Live from Austin!

Idiocracy is Mike Judge’s new live action movie. Well, I say “new”; I gather it was pretty much finished in 2004, and since then he has been battling with 20th Century Fox to get it released. Right now, it’s showing in a handful of cities, probably a contractual obligation release before it gets shuffled off to DVD or buried outright. One of the cities is Austin, so we went to see it last night.

The premise of the story is the observation that smart people pretty much aren’t having children, while mouth-breathing idiots can’t seem to stop doing so. A supremely average guy from the army is chosen to be the subject of a suspended animation experiment in 2005. Unfortunately, after he is put into the suspension chamber the military end up forgetting about it, and our hero wakes up in the year 2505—and discovers that the world has gotten so dumb that he’s now the smartest person on the planet.

So we get to see a future where the cities are like giant trailer parks, the only clothing that exists is sports gear festooned with dozens of corporate logos, and nobody can even comprehend the idea of drinking water without coloring, sugar and flavoring added. Language has devolved into strings of rap clichés, disconnected phrases, and grunts, and the President is a pro wrestler.

I laughed more than I have in months. The pace starts to flag after about two thirds of the movie, but it’s still pretty damn entertaining if you like satire. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who thinks monster truck rallies are legitimate entertainment, then you’re probably not going to appreciate having so many barbs fired in your direction.

Celebrity-obsessed entertainment publications like JAM! Showbiz and Entertainment Weekly have panned the movie, all too aware that it sets out to mock their readers. It rips into Hollywood too, and has made a few corporations unhappy. Starbucks seem to have taken the jokes in their stride, like they did with Austin Powers, but Pepsico have clearly forbidden any of their trademarked logos from being shown in the movie. As such, the Negativland Dispepsi approach is followed, with significantly disguised parody logos being used and the real product name referred to only verbally. I daresay a good few jokes were removed or muted by the corporate censors too.

Still, probably worth going to see, and definitely worth renting on DVD.

I’m in Chicago to put signs on doors. No, really.

IBM is setting up a swanky new customer briefing center, where major customers are given custom presentations, attend hands-on technical demonstrations, and are shown proof-of-concept systems. Outside each room will be a video screen. The plan is for each screen to show the room number and name, the title of whatever event is happening at that moment (or starting soon), the times of the event, and the name and e-mail address of the IBM contact responsible for the event. There may also be a need to put custom logos, screenshots, clip art or animation on the screens.

There are turnkey systems for doing this sort of thing, but they cost a ton of money and are a pain to administer. So, we’re building one in-house. Or more specifically, I’m building the software, a colleague is installing the (Linux based) hardware. Each room will be driven from a central Domino database, which can be managed by any authorized user, and is integrated with the system used to book meeting rooms. The screens will show a web page, implemented in XHTML and CSS, and displayed using an embedded version of Firefox (I hope, or else I’ll have to do some extra work to downgrade the web design). The page will simply refresh every N minutes.

The hardware only arrived on Friday, so everything was booked at the last minute. I picked the closest hotel to IBM that had broadband. It turned out to be the Hard Rock Hotel in downtown Chicago, on the north edge of the theater district. The current IBM office building is a short bleary-eyed zombie-like morning walk away, and there’s a Starbucks across the street from the obvious route, so that works well.

Also just down the street is the Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist. Until now, the only Christian Scientist church I had seen was the one in Boston, labeled First Church of Christ Scientist. I had thought that that was just the full brand name of the church, like the First National Bank. It hadn’t occurred to me that they actually number the things. Thank goodness Starbucks didn’t take that approach, or they’d have problems fitting wide enough signs on the stores.

This evening I walked to the original Pizzeria Uno. Just down the street someone had started an independent pizza restaurant called Pizzeria Due, with a very similar logo. I thought this was pretty amusing, and would have eaten there, but there was a queue almost as long as the one in front of Uno.

I’m sure I heard something about Chicago having a tough economy; yet someone is clearly doing well, as downtown is infested with condo developments. Many local businesses have recently shut down, and often have “Coming soon: more condos!” signs on the windows. A condo here starts at $200,000 or so.

Further evidence of selective richness: I saw a shiny silver Lambourghini downtown. I think it was a Countach. I love the design of the Countach, and the name—it turns out it’s the Italian equivalent of “Holy crap!”. The car got that name because when people living near the Lambourghini plant saw the test car being driven, they tended to say something like “Countach!”. A security guard was standing looking at the car. I’m not sure whether he was a guard from a nearby store taking a break, or whether it’s possible that someone is rich enough to hire a guard to stand and watch his car.

There’s also an enormous Apple Store. It’s just like one of the stores in the original Grand Theft Auto—the one where there’s a special stunt jump that involves driving through the plate glass windows and up the glass staircase.

If you like Art Deco, Chicago is the city for you. It’s everywhere. The hotel is in a historic building, and has some beautiful metal elevator doors on the ground floor. It also has an authentic deco mailbox set into the wall; or rather, something which used to be a mailbox. It doesn’t have a slot any more.

OK, new screensaver early beta now available for download for a limited time only. Requires OS X 10.2, unfortunately.

The actual animation is by no means finalized; think of this as a demonstration of the sort of things the finished screensaver might do.

You might be wondering why on earth I’d want to make yet another screensaver inspired by That Movie. Well, I got some e-mail from someone who suggested it. I pointed out the various attempts already available, but he managed to convince me that they weren’t good enough, and that SnowSaver did a much better job than any of them at dealing with the “things drifting down the screen” part of the problem.

Of course, that still left the rest of the problem to deal with. There followed a great deal of frame-by-frame examination of movie footage and hand-drawing and optimizing of symbols. There was also the minor detail of writing just over 1,500 lines of Cocoa code, which includes a particle system, an OpenGL text library, and a couple of state machines… Generally speaking, the project has obeyed Hofstadter’s Law.

Spent the afternoon and early evening improving the screensaver and learning my way around Cocoa better. (As opposed to cocoa butter, which would probably have been much more enjoyable if used appropriately.) I now have a preferences sheet with various sliders and a color selector, and code to load and save preferences in the correct way. In the process, I triggered yet another bug; tracking it down revealed yet another way in which the reality of the screensaver API differs from the documentation. This in turn has suggested a possible cause for the “textures vanishing when returning from full screen preview” bug, which I’ll investigate tomorrow.

Also on the agenda for tomorrow is gluing together the parameters set by the preferences dialog, and the actual OpenGL snowflake animation code. Should be reasonably trivial, and while I’m in there I plan to try adding a couple more snowflake textures.

Once all that works, it’ll be 1.1b1. (1.0 was the same as 1.0rc2, for those who are keeping track, but I’m not going to bother making a separate renamed release.) Assuming 1.1b1 works for everyone else, I’ll probably go straight to 1.1 and announce it on MacUpdate and VersionTracker.

Anyway, by 19:00 my brain was shutting down from excessive programming. I was unable to engage in conversation; in fact, I was pretty much unable to engage with the outside world at all. I wonder if I was always like this when I was hacking code all day back in the early 90s? Probably, unfortunately. I suspect that being a highly productive programmer requires a state of mind which isn’t altogether healthy.

We went to the Rosebud, I ate fish since my body was craving it. (Listen to the body, sometimes it knows what it needs and will tell you.) I made a swift return to the human race. We came back, and with the aid of coffee I fixed the aforementioned bug. I rewarded myself with a couple of mince pies and a movie.

One of the disadvantages of NetFlix is that months can elapse between adding a DVD to your queue, and actually watching that DVD. So I know that somebody, somewhere recommended that I watch Gun Shy, but I no longer have any idea who. Anyhow, it was moderately funny, but a bit too tense to be completely enjoyable. I’d probably give it 3/5.