I don't do this link forwarding much, but I think this one surely deserves a lookie. I can't say it made me want to go to North Korea (or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as is the official name), but it sure is a sight to behold.

Views of North Korea

That's right, I'm talking about The Postman. No, not Karl Malone, it's a Kevin Costner flick. There's a wealth of things to pick at, so let's get cracking. First of all, Kevkev is known to play these loner types who never say a word and this occasion is no exception. But rarely is the main character of any story, the hero of the story, as dim as he is this time. I mean usually, even if most of the supporting cast are just dumb people, at least the hero is smart and clever. Well Kevin can barely pass for that. So he stumbles across a mailvan and he turns up to this godforsaken town with mail as an excuse to be let inside and fed. And magically the people (like I said they're dumb in this movie) start believing the bs he tells them just to get by. There's one really eager guy with no purpose in life who would just love to be a mailman. He's sworn in and then it all goes from there.

Here's a thought, if all they have is raggeed clothing, barely edible food and basically 19th century life, how did they produce that sound clip played around the campfire? That's right, we see two accoustic guitars, but there's a nice bass sound as well, so where's the amplifier?

Anyway so this one chicks digs him right, and then she's carrying his child and they are chased by the forces of evil (that's not a metaphor, it's real) and they escape and camp out in this cabin in the woods. But he's shot so she takes care of him and now she's the heroine, fixes up the cabin, hunts down food to feed him and he's just on the couch with his feet up. Then she goes out in the snow (blister I should say) to check out the stream and suddenly she trips and the stream is taking her down and she screams and Kevie runs out to rescue her. Aha, you *can* walk you lazy mofo, but he did rescue her so it's a warm and touchy moment. *tear*

Even though the movie is almost 3 hours long, there is no proper introduction to the story. How the hell did we end up in this world? Off imdb we learn that war wiped out everything and it's 2013, futuristic apocalyptic scenario. So there is this army, but they're not fighting anyone, they're just terrorizing people in these little towns. Then they mention Europe, what about Europe? What about it, we never find out anything. Or even the rest of the country. Clearly, they didn't give this whole New World Order thing too much thought. It's kinda "Waterworld" on land.

But wait, there's more. After a bloodbath, Kevie gets a letter from the president he made up, President Sparky in Minneapolis. Yes, that's right, Sparky. The "letter" orders them to disband the fictional postal service they created.

Then studly plays the "that's my child" card with the chick to get her to go with him to "St. Rose", which may or may not be the name of a place in a Shakespeare story.

Aye aye, plot thickens, there's a postal service in California and they didn't start this one. And then out of nowhere they start recruiting and suddenly the post office has an army, imagine that. Here's the Civil War all over again. But no, the general has an ace up his sleeve, the deputy postman as prisoner. Aye, but the dimwit postman used to be in the general's army before he escaped and according to the rules of the army, he can challenge the leader in a pissing contest. Finally everyone who had told him "you're smarter than you look" is validated, he was just playing dumb. Cue in some greco-roman wrestling starring the two valiant opponents and eventually the postman wipes the floor with the copy machine salesman (what a great moment for postmen everywhere, when's the last time the mailman won at anything?). Then he announces there's no more war, peace from now on. Yay, let's kickstart this pathetic civilization shall we.

Last scene. It's suddenly 30 years into the future and his daughter is delivering a speech about her heroic dad to a very small group of people (considering he saved the world and all that) in a little bay that looks surprisingly much like 2001, with houses and yachts in place.

But wait, what about Europe? Oh the hell with it.

What is it with Harrison Ford getting into big trouble and having to bail himself out? First "The Fugitive", now this? In a way the two stories are similar, except.. they're not really. Very decent movie, this, it has my stamp of approval. I like how the story unfolds in the beginning, when there are some unfilled gaps that make you wonder "is this guy important? should I pay attention to his name?". But Harrison does a hell of a performance too, in fact overall the acting is very good. Well, the plot is generally very good, but at the end it comes apart a bit. First of all, there's only so many different ways to make stealing money seem novel, so they try to keep you waiting for quite a while wondering what's going on, which is great. But then once the cat is out of the bag, there isn't that much mystery left. As Plan A goes awry, that's a twist I don't quite buy. A guy as well organized and well-informed as Bill Cox should know about the merger and all that it entails. Then it takes a turn for the desperate where we go from "there's no way he can save his family to", "hey, maybe there is something he can do". That lack of direction lost me a bit, it seems a bit of a filler. In fact, most of the second half does. Inevitably, people die, there's shooting and finally a long fight scene where the good guy wins. I mean that kind of thing is done to death and it's a bit disappointing to come out of a story like this. Still, the strong intro keeps it level and I still appreciate the whole.

What's fun about this production is that they got most of the technical things right. Which honestly shouldn't be too hard, just walk into the building of a big company and take some shots. They do add certain features for effect though, like the green on black Unix terminals, make them look very 80s. One mistake I noticed was when he was mounting his cdrom, he typed "mount /dev_/cdrom /mnt_/cdrom -t iso9660" (I added underscores where he used spaces, those spaces shouldn't be there). Otherwise you got nice Dell flat monitor, the Dell servers in the data center, all looks kosher. The improvised scanner he uses to read off the account numbers off a screen is actually more MacGyver than hackerish, he takes an actual scanner and connects it to an ipod, not that hi-tec.

Paul Bettany does a good job as bad guy, even though I like his smug, bright side much more than his violent, desperate side, which isn't all that convincing. I just remembered where I've seen him before, a few years ago I was made to sit through an incredibly boring tennis movie called "Wimbledon". Credit to Paul then, had I placed him right when I started watching "Firewall", I wouldn't have bought his bad guy character.

The worst thing about this movie is probably.. the title. By now, everyone knows what a firewall is and why you should have one, so playing on that common knowledge doesn't seem terribly clever considering they don't really deal with firewalls in the movie. Going by the title, you would think it plays a crucial part.

And Jack, if you didn't work for a bank all your life I wouldn't believe you could type 24-character IBAN numbers that fast without even double checking.

Oh and good job not simply reproducing "Enemy of the state".

The first I heard of c#, Microsoft's flagship new language for seamless software development from 2000, one of the first reviews of c# came from some higher-up in the Java hierarchy of Sun. His conclusion paraphrased here for your convenience, was "c# is basically a botched ripoff off java". He was saying that what java had done right, c# had changed for the worse, otherwise it was pretty much the same.

As I got my first introduction to c# recently, I wouldn't entirely agree with that. I'd say c# is (as announced), indeed a hybrid java/c++ combo. At first sight, it looks like java, but certain things are basically ripped right out of c++:

• pass by reference for primitive types
• virtual methods
• operator overloading
• user defined copy constructors
• namespace declarations

And some things are completely new and wacky:

• properties defined implicitly with accessors (not unlike ruby)
• overriding base class constructors in derived classes (what does this say of encapsulation? hm)
• sealed (non-derivable) classes
• structs (from c) as lightweight alternative to classes
• foreach statement (similar to php)
• delegates (a bit like function pointers in c++)

In a way it looks like c# went completely java, but they couldn't bare to leave behind certain features of c++. And that's reasonable, it becomes some sort of superset of the two and with a rich library. My impression so far is that it seems to be java without some of the pain.

As I browse through Sourceforge, I can't help but get the impression that there seems to be a lot of libraries in development, as opposed to not as many applications. Is it because people have don't need as many new apps anymore, whereas technology keeps advancing and libraries for just about anything spring up, with bindings for c all the way to ruby?

Another thing is that while innovative or useful apps are pretty far between, the same things are often reproduced countless times. I cannot remember how many im chat clients I've seen over the years, meanwhile gaim remains the reference point. But even with so many clients, there hasn't been one that was actually great. So why do people start new im projects? And since they are, why aren't those new projects better than gaim and all the "old" apps we have? And how many CMSs do we really need? There isn't a forum system out there that rivals vbulletin on functionality (phpbb is primitive in comparison), but there are countless frontends for xinelib, even though they're all the same and still inferior to mplayer, which has been around for ages.