On WALL-E

This contains a few spoilers, but nothing that would completely ruin the movie for you if you haven't already seen it.

I saw WALL-E this weekend, and overall I thought it was pretty good. I'm a bit mystified by the torrent of comments up on Twitter and in the blogosphere saying it's perfect in every way, the best movie of the year, it's fantastic, etc. It's certainly a great movie, but I wouldn't put it in genius territory quite yet (maybe I need to watch it another time?). I thought The Incredibles and Ratatouille were a bit better overall - we'll get to the big reason why in a second.

I have to admit I really liked the undoubtedly intentional homage to Johnny 5's design (from Short Circuit, which was my favourite movie for a long time as a kid - you could tell even back then I'd become an engineer!). Also loved the Mac startup sound when WALL-E boots up, but that's been covered to death already.

Nitpicking

1) The passengers on the ship are referred to as "shoppers", which begs the question of how a population of 8-th generation travelers who don't seem to actually do any useful work can accumulate any assets to spend, and how those assets would have any value when the only trading partner is BNL. There appears to be a completely uniform distribution of "stuff" among the population, so there can be no interpersonal trade or bartering. How is the shipboard economy sustained? I would have loved to see a few hints on what their economy is like; as it is, I think we can just speculate and wait for the DVD with director's commentary. As an aside, I'm trying to think of examples in sci-fi literature of self-contained shipboard economies, and I'm coming up blank. I loved the ideas in Charles Stross' Accelerando, where the ship of (virtualized) explorers has no economy itself (the explorers and their physical environment being nothing more than a simulation), but the characters set up a kingdom which acts as a trust back in the originating solar system, tasked with making enough money to continue powering the ship remotely over decades.

2) Why are they throwing garbage out into space? It seems clear the Axiom ship, which has been out there for 700 years, is intended to function as a self-sustaining system, but if that's the case, they certainly can't afford to be throwing out materials at the rate at which we see them doing so during the movie. The movie does establish that the ship itself commands automated probes like the one that carried EVE, so perhaps we're meant to assume these probes also handle mining for raw materials.

3) The ship lands at the end of the movie, and in scale, it's clear it's much smaller than a large city (it looks like it might be a few kilometers long, if even that). So where is the rest of humanity? My assumption today is that somehow, the lifestyle that led to the extreme consumerism of the race and the destruction of the environment also caused a gradual contraction of humanity's numbers down to a couple thousand, who finally decided to evacuate when BNL provided the opportunity. Again, maybe I missed some key hints, but I didn't see this addressed.

4) How is it that even after seven centuries, atmospheric pollution hasn't died down? Part of the explanation could be that there's no vegetation to absorb any of it, but you'd think even then, over that length of time, the cycle of rain and evaporation would push it all down as water, and everything would end up in the oceans sooner or later, clearing the air. (But hey, what do I know about ecology, I'm a software guy. I'm sure over the coming days we'll get analysis by people who know how to answer this.)

WALL-E after the other Pixar masterpieces

My final gripe (all the above are just fun openings for speculation) is that the moralizing message in this one is quite a bit more blunt and in-your-face than it was in previous Pixar films. This is part of what made them charming, they weren't too blatant with their moralizing. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few 'lessons' imparted on the viewer by each movie, and there's always an obvious unoriginal one, as well as a less cliché secondary lesson. (Remember, this is just my opinion, and I certainly wasn't acing the literature and film analysis courses I took back when I was in school.)

Finding Nemo had the tired, obvious lesson of "you can do great things no matter who you are, accept yourself along with the small imperfections" (the whole misshaped fin thing). It had more interesting, less obvious lessons about the treatment of animals, their natural habitat, and the value of sticking together as a family.

The Incredibles had the best one: "When everyone's special, no one is". This one theme, with Syndrome's jealousy, is a terrific teardown of the stupid, broken, touchy-feely politically correct "everyone's a winner" style of educating kids where somehow, everyone ends up with a prize at the end. Life isn't like that. Your precious little snowflakes aren't all winners. I love that the writers had the guts to put in that line about everyone being special. Its secondary topic, I think, was an examination of what it means to have an unfulfilling life, and though I adored this movie as it is, I've always thought a slightly darker ending, where Bob Parr ends up forced to go back to just surviving in the shadows, would have been more fitting.

Ratatouille? A bit harder to analyze, actually, and it seems the harder the Pixar movies make it to identify their central themes, the better the movie ends up being. Ratatouille was, arguably, firstly about following your dream despite an unsupportive peer group (a bit similar to Nemo in that respect), and secondly about the art and enjoyment of food, and the evilness of commoditizing and commercializing food preparation. Mmmm, tasty. I'm still not sure how the critic fits in.

Finally, we get to WALL-E which is the one I'm most likely to get wrong, because although I've seen The Incredibles something like 8 times, I've seen WALL-E but once. WALL-E hits you over the head with an unsubtle full-throated shout of "stop consuming / wasting so much", etc, etc. I thought showing the indoctrination of newborns in the school/nursery was quite nice ("B is for BNL, your very best friend"), but it was so brief it may whizz right by the youngest children in the audience [this isn't really a criticism, given my opinion about the film's lack of subtlety].

The deception and poor planning on the part of the BNL CEO ("stay the course!") were likewise enjoyable, but not particularly clever or restrained. Showing the human race as lazy, unthinking pleasure-seekers is also in many respects apt, but at this point it's a smidgen tired and overused. (Though WALL-E did it better than Idiocracy, I must say.) The other part of the story worth talking about is the (extremely cutely done) love between WALL-E and EVE, which has the novel property of unfolding between robots, but once more it's a familiar archetype: the dumpy, ugly guy falls in love with the hopelessly beautiful and refined female character who has no interest in him. He persists and eventually gets the girl - big surprise.

It's certainly worth the 10$. Go see it, then come back and comment. I'm looking forward to seeing it another time, and hoping to go "OH! Of course! How stupid I've been!", and changing my opinion about all the above.

A Few Snapshots From Westfest 5

Last weekend was Westfest 2008 (Westboro's annual music festival, in Ottawa), and due to a craaaaazy week at work I didn't really have time to post any snapshots until tonight (although they were on my Flickr feed, if you're following that). Here, enjoy!

It pretty much rained the whole weekend (and every single day this week - ugh!), so I only managed a few pics during a rare moment of sunshine:

^^^ A few concertgoers hanging out

^^^ A hip-hop band out of Manitoba called Grand Analog. They were actually pretty great!

^^^ Their lead singer, trying to rev up the crowd (not completely successful, but oh well)

^^^ I like this couple, they have the same weird hairdo and fit together so well

^^^ The Candy Store, a new shop that just opened up on Richmond Rd. Haven't shopped there yet. (I'm not really a sweets and candy kind of guy - I'm sipping a blended nectarine/tofu shake as I write this.)

^^^ This kid was hilarious, more on him in a second

So here's the story: the boy was in the American Apparel boutique, and being rather small and questionably behaved, he managed to sneak right into the display case. He then - and I am not making this up - started caressing the legs of the female mannequins. Then, he started pulling on clothes, on both the male and female mannequins.

The depressing part of the story (for me) is that in a five-minute span, two different women asked me if he was my son. Ouch. To think that I'd have a kid already - that's a huge, depressing, dose of "you're not getting any younger". Maybe my youthful good looks* are increasingly a thing of the past.

 

*: Just "youthful looks" might be a bit more truthful, but who's counting ;)

Java Devs: Gear Up! (a Shout Out to adaptj and tda)

Found an awesome tool today that I never knew existed, and it blew my mind. It's called StackTrace, from adaptj. There's a free version you can launch using Java Webstart (JNLP). This thing is awesome at solving one small, but all too common problem: being unable to get a thread dump in a running JVM because you don't have the console that launched the java process. (Imagine someone on your QA team calls you up, and says that his nightly build of your app locked up - you ask him three questions: Did you start it with remote debugging enabled? no? Then did you enable log4j logging? no? Did you keep around the console that launched it? Ah, no again, of course. At this point you're usually screwed. But not anymore!)

It looks like this:

When you start up StackTrace, click the little gear icon or go to Process > Select... and you get a list of all the java processes on your system. Select the desired one, click OK, then back on the main screen hit the "Thread dump" button.

Boom. Instant thread dump of everything in that JVM instance. THIS. IS. HUGE.

Second little discovery of the day is called tda. It's a thread dump analyzer that will open up a saved stack trace and show you exactly which threads own which monitors, and speed up a bit your task of slogging through pages and pages of stack traces. Give it a try:

Is Bell's Torrent Throttling Sucking Less?

n.d.a.: My ISP is 295.ca, which is a DSL reseller affected by Bell's torrent throttling.

Screenshot taken at 16:30 today from a terminal window, late afternoon being in the time period where torrents are normally getting throttled down to around 25 k/s:

185.9 kB/s! (Sure, not great, but for a throttled connection during peak hours this is acceptable.)

A Lifesaver for Multi-Monitor Users

If, like me, you're used to spending a lot of time in KDE on Linux, trying to move windows around on a large desktop (such as in a multi-monitor setup) on WinXP can be pretty frustrating because there's no native support for KDE's ALT+DRAG method of moving windows.

KDE supporting this is a very Good Thing. Fitts' Law predicts the time required to move a cursor to a target area as a function of the target's size and distance from the current cursor position. It implies that a very large target, close to the mouse pointer, will be much faster to access than a small one, especially if it's further away.

This explains why it's comparatively hard to move a window under Windows: the cursor has to move from its current position all the way to the top of the window to be moved, which is a wide but not very tall target. KDE's usability improvement is to allow the user to hold the ALT key, and click anywhere within the window, then drag it to a new location. [Which can even be to another virtual desktop, but lack of support for that in WinXP is another stupid annoyance that we'll complain about another time.] This makes the target area as large as the window, so you don't really need any fine motor skills, and the distance to target is often zero, because your pointer is already there.

So here's what I came online to post about: howtogeek.com posted an AutoHotKey script to enable this functionality in Windows. I've been running it for 3 days now without issues, so I'm giving it the thumbs up. Get it now.

The Economics of Consumer Photo Printers: Only Good for Homemade Porn?

I just remembered that I meant to print out something at work today, and it's 11PM and I don't own a printer, so it's not happening today. But it got me thinking about laser printers, so I looked up a few on costco.ca and bestbuy.ca.

Checking out the laser printers, I saw a bunch of those little home photo printers, like the Canon Pixma series, and I got curious: how did the total operating cost of those things, once you factor in ink and photo paper, compare to my current solution: photolab.ca?

Are my Intuitions any Good?

Intuitively, I figured that buying your own printer and consumables would be expensive up front, but pictures would have a lower marginal cost, so once you amortized the cost over hundreds of prints, you'd eventually reach a break-even point after which owning the photo printer was the cheaper option. I did a bit of investigative work to try and locate this break-even point. Foreshadowing: my intuitions can be waaay off the mark.

Photolab's up First

First, the photolab.ca approach. The cost is exactly 0.19$ per 4x6 print (it drops to 0.15$ if you order >100 at once, but let's ignore that and assume we're printing small batches every week). You then pick it up at a Loblaws or Superstore and pay on reception. I've used them and found the quality to be great [if you're in the Solace offices, all the pics you see in my cube are from there].

Buying a Pixma MP620

Next, let's choose a Canon photo printer to compare against. Best Buy has a few cheaper Pixma units, but they're all end-of-lifed and the Canon website doesn't sell ink anymore. Cheapest current-ish one I found is the Pixma MP610, which looks like something I'd buy, and goes for 129.99$.

Canon sells the 3-colour CMY cartridge pack for 64.99$ (site is not linkable, it's called "CLI-8 Colour Combo w./ PP-101 4x6 50 SH PK"), rated for 280 pages of letter paper at 5% coverage. In terms of surface area, a 4x6 print is equal to 0.2567 pages of letter paper, but since you're printing border-to-border instead of sparse text, you'll need 100% ink coverage. We can thus estimate that the cartridges will give us 54.542 4x6 prints, which is handy because coincidentally, the box includes 50 pages of 4x6 photo paper, so let's round that 54.542 down to 50 to account for the waste from cleaning the heads. This makes our cost per page 1.30$ per 4x6 print. On top of the cost of the printer. That's not a typo.

Comparative Results

Now you know where this is going, but I thought it would be extra fun to graph these costs (assumes the cost-per-photo is evenly amortized, in reality the blue line would be a staircase curve):

And here's what it looks like if a sales guy were to walk over and GIVE YOU THE PRINTER FOR FREE:

I think the conclusion we can draw from this is that the premium for home printing is huge, so I suppose it would only be worth it if:

1. You regularly have a very pressing need for printouts and can't wait 24 hours for the lab to process your order, or
2. You wish to get your printouts without an anonymous technician seeing them - wink wink nudge nudge.