Multimedia Mayhem - Injection, Life, and others

This is a broad collection of what I've been soaking my brain in over the last few weeks, a mixture of movies and comics. First up, my latest reads in the comics media.

Descender

Written by Jeff Lemire and illustrated by Dustin Nguyen, this is the story of an artificial boy, TIM, trying to find his human "brother" many years after a cataclysmic attack on the human/alien civilisation by the robotic Harvesters.

Drawn using what looks like watercolours, Nguyen and Lemire have conjured up a fascinating and engaging story of TIM's journey to find Andy (who's since grown up and become a robot bounty-hunter). The style is unusual and, although it doesn't always work for me, I've stuck with it as I like the story and the characters, even Andy.

The Sheriff of Babylon

In the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, Christopher Henry, a military contractor hired by the administration to train the new police force, tries to find out who has killed one of his recruits.

Tom King (writer) and Mitch Gerdas (artist) have woven a labyrinthine plot of cops, insurgents and other opportunists in a murder mystery set in Baghdad just after the fall of Saddam. King (probably a pseudonym as he's a former CIA officer) has managed to convey the confusion of post-Saddam Iraq where no-one is quite who they seem. Gerdas' art is subtle enough to shock you at the horror of the carnage without distracting from the story. Overall, it's slow going, but it's more than worth the effort and I'm looking forward to the next volume.

Life

A movie, just to break things up a little. This is a biopic of the encounter between photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) and James Dean (Dane DeHaan) just before the premier of East of Eden and Dean's subsequent fame.

Directed by Anton Corbijn (I've seen quite a few of his movies: The American, A Most Wanted Man and now this), it takes a while to get into. This is partly because DeHaan's voice sounds so dull and flat (the sound quality is generally bad throughout), but also because the pace is slow, building up the frustration that mirrors Stock's as he tries to get the essence of Dean onto film. Stock made the iconic photos of Dean that everyone now knows and that featured in the Life magazine article, making Dean famous, and this lends the film a quiet poetry that makes it worth watching to the end. Recommended, but not for the impatient.

Injection

Authored by Warren Ellis, who lives futher down the Thames Delta, this is illustrated by Declan Shalvey. A team of experts try to create a new kind of artificial intelligence by fusing magic and technology, with disastrous results.

A sort of fusion itself, Injection mingles elements of Hellblazer with Neuromancer and James Bond, but Ellis is good enough to bring off what could have been a real mess, making it a delight to read. The characters are engaging, although the agent character, Simeon Winters, has yet to be significant, as is the logician Vivek Headland. The art is also excellent, combing the mythical with the technological. Ellis is also writing Trees with artist Jason Howard, which I'm also reading, an alien invasion story. His work is always worth reading and he's got an interesting newsletter, Orbital Operations, that I subscribe to.

It's Just Not Cricket! - Death of a Gentleman and Red Army

I've been watching two sports' documentaries, the first about cricket and the second about ice hockey, one about the future and the other about the past.

Death of a Gentleman

Two cricket mad journalists (Englishman Sam Collins and Australian Jarrod Kimber) try to find out if test cricket is dying out and if so why, mostly by following the career of test cricketer and Australian opening batsman Ed Cowan.

What starts out as a travelogue with the focus on test cricket matches turns out to be a sort of sports version of "All The President's Men", with Sam and Jarrod finding a trail of very suspicious dealings between the Australian, England and Wales, and Indian cricket boards to effectively take over the International Cricket Council (based now in Dubai!) at the expense of other ICC members. Mostly this is due to the sheer spending power of TV franchises centred around the Indian Premier League.

The IPL is based on Twenty20, a short version of the game akin to Sunday League cricket, and this has increased the popularity of the game, but to the detriment of test cricket, partly due to the different styles required, but mainly due to good players being unavailable having being "drafted" into the IPL, in a fashion similar to American sports.

It's unusual for a sports documentary to engage as well as this and, although it's a little melodramatic at times, it does show the corrosive and corrupting effect of money on sport and the people who run it. Recommended.

Red Army

By the 1980's, the U.S.S.R.'s national ice hockey team had come to dominate the Winter Olympics, frequently winning gold. With the invasion of Afghanistan and a potential boycott of the summer Olympics later that year looming, a clinching match took place between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.

Centring on the Soviet team, especially the leader of the five most prominent players, "Slava" Fetisov, this is a window into that late Soviet era, complete with KGB minders, midnight arrests and defectors. It also shows how these players struggled to survive in the post-Soviet world, eventually teaming up to win the Stanley Cup in 1997 for the Detroit Red Wings. Recommended for fans and non-fans alike.

Mega Film Update

It's been a while since I wrote anything down and I've been going through films at a rapid rate. These are the highlights.

Good Kill

Related to the previous blog about drones, this is a drama starring Ethan Hawke as an airforce pilot relegated to piloting drones and showing signs of the strain.

A slow drama that captures the growing tension between Egan and his colleagues regarding their work, and also with his wife (January Jones), it never quite succeeds, everyone being a little too controlled and unemotional. Not bad, though.

Future Shock - The Story of 2000AD

A documentary on the creation, trials and  success of the best comic Britain ever produced:

This introduces you to figures such as Pat Mills, Andy Diggle, John Wagner, Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Carlos Ezquerra, Carlos Ezquerra and Grant Morrison. Even Neil Gaiman and Karl Urban get a look in. 2000AD affected an entire generation (mine) and, although video games and the internet have lessened it's effect, it still packs a punch.

Spectre

Yet another outing for Mr. Bond. James gets in trouble again when he follows a lead to a mysterious organisation... (yawn). Tell you what, I'll let Honest Trailers explain.

 A nice finale for Daniel Craig, although the plot was meandering. It all looks very nice, stylish an' all, and there's enough special effects, stunts and exotic locations: I think it's just that it's a fantasy and it shows.

Killer Joe

Desperate for money, Chris (Emile Hirsch) plots with his inept and devious family to have his estranged mother murdered by hitman "Killer" Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey).

A film version of a stage play, it shows as it's sometimes slow and claustrophobic. The Southern Gothic makes the film too grotesque for my taste, and, although the plot has a few twists and McConaughey does his best, it doesn't really engage. It also puts you off KFC.

The Fantastic Four

 Reed Richards (Miles Teller), after demonstrating his matter transporter with childhood friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), gets invited to help perfect a larger version with Sue (Kate Mara) and Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), together with original inventor Viktor von Doom (Toby Kebbell).

A remake of the Marvel film made about ten years ago (probably because Chris Evans is now Captain America), it's basically a teenage version, and a bit rushed at that.  The special effects are good, but the plot seems a bit haphazard. Not bad, but just not that good, as if someone deliberately made a pizza movie.

Clangers!

While you weren't looking, the BBC have been showing a new series of that 70's kids show The Clangers. It's all been updated (there are fewer Clangers, but they've all got names), with a nice, but unobstrusive, combination of CGI and stop motion. The stories are also engaging:

Obviously I like it. Michael Palin takes the place of Oliver Postgate, but Smallfilms are still involved. They gone full media on it with a magazine and a really nice web site:

Just when you think the licence fee isn't worth paying.

Movie Update - Ant-man and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

I seem to be going through movies at a fair clip recently. First, the fifth MI movie. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the IMF team, on the verge of being shut down (again), try to expose baddies de jour The Syndicate, lead by Solomon Lane (Sean Harris):

Essentially a series of stunts and CGI held together by a relatively weak plot, the cast try their best make it interesting, but it's a case of diminishing returns by now. Not a bad pizza movie, just not a good one.

The second film is one of Marvel's more peculiar super-heroes. Thief Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), vainly attempting to go straight, gets involved with scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) in his attempt to prevent his shrinking technology from falling into the hands of vilain Darren Cross (Corey Stoll):

Although not brilliant, it does have a unique style of it's own, mainly thanks to Michael Peña as Lang's pal and Ant-mans general charm. Rudd makes the best of the role, with Douglas as the mentor and Stoll chewing the scenary (something that was missing from MI:V). One thing, though. The technology effectively changes the volume ("the distance between atoms", as Pym puts it), but doesn't affect the mass, so Ant-man couldn't ride ants as he'd just crush them under his weight... oh, ok, it is a comic book.

There and Back Again - Mad Max: Fury Road and Cartel Land

Courtesy of my Amazon LoveFilm subscription, I watched the latest instalment of the Mad Max films. Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), haunted by the death of his family, captured and used as a blood donor in a post-apocalyptic landscape, tries to help a group of women escape from their evil overlord.

Mad Max is one of those subjects that's difficult to discuss objectively. It's all about how you feel: rationalising doesn't work. Subtle things like, I dunno, plot or the quality of the acting, pale into insignificance. You have to judge it on it's own terms. You have to ask "Is it bonkers?". The answer is Yes. Yes it is. Yes, it's very bonkers. There is, however, a lot of driving around the desert in amazingly weird vehicles covered in spikes, so it is fun, but part of your brain feels a little uncomfortable as it tries to evaluate subtle things like plot, which is futile as there is none.

Much more downbeat is the subject of this documentary film about a Mexican and an American and their answer to the criminal cartels dominating life around the border between the two counties:

Even though Mireles is no saint (at one point he virtually orders the death of one of the gang members), you have more than a little sympathy for him: his situation has been brought about by the gangs on the one hand and a corrupt and cynical government on the other. Nailer is much more complex, but again there's the feeling of a government too far away to care. The film matches up with a book I found at the shop a while ago, called Amexica, by a journalist who covers the area:

Shaun the Sheep - The Movie

I've bought a small Blu-Ray player and the first film I've played (apart from the first Thor film, which I already had in dual format) is, appropriately, the Wallace and Gromit spin-off Shaun the Sheep. Shaun and his friends decide to liven up their lives by taking a day off, inadvertantly putting the farmer into hospital with memory loss:

Because there's no dialog, all the laughs are visual, essentially a silent comedy, and it's brilliant (how do you hide a flock of sheep in the middle of a city?) Fun for children of all ages and very recommended.

Building a 3D Printer

Yes, folks, I've decided to join the 21st Century and build myself a 3D printer. It's delivered in weekly parts, as a magazine subscription, courtesy of Eaglemoss publications:

I've built it in stages, collecting a few months worth, and I photographed as I went. First the x-axis is constructed:

The rather chunky stepper motor is hidden behind the gearing, connected to a test circuit. The y-axis is fixed to the frame of the printer:

This shows where the print head is connected: the head moved across, while the piece moves perpendicular and vertically. The piece is printed on a heated plate:

When I got most of the structure assembled, I took a little video of the z-axis working:

This weekend, I put in the power supply and the covers:

The next phase will be to connect up the printer head, but I've installed the software that's used to load the models into the printer and connected it all up and switched it on, and it all communicates, so thumbs up so far. 21st Century, here I come!

Happy New Year

Suffering the last of April's storms, I thought I'd sit down and write something at long last. The main reason for the long time in writing is the amount of work and the long drive home, which the roadworks at J30 of the M25 have made even longer.

I've not really been ripping through the movies much, although there are one or two interesting ones. First, Fruitvale Station. On New Years Day, 2010, Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) was shot and killed by a Transit Policeman in San Fransisco, while handcuffed and unarmed. The film depicts the day leading up to his death, as well as showing flash-backs to his earlier life.

Although this is a film worth watching due to it's subject matter, it's not preachy or trying to convey any message other than that of a waste of life, and it does carry you along. The only complaint I have is that the sound quality is bad and it's difficult to follow the conversations. Recommended.

Tomorrowland stars George Clooney as a former child inventor who discovered a parallel, futuristic city.

A strange, confused film that just avoided bombing at the box office, it's difficult to see who it would appeal to. It's too complicated for children and teenagers (where is Tomorrowland, is never successfully answered), and there's too many children in it to appeal to the adults. This is mitigated to some extent by the gobsmacking special effects in the visualisation of Tomorrowland, how everyone in the 1960's thought the 21st Century would look.
There's also been a new series of Bosch on Amazon. Harry Bosch investigates what looks like a gangland shooting:

Slightly less distracted than the first season, Welliver slips back into the role like an old, favourite jacket. Ten hours well spent.

Post Christmas/New Year Movie Catch-up

It's been a while since I wrote anything, so I thought I'd do a quick catch-up.

Child 44

An adaption of the book by Tom Rob Smith. Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy), a former Soviet war hero and working for State Security, tracks down a child-killer while trying to save himself from an ambitious colleague (Joel Kinnaman).

Not as good as it could have been, too much of the plot revolves around Leo and his wife trying to avoid the Gulag and, when he does catch up with the villain, it's almost an afterthought. Not bad, but might lead to better sequels.

Noah

Based on the book of Genesis characters, Noah (Russell Crowe), the last descendant of Abel, is tasked by God to save the creatures of the Earth at the cost of the human race, which has become corrupt and barbarous.

Despite a faintly ridiculous plot, it's a reasonably coherent film, marred only by it's length.The acting is good enough, even from Ray Winstone as Noah's nemesis, but it's only an average pizza movie. Ray Winstone as God might have been entertaining, though.

The Wolf of Wall Street

A story of greed and excess from Martin Scorsese, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), an out of work trader, realises there's a clever way to separate the unsuspecting from their money...

Can't say I like it, 'cause I don't. It's puerile and hollow, a pale shadow next to any of his previous films, even Goodfellas.

Taken 3

The latest of the Taken series sees Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) framed for the murder of his ex-wife, kill a load of Russian gangsters and finding out it's her new husband wot done it. Or something. I am past caring.

Birdman

Winner of this years Oscar for Best Film, beating Grand Hotel Budapest, Selma and The Imitation Game, Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), a has-been actor used to super-hero roles, tries to stage a play on Broadway.

I'm not quite sure how this got onto the list, but it must have seemed a good idea at the time. A gesture to stepping outside the comfort zone, perhaps. It does seem like a film that actors, especially film actors, would understand, a sort of in-joke. It left me feeling a bit cold, however, with the mix of fantasy and reality recalling Terry Gilliams The Fisher King, without any of the latter's charm. Played straight, it might have worked.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I got to see the latest Star Wars and jolly good it is too. Abrams hasn't disappointed. The production is slick, with unobtrusive CGI. The plot, while including elements of the original, is workman-like and has enough twists and turns to make it enjoyable. The best parts for me, however, are the knowing nods to the fans (I especially liked the Millenium Falcon with a tarpaulin over it). Above all, there was no cuteness in it: no Ewoks or Jar-jar. And the Stormtroopers still can't shoot straight.

Rather than show yet another trailer, Disney are promoting Star Wars: Rebels, which is worth a look:

Have a happy New Year, everybody.

London Java Community Open Conference 2015

Yesterday, I saved up enough pennies to go to the annual LJC Open Conference at the IBM building, right next to the National Theatre on London's South Bank, and done in the same brutalist style.

Open Conferences, sometimes called Un-conferences, are where there is no set schedule, other than perhaps, as here, a key-note to start. It's left to the participants to organise the presentations and workshops. This is what makes it cheap, but you get what you pay for.

The Conference Key-note: 20 Years of Java

Starting off with the key note by Simon Ritter and Steve Elliot, both former employees of Sun Micro-Systems (Steve still works for Oracle, Simon does not). This covered Java since it's launch in 1995, showing how the language has evolved from the 200 odd classes in version 1 to the 4000+ in the latest version, 8. They commented that this bloated situation would improve with the introduction of "Jigsaw", the modularisation of the JDK.

Performance by the Numbers with Simon Maple

The first presentation I attended concerned a survey conducted by Simon and his company to see how much performance testing was done by the profession and what effect it had. Unsurprisingly, few tested regularly and most tested in reaction to performance bottlenecks when they were found in production. Most performance bugs were connected to databases as much, if not slightly more, than the applications themselves: JPA and Hibernate being the worse culprits in this regard. The lesson here being performance test early, often and with the right tools.

Microservices in the Real World with Chris Batey

Given the popularity at the moment, and linked, to some extent, with the previous talk, Chris took us through his experiences with microservices, especially dealing with outages and his efforts to make the applications more robust (he recommended Netfix's Hysterix). His slides of the talk can be found here.

Lightning Talks and Lunch

Both before and after lunch there were lightning talks, five minutes where anyone could talk about almost anything. One involved the use of Microsoft's Kinetix to create ghostly 3D images, like a cut-price 3D scanner. Another mentioned a book called "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter, with a view to writing every algorithm that ever could be written.

JDK8 Lambdas and Streams: Beyond the Basics with Simon Ritter

The first proper presentation after lunch was regarding the new features of JDK 8. Simon gave us a few examples of how he has changed his style of programming from the procedural style to the new functional style using lambdas and, especially, streams. In particular, he showed how using the Supplier interface could allow lazy evaluation, something normally only available in interpreted or functional languages such Scala, and how to design and use accumulators for use with Streams.

IoT 4 Java with Carl Jokl

Having been to the presentation earlier in the week on the BBC micro:bit, I was interested to see what the LJC was doing about this. Unfortunately, it's all at the very early stages at the moment and Carl didn't have much to show other than a few concepts: it would have been nice to see some actual things.

Generics: Past, Present and Future with Richard Warburton

Lastly, Richard gave a short presentation on the use of Generics and how they might evolve with future versions. Generics are Java's way of implementing meta-classes, classes built around other classes, Collections being a usual example. Java 7 introduced intersection types to generics, which can make things even more confusing, so you get code like this:

private static <I extends DataInput & Closeable> PersonWithGenerics read(I source)

Allowing any object that implements both DataInput and Closable in it's hierarchy of classes and interfaces to be used. It's a bit like a multiple inheritance workaround.

Richard also showed us was an actual use of the "super" keyword in Generics, something you don't often get. I won't go into it here, as it was somewhat involved, but he put the code for the session on Github.

He also mentioned some ideas for future versions, including Generics for primitive types (not just the objects of types, as at the moment).

Conclusion

Was it worth the £25? Yes, I think so, and 200 other people thought so too. The presentations were of reasonable quality, what I saw, and better than you would expect. Perhaps because it's less contrived than a more expensive conference.

An impression I did get was that Java is starting to be very retrospective: the key-note said nothing about the future, only the past, and it's new features added with JDK 8 are struggling to be accepted. A concern I have with our profession, and Java in particular, is this conservatism and resistance to change.

IoT Innovators Meetup: Meet the BBC micro:bit with Howard Baker

It's been a while since I attended any hardware meetups and so I went along to a new group meeting at Canonical (the organisation behind Ubuntu) on London's South Bank, behind Tate Modern. Nice offices:

The presentation was given by Howard Baker who is a lead at BBC Learning looking at innovating technologies.

His talk was about the background to the micro:bit, the BBC's initiative to promote software development in schools through a micro device.

It turns out that software development is not taught at schools, something that astounded me (A-Level at least...) and that Universities complain that the entrants to Computer Science courses have to be taught basic programming skills. In answer to this. the current Director General of the BBC wants an initiative to promote programming, in the same way the Model B did all those years ago. Everyone has a computer these days so, after a few false starts, Howard and his team came up with the micro:bit. It has a small ARM chip, a magnetometer, accelerometer and a neat 5 X 5 led display, along with a low power blu-tooth transmitter/receiver. It also has a mini-USB port and external analogue/digital connector.

It's also got a nice web site with on-line editors for producing code to run the hardware, one in a Scratch-like block language, which translates into Microsoft's Touch Develop language, and one for JavaScript. There will, hopefully, be a Python one as well.

The goal is to roll out the device to 1 million children of 11-12 year old's (1st year secondary). Howard emphasised the social aspects of the program, saying that it wasn't just aimed at the children but that the parents could see their children being creative and enthusiastic. In particular, he said that he thought that the idea of owning the technology and making it themselves was fundanental, turning children "from consumers into creators", being influenced to some extent by the Maker movement.

Overall, it was an excellent presentation on an engaging subject, expecially for anyone who tried to play Elite on a Model B. So if you want a look at the future of technology, it will be available from a teenager near you.

After the presentation, I took a few snaps of the buildings around the river, all lit up.

Very festive.

Movie Hardmen - Riddick, The Gunman and Run All Night

In a bit of a movie update, first the belated and imaginatively titled third instalment of the Riddick series.

Our eponymous hero, having grown slipshod in his security arrangements as leader of the Necromongers, finds himself stranded on a hostile planet, pursued by two groups of bounty hunters.

Other than money, it's difficult to see why this film was made, as it's just a rehash of the first film, with bits of the second thrown in for good measure. Mr. Diesel looks like he had fun, and it's all workman-like, just... why bother?

Much better is Sean Penn's attempt at the tough-guy genre with The Gunman. Jim Terrier (Penn), a mercenary working for an NGO in Africa, searches for who sent a hit squad after him.

With a good plot, if a bit slow, and a decent supporting cast including Javier Bardem, Ray Winstone and Mark Rylance, Penn's able to hold down the hard-man role pretty well, and there's plenty of bangs and crashes. It's different enough to be an above average pizza movie.

Lastly, the latest Liam Neeson vehicle. Burn-out gangster and estranged father, Jimmy Conlon, is given a chance at redemption when his son Mike (Joel Kinneman) witnesses a murder.

Neeson seems to be picking better films to do between Taken sequels at the moment, and this is no exception. It's plot keeps a decent pace, if a little predictable, and there's a great supporting cast with Ed Harris as the former friend turned Nemesis. And just in time for Christmas.

Autumnal Equinox

Taking advantage of the light and the air, I took some photos of the trees around the work's estate, resplendent in the Seasons glory:

I also managed to take some photos of the fireworks:

The Trouble with Robots - CHAPPiE and The Avengers: Age of Ultron

A movie update, while we're all waiting for Star Wars to turn up in December. This time it's all about robots and their relationship with their creators (without Mary Shelley, where would the film industry be?).

First up, CHAPPiE from District 9 and Elysium director Neill Blomkamp. To cope with the increasing crime rate in Johannesburg, the police turn to Tetravaal and their latest robot invention, created by Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), while Deon has a bright idea...

With a workable, if rather slow, story and decent enough effects, with a few A-List names to pull in the punters (Sigourney Weaver as Deon's boss and Hugh Jackman as his rival), this is a pretty good pizza movie IF you can stomach the idea of Afrikaaner Punks, which is where it falls down for me. And, for South Africa, surprisingly few black people.

Continuing the theme, I watched the latest Marvel release (Antman hasn't come out on DVD yet). After a successful raid by the Avengers on a Hydra fortress, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) experiments with what appears to be a new form of intelligence.

With lots of bangs and crashes we've become accustomed to by now, the plot is reasonable and tries to include a softer side, with the unlikely romance between Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), and Hawkeye's (Jeremy Renner) domesticity. James Spader provides the wit as the voice of Ultron, and I liked Iron Man's Hulk Smasher suit, but this felt to me like a mash-up of previous films, a film between other films. Plus this looks just awesome in comparison!

London Java Community, Docklands - Swagger and Hazlecast

Tonight I went along to see two presentations hosted by the London Java Community Docklands branch at Credit Suisse, all wood panelling and soft carpets in the lobby:

First up was David Garry, whose soft Irish tones introduced us to Swagger, an open source REST API definition language and tool suite. You can either reverse engineer you existing API into Swagger or create a new one and generate code from that. The web site has a rather natty online editor:

which will allow you to roll your own definition as well as creating the source code for both server and client. Shown below is some the code produced for SpringMVC:

@Controller
@RequestMapping(value = "/addresses", produces = {APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE})
@Api(value = "/addresses", description = "the addresses API")
@javax.annotation.Generated(value = "class io.swagger.codegen.languages.SpringMVCServerCodegen", date = "2015-10-13T22:20:28.432Z")
public class AddressesApi {

  @ApiOperation(value = "Addresses", 
                notes = "A collection of addresses.", 
    response = Address.class, 
    responseContainer = "List")
  @ApiResponses(value = { 
    @ApiResponse(code = 200, message = "An array of addresses"),
    @ApiResponse(code = 200, message = "Unexpected error") })
  @RequestMapping(value = "", 
                  method = RequestMethod.POST)
  public ResponseEntity<List<Address>> addressesPost(@ApiParam(value = "Latitude component of location.", 
  required = true) 
  @RequestParam(value = "latitude", required = true) Double latitude

It's a mess of annotations, as you can see, but I suppose if you've got a couple of hundred of these definitions, and you have to keep them all documented, Swagger can come in handy.

Next was David Brimley who introduced us to Hazelcast. A few months ago, Pakt had a free book offer and one I downloaded was on an introduction to the subject:

It's a kind of middleware for data services, styled as an "In-memory Data Grid", implying caching of data. It does implement the JCache standard (JSR107), but it also includes a messaging and event API, allowing you to be notified of changes in data; clustering and scaling of data "nodes"; and remote code execution (imagine Java stored procedures... sort of). David gave us a very thorough overview, given the limited time available to him.

Overall, it was a good set of lectures, but it wasn't a particularly relaxed venue: we had to give our name tags back, and there were no refreshments as at SkillsMatter. Next months Docklands do is at Barclays, so that might be a bit more relaxed. Not banking on it, though (sorry!).

A Boy and His Robot: Big Hero Six, Interstellar, Jupiter Ascending and Black Sea

A bit of a movie catch-up with three sci-fi and one psychological thriller.

First up, Interstellar. With a looming ecological catastrophe, former astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is asked to venture through a recently discovered wormhole to find a new home for Humanity.

While the acting and special effects are good, at two hours plus, this seemed a little dragged out to me. Plus, although they had expert advice on the physics concepts involved, the plot did seems a little contrived (I didn't understand how they managed to get down to the first planet without being ripped apart by tidal forces from gravity stong enough to slow down time). Quite a good pizza movie, though, and a more positive spin on the future than most films.

Next, Black Sea. Unemployed submariner Robinson (Jude Law) is offered an opportunity to salvage gold from a sunken U-Boat.

A claustrophobic and tense thriller, with some genuine starts (for me anyway), it's spoiled by technical errors (there's a reason they use diesel in ships: it's inflammable) and the silliness of the plot. An average pizza movie, but no more than that.

From the Wachowski siblings, who brought you the Matrix, comes Jupiter Ascending. Jupiter (Mila Kunis) a cleaner in Chicago turns out to be the genetic twin of a long dead Queen of... Lord, I can't be bothered. Instead of showing you the trailer, I'll let Honest Trailer's explain (if they can):

I didn't think it was that bad, but, like they say, the plot has holes you could drive a tank through and the acting is bad enough to make Sean Bean look like Laurence Olivier. Harmless enough, I suppose, but more expensive than Black Sea for a not much better result.

Lastly, we have Disney's attempt to cash in on the Manga phenomena with Big Hero Six. After losing his brother in a fire, Hiro (geddit?) Hamada and the formers robot creation Baymax try to find out what happened.

Although still a Disney film, and, therefore, a bit cardboard cut-out, it's a reasonable plot and good enough characters to make it an enjoyable 90 minutes. I liked it.

From the 3R's to 6 (or 7) D's, with Julia Begbie

Subtitled "Digital Disruption within Education", this was a presentation I attended yesterday, hosted by the London Futurists at Birbeck. Julia and her colleagues at the KLC School of Design have created the U.K.' s first completely on-line Design degree.

Essentially, aside from giving an overview of her experiences creating online education, Julia presentation centred on the affects of MOOC's (Massive Open Online Course) on education. Having been on a few courses via Coursera, this was quite topical, and Julia showed that the initial popularity, failure and resurgence of the MOOC's mirrored the Gartner cycle quite accurately:

The 6D's in the title of the presentation are from the entrepreneur Peter Diamandes, "the 6 D's of Exponential Growth":

Julia added a 7th D, Data. Education (citing Khan Academy in particular) benefits from feedback through the huge data sets created by the courses. She also showed a few sections of Sir Ken Robinson's talk animated by the RSA a while ago:

Overall, it was a good presentation by an enthusiastic speaker. However, there was something that's been bothering me about technological, and with it human, progress, which this presentation illustrates unconsciously. What was preventing all this happening years ago? All the bits where there: Drupal, for example, now at version 7, has been around for fifteen years; Wordpress for about twelve. Why the wait?

Last Films - God's Pocket, The Drop and Drone

It's been more than a month since I wrote and I'd like to say it was because I was busy, but I can't. I have managed to watch a few films, however and, by coincidence, the last films of Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini, as well as a prescient documentary.

First up, God's Pocket. Mickey Scarpato (Hoffman), resident of tough neighbourhood, tries to give his step-son a decent funeral after his fatal work "accident", while trying to console his grieving wife (Christina Hendricks) and make ends meet selling the proceeds of a heist.

Notable for being one of Hoffmans last films (he filmed Mockingjay parts one and two), he was also a producer. Styled as a black comedy, it does seem to be a bit of a self indulgent film, although not a bad story, and as well acted as you'd expect, with a supporting cast to die for (John Turturro, as well as quality TV actors Peter Gerety, Domenick Lombardozzi, Eddie Marsan and Molly Price). However, it has the feeling, as Hoffmans character does at the end to the place he lives, of being best left behind.

Much better is a crime film, The Drop, written by novelist Denis Lehane (who wrote Gone, Baby, Gone) from his book of the same name. Serving behind a Brooklyn bar, which is also a cover for a criminal money bank (a "drop"), Bob Saginowski (Tom Hardy) tries to keep his head down while keeping his eye on his cousin Marv (Gandolfini) who used to own the bar.

A genuinely good plot, as you'd expect, with a few twists and turns. Hardy tries a bit too hard to be the innocent criminal, but it's the skilled Gandolfini who makes it look easy as the down-on-his-luck former petty gangster. Worth watching.

Lastly, a documentary all about drone warfare and the impact it's had on a forgotten part of Pakistan.

It's easy to forget that there's been a one-sided war going on fought, not with men but machines. What the film shows most vividly, as much as the victims, is how easy it is to recruit young men, skilled in video games, to kill people on the other side of the world and that this technology, more than plutonium or anthrax, is available to almost everyone.

Minions! (in 3D)

I'm on holiday at the moment and, to take a break from all the running around I usually do, I went to see the new Despicable Me prequel.

Minions Kevin, Bob and Stuart set out to find a new evil boss to serve.

Although not as good as the originals, probably because it lacked Gru and the girls, the plot's clever enough and there's the odd swipe at the Brits (or, rather, everyone else's perception of us). Light summer viewing for kids of any age.