Recap

In January I scribbled out a short list of writing-related things I'd like to achieve. As the last moments of 2012 trickle away, let's take a look back and see how badly I failed.

• (Self) Publish two volumes of short stories — Well, I got halfway there, even if at two stories it's only just a collection. I've got another couple of stories almost edited, so I'll see if I can't completely tick this one off next year.
• Commission a graphic novel — Didn't even come close. The script still needs writing. In typical programmer geek fashion, I think I'm going to have to code myself the ultimate storyboarding iPad app first, before I can settle down to writing the actual story.
• Complete a full-length script — I'm not sure I even started a script this year.
• Complete the novel(la) I've been planning — Yeah... Nope. Didn't happen.

So there you have it. Twelve months later and I'm no closer to achieving my writing goals. Time to start work on another list, I think.

π

I've had a Raspberry Pi for a few months now, and to be honest I still don't know what to make of — or indeed with — it. Here are a jumble of my current thoughts.

Running RISCOS is fun. Way back in the distant past when I was at school, the computing lab was populated exclusively with Archimedeses. Compared to the home computers of the day — the Atari STs and Commodore Amigas — these were nice fast machines with a lovely hi-colour GUI. Real Rolls Royce machines. Seeing RISCOS boot in a few seconds on the Pi gives me a real buzz. It's also cool to see it connecting to the internet, given that we didn't have any of that nonsense back when I was in school. It's just a shame that the default web browser doesn't support JavaScript, rendering most of the modern net unfortunately broken.

I wish I could find more to do with RISCOS. But then it's always seems to be the same with me when running a new OS for fun. Without actually needing to get work done with it I'm usually at a loss. I guess if I wanted to risk nostalgia overload I could spend more time running the Hatari ST emulator on it. I'm looking forward to giving BBC Basic a whirl. It would be nice to think that this classic language, on which a good number of the UK's bedroom coders cut their teeth, could step in to fill the Pi's remit of inspiring and empowering the next generation of programmers.

DexOS looks like a fun low-level OS. I haven't got it running yet, but I will one of these weekends. The same goes for Plan 9, which doesn't seem to like my mouse at all. And I'm really looking forward for the day when Android is usable on it, especially if someone figures out how to let it host its own development environment.

Rasbian, the Pi's de facto operating system, however, is slow. Almost unusably so, in my opinion. Maybe this is in part due to running it from an SD Card, but since this is the main configuration for the majority of people you'd think it would've been optimised. Applications are slow to launch and web pages trickle down. Sure, the Pi is "only" a 700Mhz CPU with less than 128Mb of RAM, but I can't be the only person who remembers Linux performing far better than this on much older hardware. Yes, considering you get a complete Linux distribution for free, I really shouldn't be complaining. But the aim of the Pi project is to get kids coding, and I'm not sure whether such a frustrating environment is the best place for that.

The thing with the hardware from the home computer boom of the early 80s — the hardware and the time which the Pi is seeking to hark back to — was the constraints it imposed. Constraints foster creativity, and most of the fun learning to program in those days was in finding the limits of the hardware and pushing against them. You typically only had a choice of a couple of languages (if you had any choice at all, otherwise it was just the built-in BASIC) in which to explore your environment. Learning everything about the machine was possible, and once you had a lot of the fun was in teaching it to perform new tricks. (This kind of limitation, I think, was also partly why the iPhone quickly became popular with hobbyist coders.)

The Raspberry Pi finds itself in an unfortunate position. The hardware, while undoubtedly cheap and mostly capable, is underpowered by the standards of the day. It can run Linux, but not nearly as well as you could on a standard x86 desktop system. The same goes for the available languages and programming environments. Ultimately, the Pi fails to be unique in the way which the home computer systems it tries to ape were.

First

It's only bloody November again, isn't it? This year I'm not even going to pretend to attempt NaNoWriMo, following my abject failures of the past couple of years. Not that everything's dead in the water on the wordage front. I've finally sorta ticked-off one of the items on my to do list by self-publishing some short stories. I say sorta because, rather than the half dozen or so I initially planned to include, this slim volume contains only two.

The Endless Sleep is available from Amazon here. It's a Kindle exclusive for the moment (until early next year, at least), meaning that it's available to borrow for free to Kindle-owning Amazon Prime customers. I'm doing this for the readers (and feedback) rather than the money, so I'm hoping this is a gamble which will pay off. I'm finding it almost impossible to get motivated to write at the moment, so I'm hoping that this will provide some form of a shot in the arm. Maybe a few 2-star reviews along the lines of "Not quite the worse thing I've ever read". A boy can dream.

I really have to thank my editor, Julia McKay. She can be contacted here and I'm sure can help you like she helped me. Together we fixed a lot of problems. All the remaining ones are due to my own intractable stupidity.

Clock 2

I made another clock. Much simpler this time.

Clock

Since the electricity was turned off briefly a couple of months ago, it has permanently been --:-- o'clock in my sitting room. Over the weekend I finally resolved to do something about this. Faced with a choice of either Googling the instruction manual for my ancient Philips DVP 3100V combo DVD+Video or just nipping down to Poundland to buy a cheap wall clock, I decided to go with option 3. And so I wrote a simple clock app using Corona and repurposed a 1st generation iPad to run it on.

Oh, the hours I could waste watching those little balls bounce around. It took a bit of fine tuning the trap door to stop them from clogging-up the workings but the current version has been running for a day or so now without grinding to a halt.

I've got a few other ideas I'd like to try out, so I think I'll make changing this clock a regular event.

Xerox

After seeing both the Swedish and US film versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo I felt compelled to find a copy of the book just to read the canonical version of the story. While the two movies where identical in so many respects — almost down to the framing of some shots, which I assume is a testament to the descriptive clarity of the source narrative — there were a couple of notable differences. Was Blomkvists's religious daughter invented by Fincher, or did the Swedes choose to remove her and instead give Lisbeth her pivotal revelation? The remake of Total Recall offers a similar chance to examine what is considered the soul of a story.

Most importantly, Total Recall is a remake of the 1990 film, rather than a further re-imagining of We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. PKD is listed as writer of the original inspiration in IMDb but I can't say I remember seeing his name up on the screen. All that has been kept of his story is the central premis of a spy whose suppressed memories are re-awoken after a visit to Rekall. Mars has been discarded entirely, apart from as a throw-away line.

So what's been brought forward from the Arnie version? The names have been kept the same; we get the same double-tripple-bluff plot; the "this is all a delusion and you're still at Rekall scene" (although minus the neat "So it won't matter if I shoot you then?" resolution of the original); and the pretend wife. In fact, this remake is all about the pretend wife, who is given a more prominent role than Sharon Stone's version. Which I guess makes sense, given that Kate Beckinsale is director Len Wiseman's missus. (We also get a couple of nice references to keep fans of the original happy: there's the three-breasted hooker — which, given the lack of radiation mutants doesn't make much sense here — and a woman bearing the likeness of the exploding-head Arnie decoy in the customs scene.)

In all the film was pretty good. It was played straight, but not in the po-faced way The Dark Knight Rises was. (They bungle the single almost funny line: In response to "That's your wife?" I would have gone with "We're having problems".) Sure, there were some major logical flaws (not least, how about they start by building some robots to build all those other robots?) but on the other hand I could happily watch Kate Beckinsale kick/shoot/jump over things for hours. And once again we see Bill Nighy demonstrating that he's happy to spout any old tosh for cash.

Also, it's fun to imagine that in the original script the only two parts of the world left inhabitable were the UK and France, and that The Fall was originally the Chunnel.

Nexus 7

In a moment of giddiness following the Android coding introduction I took at iOSDevUK, I ordered a Google Nexus 7. I've had it for a few weeks now (and, no, still haven't written any code for it), so here are a few of my current thoughts regarding it.

The bottom line is that I like it. I like the 7" form factor and I like the Jelly Bean system software. I don't think that, as a whole, it is better than the iPad, but it is definitely better in some ways and overall getting closer. It has replaced the iPad for most of my second-screen needs, and in particular I find it much better for reading eBooks. The screen isn't quite iPad 3 quality, but the difference isn't so great as to be noticeable, and the difference in weight more than makes up for it. (I chiefly use the Kindle app rather than iBooks, meaning that all my purchased books are synced between both devices.)

So... First impressions. Which were terrible. I was greeted by the screen you see below.

Would you look at that? A Michael Bay film (which doesn't actually exist — as all right-thinking people know, there was only ever one Transformers movie made and that stared Orson Welles and Eric Idle) and a Jeffrey Archer book. Seriously, Google, what the hell are you trying to do to me?

Joking aside, the real first impression of the Nexus 7 came from the screen which offered to set up the device with all my Google accounts. I thought I had unchecked this option when I ordered, but there on the first screen was my Google username and a prompt for my password. (Perhaps that was the difference — by unchecking that option, I had to manually start the setup process myself.)

For a lot of people, their first interaction with Jelly Bean will be entering their wifi password. This is the bit where you discover the default keyboard is disappointing compared to the iPad's and that the beep it makes on every key press is incredibly annoying. You can, of course, replace it with a third party keyboard. And here you have both the advantage and disadvantage of Android in a nutshell: the power to configure the system to your liking traded off against a less than optimal default setup.

There is a lot to prefer in Android over iOS. In many places it feels far more of an integrated whole. There are also times when it can be downright baffling. The behaviour of the system-wide back button is one such place. These two are related, as they're to do with the way individual parts of apps can be chained together and called from one another. So for instance, the Facebook app may open a page in Chrome which instantly pulls up the YouTube app to display a video. Hitting the back button will let you work backwards through this stack to return to the Facebook app. Unless you stop to interact with, say, Chrome on your way through, at which point the back button will start working back through Chrome's history. Or something. Like I said: confusing.

I can't really say what the Nexus 7 is like as a tablet, because so many of the apps I've tried are basically the phone version displayed on a large screen — or larger screen, since Android phone screens are already creeping up into the far end of big. The lack of polish is also noticeable, even in big name apps. IMDB is one of the most professional-looking I've tried, and even there the rough edges are evident, such as in the image gallery view, where you swipe the screen to flick between photos. There's no smooth page-to-page scrolling, no smooth transitions, no inertial scrolling through lists — none of the little features which are so easy for iOS developers to implement and which make such a difference to the user experience. In fact, it's sad to say that most of the apps with the best UX are direct un-Android copies of their iOS equivalents.

But in all, and for its price, the Nexus 7 is a great device. Hopefully it will inspire developers to create some great tablet apps to make best use of its features. (And since I would argue that Android tablets are a distinct market to Android phones I hope we will see it becoming worth those developers' time to do so.) I wouldn't recommend anyone get it instead of an iPad, unless they're on a very tight budget, but I'd certainly suggest you take a look at it if you were, for instance, considering a Kindle (or have given up waiting for the Kindle Fire to appear in the UK).

Untranslatable

This list of untranslatable words collected by Fuchsia Macaree — tweeted by Polly — lead me to see whether I could fit them all into a single narrative. I wonder how much sense it makes before you read the definitions. (And, yes, I know I missed one.)

For a little while she let the craic of the foka enfolder her. The renao company of friends, the swapping of istories me arkoudes. And Steven. The mamihlapinatapai across the table, the yuanfen almost tangible.

But the conversation turned to politics, as was its inevitable want. A magazine was passed around, its cover extolling the man's imagined virtues. He was a snorker, she thought. She could tell from his eyes. He had a backpfeifengesich and a bad case of age-tori. She knew his type. Incapable of xinku, a stranger to gigil, it was the poshlost of men like him which had bred the qualunquismo so prevalent in her generation back home. Which had ultimately caused her to flee the janteloven of that same homeland. To abandon it, and with it the dozywocie.

All at once she no longer felt herself among friends. The desire for uitwaaien forced her to her feet. She left the cafe and wandered into the nearby park. Under the komorebi she closed her eyes and let the waldeinsamkeit wash over her, a feeling as refreshing as oppholdsvœr, as pleasurable as hanyauku.

At the edge of the park was a neidbau, bedecked in neon, casting a chill finger of shadow across the neighbouring buildings. She climbed to its roof and stood looking out across the tops of the trees. It had been a mistake to come to this city. She would never learn its ways, no matter how long she stayed. She wondered what changes she needed to make to herself, what alterations she would have to adopt, to fit in. She imagined that somewhere there was an alternative her, a her who had once, long ago, chosen to walk a slightly different path, who would be at home amongst this strangeness. L'appel du vide took hold of her, pulling her inexorably towards the edge of the roof, feet shuffling slowly closer to the drop.

A noise from behind broke the spell. She turned and tartled, then bit down hard against the zhargzharg as from out of the shadows stepped her eidolon.

Batman Ends

Back in the early 90s, around the time I was at college, Radio 1 — rather randomly — broadcast an adaptation of the Batman storyline Knightfall. While I didn't expect The Dark Knight Rises to be a faithful retelling of this, I felt that the similarities meant it would provide at least a good point of comparison. I came out the other side rather disappointed.

Knightfall represents what I think is one of the major strengths of long-running comic book series: namely, the massive cast of supporting characters the writer has to play with. Batman is faced with a rogue's gallery of villans, and has to call — however reluctantly — on his allies to aide him. The Dark Knight Rises took a different route, in large parts being about Bruce Wayne battling his inner demons. Taking on the Big Bad is left to the secondary characters — mostly Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who thankfully is starting to not look like a teenager — with Batman only reappearing deus ex machina at the last moment.

Is The Dark Knight Rises a good film in the context of Nolan's Batman trilogy? I'm not sure. It's cluttered and confused, and suffers from the Doctor Who problem of thinking that you need to set the stakes really high — OMG they're going to nuke Gotham! — to build dramatic tension. Bane's Occupy Gotham plan doesn't really make much sense, feeling like an attempt to crowbar in some clumsy social commentary, and the Nolan boys seemingly couldn't resist throwing in a couple of random twist endings.

Anne Hathaway is by far the best thing in the film, but then — Halle Berry aside — you can't really go wrong with the character of Catwoman. And there, I think, lies the problem with the film. It doesn't have enough superheroes and supervillans in it. The gradual darkening and grittyfication of Batman over the years shows that it's perfectly possible to keep all that is great and escapist about the genre while ditching the childish campness, but what Christopher Nolan has attempted to do here is make a superhero flick without the superhero. And it's all turned out a bit of a disappointment.

Spider-Man Starts

As someone once pointed out — probably over at IO9 — the main problem with comic book adaptations is that they usually end up being origin stories. Despite having decades of plot lines and a pantheon of supporting characters to draw upon, the movie studios seem compeled by the need to introduce the superhero to their audience. These tales are seldom the most interesting there are to tell.

So here we are again, ten short years after Toby Maguire first donned the red and blue spandex, introducing a new generation to a new Spider-Man. I guess it gives Andrew Garfield something to do until the inevitable Andy Murray biopic (which has been posponed for another year due to the dour Scot's inability yet again to provide the requisite happy ending). This new Spider-Man is less emo than Maguire's — which isn't hard: there are suicides in eyeliner factories which are less emo than Maguire's Spider-Man — and more of a sk8r boi.

And, well, that's about it. Martin Sheen at least made the character of Uncle Ben memorable, Denis Leary is alright as Commissioner Gordon, and Rhys Ifans, you feel, is always tottering on the edge of suddenly being hilarious and Welsh, but never is. To my eternal embarrassment, my lack of comic book knowledge meant I spent most of the film thinking that the main bad guy was Killer Croc. (But given he was actually "The Lizard", an 'it's Friday afternoon so let's just think of something anything doesn't matter what and then go down the pub' kind of character name if ever I heard one, you can perhaps excuse me that.)

The mechanical web shooters were a nice touch — although probably one motivated by a desire to connect to the kids in the audience who haven't woken up one morning and suddenly found themselves able to shoot spider silk from their wrists — but it was never made clear whether it was the spider bite which kicked off Peter Parker's other super powers or whether they just coincidentally manifested themselves at that convenient point in the plot. Still, I guess if we want answers to this, and to the mysterious disappearance of Peter's parents, we'll just have to wait for the sequels.