September 2005 Archives

Mirrormask will be released tomorrow !

The movie designed by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, in collaboration with the Jim Henson Company is credited to be both stunning, original and cheap (developped for only $4 millions with off-the-shelf software).

From the early images and trailers, it does look stunning. This is THE movie any fan of Dave McKean's visual work and Neil Gaiman's imagination have been waiting for for years.

Now that the movie is here, the problem will be to actually watch it.

It is released in selected theaters only (although produced with Sony Pictures). I haven't found any word about a possible general release.

Since this is a movie to see on a big screen, I will have to find where the nearest theater will be from here.

No chance to see it in the sorry excuses of theaters I have around me

For more images, art and the movie trailers, check out Mirrormask official website. 

This is not really what I had in mind when I said I was looking for better visual tools to make sense of world events :)

I got frustrated today by several news articles about the Gaint Squid recently photographed by Japanese scientists. Not one of these newsbites had either a picture to show, or even a link to a place where we can see the beast.

I set out to look for the picture on Google and got distracted along the way by the oddities reported by A Welsh View. Fakes or not, these news range from the funniest to the just plain weird.

And the squid pictures ? You will find them with this Deep Sea Squid sightings article from National Geographics.

I came across BBC NEWS | In Pictures while looking for more images from the recent hurricanes in the south. This site features daily picturees, photo journals, special editions and archives for about a year's worth.

Still looking for more tools to make better sense of world events... 

As with last year's Tsunami in Indonesia, the devastation left behind by Katrina is difficult to grasp. Printed press and even news Media are too focused on the drama of unfolding events to provide a real sense of the scale of the devastation. You have to go on the web to get the idea.

NASA's Earth Observatory provides a remarkable series of satellite views of the disaster, from Katrina's eye, Katrina's arrival over New Orleans, to comparative views of the flooding in Louisiana and submerged streets of New Orleans. A more detailed view of the city of New Orleans under water is also available.

Very responsive, Google provides two views of the area : Google Map of New Orleans lets you compare views before and after the flooding, and overlay streets on top of the satellite views, and Google Earth Katrina's Imagery provides frequent updates of the flooded areas beyond New Orleans.

The human scale of the devastation is as difficult to grasp as the geographical scale. Things on the ground are much more complex than the too often polarized views provided by TV news.

The reality of the situation is literally tangible on the daily log of the support crew of DirectNIC, in charge of a backbone node in New Orleans. The Interdictor has become another perfect example of live, raw reporting, including live cameras and hundreds of images of the situation on the streets.

Once you have seen these images, you should be convinced to help, donate or do something about this catastrophe. 

 [09/28/2005- I should have checked earlier.... I just found out there is an extensive coverage of Katrina from National Geographics.]

The switch of this site to the new 3.2 version of Movable Type took a little longer than expected but it was well worth the wait !

After using it for a couple of days, I keep finding little changes here and there, interface improvements, better icons... overall, the new Administration is clean and streamlined. More importantly, it makes sense.

I won't go into the main features of this new version. Other sites such as Planet Movable Type are doing that in a much better way than I would.

One word of warning though if you are using IIS6 and Perl 5.6 on Windows like I am. Some Perl scripts included in the new version simply refused to run.

That can be a problem if the script you are trying to run is 'mt-upgrade.cgi' or even 'mt.cgi'.

It turns out the path to the new perl libraries was not defined properly. Thanks to a quick email to Six Apart's support line (answered by Brad Choates no less :) ), a solution magically appeared in my inbox.

Simply add these 3 lines to the '.cgi' files using the new 'Boostrap' method :

use File::Basename;
use File::Spec;
use lib File::Spec->catdir(dirname($0), "lib");

(These lines should be added right after 'use strict;').

Now I just have to find enough time to study the new system of styles and the StyleCatcher plugin.