mercredi 23 juillet 2003

Tony, nosh and the vanishing eatery trick With this post-blogcrash entry, the "backlog" is done. (Tomorrow, I can clear the NetNewsWire cache that saved my skin.) I enjoyed friend Tony's approach to restaurant criticism so much that I do want to reinstate his report on 'nosh', e-mailed a week back. He is admirably succinct: "Too hot to go far, I crossed the road to the Lebanese resto whose vernissage we witnessed (on June 14). My scoring: service, 4/10: comfort, 2/10: food, 2/10: prix, high; quality, below average. This leaves the championship table unchanged @ system, 20 points, customers, zero. Hardly a problem of rodage, I'm afraid; the attention to superficial detail points to yet another bid for a quick killing & sale to the next owner." The thing is, visitors returning to Paris often express disappointment to find that a restaurant they enjoyed the last time has vanished. It's only too simple. There's a tax dodge, too tedious to detail, which allows those who want to do what Tony describes a period of up to three years. What is unusual about his Lebanese place is that it didn't even start out according to the usual pattern: fanfare opening; excellent food and service (about a year); decline in food quality, but the hooked customers keep on coming (about a year), overlapping with steep price rises (latter six months of year two); clientèle starts to drop off (six months); owners largely absent, other staff do the work (final period); change of ownership; fanfare opening, etc... 11:17:49 PM  link   your views? [] The mastery of 'Equilibrium' and other sci-fi tidbits (Part of this entry is one of the items I'm reposting following the mighty blogcrash:) Bored by the 'Matrix'? Disappointed by 'Reloaded'? Almost unnoticed amid the hype and the wall-to-wall net coverage of the letdown of at least my own sci-fi film year, an almost flawless masterpiece of the genre, 'Equilibrium,' finally came to Paris this month. With the devastation of a nuclear World War III behind it, the price humanity has paid for lasting peace in writer-director Kurt Wimmer's aseptic utopia, Libria, is the daily consumption of Prozium, an emotional sedative. Those who fail to take it are ruthlessly eliminated by the Ninja-like 'Clerics', with Christian Bale in the lead role as John Preston, the toughest of them all. A widower with two kids, Preston's own wife was executed as a transgressor. This is not a fact of life to bother a man capable of turning on his own partner for venturing to hang on to an outlawed book after a seek-and-destroy raid into the Nethers beyond Libria's borders to burn out a group of rebels. Preston's own problems begin the morning he drops his dose of Prozium. He's prevented from replacing it by a bomb alert as he's picked up for another mission into the Nethers by his new partner, Brandt (Taye Diggs -- pictured with Bale in the photo pinched from Miramax). That's where Preston learns to feel. And with emotion come his first acts of rebellion, the discovery of what it is to be truly human. Wimmer is a magpie. 'Equilibrium' borrows liberally and shamelessly from Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis', Huxley's 'Brave New World,' Orwell's '1984', Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451', the Third Reich and, among others, ... 'Matrix'. My very minor gripe with a film where the suspense is maintained throughout is that some of these references are a little too obvious. The result is a highly intelligent thriller full of memorable images and scenes, from the early torching of one of the world's most famous paintings -- destined for the flames because of its potential emotional impact -- to a martial arts battle near the end which draws on the now-legendary corridor scene from 'Matrix' itself and outdoes it! 'Gun-kata', the fighting technique employed by the Clerics, was developed by Bale himself, according to one 'Equilibrium' (Sci-Fi UK Flash) site. Bale turns in a convincing and moving performance as a man thawing out from a killing machine into a rebel with both a heart and a cause. I'd also give special mentions to Sean Bean as Partridge, master of Libria in the name of the Father (Big Brother), Emily Watson as 'transgressor' Mary O'Brien, and William Fichtner as rebel leader Jurgen. Plot and action apart, 'Equilibrium' is visually outstanding, a beauty to watch, including the violence that gets a far more realistic and sometimes disturbing treatment than in some of its "sources". My daughter walked out of the cinema thanking her lucky stars she wasn't in Britain, where at 14 she would have been considered too young to see what she immediately decided was her "best movie of the year". She beat me to reviewing it, in French, on the belcatja blog (no permalinks, see 'le 23 juillet') she shares with friend Severine. I didn't hesitate to give it 9/10 at the IMDb. What I have yet to work out (not that it matters) is what "nationality" the movie is, since it flies a US flag but the credit for the excellent musical score by Klaus Badelt and a good number of the cast and production crew go to Germans, while it was partly shot in Italy. If it's too late to catch it in the cinema, the DVD is available in the US, but not until October in the UK and probably elsewhere (Amazon). The trailers before the film included one for 'Pirates of the Caribbean' (Flash) and another for Terminator 3 (also Flash). Both out here next month, these are the most hyped movies of the moment. The latter was a big been-there-before yawn. I'm not surprised James Cameron gave it a miss as director, returning instead to his obsession with the Titanic ('Ghosts of the Abyss'; more Flash). After 'Equilibrium', for all its superficial lack of originality, my desire to see any more of Terminator than the trailer was further lessened! zzz Last week's heat -- which finally did top the magic 100°F mark -- reduced most people in "the canteen" one lunchtime to silent gobblers. Until Jean-Claude started waxing enthusiastic about L'Incal. The what? I'd come across Moebius, but knew nothing of the "mystical tetrahedron also sought by everyone from the President (who is cloned, not elected) to the underground to the Technos to aliens from another galaxy." A note of further enlightenment with 'La Bande Dessinée française' (in English) dropped in the afternoon. Thanks, J-C, who also wrote that "le parallèle avec "Le cinquième élément" est flagrant: il y a cinq volumes et le dernier se nomme "La cinquième essence". On retrouve ainsi ce personnage de anti-héros qui doit sauver le monde, sans parler d'Animah la déesse sexy gardienne de l'Incal. Il faut dire aussi que Moebius a collaboré au projet du film. J'ajouterai qu'à côté de "L'Incal", et ceci grâce à l'imagination délirante de Jodorowsky, les scénarios de "Dune" ou de "Matrix" paraissent ridiculement pauvres et simplistes. C'est un cocktail réussi mêlant humour, sexe, violence, politique, philosophie, mysticisme et le plus étonnant c'est que la mayonnaise prend!"(**it's OK, I will translate) High praise indeed. zzz I never did pass on, should you not know and care to, who won the 'Campbell and Sturgeon' sci-fi awards this month. Now I remember that I did read the name Nancy Kress (she was one of them) somewhere before I picked up a couple of her books yesterday. _______ **"The parallel with 'The Fifth Element' is flagrant: there are five volumes and the last is called 'The Fifth Essence'. We rediscover the anti-hero who must save the world, not to speak of Animah, the sexy goddess guardian over the Incal. It should also be pointed out that Moebius worked on [Besson's] film project. I'd add that compared with the Incal, thanks to Jodorowsky's unfettered imagination, the plots of 'Dune' and 'Matrix' seem absurdly impoverished and simplistic. This successful cocktail blends humour, sex, violence, politics, philosophy, mysticism and the most astonishing thing is that the mixture works." 11:04:52 PM  link   your views? [] Panzer Division X: stealthy progress (Reposting:) Jean-Claude, a web wizard friend, asked about Panther. Mac OS X 10.3 as it will be from mid-September. Well, to stick it all in one place, here goes ("old" news always being new to somebody). There are new tidings too, though; with QuickTime, a reasonably fast connection and a fine academic site, you can watch OS Ten movies for 'geeks' (X marks the spot below). Panther will be "$129 when it goes on sale later this year. For that investment, Apple says Mac users can look forward to more than 100 new features, including a new look for the Finder, as well as Expose, a feature designed to make it easier to find the window one is looking for on a crowded desktop. Another new feature in Panther will automatically synchronize files in a particular folder into a .Mac subscriber's iDisk, Apple's name for its online storage service. The new OS also features improvements under the hood designed to bolster the OS' Unix underpinnings and [would this be what you wanted to read, sir?] allow Mac OS X systems to fit in better on Windows-dominated corporate networks. (...)" That came from Ina Fried in a ZDNet article on June 24, along with comments, including a few "world yawns". Scarcely a blitzkrieg. The Server version? Upwards from $499, for 10 clients (also ZDNet). Cupertino itself offers what Apple coyly dubs a "sneak preview" (Mac OS X). Plenty of info and links there, once you've waded through the "cutting edge", "super-modern", "jaw-dropping" and even "très cool" propaganda. "Why cats?" Why not? Or ask Spartacus, as Lucas Foljanty is known at TS (blogrolled) when he's not busy with his Apple Museum, where he lists software codenames along with everything else. Mac OS X started out as Siam before somebody came up with Cheetah. (A few other names in the code cornucopia make almost anybody feel young standing next to the vigorous Steve Jobs...) In Helsinki, at 'Nickel And Chromium', inveterate "rambler" Lauri Kieksi described some features you can't see in screenshots in "Panther Notes". Lauri went slightly further inside with a look at the much-vaunted "WebCore" and application integration on June 12: "Is Panther Apple's Longhorn?" Those of us who signed up for Apple's .Mac service, increasingly integrated with the OS but much flamed on cost and clumsy presentation grounds, will believe one promise about iDisk (100 MB of storage -- and where I keep the pix for this blog among other things) when we see it: "Incredible performance and speed. "Working with the files in iDisk is as fast as working with your Mac. A copy of your iDisk content is kept on your local hard drive, so there's no delay in browsing your directory, opening files, or saving files." That's the claim at the .Mac Panther preview page. At present, I've learned scarcely to think of summoning my iDisk to my desktop at certain times of day once America awakes. Some developers are excited by the likes of 'Xcode' -- "as quick to forgive as it is to compile" (Apple again). Michael Singer reported for Australia.internet that: "(...) As part of its love affair with graphics, Panther adds in Apple's 'piles' GUI design concept. Now called 'Expose', the patented technology based on its Quartz Extreme engine allows users to browse collections of documents represented graphically in stacks. The filing system then divides into sub-piles based on each document's content. New features in Panther Server, also highlighted this week [late June], include Automatic Setup for easily setting up multiple servers; Open Directory 2 for hosting scalable LDAP directory and Kerberos authentication services; Samba 3 for providing login and home directory support for Windows clients; and the JBoss application server for running J2EE applications. (...)"'Apple Turns "Panther" Loose'. X --> 'macosxlabs.org', a "Lab Deployment Initiative (...) created by members of the Apple University Executive Forum," plans a webcast on the Panther server today, starting at 1:00 pm ET (7:00 pm here; right now, as it happens). This will subsequently be stored for later viewing. Their previous broadcasts are clear and enlightening. Probably up J.-C.'s street, since he works with Jean-Paul at NetFront. If you want more, including argument, try a search at Geek. Or MacRumors. Mikey-San announced that he'd been sent evidence that the Panther version of the Text-Edit app can open Microsoft Word files, at his 'new damage' blog (via MacSlash). He thinks it would be "fucking awesome if this feature makes it into the final release". If that's straight -- and it looks genuine -- then I'd be surprised if it doesn't. Apple's 'Switcher' campaign has yet to show stunning results. There's a Panther forum at MacOSX. More than you want to know and plenty of speculation besides... Most Panther news is coming out in drips and drabs. Much of it is as unreliable as Apple likes these things. "Are you going to get it?" Almost a month ago, I'm afraid I said "Sod Panther for now" and even dismissed it as a "gadget freak's wet dream". That was ill-judged! I still feel that way about some of the "iApps", but now I've started dimly to grasp the developer side of the OS, the Panther news updates make it an increasingly interesting prospect. 7:23:18 PM  link   your views? [] African gallery (2): Gina, Algeria, & hell in the heat (Reposting entry from July 13:) Algeria is a huge, beautiful and potentially wealthy country with a tragic recent history. Since a bloody struggle for independence from France, won in 1962 and only acknowledged as a "war" by both parties in the 1980s, its people have seen more than anybody's fair share of official corruption and ruinous strife. "Outrage", as Gina called this first scene on a street in the capital, has become part of daily life. Many Algerians, particularly young people, channel their fear and distrust of the government and its security forces into insurrection, armed, artistic or intellectual. Descendants of those who lived there before the Arabs arrived -- they conquered north Africa in the 7th century -- also seek recognition of "minority rights". On top of high unemployment, lack of housing and other economic and political woes, Algerians were wracked by a devastating earthquake in 1980. Last May 21, a new one struck the Mediterranean coast (read on and see the remarkable photolog Gina sent me after covering the terrible story for AFP). 7:06:17 PM  link   your views? [] OS X terminal delights and hidden treasures (Reposting "lost" entry:) The "how-to" part of this item about starting to use the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X, to enable software of the kind being developed in the SourceForge community, is based on a bulletin board entry I posted at TechSurvivors on July 11. It may interest other people as new as I was to some really fabulous programmes. Like somebody at TS, though I've been playing with a few cheap HTML editors of late, I'd been looking for the real works. I found it, for free (via French graphic design mag 'Studio Multimédia') at no less august a source than the WWW consortium. Amaya deserves to be much better known than it is. The W3C's web editor and browser (being fetched and compiled in this picture), looks like this (Amaya site) screenshot. While it can't do everything, the consortium assumes you know nothing about HTML, XHTML or CSS should you like things that way. Amaya helps you build web pages which fully conform to the global standards and should work in any browser, provided it can handle all these languages. (Update:) By the time I "crashed" this log, which was my fault, not Amaya's, I'd made pages which loaded properly in everything but iCab, which can't yet cope completely with cascading style sheets. Here's the "catch" to installing Amaya for those disinclined to explore the Terminal application and the remarkable but latent power of the operating system. You need to be running Apple's X11 or something similar, together with XFree86. Moreover, none of an astonishing stock of software will work unless you've installed the developer tools that come with OS X, or are a very hefty download (400 MB plus) from the Apple Developer Connection site. To the faint-hearted, all this sounds like a fearsome challenge, even for people who've already bunged in the developer tools, following the letter of Mac books which recommend this, but never explored them. Well. It's worth it! The process is far easier than such people might imagine. Here's how (the full story...) 6:56:34 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.