I’ve had superb experiences with 82ASK up till now. It’s a very simple but useful service; text any question to 82ASK (82275) and they send you the answer back for a pound (or don’t charge if they can’t answer). I’ve found it’s very useful when out and about and you’re trying to answer a travel or shopping query.

After flying back to Heathrow Terminal 4 the other day, I need to get to the Central Bus Station, which is right next to Terminals 1, 2, and 3. On the way out I’d caught the free Heathrow Express to T4, but I thought it went in a loop round Heathrow, like the tube, so wasn’t suitable for the return hop. I wanted to get to the bus station quickly to see if I could catch an earlier bus home. So I sent this to 82ASK as I was getting off the plane:

Syriana is a tight but complex thriller that deals with issues of politics, oil, and terrorism. Recent happenings with Hezbollah and Iran give it extra poignance. It would certainly benefit from repeat watchings, and I wouldn’t claim to be able to explain it all. The relevancy or accuracy of the film it is probably almost impossible to know.

It’s certainly an adult American thriller, and Stephen Gaghan, the writer and director, is obviously familiar with American political nature and is not constrained by his national culture. Even the fake British news presentation at one point is not from the usual Hollywood ’tea and the queen’ mold, and only allows one minor slip-up through: the use of the phrase ‘one-hundred-sixty’ rather than ‘one hundred and sixty’. There is a lot of subtitled foreign language content (such as substantial amounts of Arabic spoken by George Clooney), which is also rare in American film (another good example being The Last Samurai). Let’s hope this consciousness of the world from American filmmakers grows.

I’ve just come back from the Good Experience Live (euroGel) conference in Copenhagen (more on the city and Denmark in a later post). It was a superb and surprisingly moving experience, and as a conference that I paid for myself, I would say it was worth every penny for personal development reasons alone. I would recommend it to anyone with a wide range of interests.

The theme of the conference is hard to pin down; it is defined as ‘good experience in all its forms’. I’m still struggling to ‘get it’, but it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t. In practice, this seems to mean a variety of speakers from across the arts and technology, some of them specialising in user experience or customer experience, coming together to share their stories.

Why do high-street media shops (Videos, DVDs, CDs, Books) still exist? These items were amongst the first to be available for online ordering on the internet, with Amazon and others offering them from around 1995. Yet HMV, Waterstones, and so on don’t show any outward signs of disappearing, or even reducing prices significantly, apart from the hit they allege that virtual media (i.e. MP3 downloading, legal or illegal) is having on their business.

To some people, Farmers’ markets, such as those that visit Winchester on a monthly basis, are an interesting part of a day out. Browsing round provides the opportunity to buy bread, cheese, beer, jams, and other such produce that’s no doubt better than most of what the local supermarkets stock. Many people get stuck on particular brands (read: particular stalls), because they prefer them, and go back again and again to the same place.

Let’s be clear: long before Chris Rock came onto the Hollywood scene, Eddie Murphy was there in his place. This film is classic Murphy, with his wise-cracking, fast-talking, slightly camp personality in full flow.

The plot isn’t much to speak of, but the comic characterisation is well-done, if a little clichéd - the bumbling duo of Taggart (John Ashton) and Rosewood (the strangely-named Judge Reinhold) are straight out of the book of cop stereotypes. The film is well-directed and edited - some of Martin Brest’s opening scenes, showing a-day-in-the-life of poor America, could belong to a film much more serious than this.

Marc Andreessen discussed the history of programming in a recent podcast, noting the shift from machine-targeted languages to human-targeted languages. Although he seems to think that the change was fairly sudden (for him, it was started with Java in 1995), and he spends a surprising amount of time discussing PHP, which seems to be his favourite example of an easy-to-use language, his general point is still well founded.

It’s certainly interesting to see how languages like C and C++ are fading, their place being taken by Java. This is simply due to economic incentives: why spend expensive programmer time solving problems than can be solved by a cheap machine? Java is in danger of becoming overly feature-laden, but it still has a single important strength over its predecessors - simple dynamic memory management - no more explicit object creation/destruction. This does for memory what filesystems have done for disk. It’s hard to see just how much this has done for development speed and robustness until you compare it to what went before. PHP, Python, and so on, have the potential to do more, particularly for the new breed of web-based applications.

• Quiet zones on trains:

  • Only make sense if the train company itself makes minimal noise. Waffling away on the PA, as on the Heathrow Express this morning, does not a quiet journey make.

  • Allow talking, and modern mobile phone microphones are sophisticated enough to pick up normal voice volume audibly, so why are mobiles not permitted? Shouting into the phone is a different matter. Having said that, landline phones normally feed back a small amount of your voice into the loudspeaker to encourage you to be quieter - why don’t mobiles do the same? Perhaps an audio engineer could explain.

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It appears that there are increasing numbers of customers revolting against bank charges which they deem as ‘unfair’. It appears that the law states that these charges are indeed illegal, because they cover more than just the costs the banks incur. In other words, banks are not allowed to make a profit on these charges. This is awkward because it artifically distorts the marketplace. It would be useful for banks to put in place high charges to discourage customers from using unauthorised overdrafts, keeping too small a balance for regular transactions, etc. There are already regulations in place ensuring that charges have to be clearly laid out in account terms and conditions, so this isn’t ‘unfair’.

I installed the popularity contest plugin some time ago to count the popularity of posts on this blog. Unfortunately, up till now it hadn’t been counting page views, which significantly skewed the statistics. I recently discovered, however, that there was a bug in the WP-ShortStat plugin which caused it not to register hits (due to a regression in Wordpress). I applied a similar fix to popularity-contest.php version 1.1 and it now works. It looks like a different fix has already been applied to the version in Trac to fix the problem.