This film makes no sense.

Nope, not The Wizard of Oz. One of the characters in The Cat Returns is a crow named Toto, but he helps out Haru (not Dorothy) when she is kidnapped to the Cat Kingdom (rather than, er, Oz). Yep, this is a kid’s film. It’s entertaining and well-executed, as one would expect from another film from the Studio Ghibli production team, and light-hearted too, but there’s nothing deep, nothing glittering, and nothing rich like one might get from a Hayao Miyazaki film (such as Howl’s Moving Castle, which I wrote about the other day). A good film, but not one with a soul.

To see animation at its very peak, you need to see Japanese anime. Howl’s Moving Castle is another excellent slice of this from director Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki’s film is superbly executed in almost every way. The animation is mouth-wateringly rich and silky, supplemented by camera moves made possible in the age of CGI. It’s clear that he is using this technology to not only match what’s possible in live action, but move beyond it. The art is typically Japanese - beautiful and detailed. The moving castle itself seems to be a bewildering mix of 2D and 3D - an almost living object on screen. It has to be seen to be believed - and some scenes have elements of almost photographic realism. The sound, including the foley, is competent and matches the visuals well.

From time to time I listen to RadioEconomics. It’s not quite as interesting to me as EconTalk, partly because it doesn’t have the same focus on liberty, but an interesting discussion the other day with Dr. Diane Coyle from Manchester University brought me to two conclusions:

1. Developed countries will suffer from increasing inequality if the current trend of outsourcing increases. Creative ‘knowledge’ work is becoming the province of a large proportion of the population in places such as the US and the UK. However, there are still fundamental limitations on transport and technology that mean that labour-intensive jobs, from train driving to fruit stacking in Tesco, aren’t going away any time soon. A gap in the middle will begin to form, where the medium-skill jobs once were, that are now being increasingly fulfilled by folks in India and other places. This is probably inevitable. Maybe this seems like an obvious point to some people, but I think it is crucially important to keep this in mind to evaluate the promises of those who would like to be in the position to form public policy (in short, election candidates). Whether income inequality is a problem is a question for another time.

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A train I was on from Winchester to London yesterday was delayed because of faulty doors on another train. In fact, at one point, we actually managed to go backwards for a few miles to get to usable track. Despite sitting stationary for 15 minutes whilst the signalmen dithered and ending up almost half an hour late, South West Trains didn’t mention provide any reparations for passengers on the train. By contrast, my experiments in travelling by coach recently (primarily on National Express) have been very promising; they are cheaper than the train and surprisingly reliable for road-based transport. I shall consider them more seriously in the future as an alternative to the train (I don’t normally drive).

I am now on the official list of IBM external bloggers. You can find plenty of my colleagues there also, blogging on a variety of IBM-related and other topics.

(Using big words gives me a cheap thrill).

Has anyone else noticed that the word ’expert’ is changing its meaning, becoming more generous? It seems like the bar for becoming an ’expert’ is lower than it once was (good examples can be found on the 6 o’clock news). Of course it’s hard to measure this other than empirically, but it’s fun to play the mental exercise - are you an expert in anything? I’m going to assert arbitrarily that unless you know more about a subject than 95% of the people who are in some way experienced in the field in question (by the most narrow definition feasible), then you’re not an expert. I think this approximates to the definition of ’expert’ most people used to have, but not any more (I’d postulate the figure is now drifting in the 60% region). My strict definition of ’expert’ means I’m not one in economics, film, libertarianism, SOA, or a variety of other fields I’m interested in. I don’t find this depressing, though - I think it just makes the word more useful. A vague definition is the enemy of precise language (something Strunk and White advocated). Unfortunately, most dictionaries are vague on expert, only hinting towards a ‘high degree of skill’. This is why I felt it might be better to put numbers on it (even if the domain can still be vague).

Sometimes I think we in the IT industry forget that the point of computing is to make the lives of human beings easier; to do things for us and automate our work; not to introduce extra tasks (this premise is the thrust of IBM’s Autonomic campaign). I was reminded of this the other day when I was writing a set of Perl scripts to download podcasts for me by tidying up the output of goldenpod. I wrote these in Perl because, despite its arcane syntax, it is fabulous for the kind of ‘glue’ job I was doing: taking the output of another program, modifying it, doing some tidy-up on my filesystem, etc. This is primarily because of the rich set of modules available, which in my experience dwarfs any other language. It took an hour or two to write, but now that I’m done, it’s rock-solid stable and does its work silently without my intervention, saving me time in the long run.

If you’re using WebSphere ESB, Fixpack 3 for version 6.0.1 has just been released, which fixes a variety of problems. You can find out more here.

One of the troubles of working in the IT industry is that no-one ever agrees on what the next big thing means. This is partly because software terms tend to run out from between your fingers when you try to grab them, just like soft putty - want to try defining ‘blogging’? One example I’m thinking about a lot at the moment is SOA (Service-oriented architecture). The problem isn’t just that people don’t know what SOA means, but that there isn’t a single definition - every software vendor has a subtly different message.