Amadeus, which could have been more lengthily titled ‘The Rise and Fall of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’, is an outstanding film from the Academy Awards’ back-catalogue. Winners of eight Oscars, it deserved them all, despite its many historical inaccuracies and liberties. An extremely watchable film, it never drags despite its length, and each scene tells.

Amadeus is a film of contrasts. It depicts Mozart as a fun-loving wally, reminiscent of Yahoo Serious in Young Einstein (or at least his hair). His music, always sublime, provides the soundtrack to the film and makes clear the disparity between it and his outward personality (at least here). It’s possible the film libels Mozart with this playful presentation, but if it does, it does it in a charming way. The distinction is reinforced by the assertions of Salieri, the narrator, that Mozart was a vulgar man, but his music was not. The narration is sometimes presented with visuals, and intercuts with the visuals of Mozart’s life. Richard Frank is superb as the priest of few words: the confessional foil for Salieri’s tales of immorality and blasphemy: his head is often in his hands, unbelieving.

Andre Tost has written a short, but very helpful, article that clarifies a few of the more confusing issues surrounding Web Services. None of the concepts are particularly new, but Andre provides a good summary of some potential pitfalls. It’s well worth reading if you’re interested in SOA or ESBs in general, as well as Web Services specifically.

As an aside, I found this article as part of the WebSphere ESB support RSS feed. For those that aren’t aware, there are support RSS feeds for several IBM software products, which provide new information on documentation, fixes, and other issues. Find the product you’re interested in on IBM’s website, and click on the ‘Support’ link. Then look for the orange RSS logo for the feed.

The Fugitive is a good action-mystery, based on the original TV series. Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones both put in solid performances, and Jeroen Krabbé is subtle as the slimy Charles Nichols. The plot is careful, without too much flabbiness. It perhaps lacks the shine of a classic, but it’s definitely very watchable.

Armageddon is:

• Laughably inaccurate.

• Poorly acted by almost everyone. Given the number of high-quality stars (for better examples, see Death Becomes Her - Bruce Willis, Changing Lanes - Ben Affleck, The Man Who Wasn’t There - Billy Bob Thornton, Ghost World - Steve Buscemi), such a low standard is impressive.

• So gung-ho you can barely watch at times.

Armageddon has:

• A ridiculous plot. Deep-core drillers are hired by NASA to land on an asteroid in space shuttles and blow it up with a nuclear warhead?

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It looks like ASLEF are going ahead with three days of strike action on South West Trains’ services. I went to their website to look for an mention of it but could find none. The same was true of the RMT, who are also taking part. Meanwhile, South West Trains have put up notices in stations indicating that ASLEF has announced these strikes because SWT managers drove trains to alleviate recent strike action. As SWT put this, ‘we think this is good customer service’. Well, quite. I would support any measures by SWT to reduce union membership amongst their employees if this is what results.

Apologies for the lack of posts recently on WebSphere ESB. I’m currently out of the office and out of ‘work’ mode, so I’m not writing many posts on that topic. I’ll be getting back to it in a week or two, though, so please stay tuned. Incidentally, if you’re not already aware, you can subscribe to RSS feeds for just a specific topic on this blog, such as SOA & ESB (feed here) - in fact, you can do this with any WordPress Blog. Just go to the category archive (select from the list on the right-hand side), then append ‘/feed’ to the URL.

Richard has been talking about security scams over at Gendal World. There certainly seems to be a lot of empirical evidence that security principles aren’t well understood by the general public.

For example: My credit card expired recently. On receiving the new one, I forgot to sign it, and put it in my wallet with the back blank (yeah, I know). I’ve since been able to use it twice unsigned:

• At a pub, I paid for ~£10 worth of drinks. They didn’t use chip-and-pin, so I was asked to sign. When the barman noticed I was missing a signature, he pointed out that I really should sign it, but ’this time’ he’d take other ID. I showed him my photo driving licence (with a signature), and there were no further questions. I was sufficently fazed that I forgot to sign it again, and:

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Imagine the scenario:

• You live in Winchester and don’t drive.

• You’ve gone out for the night.

• You’re catching an early flight from Southampton airport the next morning.

• Because you’re a bit slow, it doesn’t occur to you that trains don’t go to the airport early enough, until:

• You return home at 1am that morning from the pub to check the timetable.

• You realise they start at least an hour too late.

• You panic.

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Purely by accident, I discovered this little bug on Google: go to google.com/wibble (or any other invalid URL). The 404 page that appears has an ancient logo. Judging from Google’s logo history, it’s pre-1999.

Is this really a mistake, or is it a feature? I can’t believe I’m the first to notice this. It’s cute, anyway…

Economists often use words differently from other folk. Words such as ‘profit’, ‘wealth’, ‘rent’ and ‘cost’ all have subtle, but important, differences from the way many of the general public use them. Such words can easily get tied to particular value judgements or politics - for example, the word ‘profit’ conjures up images of fat cats and greedy people in the minds of many. In the minds of economists, profit is almost always a good thing - partly because they don’t tie the word just to money.