Things I learned from "WarGames - The Dead Code".

• Terrorists love to play online games, and they're really good at it too.


• If you play a war-themed game really well, the government will think you're a terrorist.


• Supercomputers can talk and their insides light up and flash when they're processing data.


• When something is written to or displayed on a computer screen, it always makes some sort of beeping noise.


• When a user is denied access to a remote computer system a deep bloopy noise is made and the screen goes blank.


• Articifical intelligence always equals hostility towards the human race.


• The more powerful computer, the more unrealistic and crazy 3D-swirling graphical user interface.


• Computer-savy teenagers can do anything even remotely imaginable with any and all pieces of information technology hardware, especially if there's a cheap joke involved.


• You can use Photoshop to make fake passports. Really. You can.


• If you're gonna make a movie that really sucks, be sure that the title and absurd story at least does a good job of raping the legacy of a real classic piece of cinema.

This has been some of the most loathsome ninetyfive minutes of my life. The only thing that could've made this movie any worse would've been an appearance by Steven Seagal. Oh well, maybe he'll appear in the sequel...

Yes! Yes! Make with the awesome Master Whedon!

Serious ass-kickering awesomeness courtesy of Joss Whedon coming soon...

More info here, and here.

The importance of good acting

I was watching "Equilibrium" with Christian Bale last night when something struck me. Imagine if a REAL actor like Christian Bale, who is by far one of the greatest actors in modern time, had played Neo in the "Matrix"-movies instead of Keanu "I have no facial expressions except the one that looks like a zoned out pothead and the one that looks like I'm taking a difficult dump, and I can't act worth shit" Reeves?

The first film was an amazing movie despite Keanu's abysmal performance and the two sequels have grown on me with time, but if Christian Bale had been given the opportunity to portray Neo, damn, the trilogy may have been one of the most epic ones ever, right up there with "The Godfather", "Trilogy of the dead" and "Lord of the rings". Now it's just a runner up with some really cool science fiction ideas and an interesting philosophical spin.

Oh well, at least they didn't give it to Will Smith as originally planned. That's always something to be thankful for.

And this reminds me that I gotta get "The Prestige" on blu-ray real soon. Wolverine AND Batman in the same movie, how can it be anything but awesome? Trust me, it IS awesome :-)

Maybe they're not all bad after all

Or at least they're getting better, Microsoft that is. According to a recent announcement on their website they're finally releasing documentation for their horrid binary file formats. The ones used up until 2007 at least.

This is a good thing, a very good thing even. Granted that the documentation is accurate this means it'll get easier for developers to interoperate with Microsoft's proprietary technologies and that's great since they have such a huge percentage of the market when it comes to wordprocessing, spreadsheet and presentation software (i.e. Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Good news for data portability in other words and maybe now the OpenOffice-team won't have to reverse engineer stuff until they're blue in the face to make Microsoft Office documents work flawlessly within their own applications.

I'm calling this a good day for interoperability and open development.