Told in two parts side-by-side, with Paul Dano playing the younger Brian and John Cusack playing the older, the film shows how drugs and the pressure to create lead to his mental breakdown, but also his eventual recovery thanks to his then girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks) rescuing him from the clutches of a dubious and controlling psychiatrist (Paul Giamatti). Like most bio-pics, it must be taken with a pinch of salt and I would imagine that the reality was a lot more complicated. However, Brian's eventual completion of his master work, Smile, gives testament to his recovery and innate genius. Recommended.
Monday 31 October 2016
Love and Mercy
Another film from the Amazon subscription, this charts both the decline into mental illness and eventual recovery of Brian Wilson, the songwriter behind the Beachboys' many hits.
Told in two parts side-by-side, with Paul Dano playing the younger Brian and John Cusack playing the older, the film shows how drugs and the pressure to create lead to his mental breakdown, but also his eventual recovery thanks to his then girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks) rescuing him from the clutches of a dubious and controlling psychiatrist (Paul Giamatti). Like most bio-pics, it must be taken with a pinch of salt and I would imagine that the reality was a lot more complicated. However, Brian's eventual completion of his master work, Smile, gives testament to his recovery and innate genius. Recommended.
Told in two parts side-by-side, with Paul Dano playing the younger Brian and John Cusack playing the older, the film shows how drugs and the pressure to create lead to his mental breakdown, but also his eventual recovery thanks to his then girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks) rescuing him from the clutches of a dubious and controlling psychiatrist (Paul Giamatti). Like most bio-pics, it must be taken with a pinch of salt and I would imagine that the reality was a lot more complicated. However, Brian's eventual completion of his master work, Smile, gives testament to his recovery and innate genius. Recommended.
Sunday 23 October 2016
Citizenfour
This is a documentary describing the meeting between Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden regarding the latter's whistle-blowing on the NSA (and other agencies) collection and use of personal data from the internet and other sources.
The initial impression I get about Snowden is that his actions were motivated by utopian ideals. That the internet should be a free and open society of equals. That the spy agencies are hoovering up vast quantities of data by subverting the ISP's and other involved companies would hardly be surprising even to the most naive. That's what spy agencies do: spy. Whether it's on each other, us, companies, a man preparing to blow himself up to further his cause, it doesn't matter, except after the fact. In other words, it's what the spying is for that matters and the main accusation of the film against the US government is that this is being done for profit, rather than protection, to screw over other countries rather than to protect itself and others. The argument against this is that security can mean economic as well as physical, but the best economic security is good government and administration, effective diplomacy, not spying.
The film ends on rather a romantic note, with Snowden's girlfriend joining him in Russia despite all the problems she must have gone through to do so.
The initial impression I get about Snowden is that his actions were motivated by utopian ideals. That the internet should be a free and open society of equals. That the spy agencies are hoovering up vast quantities of data by subverting the ISP's and other involved companies would hardly be surprising even to the most naive. That's what spy agencies do: spy. Whether it's on each other, us, companies, a man preparing to blow himself up to further his cause, it doesn't matter, except after the fact. In other words, it's what the spying is for that matters and the main accusation of the film against the US government is that this is being done for profit, rather than protection, to screw over other countries rather than to protect itself and others. The argument against this is that security can mean economic as well as physical, but the best economic security is good government and administration, effective diplomacy, not spying.
The film ends on rather a romantic note, with Snowden's girlfriend joining him in Russia despite all the problems she must have gone through to do so.
Thursday 20 October 2016
BBC Micro:bit at Home
Yes, folks,I decides to raid the piggy bank a little and get a BBC Micro:bit from those rather lovely people at "Technology Will Save Us!":
As well as the basic package, they give you a few bits to play around with. However, they don't give you a prototyping board, which would have been handy, but you can get those from Maplin. It looks pretty and when you plug it in to the battery pack it does a little start up routine that's pretty awesome for such a small device. Cute!
As well as the basic package, they give you a few bits to play around with. However, they don't give you a prototyping board, which would have been handy, but you can get those from Maplin. It looks pretty and when you plug it in to the battery pack it does a little start up routine that's pretty awesome for such a small device. Cute!
Wednesday 19 October 2016
Badoo Londroid
Just for giggle, and potentially free food, I went to a meeting of that alternative Java (i.e. Android) development group Londroid, sponsored by Badoo, a social networking tool, and hosted at Skill Matter/CodeNode. William Gibson once refered to Britain as Mirror World, like America but oddly different, and the same is true of Android to Java. It's where the Java desktop world went when the internet turned up and everything went all server-side, so the meeting had a certain surreal quality for me.
It also gave me the excuse to meetup with my erstwhile colleague Matt, who has finally had enough of working for airline companies and has gone contacting at a fitness firm. Very fitting.
Building a framework with Clean Architecture with Rich King
First up was Rich from the sponsor Badoo. Rich discussed how the Clean Architecure principals, as described in "Uncle" Bob Martin's blog post, impacted on the development of the Badoo Android application. Here's a description of Clean from the man himself:
What Rich described in his presentation is separating the parts of the system into domains (shades of DDD here), usually done in the Java world when designing for a Microservice architecture. Because of the limited nature of the Android platform, all this is in what might be described as a micro-monolith (think there's a niche for nano-services on Android?). All-in-all a nice presentation, only spoilt by ghost transmissions from the presentation upstairs.
Presentation Patterns Using Rx with Yoel Gluschnaider and Flavio Zanda
Although there are no Spring-like frameworks in Android, again due to the limitations of platform, RxJava has taken off somewhat, mostly as a more sophisticated option or supplement to data-binding.
However, there's still a need for what frameworks usually implement, in this case the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern for managing the interactions between the screen and what goes on the the back. Alternatives to this pattern are the Model-View-Presentor (MVP) and the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) patterns. The former, and the one they recommended, is a variation on MVC pattern and, like this, the view makes a request to the controller and the controller consults the model about how to respond. MVC assumes the controller is pretty dumb, just acting as a junction box separating the View from the Model. MVP moves most of the decision making to the controller, to the point that View does almost nothing (a Passive View pattern, as it's been called). MVVM is more complicated, by the sounds of it, and I haven't had time to do any research on it at the moment, but that looks interesting.
Yoel and Flavio's talk was very engaging and only marred by the fact that everyone was hungry by the end and expecting the promised food. This was at a place over towards Old Street and well out of my way, so I made my excuses and left the group hungry (for knowledge as well).
It also gave me the excuse to meetup with my erstwhile colleague Matt, who has finally had enough of working for airline companies and has gone contacting at a fitness firm. Very fitting.
Building a framework with Clean Architecture with Rich King
First up was Rich from the sponsor Badoo. Rich discussed how the Clean Architecure principals, as described in "Uncle" Bob Martin's blog post, impacted on the development of the Badoo Android application. Here's a description of Clean from the man himself:
What Rich described in his presentation is separating the parts of the system into domains (shades of DDD here), usually done in the Java world when designing for a Microservice architecture. Because of the limited nature of the Android platform, all this is in what might be described as a micro-monolith (think there's a niche for nano-services on Android?). All-in-all a nice presentation, only spoilt by ghost transmissions from the presentation upstairs.
Presentation Patterns Using Rx with Yoel Gluschnaider and Flavio Zanda
Although there are no Spring-like frameworks in Android, again due to the limitations of platform, RxJava has taken off somewhat, mostly as a more sophisticated option or supplement to data-binding.
However, there's still a need for what frameworks usually implement, in this case the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern for managing the interactions between the screen and what goes on the the back. Alternatives to this pattern are the Model-View-Presentor (MVP) and the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) patterns. The former, and the one they recommended, is a variation on MVC pattern and, like this, the view makes a request to the controller and the controller consults the model about how to respond. MVC assumes the controller is pretty dumb, just acting as a junction box separating the View from the Model. MVP moves most of the decision making to the controller, to the point that View does almost nothing (a Passive View pattern, as it's been called). MVVM is more complicated, by the sounds of it, and I haven't had time to do any research on it at the moment, but that looks interesting.
Yoel and Flavio's talk was very engaging and only marred by the fact that everyone was hungry by the end and expecting the promised food. This was at a place over towards Old Street and well out of my way, so I made my excuses and left the group hungry (for knowledge as well).
Tuesday 11 October 2016
Domain Driven Design London - The Three Real Problems in Software Development
Yes, I thought there would have been a few more. This was a presentation I attended at Skills Matter/CodeNode, just off Broadgate, by Pete Smith.
The three problems, as Pete sees it, are:
The three problems, as Pete sees it, are:
- grouping and separating the work into domains, both in terms of software and teams;
- using the tools and technology wisely;
- communication.
Sunday 9 October 2016
The Economic Singularity with Calum Chace
Have a little time on my hands these days, I went to see a presentation hosted by the London Futurists concerning the impact of artificial intelligence on the world economy. Chace is the author of two books concerning AI:
The first concerns what he terms the technical singularity. This is where AI becomes smarter than humans, attains consciousness, etc. The second book, the main subject of the presentation, concerns the impact of current AI developments on work and society. Jobs that we currently consider safe today, lawyers, truck drivers, doctors, etc. will be replaced by neural network-based AI's. This will lead to social instability and calls for economic reform, leading to a basic universal income state, with AI, or AI supported elites, making the decisions. Sounds awful. The banality of the future.
Back in the real world, the Oxfam shop has been flourishing due to the new precinct opening nearby, what Mark called The John Lewis Effect. "We're a Destination shop now", he proclaimed, to mutual joviality.
The first concerns what he terms the technical singularity. This is where AI becomes smarter than humans, attains consciousness, etc. The second book, the main subject of the presentation, concerns the impact of current AI developments on work and society. Jobs that we currently consider safe today, lawyers, truck drivers, doctors, etc. will be replaced by neural network-based AI's. This will lead to social instability and calls for economic reform, leading to a basic universal income state, with AI, or AI supported elites, making the decisions. Sounds awful. The banality of the future.
Back in the real world, the Oxfam shop has been flourishing due to the new precinct opening nearby, what Mark called The John Lewis Effect. "We're a Destination shop now", he proclaimed, to mutual joviality.
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