents barely use the web. I know people who would sit hours in front of a computer for fun. They watch movies, read comics, read newspapers, whatever. But if you've never done this, why do it now?

I can't say I'm up on everything. I should be listening to podcasts. Maybe I should podcast myself. I told my dad recently what podcasting is. I want to know how RSS does what it does. At the very least, I've heard of these terms.

The kinds of technology that seem to work best are those that people absolutely can't do without. So far, that's cell phones, email, and the browser (maybe video games, if you want to include that). It's difficult to make people embrace technology they don't think they need, especially if it means learning something new.

PDAs, for example, are still relatively uncommon. I only know a small percentage that use it. You're more likely to find someone with an IPod than a PDA, even if th e prices are somewhat similar. Music resonates far more than a reminder service.

What does the crystal ball fortend? Who knows? We'll watch it unfold in the next few years, and see.

Harry to the Max

I caught Harry and Max on DVD recently, after watching Race You To the Bottom at Reel Affirmations.

Ostensibly, the story is about two brothers, with a manipulating mother, who jump starts their singing career. Harry's the older brother, fading boy-band one-hit wonder. Max is starting up his career, though he wants to major in physics at some top-notch university.

The story's ultimately about incest. I've seen enough films on the topic that it doesn't particularly faze me to watch another one. This is generally sympathetic to this relationship, although generally unsympathetic to the lives that kid singers lead.

What really hurts the film is it's awkward unnatural dialogue. By contract, Race You To The Bottom seemed far more natural, despite also having moderately intelligent people. I just couldn't believe these two were brothers, and certainly didn't buy they were music stars.

The two parts don't mesh well. When dealing with celebrities, it helps to have the trappings of celebrities. You don't see band practices, nor agents. Instead, the story tosses out any external people, and focuses on about four people. Harry, Max, the chick played by Rain Phoenix, and an older guy who Max once had a thing with.

Oddly enough, the parts I liked best were throwaway scenes, with music overlayed on top of travelling the roads. I don't why.

This might have been a good story. The actors are good enough. But the script really needs help. It just doesn't seem real enough, or emotionally involving.

Potter Pans

On Black Friday, I went to watch Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire at the local multiplex near my folks. Reviews had been, overall, positive, some placing this as the best of the four Harry Potter films.

Although I did enjoy it at the time, I felt the entire first half of the film was a bit of a muddle.

Let's see. There's a tri-wizard tournament, where two other schools are invited to Hogwart's. It turns out one is an all-girls school and the other an all-guys school, and they're appropriately stereotyped. The girls are dressed in blue, speak French, and flirt. The guys are lead by Victor Krum who's a complete non-character. Does he utter five words throughout?

The tournament is explained as something dangerous, and yet, there's nothing Amazonian about the women, and indeed, the female representative (each school has a single representative, except Hogwart's which has two. Harry Potter, whose name is mysteriously entered in the goblet of fire, and is spit up as a contestant, despite Harry being too young) wilts appropriately.

Mike Newell, who directed this film, is the first British director of this British fantasy series. Unlike the other directors, he grew up in a British boarding school, and infuses the story with little tidbits, such as a study hall where Snapes keeps whacking people who talk.

It's also the most international cast of the four films. There's East-European Krum, and the French whoever they are, and even the Indian girls who serve as dates for Harry and Ron (and Asian Cho, with an Irish lilt). They are suitably dissed, as Harry is too shy, and Ron pines after Hermione.

The ending is not terribly deserved because the character of Cedric Diggory isn't developed. Ultimately, if Goblet of Fire fails, it's because it tries to cram too much story, of an uninteresting sort, into two and a half hours of movie, and can't do its many parts justice.

Shortly afterwards, I saw an A&E special on Harry Potter, which is really the actors promoting the film, and pretty much summarizing it too. As usual, you see ideas the director had that, at least for me, didn't come across as I had thought. For example, I didn't really get the sense that Dumbledore wasn't all-wise and all-knowing, and that for the first time, he was unsure of himself. That's mostly because I didn't get a sense that he was all-knowing and all-wise from the previous films.

I'll also say that the kids looked really young in the first film. It's amazing to see just how youthful they were, much like the old Full House episodes.

Well, there's still Kong, Narnia, and Brokeback Mountain. Hopefully, they'll turn up better.

Savage Love

I was listening to the local NPR's fund-raising drive. This happens, I believe, twice a year. There are critics who think the government shouldn't fund a leftist radio organization, the same kind of critics who say the government shouldn't fund the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) because of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe (do a Google image search if you want to see what kind of photos Mapplethorpe is noted for).

Fortunately, NPR seems to do a pretty good job of staying afloat from people who pledge during beg-a-thons. It's also a great time to listen to best stories that have been broadcast on the air. When you listen to these, you really see how deprived evening news, and even all-news networks like CNN are. If anything, NPR makes the stories more personal, and that makes it all the better.

One story I heard was about an Iraqi war veteran. He's suffering from post-war trauma. In this war, he had to kill for the very first time, and he had to do it time and again. He could justify the killing to some extent. He did it to protect himself. Even so, it takes quite a deal more iciness to have a complete disregard for life, even as most people's nature is to distinguish between them and us. They are inhumane. We are good people. They are monsters. We are solid folk.

This was one of the more harrowing stories I've heard, made all the more powerful because it was partly narrated by the man.

Another story was the origin of the song Ring of Fire, which Johnny Cash was well-known for. Johnny Cash was, until the time of his death, seen as a long-time country star. Since many people aren't country fans, that was all anyone knew about Cash.

When he died, there was a resurgence in the popularity of his music, due, I suspect, in large part to his deep, resonant voice, his abuse of drugs, and the darkness of his lyrics. Suddenly, it was hip for college-aged kids to revisit the songs of Johnny Cash. There's even a film with Joaquim Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as the leads.

Ring of Fire was, as it turns out, written by June Carter, who became Cash's wife. Except, at the time, she was not his wife. Both Cash and Carter were married. Carter was Nashville country royalty. Her mother was also a singer, and highly regarded. She was also raised religious, a good Southern Christian, who beliefed in hell and brimstone for sinners. And she lusted after Johnny Cash, a man that was not her husband.

She wrote a song Ring of Fire, to express this forbidden love, about a person descending into hell. She eventually divorced her husband, and Cash eventually divorced his wife, and they married, and basically lived happily ever after.

Another of the fabulous stories was that of Dan Savage. Now, I know very little of Dan Savage. I knew he wrote a column called, not surprisingly, Savage Love, which is a kind of advice column, I think. His name suggests, well, a kind of savageness, even though, that's quite a silly thought to have.

I didn't even know Dan Savage was gay. So, he is. He's been with his partner for about ten years. A few years ago, he and his partner decided to adopt D. J. During the height of the 2004 elections, one major topic that got a lot of play was gay marriage. It said something of the moderately insidious nature of this topic that it both pushed gay marriage further than it has been pushed, and yet galvanized the religious conservative base to vote on referendums that basically acknowledged that states considered it illegal to have same-sex marriages.

This was a bit of deception. Those who were encouraged to vote believed that not voting meant tacit approval of gay marriage, or even legalizing it. Conservatives in the know did not do much to disguise this untruth.

Dan's parents, one Catholic, one a Republican, wanted Dan and his partner to get married. They wanted them to show their commitment to one another through marriage. The two had only given it casual thought. As Dan says, when you admit you're gay, you are also saying that you are willing to give up marriage, kids, the whole lot. And, until last year, many political gays just felt Americans weren't ready to deal with gay marriage, and so gay marriage wasn't top on the list of political agenda items to push.

When it became the hot button issue, one of the people opposed was D. J. who was about 5 years old. He thought of marriage as something girls wanted, and guys didn't like marriage, so his parents shouldn't get married.

Now, I've never heard Dan Savage speak, until I heard this segment. For all I knew, he sounded like Howard Stern, a deep, practiced radio voice. Instead, he has the prototypical NPR voice, somewhat timid, and unassertive. I don't mean that he sounds stereotypically gay, because he doesn't. There's no lilt or camp in his voice.

The typical NPR female voice, to my mind, is basically the voice of Lisa Simpson. Remember the Johnny Cash story? It was narrated by Sarah Vowell. She did Violet's voice in The Incredibles, the shy, invisible girl character. She sounds like Lisa Simpson.

I can't really do the story justice. You should really listen to it yourself. Here's the link: Zing Zing, Zoom Zoom. You need RealAudio to listen to it. Go about 19 minutes into it. You'll be glad you did.

Ceviche

A few years ago, I went to Jaleo for the first time. In fact, it was on my birthday. A friend and I were wandering around Bethesda, looking for a place to eat. One place seemed closed. Another, too expensive. Then, we went to Jaleo, and the prices looked way cheap.

Once we sat down and had tapas explained to us, we found out why it was so cheap. Tapas is, for lack of a better word, Spanish dim sum. For those of you who've never had dim sum, this is basically Chinese appetizers. Restaurants specializing in dim sum usually do it on the weekends, from about 11 AM to 3 PM. If the size of the restaurant permits, they bring carts filled with appetizers.

Typical dim sum include dumplings of all sorts, beef, chicken, shrimp. They have fried rice, some veggies, battered balls, taro cakes. Occasionally, there are a few exotic items. Chicken's feet (which is basically chicken skin over very tiny bones) and possibly even congealed blood, for the really brave.

You point to what you want, or ask, if you don't know what you have, and the wait staff puts a mark on a card, indicating what you've ordered. Each appetizer is usually suitable for about 3, maybe 4, to get a small bite. A dim sum meal consists of eating maybe 4-5 samples, if you want something light, or upwards of 6-8, if you're really famished.

For a brunch, dim sum can be a bit heavy. Like much of Chinese cuisine, dumplings are known to be greasy, and so you have to deal with greasy food.

Tapas, in general, is not nearly this bold. Tapas, at least at Jaleo, splits into three categories, based on temperature. Modeled after a clothes washer, the temperatures are split into hot, warm, and cold. Unlike dim sum, there are no carts. You order with the waiter, and they deliver.

Since I've only had tapas maybe half a dozen times, I can't recall what items usually come with tapas. There's, I'm sure, some meat offerings, some fish, various veggie things. Overall, it's less greasy than dim sum.

Last night, I tried a place called Ceviche. Now, apparently, this is a Peruvian dish, and can best be summarized as "Peruvian sushi". You take raw fish, then mix it with, say, lime and cilantro. The acid tends to make the fish looked cooked, but it's raw.

Dave and I split the ceviche. We also both had mixed drinks. Dave had a daiquiri, in the style of Hemingway, which Dave said tasted like grapefruit juice. I had caipirinha, a Brazilian drink, made from lime, cachaça, and sugar. It's basically a Brazilian mojito.

Here's a description I found for cachaça.

Cachaça is Brazilian liquor made from distilled sugar cane juice. While rum is distilled from molasses, cachaca is distilled directly from the juice of the unrefined sugar cane. Before distillation, the juice ferments in a wood or copper container for three weeks, and is then boiled down three times to a concentrate. Cachaca is always distilled in such a way that the scent of sugar cane and inimitable flavor typical of rum are retained.

I've noticed that restaurants that sell mixed drinks usually have less alcohol than if you were getting it at a bar. At least, I think so. I did have a magarita at some restaurant, and they gave me something like 12-14 ounces worth. That was a lot of alcohol.

I also ate some kind of dish made with some cheese sauce, potatoes, tomatoes, avocadoes, and a soft-boiled egg on top. This was decent, but I was hoping for something a bit spicy.

Dave said that the place, despite being named after a Peruvian dish, is more of a Cuban place. It tries to look trendy, though Dave felt it looked like a chain, sort of a Latin American Tara Thai (Tara Thai is a chain Thai restaurant, as you might imagine). No idea whether that's true or not. Dave said Cuban food is generally not spicy.

Anyway, with the mixed drinks, and each of us having a modestly expensive dish, and splitting the ceviche, it all added up to a pretty penny, which I treated, since I'm the one making the money. I jokingly remarked to Dave that I expected him to put out. I wonder if that term is even used much any more. Make me feel old to use it!

Next time, I think, we'll try the Thai restaurant next door (I saw two former students at the Vietnamese restaurant, that really is next door--the Thai restaurant is really two doors down), which should be a lot cheaper than Ceviche.

I'd recommend trying Ceviche once, but the prices, and the general "it's all right" feeling I got, means I probably won't head back, except to get just the ceviche itself. One plus---the portions were tiny. I think restaurants should do that more often.

One minus. I decided to get more food. I went to the local Jamaican carry out. Oh, is this place ever slow. I decided to be brave and order the soup, which is called "Mannish Water". I'm sorry, but this has to be the least appealing name for a soup ever. I'm guessing that there is some sense that it is a masculine kind of soup, by I tend to think thoughts like rancid sweat. Not appetizing.

This time, they explained what it was. In parentheses below, it said "Goat Head's Soup". Also, not so appetizing. I still ended up buying it. It tasted a bit strange. There are some goat meat that had fatty parts. I have no idea if that was really part of the head. There was some kind of dumpling, and some kind of veggie like thing that looked like bamboo, but who's insides tasted a bit starchy like potatoes.

I had half of the soup, before putting it away.

Then, after that, I went to a party at Yancy's, who, I was told, lives nearby. By nearby, I thought this meant may 5 minutes away, walking. But it was more like a mile, walking. And it was cold. And I was carrying beer. And when I got there it was really crowded.

At these kinds of parties, one ends up talking to people that one knows. I talked to Arkady, a guy I occasionally play tennis with. He used to room with Justin, which is how I knew him, before both moved out to separate places. Arkady was there with two of his housemates.

The centerpiece of the party was something called the "Jesus Luge", if I understood what was being said. This was a frozen sculpture of Jesus on the cross. Well, it's more like Jesus as if He were a stuffed puppet, and an ice sculptor depicted this puppet. There's no sense in trying to capture the emaciated Jesus, so often seen in paintings.

This was meant to be some kind of blasphemous humor, which is fine by me, as I'm not the religious sort. Most people deemed it as uber-cool. I just wondered where one even finds such ice sculptors, and the logistics of bringing it back.

They must have invited some 40 people or more, and it was really crowded. I had the misfortune of standing in front of a side door, and was forced to constantly dance near that door as people attempted to go in and out. I know. I shouldn't have stood there, but that's how crowded this place was. I was trying to talk to this guy, Jeff, that was Dami's friend, and whom I had taken a course with once.

Finally, seeing some space clear up on the couch, Jeff and I claimed it so we could talk. It felt deserved after all that door maneuvering. We talked about how he was doing. He said he was happy to be done with school, and looking forward to not having exams. Jeff knew one other guy who seemed awfully stoked about the ice Jesus, and the guy asked to partner with him for beer pong.

We also talked with Dan, Jaime's college buddy, who usually comes to these parties. Dan's now a lawyer. He's always had insightful observations about pretty much everything. It turns out Jeff has been part of the ACLU, and asked Dan his opinions. Both seemed to hit it off because they seem to be near each other politically.

I wanted to head to work the following day, so I left just around midnight. Since I wasn't completely sure how to get back, I headed to route 1. It was cold, and I was walking around some motel, and people were making a ruckus, which I wanted to avoid. Turns out, it was nothing. I then thought about eating at this 24 hour diner. But it was locked, despite people on the inside.

I figured, that's good. I already had a dinner, then bought soup, then had some beer at Yancy's, so maybe I should head home and get to sleep.

And that was my Saturday evening.

Racing in Circles

For fifty years or more, the United States has dealt with issues of racism. Sure, racism goes back long before that, but dealing with the issue as racism has, it seems, been a more recent event.

In the 1970s, even as people tried to view the country in a color-blind fashion, there were challenges. For example, towards the start of the 1980s, rap (and then hip-hop) became popular, but generally serious listeners of rap were black. Even then, there were attempts of white rappers to cross over, most notably, The Beastie Boys. I knew folks who just couldn't stand rap or hip-hop. These were generally non-blacks.

However, non-blacks who grew up in the 90s have increasingly embraced the hip-hop sound. This is not to say that non-blacks listen to hip-hop exclusively, but that it is part of what they listen to.

The point? The point I'm making is that 50 years of dealing with the civil rights movement has shown increasing progress towards some kind of racial equality, or at least, a heightened sense of racism. Sure, you will always find people who are racist, and those who would brand others as racist often have issues too, playing the blame game, rather than dealing with their own form of "ism".

You would think a society, so sensitive to the racism label would, well, be rather racist. And, yet, because it's constantly in our face, the effect has caused us, for the most part, to be less racist.

I just read an article that was trying to discuss racism in France. In France, the government says that all French citizens are the same. They are French. Because they posit that everyone is French, they make no attempt to determine if there is racism. They collect no statistics. Even if people are being racist, and there is evidence to suggest they are, there's no way to document it, because the French government averts its eyes.

I'd guess, if you ask a French immigrant from North Africa, or a Turk living in Germany, would tell you that the "French", meaning the white "French" and the white "Germans" do not consider them French nor German. All the thoughts white Americans had about African Americans, in particular, are thoughts that run through Europeans for non-native Europeans.

Brazil is seen as one of those countries where blacks and whites often consider themselves equal. Intermarrying between blacks and whites is quite common. Yet, at the very highest levels of government and industry, whites are far more common. There's equality at the lower income levels.

Ultimately, it's not just race, it's culture. People group themselves to those that look and behave the same. I would imagine that, were blacks, whites, Asians, etc. thought alike, enjoyed the same songs, the same literature, and so forth, there would be far less difference, than the obvious skin tones. It's because there's a cultural difference on top of that, that people associate skin color with stereotypical traits.

That commonality, I think, would be bad, because it leads us to a stagnant way of looking at the world. Americans exclaim that no one would ever pay more in taxes than they receive, and yet the richest Swedes must pay exorbitant taxes. Ultimately, we're better off when we can challenge the way we look at the world, and this means everyone. Just because, say, one group is discriminated against, doesn't give them any more enlightenment than the next person.

To sum up, I find it fascinating that accusations of racism might lead to a less racist society than a society where the government claims no such thing occurs.

Programmer's Dilemma

I once read that computer science brings together people who think in the same way. That is, they think algorithmically. How best to describe this kind of thinking? Basically, it's problem solving using tools. The tool part can't be underestimated, because it's essential to the kind of solution you get.

For example, suppose the problem is eating spaghetti. I give you a fork and possibly a spoon. How do you eat it? One way is to get the fork in the spaghetti, use the spoon to push the fork against, and swirl. The spaghetti gets wrapped around the fork. When there are no strands left out, then you eat.

But, now I ask you to eat spaghetti with chopsticks. The swirling trick doesn't work nearly as well. Instead, you have have to lift the spaghetti up in the air, put your mouth underneath, and eat. Or you bring the bowl to your mouth, and slurp.

In any case, how you eat depends very much on what you use to eat. It depends on the tools available tool to you.

In a way, programming is much the same. Now, most people would tell you that the programming language is the tool. Say, Java or C++ or C#. However, that's no longer the case. The kind of software people want to write, say, server software, would require so much effort to develop the code to do the infrastructure that you'd drive yourself nuts. Other people have therefore created framework to make it easier to write these applications.

That's supposed to help you program. But, then people have developed all sorts of things that are peripherally realted to programming. For example, if you have multiple developers, you want some way to prevent one person from overwriting the work of another person. Software firms use some kind of version control system. There are several to choose from: CVS, Subversion, ClearCase. The problem? Suppose you get to know CVS reasonably well. Now, the company wants to switch to ClearCase. Now you have to learn more stuff.

Is this reasonable? Technology is both boon and bane to programmers. In order to program Java, I use Eclipse. Eclipse is not emacs. It has lots of features, in fact, far too many for me to keep track of. I'm sure I'm not using a bunch of features I could be using. Whose fault is it that I don't use it? I'd say it's Eclipse's fault.

You see, at one point, I learned how to program. Those basic skills are still the fundamentals of programming. Yet, the entire environment has changed. A good programmer these days must learn how to use a testing system, a version control tool, a build language like Ant, possibly XML and processing XML, possibly SQL of some sort, some server technology. Now, tell me, is that really necessary?

To give you an analogy, suppose I tell you to learn a musical instrument, say, the clarinet. You invest time learning the clarinet. Do you expect the clarinet to change over the years you use it? What if they move the keys around? Add keys. Remove keys. Add bizarre features? A double reed. An electronic sound modifier? What if the music notation changed on you? You have to learn to read a new form of music. It offers features (I can't imagine what) that you've never seen. You can see it's beneficial, but it's work.

Next week, you're supposed to be playing a trombone. Or now, you have a piano, and have to deal with chords. At one point in your life, you played the clarinet, and while that music is still fundamental to what you do, there's more crap to deal with. How much of this is algorithmic thinking?

My feeling is that, yes, the tools are changing, and changing, and changing some more. They address problems that programmers deal with, but there's no agreed upon solution. Thus, variation upon variation upon variation. You know why Mac lovers hate PCs and why PC lovers hate Macs? Because using the other computer makes them feel like idiots. They know how to use one computer well, and now they're told everything they learned is different, and behaves in some way they're not used to.

Is that worth it? Some people don't care. They love the new. They'll sit down and figure out whatever someone else has come up with, and deal with it.

I remember there was a skateboarder named Mark "Gator" Rogowski. He was a star in the skateboarding community, before drinking and self-abuse eventually lead him to jail. At one point, when skateboarding in parks lost its allure, a new kind of street skateboarding. Mark tried to keep up with this new style, but found he couldn't learn the new way of skateboarding. He tried using his old skills, but people didn't want to see it.

Did Mark suddenly forget how to skateboard? He got good at what he did, and then things changed on him. He wasn't able to learn the new stuff, or wasn't willing to.

To me, that's what it feels like programming has become. Most people just deal with it, but it's not like mathematicians, who basically have agreed what makes a valid proof. Once they have that, they just think and think. They don't have to learn weird stuff to do what they've always done. Sure, new techniques do become available, and at times, there have been mathematicians who couldn't wrap their heads over different math techniques, but for the most part, the way they do math lasts.

Anyway, like many other programmers, I do what I can to deal.

Dude, Where's My Blog?

There's a kind of discipline needed to blog. You have to believe that someone is going to read it, or, at the very least, believe that you owe it to yourself to put in entries. Things have been relatively hectic the last few weeks, so I haven't written much lately.

Let me try to redress some of that.

Last weekend, I went to the Northern Virginia Software Symposium. They were part of the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour, where speakers talk about the state of the art in Java. The conference is geared toward those doing enterprise Java development, which, to me, represents server technologies which includes some interaction with users and databases.

Although that's not the kind of Java programming I do at work, it is a useful gauge of where the industry is, or, better still, where the industry will be heading. Given the rapid changes in the software industry, conferences such as this give attendees some bearing, as they decide what they need to learn, to keep up.

In some ways, I don't like this kind of industry. An academic computer scientist would claim that what the industry does now is faddish. And it really is. How people write code to do what they do now will change in a few years. It's not that things are getting better and better, really. It's that the original solutions were so bad.

And it's not that they intentionally started off bad, but that they had no idea, when they started off, how much work it would take to write these enterprise applications, and how inefficient it would be. Often, when you design something, you want others to be able to decide how to use it. Thus, there is a lot of ways to configure the system. A lot of work is required to get the configuration to match your setup.

The lesson is that flexibility implies complexity. If the computers used by everyone was exactly the same. Same software, same location of software, same everything, then it would be easy. But everyone has something slightly different and want to set up stuff in different ways.

Anyway, ever since J2EE came out, and ever since people decided it was something of a headache, people have been trying to find other simpler ways to write software for servers.

The conference is set up in 11 sessions. Friday had three sessions, plus a keynote. Saturday and Sunday had four sessions each. Each session has six speakers in six separate rooms. The problem is deciding which session to attend.

My first thought was to attend some sessions on Ruby. Ruby isn't Java, but since Java appeals to the open-source community (although Java isn't open source), and in particular, since it isn't Microsoft, there's demand for Ruby talks.

Now, I heard of something called Ruby on Rails. This is a framework to develop web applications using Ruby throughout. Ruby is a language like Perl, but is object-oriented. Ruby, the language, was developed by a guy named Yukihiro Matsumoto, of Japan, who goes by the nickname, Matz.

Although I had expected some discussion about Ruby and Ruby on Rails, what I did not expect was that Ruby on Rails would be so incredibly popular. Dave Thomas, who is an entertaining speaker from England, recently co-authored a book on Ruby on Rails. He gave five entertaining talks, four of which were on Ruby.

The other talks were on Spring, Hibernate, Ajax, some stuff with graphics. Although I attended 11 talks, I heard only four speakers. I went to five talks from Dave Thomas. I went to two talks with Jared Richardson. I went to half a talk with Venkat Subramaniam. I went to one talk by Paul Duvall on Cruise Control. I went to two talks by Scott Davis.

Of the speakers, Dave Thomas was the best. He's funny and teaches well. Two things you want in a good presentation. Jared Richardson was good at presentation, but I felt his content was a little light. He also seemed to be plugging the company he worked at (before I came, we were a disaster---even if this was true, it sounds like bragging). Paul Duvall was OK, if a little bland. I should have attended a few more talks by Venkat, who is hyper. He talks fast, though I could follow him.

Venkat is also an amazing thrower. He would throw out candy to people in the room, and get very close to where they were, even if they sat more than five rows back.

Scott Davis was also quite good. He has this infectious smile and seems real happy all the time. I sat in a presentation about playing with various map services (via Yahoo Maps or Google maps) and then gave another talk on how to do XP (extreme programming) for one person.

From the entire symposium, I got a better feel for trends in Java. In particular, AJAX and Ruby on Rails seem like the hot subjects of the day, and it was suggested people spend some time learning how they work. Other topics of interest were Spring and Hibernate, something called RESTful services. There was a trend to lightweight solutions on the server, as opposed to the heavyweight solutions currently in place.

Although we don't do this kind of programming at my work, it was a good view into where the industry is headed, plus, since these speakers are selected by their entertainment and education value, many of them were quite good.

While I grumbled about giving up my weekend, I think it was still worth it. I only wish I could have caught a few more talks.

Atomic Energy

I first heard of Atom Egoyan about 10 years ago. Mike D'Angelo had written a review on Exotica, which he loved. Before Taratino (re-)popularized non-linear story-telling, Egoyan was doing it earlier.

Egoyan has been criticized for telling chilly stories, where characters are hard to relate to, and for appealing to the brainy set. He often opens his film with a peculiar scene. In The Sweet Hereafter, it is a view that's very odd, blurred. Over time, you see that it is water rushing down a windshield. Then, you see it is a person in a car in a carwash. This opening scene makes an apperance later, as it does in Calendar.

The opening scene of Calendar is a video being taken on a dirt road passing by, if I recall, sheep, or some herd of animals. The car lurches forward, then stops, as it negotiates past animals occupying the road. This scene is finally explained at the very end of the film.

Egoyan isn't like David Lynch, who often does not explain what he's doing. Egoyan explains, but in a subtle way. He gives you scenes out of context, and then puts them in context, making you piece together what's happening. In the middle of this intellectual exercise are often characters that are dealing with emotional issues, yet, he presents these traumas in a muted way, so subtle, you may not even notice if you don't pay attention.

One of my favorite Egoyan pix is one of his first: Next of Kin. It tells the story of a WASPish Canadian teen, who has the life. His parents are rich, but they are emotionally hollow. Nowhere is this more evident than in an early scene, where his parents sit near their indoor pool, and the boy is swimming. He hides behind a structure, out of view of his parents, and doesn't move.

Do his parents care? Do they rush to see if he's alive? His mother peers out for a moment, then goes back to reading. He realizes his parents don't care if he's alive or dead.

They go seek counseling. He finds a tape of an Armenian-Canadian family who is dealing with their own familial issues. The daughter, as many immigrant daughters do, is rebelling against her parents. They attribute part of their problems to a son they had to give up for adoption. The WASPish kid gets an idea. He will pretend to be their son. He is not Armenian, but he gives it a try.

The parents are so desperate to fill this missing void, that they don't even question that this is their son.

Ultimately, the film also serves as a kind of metaphor. We've all heard of American being a melting pot, but it's seen as something peculiar to the United States. Yet, people emigrated to Canada as well. Egoyan's family emigrated by way of Egypt (although he is Armenian).

The Armenian family isn't perfect. It argues. It tries to bridge the gap between the old culture and the new. The father likes to go to strip clubs, even as the mother has no idea, and devotedly stays at home. Yet, they are more vibrantly alive than the family that's considered more truly Canadian.

Egoyan hits several themes that he revisits again and again. First, there is some relation between the WASPish son, and the Armenian family's daughter. Egoyan hints at a kind of incest, even though they are not brother and sister. This kind of almost-incest occurs in Ararat between a half-sister and half-brother, though it's explored more explicitly.

He also visits the video as a form of digital memory. In this case, video is used in the interviews that the WASP kid views. In later films, especially, Calendar, it serves as a kind of selective memory, showing that even video, which is meant to be objective, is, at times, not at all objective. You watch what you want to, and what it means, depends on the viewer.

Egoyan also deals with some themes he doesn't explore so much in later films, such as the Armenian immigration experience. At one point, the "son" who is clearly in his late teens, wants to be held by his "mother" as she did when he was young, even though such an incident never occurred.

It is a form of rebirth, and as with many scenes, Egoyan mutes the emotional impact of this kind of rebirth. It is common among, say, born-again Christians, and yet, he does it without any religious implications. Egoyan constantly revisits powder-keg issues but never glamorizes or overplays it, partly, because he wants us to accept it as it is. I believe, for example, that he thinks incest is indeed fine, in the right conditions, but he also knows it's a very tricky subject, and so he must show it in a way the unintelligent viewer doesn't notice or care, and the intelligent viewer sees him sneaking the ideas in.

The transition theme also occurs at a birthday party. The kid has a birthday early on, where his real parents go through the motions. Then, he has another one in the Armenian family. They sing "Happy Birthday" before slipping into a traditional Armenian song, and you see the embrace of one culture for another, and one child into a family, serving both a small and large theme simulataneously. Egoyan seems to avoid this parallelism in his later films, preferring to tell the story at hand, and not make it metaphorical of something bigger (either that, or he's even more subtle).

Go watch Next of Kin, and you'll see a master at his audacious start.