Wednesday July 21, 2004

There is no place like ::1

If you got that joke then you're part of a small club: the few (for now) who can read IPv6 addresses in literal form.

Yes, IPv6 again! Why do I come back to that topic? Because yesterday (July 20th 2004) ICANN officially announced support for IPv6 in their root servers.

What the hell does that mean, do you ask? It means that DNS, the mechanism that translates internet names like www.sun.com into IP addresses, can now return IPv6 addresses as well! The first 3 countries (or subdomains) to follow suite are Japan (.jp), Korea (.kr) and France (.fr).

Things are really moving fast on that front. After the Department of Defense mandate (see my blog entry dated June 28th) this is a very important step towards the large scale adoption.

What we need now is Linksys & Netgear providing IPv6 with 6to4 tunneling in their routers and we're all set!

P.S.: ::1 is the IPv6 equivalent for 127.0.0.1, the loopback address, also known as localhost or ... home.

Wednesday June 30, 2004

JavaOne, J2SE 5.0 and Spiderman 2: Go get them Tiger!

Who needs sleep anyway? That's what I was telling myself while leaving Moscone center around 11:30pm after presenting at a late BOF and heading for the Metreon movie theatre, a ticket for the 12:01am showing of Spideman 2 in my pocket.

I love opening nights of long awaited block buster movies! Sure, the line can be a pain, but it can also be quite a bit of fun. After all, the people around you are probably as nut as you are otherwise they wouldn't be here, would they? And, once you are comfortably installed in your seat, nothing beats the atmosphere in the theatre. You can feel the eagerness of the crowd, and you can't help smiling when the audience bursts into applause for such silly reasons as the lights being turned off or the main title starting. There is also something to be said for a pristine copy of the film (of course, this will no longer be an issue once theatres all have switched entirely to digital projection, but it won't happen overnight).

Back to the movie. Peter Parker, and his super-hero alter ego, are back. It's 2 years later and Peter is confronted to a severe case of the "life sucks" syndrome. I won't go into too much details as I hate spoilers and some of the most enjoyable moments of the movie are a lot more fun if you don't know they are coming. I'll just say the opening sequence got the audience, yours truly included, laughing and cheering more than once. And sequences like that abound in this movie. It's refreshing to see a good action/super-hero flick that finds a right balance of action, character development and self derision.

Dang, I just blew it! I already told you the movie is good, while most reviewers would wait until the last paragraph before telling you what they really think, forcing you to go through their whole article in the process. Ho well! I guess you can leave now. Doesn't really matter, it still counts as a hit to this page

Still here? You know, you got way too much time to waste! OK, you asked for it.

It's a fun movie! I could tell you to go and see it, specially if you liked the first one, but it would be a waste, since I know you're going to go no matter what I say! One thing I appreciated is that, as a fan of Spidey when I was a kid, Sam Raimi was able to re-unite me with the feelings I experienced then. Particularly in the "it sucks to be Peter Parker" department. At first, I was a bit uncomfortable with it, thinking it was a bit overdone, but then I remembered that it is exactly what I was thinking back then, while reading the comics. Kudos, at least from me, to the director for sticking with it despite the temptation to tone it down a bit. The actions scenes are top notch, full of energy and, more importantly, they don't feel like you've seen them dozen of times in other movies. They do have a style, a rythm that make them standout.

There is a quite a bit of foreshadowing, specially for the upcoming 3rd installment, but it is rather well done and doesn't stick like a sore thumb. It does flow quite well with the story.

I have just a couple of minor gripes. The middle section could have been shortened a bit, say 10 minutes or so. Also I was not that impressed with Kirsten Dunst performance. She seemed a bit wooden to me. And, last, I felt that some of Aunt May's speeches (you know the "with great powers come great responsibility" kind) were a tad forced. They just didn't seem to come as natural. But, like I said, these are pretty minor and certainly didn't do any damage to the movie overall.

There you have it: Great sequel, can't wait for the DVD, and for once, I'm eagerly awaiting for the 3rd opus hoping they can keep the same level of quality and fun.

One last thing, if you were a JavaOne or an Apple WWDC attendee, as were half of the audience last night, you should have a good laugh at the last line of the movie.

Let me know what you think!