Movie Roundup, 2003

The film Dolls, is made up from three interwoven tales of love and loss in modern Japan, framed by a traditional puppet story on the same theme. The main story ( of a salaryman who breaks with his fiancée to marry the boss' daughter, then leaves the wedding when he hears that on being abandoned, she had attempted suicide, and the two of them ending up wandering around Japan tied together) fails to have the clean resolution of the other episodes (an otaku almost stalks an idoru who has retired after beign disfigured in an accident, and of an aging yakuza oyabun who on getting bad news after a medical check-up, goes to find the woman he abandoned when he took to crime), and spends rather too long on admittedly gorgeous scenery shots. I was surprised to see that the wedding was to have been held in church — I suppose that is, like Kirimasu, another quaint foreign custom that the Japanese have taken to heart.

Matrix:Reloaded is another film that will have been seen by most people who would want to by now. Pity it was only the first half of a five hour movie :-( - there really wasn't a resolution, just a cliff-hanger. The FX were kewl, though. Interestingly, apart from the councillor and Neo, the real-world Zion characters were women, non-white, or both - the white males (Agents and Architect) were Matrix constructs. I agree with Howard Tayler's assessment in an open letter on his Schlock Mercenary site that it could have lost the bump'n'grind/Zion Party digression, near the beginning. Placed where it was, it didn't even have the utility of the smoochy bit in Armageddon which at about half way through the film, came at a good time for taking a leak without missing anything important.

X2 - about as perfect a realization of what have been for most of the last 35 years my favourite super-team as one could hope to see. Good performances all round, and fans will know what has to come in X3.

Russian Ark is a 96 minute single take as a viewpoint character wanders through the St. Petersburg Hermitage Museum, and through the last couple of centuries of Russian history. Visually sumptuous, though it probably packs more punch if you have a decent grouding in the history being covered.

Caught Divine Intervention at the local independent cinema. This is the Palestinian film that did well at film festivals in '02. Strange, quirky, bleak, with a very black sense of humour, from the opening scene where Santa is being hunted down by youths outside Nazareth, to the final one where a mother and son sit in a Ramallah kitchen watching a pressure cooker and she says “It's been long enough. It's time to stop it, now.” via a number of vaguely interwoven slices of life and vignettes. Everything in the film could be read as a metaphor for the desperate situation there, while simultaneously showing that even so, the people can still laugh at human folly.

See 2002 section for Avalon and Revenger's Tragedy.

Also continued at the Film Festival.

Site makeover

Thoughts behind the full redesign from this to something like this.

1. This site will use valid XHTML and CSS throughout
2. Coding strives for maximum accessibility to all.
3. That the site should be usable in most browsers with the minimum of skull sweat on my part.

The image in the banner is a picture of Mt. Taranaki in North Island, New Zealand, taken in November 1996. Fading into the banner is done with the Fade to Black... application.

Valid XHTML and CSS

This site uses the forward looking XHTML 1.1, but with fairly light use of features that are new after HTML 2.0. This means that, while I'm primarily aiming to have it look nice on modern browsers (Netscape 7, IE6), it should be adequately viewable with back-version browsers (I test with Netscape 4.5), or even as plain text. Indeed the difference between Lynx and NN4 is colour and pictures.

Version 4 browsers will not lose anything of substance - just most, but not all of the prettying-up that is done via style sheets, and some of the recent features like tool-tip titles usable on most elements (which I mainly use to explain links and obscure - often Latin - phrases). They, and users who turn off Javascript, will also only get the human-readable form of the contact addresses, as I use scripting to decrypt a version of the link and replace the plaintext human-readable part on the fly with something that has a mailto link in it. I do that to reduce the gain from trawling spammers.

I had used a table hack to put a narrow button-bar down the left, linking to the site map, but only the most recent browsers were able to emulate a stretchable clickable link area, and in small-screen devices running PocketIE, tables break the "fit-to-screen" algorithm for image layout. So I'm going for a for CSS-based formatting that looks good on a modern browser, but degrades gracefully in NN4.x and PocketIE and works for text browsers. I'd like to thank the CSS gurus at alistapart.com, bluerobot.com, and thenoodleincident.com for the hints, tips, worked examples and design philosophy.

Accessibility

Not everyone is physically able and in possession of the standard gamut of senses. That's no reason to deny them the Internet. I check my pages with A-prompt, and take heed of its warnings.

Not all pages are marked as accessible. Some are difficult to do over the whole spectrum (pages with many pictures). Some because of assumptions in the A-prompt code. As I code in XHTML 1.1, I don't have the HTML lang="" attribute, to tell what language I'm using - I have the XML xml:lang="" attribute instead, plus the <meta name="language" content="en" /> header tag. Neither are recognised by the checker.

If it weren't for the scripts, this page could gain an AAA rating. As it is, none of the pages with the webmaster address on them are accessible because the significant use of scripting is to replace a part of the page.

I can't tell the checker that a page with script on already has the non-script text in place, so I don't need a <noscript> section (and I don't because such a section is painful in XHTML 1.1). But I can tell the checker that there is no flicker on the page, even if I actually have some really horrid animations, and it will accept that. BTW, there animated images on this page, but they are the only ones on this site, and are well below the fold. [.mng files in a Java applet, rather than animated .gifs; .mng is animated .png, but alas only a few minority browsers have native support for the format.]

As noted above, the e-mail address is replaced that way. I do put the (not at all germane to the point of the page, and usually discoverable through asking the browser for page properties) last modified date in at the same time, and on this page I add the "downgrade to Lynx" experience only if it is a downgrade in what you see.

Once you get into the text-rich parts of the site (the fiction and RPG pages), they are almost all AA-level (and would be AAA if xml:lang was recognised). How well the other pages work will depend on what restrictions you operate under - they should all degrade gracefully to text, but in the picture rich pages, how useful that might be is debatable.

This rolling redesign at Easter-Midsummer '03 is also intended to be friendly for mobile users with small screen devices such as old style PalmOS devices with 160 pixel wide screens, or SPV smartphones at 176 pixels wide. For them a 150-200 pixel wide navigation column at the left eats up all the space you have, leaving the meat of the page several screen-heights down. That rather ruins any attempt that the page would have to put the key stuff "above the fold". The browser is IE3 if you're on a Windows hand-held, which also reduces the scope for fancy stuff.

No Sweat

Most pages are composed in a plain text editor using a standard template file as basis. Where a new page is not trivial, I'll compose it using Amaya (http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/BinDist.html). However composed it will finally be cross-schecked for standards conformance with a dedicated XHTML & CSS validator in Java , also available in .NET for Windows. Amaya is useful in providing a source view with line numbers to match the tool's error messages. The tool and Amaya spot slightly different things as being wrong, but the real definitive place is the validator at validator.w3.org run by the W3C, who define what's what.

All the hard work is in putting the templates together and running them and the style-sheets past the various browsers.

Background

While I disagree with some of the more evangelical "web standards" people, who really mean by that "the most recent web standards" - HTML 2.0 is a perfectly adequate standard that will suffice for writing simple, spartan, text plus images hypertext, after all - but they are right in saying that pages shouldn't be coded to employ non-conformant browser quirks, but rather should be coded for general usability across a wide range of platforms. This site works well with PocketIE, Konqueror 3.0, IE6, Netscape 4.5, 6.2 and 7; it is possible that in IE5 the CSS pattern may not lay out so well, due to known bugs, for which there is no valid CSS workround, and it will be less fancy on the older browsers, but will still be usable.

Personally I can see a reason to use browsers on a "horses for courses" basis - NN4.x has a convenient and obvious cache directory that's well placed to wipe with a secure deletion tool if you're being paranoid - NN7.x hides its cache a little more, and IE does its best to keep you from playing that sort of game. In general, if you control you hardware, and it's reasonably modern, and you don't have accessibility issues, you're probably best off accepting that we're no longer living in the mid 1990s, and you should be able to find something better on a cover disk than a 4.x browser for your platform. Or for the really cash conscious, the cheapest way that I know of to get a high-feature modern browser would be to download Mozilla Firefox () - at 4.7 Mb, for the Win32 version of the 0.9 release, that's less than half an hour with a 56k modem, or about 10% the price of the magazine with the cover disk (using cheap-rate calls) - Amaya may be slightly smaller, but it's very spartan, and is better used as a first pass conformance checker. If you need a browser that's also a mail client, chat client, news client and what have you, and you aren't using EMACS (because it does everything already) go for the full Mozilla, which is about twice the size, or Netscape at three times - both are smaller than a full IE6 download.

Cornwall and The Eden Project

Spring half term in '03 we took in a short break in Cornwall, including visiting the Eden Project.

This is well worth spending a day at if you're in that part of the world (we stayed 5 hours, and stopped only because the day had gone from foggy, with the haar blowing in over the rim of the old china-clay pit that houses the main Eden site, to bright sunshine, and Karen didn't have any sun-block, and was starting to burn around the back of the neck). It's best to get your tickets and one of the orientation leaflets from one of the tourist centres around the region rather than adding to your queueing, and to help plan your visit.

It's not just another botanical garden, or arboretum, interesting as either of those sorts of places might be; it also makes good use of artworks, starting with the horse at the entrance.

Once through the ticket booth, you see the true scope of the project.

Descending to the biomes, you find the inhabitants

Adam, a spiky metal statue on rockers that sways in the wind,

Eve, a green woman of grass

- and not one but three Serpents, of articulated wood, and other lesser pieces of decoration, in amongst the plants.

The Myths and Legends outdoor zone was still bedding down when we were there; and construction seemed to be beginning for the 3rd (desert?) indoor biome, blocking off the eastern end of the site.

I would recommend going early to the humid tropical biome, on a day where there isn't direct sunshine, and when you can feel comfortable outdoors in the light clothing that will be all that is bearable in the 25C/100% humidity within that set of domes. It was humid enough that the camera misted over.

Not so in the Hot Temperate biome - the Med, South Africa and California. Exterior first for scale

and now the interior, Med and California sections.

California scrub.

Stone fruit orchard.

We stayed at the Seapoint House Hotel in Mevagissey, which is just about visible against the sky to the right of the mast in the middle of the picture below. The grey wall above the cars on the harbour-side opposite is the path up, carrying behind the orange house and curling back around the point. Access by car is from above, then along the terrace - but to get to that level, you have to go past several "Unsuitable for Motors" signs and a 30% gradient warning.

We recommend the Mr. Bistro seafood restaurant, just off to the left of the picture (it considers Rick Stein to be a bumptious newcomer), and the Alvorada Portuguese Restaurant (which is far more than just a provider of salt cod, if that is all one has encountered of that cuisine - in fact there was no salt cod on the menu!).

Even by comparison, what we found upon returning home wasn't too shabby.

Movie Roundup, 2002

Some of these I saw at the Cambridge Film Festival, and didn't actually see full release until 2003...

I hadn't planned it that way, but I almost managed the year without seeing a Hollywood blockbuster (read - I explicitly didn't see the latest Star Wars, and nothing I've heard made it seem like I made the wrong decision, nor SpiderMan, as I always felt that Spidey was a tedious tosser. But, at a loose end one evening while Karen was out gaming, and having had good word of it, I went to see xXx. It has action, wise-cracking, sticking it to James Bond, gratuitous hip-ness, and keeps the slushy bits to a minimum – just the sort of thing to indulge one's inner 12-year-old with.

Having broken the clean run, I compounded it by seeing Chamber of Secrets – which I felt was better than Philosopher's Stone for spending more time on plot and less on gosh-wow scene setting. The station exterior shown for King's Cross is actually the next door station at St. Pancras – its recently cleaned Victorian Gothic brickwork being more spectacular than the low, modern, frontage of King's Cross, even were it not at the moment surrounded by the desolation of the works being carried out for the new Eurostar terminus.

Two Towers wasn't bad, but in a situation where they were having to juggle three storylines anyway, and trim to fit into 3 hours, adding the needless extra Aragorn material from whole cloth wasn't what I'd've done. I was amused to see them continuing to top their previous “elf stunts” with the snowboarding with a shield trick. Overall, though, I didn't think it was quite as good as part 1, which I'd seen again a couple of weeks previously.

Le Roi Danse (distributed in the UK under the translated title The King is Dancing) is a behind-the-scenes story of the youth of Louis XIV, the Sun King, from the point of view of his Italian dancing master, Lully. While Louis struggles against the severe demands of his mother's faction, Lully has to contend with maintaining his popularity against the scurrilous Moliere.

Avalon (2003 release), from the director of Ghost in the Shell, and shot in Poland, with a local cast (Polish dialog subtitled in English). The film is in some ways the Matrix in reverse – people from the dark depressing future (shot with Eastern European locations in a colour subdued style – not quite sepia, but nearly so, to the same effect as the bleached out 1984 version of 1984, but darker – by halfway through I had almost forgotten what green looked like, except as an artefact of low-light scopes) lose themselves in the eponymous VR wargame. The game takes the language of D&D – characters form parties of Warriors, Thieves (self described as guides or scouts), Mages or Bishops, and gain levels and experience; though it is all modern small-unit combat – even when there's a Bishop in one scene we never see him do anything other than be Command and Control. In another Matrix-like touch, the future computer UIs (outside of the immersive VR) are very retro – those shown here would have been cutting edge c1975.
The plot follows Ash, a 12 or 13th level Warrior, at the top of Class A, the highest division. She has been playing solo since her once famous party split up, following a game that they didn't complete after one of their number bailed out midway through. She is following leads that suggest another member of that team has managed to find the way into a higher set of game levels (Special A). It's all very atmospheric, but pads itself out by repeating a number of bridging scenes, and eventually ends a couple of minutes before we'd find out what the hell was really going on. In all, unsatisfying but pretty.

Lost in La Mancha, a documentary about the abortive production of Terry Gilliam's film The Man who killed Don Quixote, as it accumulated one jinx after another (on a tight schedule, stars don't show, the locations turn out to be next to an airbase with constant overflights, a flash flood wipes out the first day's shooting, and the actor playing Quixote is invalided out with prostate and back problems). In its 90 minutes, we see just about all the film that Gilliam actually shot, as well as seeing the true life story of a Murphy's Guide to making a film. Perhaps one of these days the real film may get made; as it is, this gives an idea of what really goes on behind the scenes.

Revenger's Tragedy (2003 release), Alex Cox (Repo Man)'s realisation of Middleton's (or Torneur's - the authorship is disputed) 1607 play, described at the time as the product of a diseased mind, transposed into a dark future Liverpool. It was shot on location there, with an all-local cast. Intertwining the original dialog with just enough Scouse for context, it makes the old story feel modern. Unlike Avalon, this dark future is all night and neon, where the Duke (Derek Jacobi, playing an aging roué) rules with an iron fist, and takes his droite de seigneur seriously. Disturbing this comes Vindici (Christopher Ecclestone, eXistenZ,Elizabeth) to take revenge for the poisoning (for refusing the Duke's advances) of his bride on their wedding day, playing his sons (Eddie Izzard superb as Lussurio, the eldest) against him and one another until the predictable Jacobean gorefest at the end. Simply superb, with a soundtrack by Chumbawumba.

The Warrior, a Hindi language film, based, I believe on a Japanese tale. Not Bollywood; rather think Kurosawa in colour.

GPS 44° 43.324'N 3° 17.038'E +1063m to home

At least it has stopped raining, but it's chilly. Headline news on the TV this morning is Potter's Bar derailment, so groan at thought of travel disruption. French railways probably seem better because they run so few trains (often if you miss the train you want, it's a case of wait to tomorrow; and here at Aumont, most of the trains are coaches).

Breakfast is standard issue - bread, croissant and jam.

Buy cheese and fruit when the grocers opens, check out, and go stand opposite the station for an hour. Meet some of the folk who I passed yesterday, also waiting. Coach not too crowded, and only makes one other stop - St Chély d'Apcher, twinned with Tadcaster. But there are two kids - burbling under fives - who I'd gladly strangle by the time we get there.

Long motorway haul to Clermont, breathless scramble to train. Which then waits for another late train.

And I'm in a compartment now with three more brats. *sigh* The one old enough to sit and read Harry Potter, and comics, is only annoying when he sucks the drawstring of his hoody, or later complains about something to do with his Gameboy (and is taken out into the corridor for strict telling off). The younger two fidget, burble, and ask if we are there yet. The corridor is narrow and busy with through traffic to the Buffet car, and the vestibule by the loo at the end serves as refuge for smokers and users of mobile phones. I alternate position as I am driven.

In Paris by just after half four, but it is raining from solid overcast, though the forecast had promised broken cloud and some sun. Metro to Chatelet, stop at the Trappiste for salad and Rodenbach, then back into the crush for the Gare du Nord.

Arrive with an hour to spare before check-in (could easily have caught an earlier Eurostar), and go up anyway for aircon comfort. Coach bloody miles up the platform, but Halleluiah! No-one in the seat next to me - especially not the huge sweaty pleb who boards shortly after me. One couple misread the class as the coach number, but are sent back to correct coach. And off through misty drizzle we set.

It was after the tunnel that the rot set in. Phoning home, I'm told not to worry, there's an emergency timetable, running every half hour, so decide to use King's Cross line rather than Liverpool Street. Half an hour late - with no announcement that we were going to be - at Waterloo, arrive at King's Cross just to miss a train. A few minutes before the next one, we're told to wait for an announcement. There are a series of these, saying that it's on its way, and so it's eventually there 15 minutes after promised. This train is full of overexcited Arsenal supporters, flush from having won the double, but find the least noisy coach. They get off at Stevenage, and then the quiet guy in the suit sitting across the way from me starts throwing up, so off to another coach, where some girls are talking about the families in the audience of the performance of Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang they'd just been to see as we sit in Hitchin station. The driver then pours on the coal, and drives like the clappers. Even so, it's gone midnight by the time I'm home, having left the hotel at 9 UK time.

Bath, beer (real beer, even if in a half-litre bottle rather than real pints) and bed.

French holiday diaries continue in my main blog.

GPS 44° 48.246'N 3° 25.460'E +1129m to Aumont-Aubrac

Dark clouds when I get up, but then sun through a low gap under them. Forecast says rain in the morning on one channel, afternoon on another.

Most inedible breakfast to date - "French toast", last night's left over bread from supper grilled more to desiccate than brown. Not even a croissant as well! Choked down a couple of slices, but most of calories came from sugaring the coffee. Meanwhile all the other tables were sending out for seconds!

Sun gone when we set out, but will make brief appearances during the day. The hotel being off the main route, only a few today - the couple from day one, and two "hares". Our breath steams in the chill air. Meet the counter-marching guy again. Tells us that Jacqueline with the two dogs - it turns out she's Swiss - is ahead, or in the lead. Unsurprisingly, we don't catch her up, but I do meet him one more time on the way. Two miles down the road, at the only town en route (St. Alban), we have lost the retired couple, and when I get out the other side, the other two have vanished. Second breakfast?

Briefly lose GR65 on reaching the D4, so go to crossroads with D987, and pick up the trail as it leaves the 987 later.

Off road now, on chalk track, just enough brightness to make it sticky, with the promise of rain always in the wind. More of the clear-cut and abandon, with sparse lines of trees around spaces where trunks have been left until they weather to grey. Overtake other walkers, exchange brief greetings. Not too much of the eroded streambeds today, and not so many long descents. Emerge from final long off-road, to find a local entrepreneur has advertised his taxi service ("Allo Taxi") just on the corner - "any baggage, any distance, equipped to handle travel for medical reasons".

Stop at convenient bench at edge of Aumont, eat melon (had the fromage blanc for elevenses), then head on in. Carry on past hotel to locate station for tomorrow, then back. No sign of a grocer, but pass plenty of boucherie/charcuteries, a news agent, a couple of shops selling general tat.

Turn back to hotel to arrive at same time as the Michels.

This far down the line, Chinese whispers seem to have attacked my name, so take a while to locate my reservation in their book (no, I'm not the M. Zeeman due tomorrow) but that sorted, my bag is waiting for me. Poky shower, so sponge bath when hot water finally arrives. This way I give my dodgy toe (slowly healing but only just faster than abrasion) a chance to air and dry.

After a while to recover, set out to locate any sign of cheese vendor, also to check out the station in more detail and do GPS fix. Find a grocer at last, down a tiny side street, then get to station in time to see the evening bus to Clermont arrive. Useful - now I know which side to wait. On the way back to the hotel, the rain belatedly starts. Meet Jacqueline, the dogs and the counter-marching chap, so make my farewells, before dashing for shelter.

Dinner is soup (diced vegetables in clear stock), a puff pastry cheese sauce thing, pork steak on pasta, cheese (Cantal and St Nectaire), and the bread and butter pud, which seems to be a local specialty.

GPS 44° 57.572'N 3° 32.799'E +979m to Les Faux

More rain overnight, but stopped by daylight.

Breakfast was a buffet so I had three (small) bowls each fruit salad, and muesli+yoghurt, plus plenty of juice and just enough coffee. One of the Michels is sufficiently sleepy that he almost pours coffee into his juice glass.

As I was checking out, he and the rest of the fast crew from yesterday were walking out the door, and after I'd stopped at the p'tit Casino for fruit and fromage blanc, I thought the dots on the horizon would be the last I saw of them for the day.

The weather is cool, cloudy, damp, with some sun breaking thro' to make it steamy. Rain blowing on wind.

After an hour, I pass the others sitting by the side of the track, munching. Later, they pass me, and this happens three or four times, until I just have joke about the hare and the tortoise - having seen one yesterday, I didn't have to look up lièvre. But honestly they were at it like hobbits!

Today the route passes through a lot of rolling terrain with pines, clear cut in places, sometimes with the cut trees just left lying. In places the ground has been cleared of stumps and loosely ploughed, in othes the debris seems to have been left simply for the locals to help themselves to firewood. The trees, gorse, and dull weather reminded me of the journey from New Plymouth to Rotorua.

Ninety minutes in, suffered through what would have been an hour of soft weather, except for the wind bringing the drizzle in almost horizontally. A brolly was very useful - I was already soaked with sweat in the steamy heat, so wearing waterproofs would have been a disaster. Gaiters are useful too!

Sun comes out, so now have parasol as brolly dries. Winding through a little village, with a horrendous steep descent and inquisitive dogs - up to now all local wuffs encountered had been dozy.

There are tadpoles, legless so far, in the puddles!

I am sure that a chap who passes me in opposite direction about half eleven is the same as did an hour or more before.

By noon, I'm halfway up scramble under trees near Chanaleilles. I listen to my legs and stop - peach, yoghurt and an oeuf dur abstracted from the breakfast buffet.

Load thus lightened, stride up to encounter the hobbits again. A stream to cross with interestingly menhir-like bridge, where a stepping stone would have been less precarious. A gate to wrestle with - needed a lot of lifting to fit the bolt back. Now on main road, and decide to skip two miles of detour. Renewed rain rakes this fairly unanimous.

It stops just as I approach the St Roch chapel and refuge, but I stop anyway to have a lunch of oranges and fromage blanc. "Tea time" quips Michel as they pass me for the last time. Off the road now and back in woods. Sun emerges for brief Fangornish ("almost felt I liked the place") moment, before becoming dull again. On home stretch now, where I'm overtaken by two cyclists. One loses (it had come loose, and he simply removed it rather than reattaching it) his back mudguard, which he soon regrets, the path being rather muddy. Guide-book says to take care to take turn off the GR65 to the village a mile or so off to the side where I'm staying, but the only care needed is to not walk into the sign for the place! (I'd expected one as it had been signed on the path before I'd reached Saugues!)

Of course this bit in the open was the only bit of blazing sun, and of course the auberge was the building on a rise that I passed going to the main road, so had to double back! There'll be a serious set of corrigenda this one.

Very much a restaurant on this Ascension Day holiday, so it takes a while to get lodged. The room's not en suite, but at least it's modern (a converted/extended old farm house). Much needed shower. I'd hoped to take a relaxing stroll, but by then chilly rain comes and goes outside, I sit and watch watch "Attack of the killer bees" dubbed into French. Soon I'm rooting for the bees, as the victims' stupid behaviour deserved them a Darwin.

Forecast says rain tomorrow morning, dull later. It is chilly now. Dinner comes with 25cl red on the table, kidneybean, corn tomato and egg salad, pork steak on mountain of peas and haricot verts, so it's likely to be windy tomorrow too :) then fromage blanc, bread and butter pud with plums, coffee. GPS makes this the highest stop so far.