'Til All Are One

OLPC Aus­tralia have been awar­ded a Bronze Lion at this year’s Cannes Lions Inter­na­tional Advert­ising Fest­ival, the advert­ising coun­ter­part of the Cannes Film Festival.

I think this is fant­astic recog­ni­tion for a Free Soft­ware pro­ject, espe­cially one that is focused on assist­ing chil­dren in some of the most remote parts of the world. I feel hon­oured to have been part of this success.

We’re happy for people to get involved to help us in our mis­sion. If you’d like to par­ti­cip­ate, espe­cially (for me) in the tech­nical field, please get in touch with me or con­tact OLPC Aus­tralia through our Web site.

I don’t get it. In a com­munity where open­ness is prized, some have seen it fit to cri­ti­cise that very tenet. In the world of FOSS, bug track­ers are laid open for all to see (and con­trib­ute to), and mail­ing lists are a hive of dis­cus­sion and innovation.

So why is it such a bad thing when we openly dis­cuss the nature of our com­munity, and the gov­ernance thereof? Kevin Rudd was widely praised for his prom­ises to pro­mote open gov­ern­ment (we’re still wait­ing, Kevin).

To put any uncer­tainty to rest: Linux Aus­tralia is in great shape. We just had yet another suc­cess­ful linux​.conf​.au and have built up a sub­stan­tial pot of sav­ings, all in the face of a global fin­an­cial melt­down. We are indeed in an envi­able pos­i­tion, and we could not have done it had we not stayed true to our beliefs. Linux Aus­tralia is defined by its com­munity sup­port and participation.

Can we do bet­ter? Of course we can. What I’ve tried to artic­u­late is that the best means of doing that is by scal­ing our com­munity. To use a code ana­logy, I effect­ively pos­ted a pub­lic bug report and invited the com­munity to help find solu­tions. You don’t see that level of trans­par­ency from many other organ­isa­tions, and I for one am very proud of that.

The FOSS com­munity in Aus­tralia will con­tinue to grow and thrive — any­body who went to linux​.conf​.au should be con­vinced of that. The bazaar feel is stronger than ever, and Linux Aus­tralia will con­tinue to hold a vital role in stim­u­lat­ing and facil­it­at­ing that devel­op­ment. But to do so in a man­ner that best suits the community’s interests requires some delib­er­a­tion, plan­ning and com­mu­nic­a­tion with the very com­munity that it seeks to assist. What’s wrong with that?

If only my local MP was as in touch with his constituents…

LotD: OpenAus­tralia, open source good­ness applied to gov­ern­ment

It looks like I’ve opened up a can of worms. Last week I bemoaned about the low voter par­ti­cip­a­tion in Linux Aus­tralia (LA) elec­tions. I spent con­sid­er­able energy at linux​.conf​.au (LCA) in Hobart pub­li­cising the issue and can­vassing opin­ion from com­munity mem­bers. This cul­min­ated in a light­ning talk titled ‘YOU PEOPLE SUCK’*, where I angrily chas­tised the com­munity for not par­ti­cip­at­ing in Linux Aus­tralia. The fury was in jest, but the call to arms was not.

It seems now that the media has grabbed a hold of the mat­ter. Frankly, I’m glad that this issue has been brought to the fore. It has been a cata­lyst for con­tem­pla­tion and debate, which in my opin­ion is the hall­mark of an open com­munity. In my chats with vari­ous people over the mat­ter, a few reas­ons crop up. These aren’t all neces­sar­ily true, but if they are believed by a sub­stan­tial sec­tion of our com­munity, they’d might as well be.

• I don’t want to pay anything

Mem­ber­ship of Linux Aus­tralia is free, as in beard! LA makes a tidy profit from LCA and sponsorships.

• I don’t know any­thing about LA
• I don’t see how LA is rel­ev­ant to me
• I don’t see LA doing anything

These three are prob­ably the most dis­turb­ing. LA must strive to mar­ket itself bet­ter and to prove its worth in the com­munity. We’ve come a long way, but I do see some areas where we could improve. For instance, I’ve found over the years that many LCA attendees don’t under­stand the rela­tion­ship between LA and LCA. LCA is an LA event, and we shouldn’t let any­one for­get it. Other areas where we could improve include sup­port for local groups, par­tic­u­larly LUGs. Vari­ous pro­jects have been in the works for a while now, but unfor­tu­nately we’ve all been con­strained by Real Life. We should be bet­ter util­ising that fam­ous open source scalab­il­ity to fix these problems.

• LA is too opaque
• I’m not good enough to participate

The sen­ti­ments above are com­plete ana­thema to a work­ing demo­cracy, and they should be dis­patched with accord­ingly. Yes it’s (gen­er­ally) true that the open source world is a mer­ito­cracy, but that should not dis­suade any cas­ual per­son from hav­ing their input.

• I don’t know any of the candidates
• I don’t have any spe­cific objec­tions or pref­er­ences regard­ing the candidates

The former is a reflec­tion of our diverse and geo­graph­ic­ally dis­trib­uted com­munity. The lat­ter might have some cros­sover with apathy, but gen­er­ally it’s an expres­sion that none of the can­did­ates are offens­ive enough to vote against (the black­list approach to vot­ing) or pref­er­en­tial enough to vote for. Enthu­si­asms can go both ways — an unpop­u­lar group of can­did­ates might be enough to mobil­ise an increased num­ber of votes against them.

• I can’t make it to the AGM, and so can­not vote
• I thought I was already a mem­ber after sub­scrib­ing to the mail­ing lists
• I thought I was already a mem­ber after regis­ter­ing for linux​.conf​.au
• The vot­ing form is dif­fi­cult to find
• The vot­ing sys­tem is confusing

These come down to the design and com­mu­nic­a­tion sur­round­ing our Web prop­er­ties. We use Mem­berDB as our online mem­ber­ships and vot­ing sys­tem, and hence there is no need to phys­ic­ally present your­self to vote (do it in your undies for all I care; just make sure the web­cam is off). Each mail­ing list has a Mail­man login, the Web site has another, and Mem­berDB has yet one more. LCA each year tends to have its own soft­ware infra­struc­ture entirely. The vot­ing form does indeed require much dig­ging to reach. There’s plenty of scope here for streamlining.

• I didn’t know the elec­tion was on
• The vot­ing period is too short
• My regis­tra­tion wasn’t approved (in time)
• I signed up dur­ing the vot­ing period

The points above are mostly to do with pro­cess and pro­ced­ure. Elec­tions need to be pub­li­cised bet­ter. One per­son said to me that they were expect­ing a big ‘VOTE’ but­ton on the front page of linux​.org​.au, link­ing dir­ectly to the bal­lot form. Maybe another Coun­cil mem­ber can cor­rect me on this, but I gather it’s unof­fi­cial policy not to accept new mem­ber­ships dur­ing the vot­ing pro­cess. Given that Mem­berDB is designed to approx­im­ate the Aus­tralian elect­oral pro­cess, this should come as no sur­prise. How­ever, this is not stated any­where in pub­lic. Also, since new mem­ber­ships must be manu­ally con­firmed (a pre­cau­tion to stop spam and mul­tiple sign-​​ups) there will be an appre­ciable lag in the approvals pro­cess. Don’t expect the Coun­cil to have any time to accept new sign-​​ups dur­ing or close to LCA.

I am yet to hear the old ‘one vote doesn’t make a dif­fer­ence’ excuse, but just in case, you can read here on why this atti­tude is not helpful.

I’d be inter­ested to hear if you have any other reas­ons (and pro­posed solu­tions) for not regis­ter­ing with Linux Aus­tralia and vot­ing in the elec­tions. I’d recom­mend that you take part in the dis­cus­sion on the linux-​​aus mail­ing list, oth­er­wise you can post a com­ment here or con­tact me dir­ectly if you’d prefer some privacy.

I won’t pre­tend to have all the answers, or pos­sess some magic map of where we should be going. I’m just another com­munity mem­ber like any­one else, who is inter­ested in see­ing us move for­wards. Please con­sider assist­ing LA to address these problems.

LotD: blue​hack​ers​.org

* yes, caps are mandatory

Donna Ben­jamin roun­ded a small group of us together to write a let­ter to Julia Gil­lard, Deputy Prime Min­is­ter and Min­is­ter for Edu­ca­tion. The res­ult was widely syn­dic­ated, hope­fully build­ing some mind­share in the pro­cess. The Edu­ca­tion Expo proved to me more than any­thing else that FOSS is quickly becom­ing accept­able to the gen­eral pub­lic — the trick is in how you pro­mote it.

So where to from here? How can we cap­it­al­ise upon the gains we have made?

Per­haps our greatest single weak­ness is the per­ceived lack of pro­fes­sional sup­port. I think OSIA should be doing more to address this (note: I’m not imply­ing that OSIA isn’t tak­ing this ser­i­ously). Here’s an e-​​mail I wrote to the osia-​​discuss mail­ing list (which is unfor­tu­nately subscriber-​​only):

The best thing OSIA can do is fight the pop­u­lar notion that there’s no
pro­fes­sional sup­port avail­able for FOSS. We can beat the TCO and Free­dom
drums as hard as we want, but few organ­isa­tions are will­ing to entrust their
com­put­ing to ‘com­munity’ support.

I man­aged the Linux Aus­tralia stand at the Edu­ca­tion Expo a few weeks ago, and
my impres­sion is that FOSS is on the cusp of main­stream acceptance:

http://​www​.dhanap​a​lan​.com/​b​l​o​g​/​2​0​0​8​/​0​6​/​2​9​/​e​d​u​c​a​t​i​o​n​-​e​x​p​o​-​r​e​p​o​rt/

Schools are cry­ing out for ways to get bet­ter value for their dol­lar, but they
aren’t going to even think about FOSS if they can’t get pro­fes­sional support.

If I run the stand again next year, I’d like to see some involve­ment from
OSIA. At the very least, we should have avail­able some leaf­lets show­ing that
yes indeed there is qual­ity, paid sup­port for FOSS.

Also note that FOSS isn’t Linux. We got the most interest in the
OpenE­duca­tionDisc, a com­pil­a­tion of FOSS for Windows.

On the com­munity side, we can con­tinue to make FOSS more accept­able to school admin­is­tra­tions, bur­eau­crats and politi­cians. Here’s my idea:

My sug­ges­tion is for us to build a Web site focused on open edu­ca­tion in
Aus­tralia. We already have the per­fect vehicle: http://​opene​duca​tion​.org​.au.
How­ever, at present it’s just a messy wiki more suit­able for our own
brain­storm­ing than for being a public-​​facing resource.

The wiki should of course remain, but I pro­pose that we build a proper,
present­able Web site that is dir­ectly access­ible via the
http://​opene​duca​tion​.org​.au address.

Why do this when we already have http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion? Open Edu­ca­tion
is much big­ger than Linux, and cer­tainly should not be anchored to it. Here’s
a short list of what it can include:

• FOSS
• (GNU/)Linux OS — on servers
• (GNU/)Linux OS — on clients/​desktops
• open stand­ards
• open languages/​libraries/​APIs
• free content/​culture
• open learn­ing
• open cur­riculum

To be hon­est, I fear that we might be only hurt­ing ourselves by tying open
edu­ca­tion to a com­pletely Free com­put­ing envir­on­ment. That might be a worthy
aim, but few insti­tu­tions are going to switch over all in one go. By offer­ing
a migra­tion path (or paths), a school can migrate more com­fort­ably at its own
pace. We ought to be provid­ing real choice, not just a bin­ary ‘with us or
with the terrists’.

FOSS (Fire­fox, Open​Of​fice​.org, Scribus, etc.) can run on oper­at­ing sys­tems
other than Linux. To use the recent Edu­ca­tion Expo as an example, we got a
lot of buy-​​in through the OpenE­duca­tionDisc, a com­pil­a­tion of FOSS for
Windows.

Also note how I split Linux cli­ents from serv­ers. Linux’s place in the server
realm is very solid, but con­vin­cing an insti­tu­tion to accept a Linux cli­ent
solu­tion is tougher. And by ‘cli­ent’, I mean either tra­di­tional desktops or
thin cli­ents. The lat­ter are often cost-​​effective and rep­res­ent a real
strength of Linux, but are often over­looked or even have reg­u­la­tions work­ing
against their adop­tion. On the server side, we have some great edu­ca­tional
tools such as Moodle and LAMS.

Open stand­ards obvi­ously include things like file formats and pro­to­cols, which
will become even more rel­ev­ant as we see more applic­a­tions (pro­pri­et­ary or
oth­er­wise) pick up stand­ard­ised meth­ods of inform­a­tion exchange such as ODF
and PDF. This should also ease the integ­ra­tion of FOSS into pre-​​existing
envir­on­ments. It also can include lan­guages and all things related. Why are
schools still teach­ing Visual Basic when they could be teach­ing Python?

The final three points all link together. Most not­ably, they are not depend­ent
upon tech­no­logy at all. Your aver­age teacher isn’t a tech­no­lo­gist, and
shouldn’t have to be. Know­ledge can be shared and organ­ised openly just like
code. Wiki­pe­dia has proven that great things can be built if ordin­ary people
are given easy to use tools.

Where to from this point? I sug­gest that we work towards get­ting a CMS run­ning
at opene​duca​tion​.org​.au. We’ll have to agree upon a design and the mes­sage
that we want to pur­vey. Con­tent cre­ation should be sep­ar­ate from tech­nical
abil­ity, so the CMS should be simple enough for any­body to contribute.

Here is some inspir­a­tion from the UK:

• http://​www​.openschoolsal​li​ance​.org/
• http://​schoolforge​.org​.uk/

The UK edu­ca­tion sec­tor appears to be much fur­ther ahead of us in terms of
embra­cing open­ness, and I think we can take some les­sons from their efforts.

To cla­rify one thing in the above, I wrote the text for http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion, but I never felt com­fort­able with it being there. So much of open edu­ca­tion has noth­ing to do with Linux and Linux Aus­tralia shouldn’t be divert­ing its focus to dwell on it dir­ectly. With a more inde­pend­ent Web pres­ence (in col­lab­or­a­tion with Linux Aus­tralia), I feel that we can be much more effective.

LotD:   Open sourcing Aus­tralia: OpenAus​tralia​.org goes live

It can be amus­ing when news art­icles or blogs are writ­ten about a report/​study that has only been released or read in excerpt. Small snip­pets can be extremely con­tro­ver­sial on their own, and are eas­ily taken out of the con­text of the gestalt article.

Such has been the case with the announce­ment of the Standish Group’s report, titled ‘Trends in Open Source’. The report is avail­able in full to Standish sub­scribers, or for a fee of $US 1,000 per copy. Standish them­selves chose to drum-​​up pub­li­city in a press release two and a half weeks ago:

Open Source soft­ware is rais­ing havoc through­out the soft­ware mar­ket. It is the ulti­mate in dis­rupt­ive tech­no­logy, and while to it is only 6% of estim­ated tril­lion dol­lars IT budgeted annu­ally, it rep­res­ents a real loss of $60 bil­lion in annual rev­en­ues to soft­ware companies.

Some com­ment­at­ors pounced on this in defence of FOSS, and in doing so played right into Standish’s hands. A week later, other reports chose to focus on the tech­nical per­cep­tions of FOSS solu­tions, in par­tic­u­lar secur­ity. Some of these art­icles basic­ally said, “we haven’t been able to read the full report, but this is what we’ve been told”.

More informed accounts have hit the vir­tual presses in recent days, and it’s been revealed that the report is very pos­it­ive over­all with regards to FOSS. When iTnews asked me for com­ment, I was assured that the report had been thor­oughly read. I said a lot of things, but the quo­ta­tion that made the final cut is the following:

FOSS is inher­ently com­pat­ible with a free mar­ket, and hence with busi­ness. There is no closed-​​off ‘com­mand eco­nomy’ that is char­ac­ter­ised by pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware com­pan­ies. The soft­ware and its devel­op­ment are totally open to the world.

Fol­low­ing the inter­view, I tried to dis­til some key points about FOSS:

• The keys are trans­par­ency and account­ab­il­ity, as well as free­dom over your own inform­a­tion and inde­pend­ence from vendor lock-​​in.
• Most FOSS is based on open stand­ards, which means that users/​companies are not tying their data/​processes to one vendor or piece of soft­ware. Some might be wary of FOSS, but I don’t think any­one can argue against the mer­its of open standards.
• There is plenty of FOSS that works well on pro­pri­et­ary plat­forms (like Win­dows). There is no inher­ent tie-​​in with Linux.
• FOSS has been most suc­cess­ful where it isn’t noticed. This can be in embed­ded devices, or in pop­u­lar desktop applic­a­tions like Fire­fox and Open​Of​fice​.org.
• Most people might think of a ‘com­puter’ as a desktop com­puter, but most of ICT (and ICT growth) is actu­ally else­where (serv­ers, con­sumer elec­tron­ics, mobile phones, tele­coms, embed­ded, super­com­puters, etc.). Linux and FOSS is far more pop­u­lar in these fields.
• Most of the Inter­net is based on FOSS and open stand­ards built around FOSS. For instance, TCP/​IP net­work­ing was built for BSD UNIX (which is open source), and the major­ity of Web serv­ers run the open source Apache web server.

Obvi­ously there are more points than these, but I delib­er­ately kept this as a quick ‘off the top of my head’ exer­cise as a means of pre­vent­ing it from grow­ing into an encyc­lo­paedic tome.

LotD: Ubuntu theme for Windows

Sam Var­ghese over at iTWire asked me a couple of days ago for input on whether FOSS would be affected if the Win­dows source code was released. I star­ted draft­ing a response, expect­ing to be fin­ished quickly, but the ideas just kept flow­ing. The end res­ult was a touch over a thou­sand words! I was expect­ing Sam to maybe quote a token sen­tence or two in his art­icle. To my sur­prise, he basic­ally repro­duced (with a little para­phras­ing) the whole thing!

The art­icle is here. Skip to page 4 to start read­ing my contribution.

Here is my com­plete response to Sam. As you can see, very little was left out of the article.

The impact on FOSS would depend on what cir­cum­stances the code was released under. Win­dows code is already avail­able under Microsoft’s ‘shared source’ pro­gramme. In this state, you must sign a restrict­ive NDA to see the code, and after that your mind is forever tain­ted with Microsoft’s intel­lec­tual prop­erty. Write any­thing even remotely sim­ilar to the code you were deigned to see, and you leave your­self open to lit­ig­a­tion. In other words, tak­ing part in shared source is a sure-​​fire way to tor­pedo your career in software.

Microsoft have for years been exper­i­ment­ing to find a licence that they can con­vince people is ‘free enough’. For­tu­nately they haven’t suc­ceeded. The danger if they did would be to shift the bal­ance in the open source world away from free soft­ware and towards a model that is more restrict­ive but still accep­ted. They have enough code to ser­i­ously upset the bal­ance, ignor­ing for the moment the com­plex­ity (which includes also leg­acy cruft, bloat and so on) and hence dif­fi­culty for any­one to actu­ally com­pre­hend the code and par­ti­cip­ate in development.

Qual­ity (or rather, lack of qual­ity) aside, Microsoft’s code could be use­ful to see how formats and pro­to­cols are imple­men­ted. Linus Tor­valds once wrote, “A ‘spec’ is close to use­less. I have _​never_​ seen a spec that was both big enough to be use­ful _​and_​ accur­ate. And I have seen _​lots_​ of total crap work that was based on specs. It’s _​the_​ single worst way to write soft­ware, because it by defin­i­tion means that the soft­ware was writ­ten to match the­ory, not real­ity.” It’s one thing to have doc­u­ment­a­tion (as the Samba team have recently man­aged to acquire), but there’s noth­ing to guar­an­tee that there are no mis­takes or devi­ations (inten­tional or oth­er­wise) in the actual imple­ment­a­tion. The WINE pro­ject is a clas­sic example — con­signed to faith­fully reim­ple­ment all of Microsoft’s bugs, even if they run counter to doc­u­ments you might find on MSDN.

There are many ‘open source’ licences. Too many, in fact. Many of these are incom­pat­ible with each other, and a ludicrous volume of them are just MPL with ‘Moz­illa’ replaced with $com­pany. What keeps open source strong are the licences that either have clout in their own right or ones which can share code with those licences. The GPL is right at the centre of this, and we should be proud that the core of open source’s superi­or­ity is Free Soft­ware. Microsoft could try and release code that meets the Free Soft­ware Defin­i­tion but is inten­tion­ally incom­pat­ible with the GPL, as Sun did with OpenSol­aris and CDDL. It still remains to be seen if OpenSol­aris is of any suc­cess, and I think GPL incom­pat­ib­il­ity is cer­tainly a factor there (for example, they can’t take drivers from Linux, so its hard­ware sup­port remains poor). Open​Of​fice​.org, on the other hand, is a prime example of a large pro­pri­et­ary pro­ject that has been released under a GPL-​​compatible licence (LGPL) and has gone on to be suc­cess­ful as a con­sequence. That suc­cess would not have happened if code could not be shared with other FOSS pro­jects, integ­ra­tion could not be made (dir­ect link­ing, etc.) and mind­share not won (FOSS advoc­ates to write code, report bugs, evan­gel­ise, etc.).

The big stinger here is pat­ents. Sun have addressed this in the past with a strong pat­ent cov­en­ant, and more recently they’ve been try­ing to do it prop­erly by for instance reli­cens­ing Open​Of​fice​.org as LGPLv3 (hence grant­ing its users the inher­ent pat­ent pro­tec­tions of that licence). Would a mere ‘Cov­en­ant Not to Sue’ suf­fice for Microsoft? In the case of Microsoft’s recent releases of bin­ary Office formats doc­u­ment­a­tion, their cov­en­ant only cov­ers non-​​commercial deriv­a­tions. Sim­il­arly, their Sin­gu­lar­ity Research Devel­op­ment Kit was released a few weeks ago under a ‘Non-​​Commercial Aca­demic Use Only’ licence.

It is be vital that com­pan­ies have as full rights to use the code as non-​​commercial groups. Oth­er­wise, the code would be deemed to be non-​​Free (Free Soft­ware doesn’t per­mit such dis­crim­in­a­tion). The con­tri­bu­tions made by com­mer­cial entit­ies into the FOSS realm is immense and can­not be ignored. To deny them access would be a death sen­tence for your code. Microsoft would be stuck improv­ing it on their own, and in that case what was the point in releas­ing it in the first place? Don’t mal­ware writers have enough of an advantage?

Don’t trust what a single com­pany says on its own. Nov­ell was for a short while the darling of the FOSS world… then they made a deal with Microsoft. I’m glad that many of us were scep­tical of Mono back before the Novell-​​MS deal, because I’m sure as hell ain’t touch­ing it now. .NET might be an ECMA ‘stand­ard’, but like OOXML it is a ‘stand­ard’ con­trolled wholly by Microsoft. Will such a stand­ard remain com­pet­it­ive and open? We’ve seen this in other stand­ards debates, a good example being the devel­op­ment of WiFi. Com­pan­ies jostled to get their own tech­no­lo­gies into the offi­cial stand­ard. The end res­ult might indeed be open, but if it’s your tech­no­logy in there you already have the ini­ti­at­ive over every­one else. If Win­dows is accep­ted as being open source, Microsoft will con­tinue to dom­in­ate by vir­tue of con­trolling and hav­ing unpar­alleled expert­ise in the under­ly­ing platform.

To raise the most basic (and in this case, flawed) argu­ment, free soft­ware is fant­astic for all users no mat­ter what. Free (not just ‘open’) Win­dows means that Free Soft­ware has finally achieved global dom­in­a­tion — a Free World, if you will. By this argu­ment, we should simply rejoice in our lib­er­a­tion from pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware and restrict­ive formats/​protocols.

Of course, I have already demon­strated that this cor­nu­copia likely will not even­tu­ate even if Microsoft released the Win­dows source code as open source (even GPL). The soft­ware on top will remain pro­pri­et­ary (the GPL’s ‘viral’ nature aside). We’ll still have pro­pri­et­ary pro­to­cols and formats — and even digital restric­tions man­age­ment (DRM) — at the applic­a­tion level. In the grand scheme of things, the end con­sequence on FOSS of Win­dows source code being released might pos­sibly be zilch.

LotD: Happy Pi Day everyone!

Whenever most people go ice skat­ing, they usu­ally begin by cling­ing onto the bar­rier going around the edge of the rink. I am no excep­tion, but con­sid­er­ing that I hadn’t skated in close to ten years, I was pleas­antly sur­prised that I was able to skate away from the bar­rier after only about ten minutes on the edge. I was able to build up some reas­on­able speed, and I didn’t even fall over once.

Des­pite the cold, I worked up a sweat, and I must have had a con­sid­er­able workout since my ham­strings felt tender for the next couple of days.

After that, we went to see Super­man Returns. The intro had me wrapped: it was essen­tially an updated ver­sion of the intro in the first movie. Unfor­tu­nately, I feel they bor­rowed too much from the ori­ginal four films. Unlike Bat­man Begins (which I loved), Super­man Returns, as its name implies, is a con­tinu­ation and not a reboot. Lex Luthor was darker, but still felt like a bum­bling buf­foon sur­roun­ded by even greater buf­foons. He played a min­imal role in the film, with a large chunk of time going to Lois Lane. Lois, I feel, was very poorly writ­ten for and cas­ted. What happened to the sassy reporter that off­set the goody-​​goody Clark Kent so well? This Lois was like a wet blanket on the whole plot.

Super­man him­self was pretty darn good. The prob­lem with Super­man, though, is that he’s too darn power­ful. Lex Luthor is a power­ful adversary with his evil genius, but if you want a char­ac­ter to match Super­man in raw power you’d have to look towards the likes of Dark­seid or Dooms­day. For the movie fran­chise to sur­vive, I think they will have to branch away from Luthor, but hope­fully not as badly as was done in Super­man III.

I saw X-​​Men 2 a few weeks ago. I’ve always been a fan of the com­ics, so I am rather sens­it­ive to any ‘changes’ that are made just for the movie. How­ever, I do real­ise that it is near-​​impossible to squeeze the entire X-​​Men uni­verse into a 2-​​hour movie. I must con­clude that they did an excel­lent job here. As in the first movie, the ‘changes’ were done very well.

There were a few little easter eggs hid­den in there as well. In the first movie, you get a quick glimpse of Jubilee (the comic book char­ac­ter whom Rogue replaced in the movie), and just like in Spider Man (another fant­astic movie) there is a short cameo by Stan Lee (This man is a GOD! If you don’t know who he is, stop read­ing right now for you have offen­ded me.). In the second movie you hear Jubilee being called by name (by Storm), and on a tele­vi­sion set you see a man with the cap­tion “Dr Henry McCoy” beneath his face. The man appears as a nor­mal (non-​​mutant) human being, but this man later becomes Beast. I think there were a few other easter eggs, but I don’t remem­ber them.

Speak­ing of The X-​​Men, I found a great fan-​​comic, The Uncanny X-​​Sprites. Quite funny. I also stumbled across Wolverine’s real name. It’s not Logan, it’s James How­lett. It’s all explained in Marvel’s Ori­gin series, which was released last year. There was also a Para­dise X series which con­tra­dicts some of the fun­da­mental aspects of Ori­gin, but I wouldn’t take it ser­i­ously. Both of these (among oth­ers) are explained in vivid detail (beau­ti­fully illus­trated, too!) at the Lost Soul Wol­ver­ine site. I spent hours read­ing all the stuff there; I was so riveted.

Last Sunday I saw The Mat­rix Reloaded. I am not going to com­pare it to X-​​Men 2, but I will say that this is another excel­lent film. The CGI was amaz­ing. There were a few little flaws, but with all the action going on they were easy to over­look. I love Hong Kong mar­tial arts movies (Jackie Chan and Jet Li are DEITIES!), and this movie sat­isifed my desire for some well-​​choreographed fight scenes. On the neg­at­ive side, there is less con­tinu­ity between the plot and the fights when com­pared to the ori­ginal movie. Also, some parts were slow and unne­ces­sary. I don’t want to see a bunch of Zion­ists (I assume that’s what the inhab­it­ants of Zion call them­selves?) dan­cing, and I don’t want to see Neo mak­ing love to Trin­ity. There’s enough pr0n on the Inter­net, thank-​​you-​​very-​​much.

Like the first movie (and the third, which arrives in Novem­ber), The Mat­rix Reloaded was mostly filmed in my home town of Sydney. It’s weird to watch scenes from a movie and think, “hey, I was at that place only yes­ter­day!” It also makes me won­der if I really am in the Mat­rix. Kooky.

The abso­lute coolest thing, how­ever, was Trinity’s crack­ing of the elec­tri­city grid. She uses Nmap to scan for open ports and finds that port 22 is open. Port 22 is typ­ic­ally used by SSH, and sure enough Trin­ity uses a known SSH v. 1 exploit to gain access to the server! As her root pass­word, she uses Z1ON1010. Not only does this make her 1337, it is also another easter egg — 1010 is the num­ber 5 in bin­ary (or so I’m told), and if you’ve seen the movie (spoiler alert) you know that Zion in the movie is in its fifth incarn­a­tion. More on this at The Register and Slash­dot, and there’s a nice screen­shot at Insec​ure​.org, the home of Nmap.

Of course, what’s a movie these days without mer­chand­ising? Sam­sung has a ‘lim­ited edi­tion’ ver­sion of one of the phones used in the movie. To me it looks like a for­got­ten prop from Star Trek: The Ori­ginal Series. It looks hideous, the ergo­nom­ics are all wrong, and the screen is too small to do any­thing use­ful. That won’t stop Sam­sung from char­ging a premium for it, or people from buy­ing it. I feel sorry for those people. They obvi­ously have some sort of psy­cho­lo­gical prob­lem that has them con­vinced that they will only have friends if they have the latest mobile tele­phone. If it’s movie-​​themed and a ‘lim­ited edi­tion’, even bet­ter. They may even pur­chase a black trench­coat to go with it. That will alle­vi­ate the symp­tioms of their inferi­or­ity com­plex for a little while, after which they will feel com­pelled to jump onto the next fad. Over-​​consumerism should be treated as a men­tal illness.