The Americans had also wanted to travel with a piece of military hardware called a ‘mini-gun’

Mini-Guns? For riot control? Diplomacy at its finest. Refusing to allow them was a rare attack of common-sense for Mr. Blunkett.

Link: ‘Shoot-to-kill’ demand by US

(For anyone who isn’t familiar with films like ‘Terminator 2’, ‘The Matrix’ or Robert Rankin’s novels: a mini-gun is a large modern machine gun with spinning barrels which fires an enormous number of high power bullets very quickly.)

Review after review has said “The second one was bad and this one is worse”. Well, I thought it was good, and I liked the second one too. The plot is a continuation of the previous film, and the ending was cheerful without being a “Hollywood ending”. People making “Highlander II” comparisons are either missing something in the sequels, or saw something I didn’t in the original.

One of the big turn-offs for the disappointed seems to be Zion. I’ve seen comments where fans of the first Matrix film are furious over the pretty mild sex scene and rave “orgy” in the second film. Some commenters on Slashdot walked out of the cinema during the Zion party scene. I wonder if some “conservative” people seriously believed the first Matrix film was a Christian parable, and then got upset at the dancing, sex-before-marriage, multi-ethnic/multi-faith bits in the sequel. They certainly won’t like the end of this one.

So here’s my review: It’s a Matrix film. It’s about guns, fake kung-fu and rambling philosophy. It has astounding plot holes. You will be able to predict exactly what the next line of dialogue is so often you’ll wonder if you’re an oracle yourself. It is not a serious film.

If you like that, you’ll enjoy it. If you don’t, you won’t.

A. and I went off to visit family in Nuneaton recently. I haven’t been to Nuneaton for a long time, and it was strange to be back. The main street has an amazing concentration of mobile phone shops. The old Tandy shop, the place I saw my first computer, has vanished.

Nuneaton has a surprisingly good range of health food shops - the small town centre has at least three decent shops, including of course a Hollands and Barrets who seem originate from Nuneaton. One of the other two shops had a great range of food, and lots of hippie nicknacks too. Nuneaton’s park is much smaller than I remember (a side effect of me being over six foot tall now, I suppose) but was pleasant to wander around, and absolutely packed with almost fearless squirrels. George Elliot’s statue seems to have moved, I’m sure it used to be in the park.

The main problem I had while upgrading systems to Mandrake 9.2 was that my Netgear router failed on the same weekend, forcing some rapid routing adjustments to restore internet connectivity, and a complete loss of wireless. My Apple Airport wireless router failed after just a year too. The Airport had a one year warranty, and was stupidly expensive to repair, so I replaced it with the Netgear FM114P. Fortunately the Netgear had a free three year warranty. After a long wait on hold they immediately sent me a new one. I strongly recommend Netgear, their kit is good and their warranty support is good. D-Link seem to losing their quality control and sturdy design, and I’m tired of their non-standard power adapters failing. Belkin appear to have gone stark staring mad and created a router that randomly chooses to supply users with adverts rather than the requested data.

I’ve been using Apache::Status to neurotically peer inside my Mod_Perl project. The information it provides is useful, interesting, and more than a little baffling. Things take up much more memory than I’d expected. For instance:

if (@_) {$self->{skey} = shift;} appears to take up 428 bytes of RAM when compiled. The XML::RSS module appears to be adding 832k. Thank goodness for shared memory… Hippo is a rather fat application.

I haven’t upgraded the OS on my home server for years, and since I’ve got some time away from work, a new Mandrake is out, and I’m just about to start another intensive round of Hippo development, this is probably the best opportunity I’ll get for a long time. Professionally I wouldn’t do this without a week or so of watching the new OS and waiting for other people to find the bugs*, but, well, it’s now or next year, and it’s a point-two release, so there shouldn’t be anything too risky cough cough

I’ve been backing up in various ways for four hours now.

There doesn’t appear to be any source code for the Linux kernel on Mandrake’s free download version of 9.2. Three CDs, no kernel code. Why?

*That’s why I hand out copies of the CDs at work. I’m devious.

There’s a growing trend of very lazy journalism here: Microsoft Press Release appears, and someone at the BBC publishes it with little or no critical analysis as a news story.

Knights rescue old Star Wars story and Star Wars Knights game shines (in two days!) : Advert for an X Box game

and the latest, excellent…

Microsoft launches ‘leak-proof’ e-mail

You can’t do what MS claim with real email. In a closed Exchange based system it would work for a while, but in the real world, running real email clients and servers, it cannot work. This is client-side security - my email client or local server can simply choose to ignore the self destruct header in the email message. Just more proprietary snake-oil and threatening DRM, creeping in with misleading publicity.

If you want to secure email, just use PGP, but security is a process, not a software feature. People leak information, not email clients. And with the UK’s lovely new laws, refusing to reveal your email contents to the Police can results in prison time, encrypted or not…

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is simply the most wonderful video game I’ve ever played. It’s near perfect. I don’t even like this type of game, normally. I can enjoy not playing it too - just wandering around, sailing or watching the storms.

Sony and Microsoft promote their consoles as powerful, cool, sexy, but I think Nintendo has the best attitude: consoles are toys. They should be fun.

How many other improbable Simpsons characters are real? Krusty? Professor Frink? The Bush family?

Link: Tiger mauls Las Vegas magician

I know I should be more compassionate when someone has been mauled by a tiger, but I can’t manage it in this case.

For over ten years I’ve used a great shoulder-bag that A. bought me for my birthday from LL Bean. Here’s the latest version of their Campus Bag. When I got the bag it was quite unusual in the UK, but they’re pretty common now, and seem to almost replaced briefcases. I suspect this is because they’re much more useful and cheaper. I’ve used mine for lugging a laptop, groceries, clothes or just a packed lunch, every day.

Sadly, the poor thing is about to collapse, and looks rather tatty, so it was time for a new bag. I wanted something sturdy, general purpose but good for laptops. With my old campus bag I had to pad laptops using rolled up t-shirts.

The UK is not an easy place to buy a good bag. The USA, mainland Europe, Australia, Japan all seem to have lots of ‘urban’ bags readily available. Not here. I didn’t want a traditional laptop bag. In the end I had to choose between a Timbuk2 bag, probably ordered from the USA, or a Crumpler bag. I went for the Crumpler ‘Very Busy Man’. Crumplers seem to be only sold in the UK by computer dealers (they have laptop compartments, but don’t look like traditional laptop bags, and are trendy enough to appeal to Mac laptop owners too) and camera dealers (as they have an optional camera compartment).

Mac dealers sell the Crumpler ‘Very Busy Man’ for about £100, but I found Warehouse Express, a camera dealer, sell them for £70. That’s a £30 Mac-owner tax.

I’m happy with it. Big, sturdy, looks good, vegan, comfortable, and can carry a laptop without needing rolled up t-shirts. The only things I miss are a carry handle and an outside magazine pocket, both of which would have been useful, but I can live without them. It’s huge - I can easily travel with my full set of food, gadgets, books and clothes now. Offsite DLTs have their own travelling compartment ;-) It has a lifetime warranty too. The Crumpler website has monkey noises. (TImbuk2 has a much better site, but it isn’t as funny as Crumpler’s.)

Heil-Smith had been on the phone at the time with her friend, Debby Nelson. The phone was knocked out of her hand during the attack. But instead of yelling for help, Heil-Smith was yelling, “It’s only a bear” to avoid scaring her friend.”

The article gives the advice thats it’s worth putting up a fight against a black bear, but with grizzly bears the trick is to immediately play dead.

Link: Woman fends off bear attack in her own garage