I’m a big fan of Fantastic Mr. Fox. We just watched it again and it was a hit with everyone from the 2 year old to grandma.

The dialog an voice acting are excellent, and the animation is really refreshing. The story is smart and is different enough from your typical Disney fare to be a welcome change.

I recommend it, go see it.

My Dell Mini 9 arrived this morning and I finally have a chance to play with it. First impressions:

• Cute little thing. It’s tiny. Fatter than I’d expected, but tiny.
• The keyboard is definitely not comfortable. I have to do a quasi pecking action to type on it; my hands don’t fit.
• Pretty clear that the Windows interface as it stands is not a great fit for a netbook (nor are linux/gnome or OS X for that matter). The screen real estate is too tight; window decorations need to be far thinner and apps need to be much more space concious.
• The trackpad is also difficult to use; my son was trying to play a game and the difference between the built-in trackpad and external mouse was ridiculously obvious.
• My immediate reaction to the reduced screen real estate was to desire a setup where every app is full screen and you can switch between apps with keyboard shortcuts. There isn’t enough room for multiple windows on screen. I might have to build something with autohotkey to make this happen.
• Chrome seems to be the best browser for it because it wastes the least screen real estate.

Some time ago trouble with the Time Warner DNS service led me to search for alternatives, which quickly led to OpenDNS. I remember setting it up and immediately noticing significantly imporved performance in everything internet – it was as if someone had magically hit a turbo button. 

Tonight RoadRunner is having more trouble so I setup OpenDNS again and I’m having the same wow reaction – everything is suddenly much faster.

OpenDNS seems to be an excellent service and if there’s a catch I haven’t found it. It’s very easy to setup, just make it your DNS provider and you’re done.

I read The Alchemist again the other day and loved it just as much as the first time. There’s something special about that book – it makes you want to get up and pursue your dreams, to think big and open again.

So I had high expectations for Eleven Minutes. Unfortunately it didn’t live up.

Eleven Minutes is a much more conventional novel than the Alchemist. The primary subject is sex and prostitution, with several undercurrents of deeper meaning thrown in for good measure.

Somehow it just didn’t grab me. The latter parts of the book get a bit creepy, and the ending, frankly, disappointed.

Perhaps it’s just the shock of the difference between The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes; looks like lots of people on Amazon reviews found it jarring.

I’m onto the Zahir next, still hoping there’s a lot more Coelho I can enjoy.

I was checking out projects from local San Diego developers and ran across Swurl. One very neat feature that worked so well I barely noticed it: when you reach the end of a page, instead of having to hit “next page”, Swurl automatically loads the contents into the bottom of the current page, so you get the uninterrupted experience  of single long page without the downside of having to wait for a giant page to load. Check it out on founder Ryan Sit’s Swurl page.

Stackoverflow is a newish service for developers – ask a question, get answers, vote on answers, build reputation. Sort of like Yahoo! Answers but for developers.

I’m surprised at how good the service is so far. I asked a question on IRC and the same question on Stackoverflow. Within 2 minutes I got an incorrect answer on IRC and the two correct answers on Stackoverflow. The voting and reputation seems to really work and there’s no IRC trolls / egos to deal with.

I’m hoping the site will maintain its usefulness as it grows. Well worth checking out. I’m here.

Live doesn’t get a lot of love and with those new ads Microsoft needs some serious help getting the word out, so let me say something nice about them. I’ve been using Live Maps lately, mainly because of the “Bird’s eye view”, and it’s quickly becoming my favourite map app. If you have’t tried it give it a shot: http://maps.live.com/ . I’m guessing you’ll like it.

There’s a new search engine in town called Cuil. Started by ex-Googlers.

I am extremely impressed. Not by the search engine itself; I like the multi-column display, but the search results still need a lot of work. For example, a search for my first name returns 0 documents, while a search for my last name returns plenty of documents that include my first name.

What is impressive is the hype and reaction this company has been able to generate in such a short period of time: every tech blog is writing about them, as are many personal blogs. The ability to generate interest is the real genius here.

Just watched Rang-e-Khoda, or Color of Paradise, for the second time. What a breath-taking movie. It’s amazing in every aspect. The casting, the acting, the direction, the cinematography, the story. Every scene is beautiful.

The title is mis-translated. It actually means color of god, which is really what the movie is about.

If you haven’t seen it, see it.

Watched In Bruges. Really not too bad. The British do good gangster movies – not shy about violence, but also layers of introspection and classical tragedy elements. I recommend it, worth seeing.

I revived a bunch of mp3 onto my windows box. I want to get them onto my iPhone. Should be drop-dead simple.

I’ve spent 10 minutes with iTunes, pressed the “Sync” button a ridiculous number of times, and I’m no closer to getting the songs onto the iPhone.

I found an article that suggested creating a special playlist and sync’ing that with the iPhone. Fine. However, when I try to sync that it tells me my iPhone is already sync’d with another computer (the infamous mac) and that sync’ing would erase the existing songs on there.

Why on earth is this difficult? Did apple really assume you’d only ever want to transfer songs from a single computer?

I’m really puzzled and disgusted. I should be able to drag and drop my songs onto the iPhone and magic should happen. Bah.

We watched Turtles Can Fly tonight. The story of Iraqi-Kurdish refugee children before, during, and just after the US invasion.

The movie is harsh. The life, the sheer numbers, and what they have to do to get by is just harsh.

The movie is well done; it’s not preachy and doesn’t dwell on the negatives. But it’s hard to watch at times.

Well worth seeing, give it a look.

I needed a version of mod_python that supports python 2.5 . I was running Ubuntu 6.10 (which started life as a 5.x install and upgraded its way to 6.10) and knew version 7.x has the mod_python I needed. So it occurred to me that the easiest way to get the new version of mod_python was to upgrade the whole operating system.

And it really was that easy. I followed the upgrade instructions, came back a little while later, and it was pretty much set. There was a minor problem with one of the language packages, but once that was taken care of I had upgraded a running system in place with almost no effort. This is my third smooth experience upgrading Ubuntu, so I’m beginning to build an unhealthy confidence in the upgrade process that gives me a little too much bravado and will probably come back to bite me later.

I had watched about half of There Will Be Blood, enjoyed it, but was surprisingly un-motivated to watch the rest. Tonight I finally watched the second half.

The first half of the movie is quite good, and Daniel Day-Lewis is fantastic. But the second half takes an unexpected turn and suddenly you’re face to face with a beautiful character study.

I don’t recall a movie diving into hatred as well this one has in a long time. Little by little it turns and material success unleashes the deep misery of the main character. “I have a competition in me” he says, and we see the results of that competition.

Nicely done, well worth watching.

Twiddla looks really good. Browser based no-setup shared white-boarding. There are a whole mess of people playing around in the sandbox and it’s holding up surprisingly well.

I caught Peter Semmelhack’s talk at ETech and also had a chance to chat with him and Mershad over lunch. Bug Labs sounded interesting – an open hardware platform where functionality can be added as modules, almost like connecting legos together. But it turns out there’s more to it than that.

Bug labs also deals with the programming interface for the devices and sensors, abstracting the functionality as web services. The device runs its own on-board web server, so getting an image from the camera is as easy as going to the url for the for the camera on the device – something like http://deviceaddress/service/camera . Apparently it implements OSGI, which would allow automated discovery and such (I’m a bit surprised they used OSGI in this context actually, but it does make sense).

I think the form factor is going to be very important – a physical device has to be physically appealing. The bug is not unattractive, but it’s not going to be as small or convenient as a purpose-built device. On the other hand, as Peter mentioned, there are lots of niches for devices that aren’t mass market (eg. devices for the blind) that the Bug could address.

I initially thought the main appeal was the modularity and ability to add sensors, but I think the open programming interface might be a bigger deal. Imagine a cell phone (or GPS device) that you had full programmable access to. Looks like this would be a fun thing to play with.

Mille Fleurs is one of San Diego’s better known high end restaurants. We ate there with some friends last night and once again I was disappointed. The lobster bisque was luke-warm and a tad salty. The steak was good, but only cooked on one end (I’m not even sure how that’s possible). My friend asked for one of the dishes to be prepared without meat and ended up with an extremely bland pasta, devoid of any flavor. The lamb was ok, but my wife found the lamb we had at Robbie and Julie’s much better. The dessert was slightly better fare, but overall quite disappointing. My previous dining experience there was similar – underwhelmed. I think I’m done with Mille Fleurs.

Bella is an interesting movie. It flashes back and forth in time – my uncle commented the direction reminded him of 21 grams. It strikes a nice balance of being obvious and mysterious at the same time. Worth watching.