Avatar - Love, War, and Magic in a 3D Tapestry

Rating: 10/10

Avatar is a beautiful film set in the fictional world of Pandora, an Earth-like moon of a distant gas planet.

Pandora from space

The ecology of Pandora is sufficiently interesting to be described as a kind of magic. The whole ecology is interconnected in a way that inherently promotes environmentalism. That said, Pandora is one hostile planet! The carnivores are highly aggressive. As far as I'm aware, Earth's predators don't try that hard to kill things that fight back. But, it works for the storyline.

The main conflict of the movie is a big evil corporation's desire to procure the "Unobtainium" which sits beneath the native's Home Tree.

3D Rendering of Home Tree

Now, a short rant... I know the word "Unobtanium" is a sci-fi reference to any advanced material that doesn't exist, but calling it Unobtainium causes a major break in presence. Even in sci-fi books, materials are called Unobtainium as a joke. Also, the movie doesn't answer the question of what makes it "Unobtainium". Unobtainium means a material that allows the creation of something that is otherwise impossible. Cameron was trying to make a clever reference here, but it fell flat. Enough of that rant, that's my only complaint about the movie.

As for the experience of seeing the movie, 3D may just be the savior of the large format cinema. I saw avatar in both regular theater format and IMAX 3D format. The IMAX 3D was a more emotionally engrossing experience.  The subtle details such as finger prints on glass or glistening of animals flank are much more vivid. Though it is better in IMAX 3D, Avatar holds up in either format. I saw it in the traditional theater format first, and liked it enough to see the movie again. However, now that I've seen it in both formats, I know I was missing a large portion of the 3D experience the first time.

Part of the reason the 3D experience is so important is that Avatar is the first feature length film to use pore-by-pore tracking for animating 3D characters. This technology successfully crosses the Uncanny Valley that so thoroughly ruined The Polar Express. There was no feeling of, "these are human-like undead wearing someone's skin." This allowed the successful integration of real imagery and actors with 3D generated imagery/actors (the split is said to be 40% real, 60% virtual). Avatar also introduced new behind the scene's rendering technology. The 3D action could actually be viewed in real time. This allowed Cameron to move the virtual camera to choose shots in real time as the actors were still doing the scene. More details on the technology and links to technical details can be found on the Avatar Wikipedia page.

Mix of real actor and 3D background

On to the movie itself. At it's heart, Avatar is a story of love, war, and community.  The story is highly archetypal and references many of the great films of the last two decades: Dances with Wolves, Braveheart, and many others. Some viewers may not like recognizing the elements of other films and books, but I would argue that every story can be said to reference others in some way. You'd be hard pressed to find a war and/or adventure story that doesn't reference the Illiad. What was most important to me is that the story is cohesive, engaging, and provides life lessons. The lessons I took away from the film, 1) be true to your values, 2) take the risks with the high payoffs, 3) don't try to kill a planet or it might kill you. Click here for more humorous life lessons. Overall, Avatar is a must see film.

Sherlock Holmes

Rating: 5/10

This movie version of the classic Sherlock Holmes tales lacks emotional engagement and has a frenetic, yet soporific, pace. The movie stars Robert Downey Jr, an actor I've thoroughly enjoyed in several movies, most recently Iron Man. Downey's performance in Sherlock Holmes is entertaining, he portrays a quirky and moody Holmes with a striking personality resemblance to TV's House. While overall the movie may have lacked the anticipated magic, it is not without several significant virtues.

The Good:
+ Engaging cinematography

+ Fast action

+ Unique pre-action descriptions

The style of the film is unique among recent big budget movies. The camera work is artistic. They chose to use  a very large aperture for much of the film, which gave the shots a small depth of field. This shallow focus is what's responsible for the extreme blurring of background and foreground objects. The effect is that the director (Guy Ritchie) can choose a small area on which to focus the audience's attention. They also play with the speed of the film, speeding up and slowing down the photography.

Note the background blurring. This shot is only an okay example of
the depth of field, but all I could find online.

The best part of the movie was the action scenes. In particular, the pre-action descriptions were awesome. In these descriptions, Holmes narrates what he will do, and how it will effect his target while the visuals show the punches, slaps, etc in slow motion. This may sound like it would make the actual occurrence of the action less engaging, but it does the opposite. These descriptions create anticipation, and if they weren't provided, we wouldn't be able to follow the action at all. Overall, these pre-action descriptions are the best part of the movie, and something I hope others have opportunity to use in future movies.

RDJ's weight loss reportedly started with food poisoning,

but that kind of muscle doesn't come without some

serious weight lifting too: Sherlock Holmes Workout

The Bad:

- Plot

- Pace

- Characterization

The mystery of the film lacks intrigue. There are a couple of novel, "how did he do that?" puzzles, but overall, I didn't really care what was going to happen. The pace of the film kept changing. This movie is the rare instance where during action scenes I was excited and engaged, while during plot movement scenes I could barely keep my eyes open. This change of pace wouldn't have been a problem if the plot of the film (storyline elements) didn't feel artificial and forced. Rather than genuinely engaging us by creating characters we cared about, then putting those characters at risk, it feels as though we were assumed to care about the characters from the get go. Aside from the relationship between Holmes and Watson, none of the characters made a convincing connection, and so putting their relationships at risk offered no suspense. In particular, the connection between Holmes and Adler (Rachel McAdams) was  tenuous at best. It was obvious that there was a history between them, and the history is alluded to, but never elaborated upon. Yet, a significant portion of the plot depends on their feelings for each other.

Conclusion:

Sherlock Holmes is great for it's cinematography and poor for it's emotional engagement. Overall, I can't recommend this film, unless you would like to sit through a weak plot to get to the interesting visual elements. Did you like the Matrix II and III? You'll love Holmes. Otherwise, skip Holmes and go see Avatar.

Kindle Reader

I got the kindle 2 reader for xmas this year. So far, I think I'm in love.

The kindle has a lot of great features:

• Comfortable form factor
• Read in full light
• Take notes while you read
• Highlight important passages

The Kindle is actually more comfortable to read than a regular book. It's easier to hold, and I find I can actually read faster. The ability to read in full light (reflection based display rather than ray based) is just a necessary prerequisite for everyday reading. It's the last two on the above list that make the Kindle a winner for me. When reading, I often want to highlight a passage or write a note, but I rarely have a pen and an extra paper with me. Plus, it takes too long to make an index so I know to what each of the notes refer. With the Kindle, you can type up notes, and they are hyperlinked into the text of the book. Also, you can export all the notes into a single file. That way, one can review the notes all in a row. I find that I remember more about books that I've read and reviewed than the ones I've only read. Thus, the ability to take notes and then review them in a summarized format is a huge gain in the efficiency of knowledge transfer.

What it is not (but could be):

• A web browsing device
• An app platform

I've read elsewhere that the reason the Kindle is not a good browsing device is because of the page refresh speed, this is patently false. Even in a 3G zone with full bars the data speed is horrendous. If the pages downloaded faster, the screen refresh would be fine.

The kindle is not currently an app platform, but could be. There are lots of great apps that could work for the kindle. For instance, it would also be good to have a timer app. But the apps I imaginatively favor would be educational - such as workbooks, crosswords, word searches, etc.

Conclusion

The Kindle, and e-ink in general are a huge step forward for the avid reader. Though I am excited about the future of apps on e-ink-reading devices, I believe these devices should be kept relatively simple for the time being. People need to get used to reading devices in a way that they can understand before embarking on more complicated applications. If the first set of smart phones were as capable as the current set, they might not have taken hold. Imagine it's 10 years ago and someone asks you, "What does an iPhone do?" Sometimes devices can be ahead of their time, the iPhone is right in it's time in the smartphone technology development, and I believe the Kindle is the same.

Virtual Box, the perfect testing platform?

Summary: Virtual Box just might be the perfect testing platform.

I'm now running Windows XP as my base OS, but I'm also running Ubuntu 7.04 and Vista 32 within XP. Virtual Box makes this not just possible, it's relatively easy, as long as you've got the ram for it. Virtual Box allows you to create a virtual pc within your machine and allocate it diskspace (which can expand dynamically) and ram. You can then install most OSs on that virtual machine. I had Vista and Ubuntu up and running in about 1.5 hours, and that was nearly all unmanned installation time.

With 3 GB of ram I've generally got more than I need for everyday tasks, so I can dedicated 512MB to Ubuntu and 1024 MB to Vista and everyone runs smoothly at the same time. Also, when you shutdown the virtual pc's you get the ram back for your host machine.

Virtual Box is open source and can be obtained here: http://www.virtualbox.org/
If you have trouble, be sure to check out their forum. The answers to all my questions were easy to find.

There are a few other programs that do this, one released by Microsoft, but I prefer open source whenever possible.

Sounds ideal right? Well, almost. You can't really do anything that requires significant hardware acceleration. So, no games. Also for me, I can't test the visual part of the Virtual Patient. The biggest benefit is, while Vista is still having growing pains, I can play around with it, without worrying that I'll need to spend time fixing it before I can get back to work.

Dvorak, Yay or Nay?

Sadly, for me, Nay. I used Dvorak for 4.5 months. The first month was difficult, I even got headaches from practicing. It's particularly difficult to learn Dvorak for someone who already types well with Qwerty. I learned to type very young, so Qwerty is pretty well ingrained in my subconscious. I touch type in Qwerty at 65-80wpm, depending on the content. After 1 month, I was typing in Dvorak at 50wpm, a respectable speed. After 4 months, I was back up to my old speed of 65-80wpm, and I may get faster. So what's the problem?

The main drawback is portability. I work in a lab, with 6 other people working on the same machines, I also use campus labs, as well as work on other people's personal machines. It's relatively easy to switch the keyboard layout in XP and Linux, but those few moments, switching it every time I open a new program, add up to quite an annoyance, particularly for short term use.

I've heard some people can switch from Qwerty to Dvorak and back seamlessly. I don't seem to be one of those people. Though, when I made the choice to switch back to Qwerty it took about 1 working day to regain full speed. Overall, it was a worthwhile experience. But until my home profile follows me around automatically, I think I'll stick with Qwerty.

Vista 64 Review

Summary: Vista64 isn't quite ready for primetime, at least for primetime as a dev environment, but it's getting there.

Programs that don't work:

• Dragon: there's currently no 64 bit version of Dragon and no eta on when there will be... kinda a deal breaker for developing the Virtual Patient much at home.
• TortoiseCVS - Solution: using Eclipse CVS (it's not integrated with the file system, but it has a nice UI)
• Asus ProbeII - Solution: just hope my temperatures are ok
• Daemon tools - only UltraISO works for mounting ISO's so far, and it's commercial
• BlueSoleil - No WiiTools. The dongle actually seems to get recognized by the Vista Bluetooth stack, but the Vista stack doesn't keep a connection with the Wiimote, it'll just make the connection and then drop it.

Drivers that don't work:

• Webcams - there are currently 2 usb webcams in existence that work with vista64, they're both expensive, $100+, and both from Microsoft. Solution: supposedly, Unibrain has vista64 drivers for the Fire-i, will be trying them this week.
• Audio drivers - my microphone works, but it doesn't sound good, can't be sure that's completely the drivers. Also the front panel audio plugs don't work any more either (they were fine on XP).

Other comments:
The only 64 bit programs running on my system came direct from Vista during installation as well as, amazingly, Maya. Everything else is run using WOW64 (Windows-on-Windows 64-bit), basically an emulator. It would have been much more effective to give a 32-bit Vista which emulates 64-bit, as OS X does now. WOW64 works well enough for most programs, but I'm currently seeing a significant frame rate drop on the Virtual Patient (24fps, down from 45fps).

Positives:
Visual Studio loads and closes WAY faster, couple of seconds instead of up to 30 seconds. Maya has some slight performance improvements. Of course, I also happened to put an extra 2GB of ram in just before I installed Vista, so I may just be seeing those improvements. I think the load time improvements are mainly due to Vista pre-caching.
The search/filter features are great. Very easy to use, just start typing in an open folder and it starts filtering, it's not instant, but it's fast.
The gadgets bar is entertaining. Weather, a calculator, funny clocks, can change the desktop on a timer, and a quicklaunch (not really necessary if you remember the name of the program you want).

Wrapping Up:
Vista 64 is almost ready. Give it 6 months and everyone can use it for everything. On the other hand, if we didn't develop specifically for Windows, I'd probably switch to Ubuntu and use Eclipse for all my dev, it just makes me happier.