Midnight Cowboy is a hard film to call. It’s a slice of film history, with some well-known visuals, well-known music, and well-known scenes:

"Hey! I'm walkin' here! I'm walkin' here!" - Ratso

But it’s a confusing film, with plenty of montages, flashbacks, fantasy scenes, and a drug-induced party. I wasn’t expecting any of that, and it doesn’t exactly help carry the plot (that which there is) forward. The sex scenes, despite being notorious (Midnight Cowboy was the only X-rated film to ever win an Oscar - it’s since been downgraded to R-rated) are tame by modern standards: although there’s a strong theme of ambiguous sexuality running throughout the film, with Joe Buck (Jon Voight) - the cowboy of the title - being pretty indiscriminate about who he sleeps with, even in his role as a hustler.

I’ve thought for a while that build, source-code management, and bug tracking software (which I’m collectively calling meta-software) could, and should, be so much simpler. I’ve written previously about my contention that bugs and features are the same thing, but the problem is wider. Software has a tendency to acquire features over time, and software that’s used to make other software is no exception. Here are some assorted thoughts about how to improve the situation:

I’ve written before about my mixed relationship with LOVEFiLM. It’s now becoming obvious that, as I suspected might happen, the turnaround time for sending out DVDs is worsening again - my last five or so have all taken several days longer than they should have, and the delays are getting longer each time. I’m far from the only ex-Screenselect customer to see this. If this continues, I’ll be cancelling my account. Please, LOVEFiLM, get it sorted.

I’m not a big fan of gangster films, so I’m only prepared to watch the very best. Most such films are violent and gruesome, which turns me off (particularly the latter), and Scarface is no exception. However, it’s surprisingly moralistic. As Tony Montana (Al Pacino, of course) says…

I never fucked anybody over in my life that didn't have it coming to 'em. You got that? All I have in this world is my balls and my word and I don't break 'em for no one.

… and he’s right: at least by his terms. Scarface is also an interesting study of the drugs industry. Of course, it’s hard to know how accurate it is (I suspect real drug dealing is much more mundane than the glamorous life here), but nevertheless, there was more than one scene that reminded me of the interesting study of drug dealing in Freakonomics, with the price of risk being openly discussed.

After writing a few months ago about how bank customers were reneging on the contracts they signed and suing their banks for ‘illegal’ bank charges, it appears that free banking is indeed in danger, with HSBC introducing a monthly fee. I’m glad to see that they won’t be charging them to those account holders with balances greater than £1,500 (read: those who rarely encounter fees anyway), but it’ll still be interesting to see how this shakes up the market. To me, this is a clear example of an unintended consequence of government regulation, in an area that would be better off left alone.

Richard and I went to see Steve Forbes (of Forbes magazine fame) speaking last night at an event organised by The London Junto (a libertarianish organisation). The topic was flat taxes, and Forbes made a compelling argument for one - albeit probably preaching to the converted. Forbes has to be one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever seen speak - he dealt with economics, business, and geopolitical questions with equal capability, forthrightness, and clarity. He’s a former Republican presidential candidate, and it’s obvious from his winning politician’s smile. The Lansdowne Club is a traditional old-boys London Club (you can tell this partly because they pointedly use the word criterion on their website), and it made a suitable venue, although it didn’t exactly appeal to my taste. All in all, a worthy experiment.

For users of Exim only:

It’s normally recommended to include the line if error_message then finish endif in your .forward filter file, to make sure error messages don’t cause recursive problems in your mail system. I have found that this doesn’t work in practice if you normally receive a lot of spam, because spammers are increasingly using your email address to spam other people. This causes bounces back to you, which bypass your spam filter because of that line (at least in my setup, using sa-exim). Removing that line greatly reduced the amount of spam reaching my inbox.

I wrote recently about my indecision surrounding the domain of information design; should detail or simplicity win out? (as always, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle - but hey, that’s boring). Google Maps and Multimap provide an interesting example of what I’m talking about.

Google’s maps are simple; straightforward; and link together yellow pages data with mapping data - together with some cool APIs that enable rip-offs (an ancient term for a mashup). However, they also strip out contextual data that any professional navigator would consider important - landmarks, land type, buildings, etc. It seems apparent that Google are trying to hit a particular market - those who find conventional maps too confusing. And to be fair, they’re doing pretty well - empirical data suggests lots of folks use them. Their reasonably robust mobile maps are also quite handy.

Assault on Precinct 13 is a low-budget action film from horror director John Carpenter. The premise of the film is very simple: a gang takes revenge for a recent bust by assaulting a police station staffed by a skeleton crew (plus a few hangers-on). Initially it appears we aren’t supposed to sympathise with the police, as they’re shown as brutish and unsympathetic, but a shocking scene a third of the way through the film turns this on its head and suddenly we empathise with the plight of those who then become beseiged and the ’tight corners’ nature of the film shines through.

It seems to be a commonly held contemporary belief that transport and travel are a guilty pleasure at best, and reprehensible at worst, mainly due to the unpleasant environmental side-effects, and should be minimised. Environmentalists have already invented carbon offsetting to assuage collective and individual guilt about the trendy problem of carbon emissions (Tim Harford has explained why this makes no sense; and I think it’s nothing short of miraculous how carbon offsetting services can put a price on emissions so easily).