Contagion and Margin call
This last weekend we stood in a huge line at the cinema to go in and see Contagion.
I enjoyed it, it has a very solid cast and it nicely touches on the numerous things that can go wrong in the case of a massive epidemic. Unlike your usual zombie film, Contagion is much more realistic (I would actually say optimistic), touching on a very possible threat and our inability to cope with it, should it take place. Everyone in the film does some mistake that makes the situation in some way worse and you can see how all of them are done out of an intention to do good. I think it’s worth viewing, but if you start feeling that there are too many people in the cinema coughing too close to you and want to run away, don’t say I didn’t warn you!
I also got to see Margin Call this week, a film about a very different threat, but somewhat similar to Contagion in my opinion.
Margin Call explores a very possible scenario of discoveries, discussions and decisions that may have taken place in an investment bank at the beginning of the financial crisis. The cast is again very strong and Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons are fantastic as usual. I think that just like Contagion, it has a very well written script and it’s well played out, touching on numerous problems surrounding the finance world, especially during a crisis. It doesn’t try to incriminate anyone (at least I didn’t feel it did), all the people involved are just doing what they think is right (and what is actually right by some measure) to try and salvage what’s important to them… for some, it’s keeping the company afloat, for others it’s having money for their family. Nonetheless, they are aware of the consequences their actions will have on the world’s markets and they struggle with that. By Hollywood standards, Margin Call is a low-budget film (just barely $4mil), but nonetheless I think it’s a very strong production that also comes at a very interesting time.
Both films (and that’s partly why I put them together) are something I haven’t seen in a while. The tension comes from the inner struggles of the characters, not from the action itself (in Contagion there is some tension from the action, but the core of it is really with the characters). The actors really make or break these types of films and in this case they do very well.
If you’re not into zombies jumping out of closets, either film could be seen as quite a good “horror” flick for the Halloween weekend. After all, a financial meltdown or a dangerous epidemic are much more real and thus scarier threats than vampires and werewolves. But for the weekend, I may just stick with Bruce Campbell‘s cult-classics.
How to format my USB drive for Mac and Windows
I was getting a bit frustrated this morning because of various problems moving files back and forth between my Mac and the other Windows machines in the house. All my portable drives, whether they were flash drives or external hard drives, have been formatted to NTFS for the past few years which always worked okay for me before. Windows obviously handles NTFS perfectly and Linux has no problem reading or writing to that either. Unfortunately, Mac OS doesn’t seem to play as well with NTFS (at least not out of the box). It can read NTFS, but it can’t write to it.
So now starts the file system war again. If I leave my USB drives in NTFS, my Mac can’t write to it. If I format it for the Mac, it won’t work on Windows. If I format it FAT32, it will work on both, but it won’t handle files larger than 4gb.
Now before people start commenting about this or that app that handles different file systems, I want to stress that I am aware such applications and plugins exist, I just wanted this to work easily/natively/out of the box on all computers, without requiring this extra layer.
After quite a bit of digging around, I found out about something called exFAT. You can read the wiki page for more info, but in a sentence, it’s somewhat like FAT, but can handle large files. It’s compatible with pretty much any Windows you’d be running in 2011 (hopefully) and Mac OS starting with Snow Leopard. So this should work fine for thumb drives going between the two OSs.
Of course though, nothing is perfect… exFAT is not compatible with Linux. So sooner or later, the file system war will start again. Until that dark afternoon, let’s pray for peace.
Upgrade time!
I’ve had my Dell Latitude for over 5 years… and it’s been 5 long years for the poor thing. It was my only machine through my entire undergraduate time and while I did get a desktop for my master’s, it still saw heavy use as I did most of my work away from home.
Five years of academic computer science study is no easy feat for a laptop to survive. Also did I mention that a suitcase feel on it once? That laptop just does not give up!
In all this time, I did only three replacements and virtually no other hardware repairs. I upgraded the memory about half-way through, I changed the battery some two years ago (the original battery was probably the crappiest thing on the laptop) and fairly recently I decided to give it a new keyboard because I had pretty much drilled through the old one. Other than that, it has valiantly made it through all this time, never let me down when I needed it and I am sure it still has a lot more to say before it will definitively retire (and when that finally happens, I will probably cry).
But in the world of computing, things move quickly and five years is more than an eternity, especially if you’re what I call a pro-user. Though my old Dell still works as fine as it always has, I need it to do tasks that it can no longer handle and upgrades won’t cut it anymore (it already can’t use all off the memory I put in it).
So, after I got sick of waiting for Android emulators to load up, I decided that the time has come to crack open the ol’ piggy jar and upgrade.
Now believe it or not… I crossed over to the dark side (or the white side rather). And I did so because they had cookies. Lots of them. So I got myself a nice and shiny 15″ Macbook Pro! And so far, I am loving it. I will probably post more thoughts about it as the experience progresses, but it is niiiiiice.
Of course this has raised some number of questions, especially from people that have known me for a while to be strongly opinionated about Apple computers being overpriced. To keep it short… the world changes quickly and opinions should try to keep up. I think Apple right now has a really really REALLY strong line of laptops. I think the Pros are still quite pricey (not the Airs though, those things are worth it) and I can’t see many reasons for a regular user to get them, but for pro users (developers, people that do any kind of media work etc.) I think these laptops are real sweet. To wrap it all up, what is a comparable computer on which I can run MacOS X, Windows & Linux (natively or in VMs) and on which I can do all types of development, including iPhone apps, and which offers the same hardware specs, quality and user experience for a lower price?
I still love my Google Phone, I still think Apple could be nicer to [mobile] developers and all the things that I’ve said before which are completely unrelated to this. I also want to state, for the record, that I have not been replaced by an Apple-programmed robot. I just decided that the MB Pro is the best tool for me to do my work on. Time will tell if I was right or not, but looking back at my experience with my previous laptop, I’ll say the stats are looking good.
Can I get away with one more cat picture? Sure I can, I’m on a Mac.
Real Steel
A friend pointed out that although I say that I am a huge film buff, I don’t ever write anything about the films I see. So I decided to change that and start writing about some of these. There’s a new category named “Film Reviews” where all of these will be put in.
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So most recently, I’ve seen Real Steel. We were trying to pick between going to see Drive and this and we decided to see this because it seemed like a more “goody-feeling” kind of film and we were in the mood for that. Now before you dismiss it as a “robots boxing action flick”, give me a minute to try and sell it (my girlfriend also liked it… so read on!)
It’s truly nice and it’s really not about robots fighting. The plot is more about the strained relationship between a 11 year old kid and his dad who never wanted him, was never there for him (up until now when he has no choice) and can’t get his own life together to begin with. It’s a bit of an old story, I’ll give you that, but it’s very nicely done and I really connected well with the main characters. Hugh Jackman did well and I loved the kid. It also stars “Freckles” from Lost (she was pretty much the only thing that kept me going through the last two weeks of my attempt to watch that show… until I just couldn’t do it anymore, cute girl or not).
Now on top of what I believe is a nice story and a good plot … you get robots boxing! And that’s just awesome. I would pick this over any of Michael Bay’s transformers any time.
So you get a funny, well-written story with some nice action and CGI. This is what I call a good a match for everyone. If you can get the chance to see it in IMAX, it’s worth it.
Chromezone and the Chromebook
As you may have heard, Google is trying their hand at a store for the first time and they are running this little experiment in good ol’ London.
So last week I decided to pop-in and check it out.
“Chromezone” is really just a small area inside a larger tech store and all they’re showing are a bunch of Chromebooks. I would’ve really put some Nexus S’s there as well and perhaps even a few Android tablets, but that’s just me. It’s a cute concept as it is and it’s obviously based off the Apple store success, but I think it needs a bit more work to really get you the experience that Apple now provides (e.g. I don’t know about other stores, but in the Apple Store on Regent’s street they have iPads sitting next to every laptop with all the information you want about the laptops there… it’s awesome!). All in all, a good start. I hope it does well and that they will consider opening more and larger “zones”.
So I sat down and played with one of the Chromebooks. I have been really excited about the Chromebook ever since the first rumours came to be (and even before, given that me and some of my college friends were speculating that such a product will come around since 2006), so sitting down to mess with it a bit was great!
It’s a nice compact netbook with a touchpad that is very similar to the one on Macbooks. I really liked the keyboard and that says a lot, since I usually hate it on netbooks because of my gigantic hands. It does do scrolling and right-clicks like a Macbook (though not inverted as it is on Lion), but I wasn’t able to get any other multi-touch gesture to work. The OS is pretty much just Chrome so there’s really not much to comment on there… if you’ve used Chrome, this is really the same thing, plus a few extra settings.
It does have some external ports, but I wasn’t exactly able to start plugging things in so I’m not sure how all of that fits together. I obviously haven’t tested start-up times either, but I’m sure it is just a matter of seconds as advertised. I should’ve done a download to see how files get stored, but I didn’t think about it at that time so I haven’t done that.
My conclusion? Well it’s very early to say after just a few minutes of toying around. I like it, I really do and I would probably like to grab one at some point. I still think it’s a very interesting and cool concept and it has a lot of potential. The only downside I see is with the price tag (which is, I believe, very different from what was originally being thrown around). The Wi-Fi version can be yours for £349 and the 3G one for £399. I may be terribly off with this, but I think that’s a lot for what you’re getting. You can have all the same functionality (and more) from a cheaper traditional netbook. For £399 I can get an iPad. I really can’t see it be worth that money, unless I missed some awesome hidden feature.
So I don’t know… if it was half that price, I’d probably consider getting one right now. But to me it just seems expensive. Nonetheless, if you live in London, visit the Chromezone, check it out, let me know what you think.
PS: There are very quick photos snapped with my phone, so sorry about the quality. I hadn’t thought about bringing the camera along.
