The Matrix Reloaded - Film Review

Before seeing the film my fear was that without the 'wow' in the original film where the nature of the Matrix is revealed, they would try to compensate with the special effects..

And to a degree that is what appears to have happened. There is a lot of pretentious dialogue that tries to raise the philosophical level of the film, but in my opinion, it just gets in the way. The only main character that is developed in any way is Morpheous, and the Oracle gets a bit more of an explanation.

Having said all that, the special effects are STUNNING, and well worth it. The car chase is excellent, especially the camera work during the motorcycle sequence. They haven't overdone the use of 'Bullet Time', but improved it and used it to good effect.

Finally we have a film with a hacking sequence that is actually believable! When Trinity hacks into the power grid, the screenshot shows her to be using nmap to probe the target and use a genuine exploit to get in.

The film does end on a teaser, leaving you wondering if you can wait until November for the final part of the trilogy.

All in all I give it 8.5 out of 10, but it is a must-see for anyone who loved the original.

Posted at 10:55 | Comments (0)

Why do I do it?

"Why do I have a web page?" is a question I get asked a lot. My usual answer is "Because I can".

There is no one true reason. There is an element of the show-off "Look at what I can do!", there is the ego thing "Look I exist in Cyberspace!", but for me personally, it is mainly a hobby, something to tinker with, somewhere to express what little artistic talent I have.

Since moving over to a Blog style of web page, I now have a lot more visitors than before, why? I have no idea, except that people are finding it more interesting than the old site.

Despite it being a Blog style page, I have consciously not made it into a daily diary, but using it to post items that are a) important to me and b) that might be of interest to others. I hope I have got the balance right, only time will tell ...

Posted at 12:26 | Comments (0)

Calendar Rant

I have three calendars, a personal one on my webserver, a work one provided by my employer and one on my Psion Revo.

"Lets see if I can synchronise them all" I think to myself.

1) I find a program that will import and export to/from the Revo in vCal format.
2) The work calendar imports and exports in iCal format, which is a superset of vCal.
3) My personal calendar doesn't do import or export, but I have the source code so can probaly write it myself.

The program for the Revo does exactly what it says. Despite all the references saying that "Any application that supports the iCal format should also be able to support the vCal format" our work application doesn't! And to cap it all, if you export a recurring item, it doesn't make use of the "recurring" feature of the iCal (or vCal) specification, it exports it as individual events. So If I have an event that recurs every working day, it exports 260 different events per year instead of just one!

Grrrrrrrr................ So bugger the work calendar, I think I'll just write a vCal import/export program for my personal calendar.

Posted at 11:30 | Comments (0)