Scotty's Engineering Log

Reviews: THX-1138, Sky Captain, and Battlefront

Last week was a very busy week for Sci-Fi and myself.

Amazon FINALLY shipped my Star Wars Trilogy on DVD, but it was 3 days late as far as I'm concerned. If I pre-ordered 3 months early, you'd think that would be plenty of time to figure out how to ship it to me THE DAY of public availability.

I got Star Wars Battlefront for PS2 the day it was available, and it is a great game. The depth of the plot isn't quite there like other SW titles, but the game play is fun and the Dolby Pro-Logic II sound is incredible. I've been working my way through the historical campaigns, so I've been on Naboo, Kashykk, Kamino, and am now on Rhen Var. I can't wait to try multiplayer. Check out the Dork Tower comics this week. They crack me up! Yeah, I'm a lot like Igor.

I went with a friend to the Denver Pavillions to catch THX-1138 in the theater. I hadn't seen it before. It's worth seeing once, but not worth $9 or buying the DVD, IMO. It had some decent sci-fi themes, which were interesting, but some heavy 70's surrealist scenes. The nudity wasn't gratuitous, and helped promote some of the storyline, but I think the R rating was justified.

By far, the best Sci-Fi of the week was "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow". Filmed completely in green screen, I was quite impressed with the classic Flash Gordon look and feel. In the credits, I counted at least 14 different special effects companies that worked on the film, including Industrial Light and Magic. The result is spectacular, and it's good, clean fun, too. I think I could actually take my kids to see this movie. I hope Hollywood takes notice, and produces more of this caliber of film. We don't need all the violence and sex that they've been churning out for so long, IMO.

One other sci-fi note. There is discussion of rating Star Wars Episode III as PG-13. This would be unfortunate, since I want to take my boys (6 and 3) to see it. I know it will be a darker film, since Anakin turns into Vader, but I'm still hoping it can be done in a PG format. We don't need excruciating detail of Anakin burning in lava, to know why he wears the life-support suit. Mr. Lucas, despite all of your critics, I think the story should still cater to the imaginations of the younger audiences. I liked Episode 1 and 2, and can show them to the boys without concerns of too much violence.

So in a nutshell: Go see Sky Captain, get Battlefront on your favorite platform, don't pre-order DVDs, and skip buying THX-1138.

(2004-09-27 10:26:30.0) Permalink Comments [2] See also: Sci-Fi

Star Wars Battlefront and the Trilogy

Ahh, today is a good day for many a Star Wars fan. Not only is the original Trilogy (okay Special Edition) available for the first time ever on DVD, but the spectacular Star Wars Battlefront game is available to experience the movies yourself! Check out this cool article on the gaming experience: http://www.starwars.com/gaming/videogames/news/f20040920/index.html.

I wasn't going to be allowed to get Battlefront until I conquered Disney's Kingdom Hearts on PS2, but thankfully I completed it this weekend! Kingdom Hearts is a terrific game, that I would highly recommend after it took me 60 hours to complete.

For a comical look at the controversial changes to the Star Wars Trilogy, check this out: http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2374

Also, theforce.net reported some audio changes to the DVDs, and this quote from Lucasfilm:

We are always impressed with how closely fans listen to the many different sound mixes we have made for the Star Wars movies over the years. It is flattering to know that, indeed, the audience is listening. Consequently, each mix comes out differently and any changes that you hear on the all-new Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround EX tracks on the Star Wars Trilogy DVD set are deliberate creative decisions. We can confirm that there are no technical glitches as has been reported.

Unfortunately, amazon.com says I won't get my Trilogy DVDs until 9/28, so I can't confirm any of the changes ;-). I will be going to get Battlefront today, though! I won't be able to play it tonight, because I'm going to the theater re-release of THX-1138, George Lucas' first film. Like SW Special Edition, this version of THX-1138 has a lot of computer enhancements.

(2004-09-21 10:15:38.0) Permalink Comments [3] See also: Sci-Fi

DocBook XSL 1.66.1 released

The latest release of the DocBook stylesheets has moved from the test release to production with version 1.66.1, available now from http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/.

An gracious member of the DocBook community also posted an RPM spec file at: http://www.madboa.com/geek/specs/docbook-style-xsl.spec.

To quote from the mailing list...

If you're running Fedora Core or Red Hat, it's easy to use:

   # the two wget invocations should each be on a single line; I
   # apologize for any line wrapping
   #
   cd /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
   # download the source, e.g.,
   wget http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/docbook/docbook-xsl-1.66.1.tar.gz
   cd ../SPECS
   # grab my spec
   wget http://www.madboa.com/geek/specs/docbook-style-xsl.spec
   # build/install the package
   rpmbuild -bb docbook-style-xsl.spec
   rpm -Fvh ../RPMS/noarch/docbook-style-xsl-1.66.1-1.noarch.rpm

Fellow DocBook TC member Jirka Kosek also posted an older paper on the extensions used by DocBook stylesheets at: http://www.kosek.cz/temp/extensions-api.html

(2004-09-20 11:29:28.0) Permalink Comments [2] See also: DocBook

Think Topic Maps

I looked a little deeper into musicplasma that fleers blogged on yesterday. Very cool site, that similar in some respects to the TMNav application of the TM4J project!

Turns out, musicplasma uses a product called ThinkMap, which based on J2EE. ThinkMap's whitepapers make no mention of whether they are using Topic Maps, RDF, OWL or some proprietary technology under the covers. They do have an XML configuration file that makes it very easy to use, combined with CSS styling for the presentation.

Very cool product. It would be nice to see some of the same visual presentation features in TMNav, or Ontopia's Omnigator.

Further digging revealed another product called The Brain, which also looks interesting, but unknown what it's based on under the covers.

Correction: Just got a comment from the musicplasma guys that they are NOT using ThinkMap engine, but have rolled their own. It was the Sony Music License engine, that used ThinkMap. Still, all of these visual representations certainly resemble Topic Maps. It would be nice if they could all adopt the Topic Map standard for interoperability, instead of going the proprietary route.

Update: Just heard from the ThinkMap folks, and they said, "Thinkmap does not use topic maps, but rather uses tables from a relational database (or practically any other data source, for that matter)." Ditto my comment above. Hopefully some of these companies will adopt some of the Semantic Web standards, to enable interoperability.

(2004-09-17 10:39:55.0) Permalink Comments [3] See also: TopicMaps

Storm Chasing with Supercomputers

Slashdot had a cool article on storm predictions with supercomputers today.

The actual article explaining this was on CNN, and can be found here: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/09/16/hurricane.supercomputers.ap/index.html. What I found interesting is that most of these models are written in Fortran! I wonder if it's Fortran 77 or Fortran 90? I learned Fortran 77 during my short tenure at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

One of the slashdot commenters explained:

Brief answer :
i) because most numerical weather codes are already written in Fortran. This means that people with the right scientific knowledge tend to be Fortran programmers, and makes porting a whole lot easier.
ii) Fortran compilers are the ones where the most work has gone into optimising the hardcore mathematical routines. Thus, the compiled code has traditionally been faster. This may no longer be true.

Current predictions can be found here:
http://www.weatherunderground.com/tropical/tracking/at200406_model.html.

The National Hurricane Center discussion of the models can be found here:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/.

The Slashdot comments also provided an interesting link to a presentation on modeling tornadic supercell thunderstorms. It's in StarOffice/OpenOffice and can be found here (warning 20mb size, but worth it): http://research.orf.cx/uw2004/uwtalk.sxi

Pretty cool stuff. It'd be cool to see this stuff modeled on some of Sun's big iron (E25K anyone?) or a V60x Compute Grid with the Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System!

If you are interested in modeling weather and climate, you should also check out kpearson's site: http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/ap-science.html#cpdn.

(2004-09-16 12:50:55.0) Permalink Comments [1] See also: Weather

New DocBook Stylesheets (version 1.66.0)

DocBook expert Bob Stayton has just released a new version of the DocBook Stylesheets at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/. The .0 is a test release, so expect a 1.66.1 release soon...

Lots of bug fixes and new features in this one! Here are the release notes:

Release 1.66.0

A number of important bug fixes, documented in WhatsNew.
Now xml:base attributes that are generated by an XInclude processor are resolved for image files.
Rewrote olink templates to support several new features.
- Extended full olink support to FO output.
- Add support for xrefstyle attribute in olinks.
- New parameters to support new olink features: insert.olink.page.number, insert.olink.pdf.frag, olink.debug, olink.lang.fallback.sequence, olink.properties, prefer.internal.olink. See the reference page for each parameter for more information.
Added index.on.type parameter for new type attribute introduced in DocBook 4.3 for indexterms and index. This allows you to create multiple indices containing different categories of entries. For users of 4.2 and earlier, you can use the new parameter index.on.role instead.
Added new section.autolabel.max.depth parameter to turn off section numbering below a certain depth. This permits you to number major section levels and leave minor section levels unnumbered.
Added footnote.sep.leader.properties attribute set to format the line separating footnotes in printed output.
Added parameter img.src.path as a prefix to HTML img src attributes. The prefix is added to whatever path is already generated by the stylesheet for each image file.
Added new attribute-sets informalequation.properties, informalexample.properties, informalfigure.properties, and informaltable.properties, so each such element type can be formatted individually if needed.
Add component.label.includes.part.label parameter to add any part number to chapter, appendix and other component labels when the label.from.part parameter is nonzero. This permits you to distinguish multiple chapters with the same chapter number in cross references and the TOC.
Added chunk.separate.lots parameter for HTML output. This parameter lets you generate separate chunk files for each LOT (list of tables, list of figures, etc.).
Added several table features:
- Added table.table.properties attribute set to add properties to the fo:table element.
- Added placeholder templates named table.cell.properties and table.cell.block.properties to enable adding properties to any fo:table-cell or the cell's fo:block, respectively. These templates are a start for implementing table styles.
Added new attribute set component.title.properties for easy modifications of component's title formatting in FO output.
Added Saxon support for an encoding attribute on the textdata element. Added new parameter textdata.default.encoding which specifies encoding when encoding attribute on textdata is missing.
Template label.this.section now controls whole section label, not only sub-label which corresponds to particular label. Former behaviour was IMHO bug as it was not usable.
Formatting in titleabbrev for TOC and headers is preserved when there are no hotlink elements in the title. Formerly the title showed only the text of the title, no font changes or other markup.
Added intial.page.number template to set the initial-page-number property for page sequences in print output. Customizing this template lets you change when page numbering restarts. This is similar to the format.page.number template that lets you change how the page number formatting changes in the output.
Added force.page.count template to set the force-page-count property for page sequences in print output. This is similar to the format.page.number template.
Sort language for localized index sorting in autoidx-ng.xsl is now taken from document lang, not from system environment.
Numbering and formatting of normal and ulink footnotes (if turned on) has been unified. Now ulink footnotes are mixed in with any other footnotes.
Added support for renderas attribute in section and sect1 et al. This permits you to render a given section title as if it were a different level.
Added support for label attribute in footnote to manually supply the footnote mark.
Added support for DocBook 4.3 corpcredit element.
Added support for a dbfo keep-together PI for formal objects (table, figure, example, equation, programlisting). That permits a formal object to be kept together if it is not already, or to be broken if it is very long and the default keep-together is not appropriate.
For graphics files, made file extension matching case insensitive, and updated the list of graphics extensions.
Allow calloutlist to have block content before the first callout
Added dbfo-need processing instruction to provide soft page breaks.
Added implementation of existing but unused default.image.width parameter for graphics.
Support DocBook NG tag inline element.
It appears that XEP now supports Unicode characters in bookmarks. There is no further need to strip accents from characters.
Make segmentedlist HTML markup more semantic and available to CSS styles.
Added user.preroot placeholder template to permit xsl-stylesheet and other PIs and comments to be output before the HTML root element.
Non-chunked legalnotice now gets an <a name="id"> element in HTML output so it can be referenced with xref or link.
In chunked HTML output, changed link rel="home" to rel="start", and link rel="previous" to rel="prev", per W3C HTML 4.01 spec.
Added several patches to htmlhelp from W. Borgert

(2004-09-13 14:33:03.0) Permalink See also: DocBook

Real Men Wear Kilts

My family and I attended the Longs Peak Scottish/Irish Highland Festival this weekend. I think it was one of the best we've ever been to!

We started on Thursday with the Tatoo (The word means: evening drum, bugle, or piper signal recalling soldiers to quarters. The earliest form of the word is from the Dutch "tap toe" which literally means to "close the tap" of the cask in the barrooms.). This spectacular event featured the King's Own Scottish Borderers Pipes and Drums, 78th Highlanders Pipes and Drums, 78th Highlanders Drill Team, Marine Band Twentynine Palms, Fort Carson Mounted Color Guard, cannons, HeadTalk-a drumline, and Dogs of the British Isles. Also quite moving was Isla St. Clair singing "When the Pipers Play".

On Friday, we went to the Field Day, taking in Scottish athletics (Caber toss, Sheaf toss, Stone throw), more bagpiping, shopping for Scottish items, and Scottish food. The weather was overcast and drizzling -- perfect Scottish weather. Then around noon, the sun broke out and warmed everything back up -- perfect Colorado weather!

My mom wanted to try Haggis, but changed her mind when she found out it was boiled. I passed as well... We bought the boys their own sets of armor to defend their "little princess" sister, and I got a Utilikilt!

my Utilikilt

I first found out about Utilikilts when Eliot Kimber wore one while presenting at Extreme Markup. The pockets are cool, and hold more than a Sporran. I got the Mocker version (seen here with Collin at the Estes parade)

Saturday we went to the parade. I usually march with Clan Cameron, but decided against it this year. I've got Cameron, Robertson, Baird, Sinclair, and Watchman clan blood, so it's hard to get kilts for all of them. Maybe I should get a kilt pin for each and pin it to the Utilikilt ;-) All of you Scots just winced, I know...

The festival is always the weekend after Labor Day in Estes Park, Colorado. Make plans to attend next year!

(2004-09-13 12:28:45.0) Permalink Comments [1] See also: General



Scotty's Engineering Log Scott Hudson's blog on XML, DocBook, Sci-Fi and Storm Chasing