Standard Operating Procedure

One of the best films that I saw at the EIFF this year was Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedure about Abu Ghraib. It takes his usual approach: a series of interviews with those involved with limited narration. Here the most prominent interviewees are Lynndie England and Sabrina Harmann, together others who were either directly involved or around the camp at the time. The images are all very cinematic - blow ups of the photos, half-seen reenactments and very simple face on shots of the interviewees.

This is obviously a subject that has been gone over in the media but not in this form - as ever, Morris mostly just lets his subjects talk and leaves it up to the viewer to put their own intepretation on what is being said, foregrounded even more here by the presence of the person responsible for sifting through the images describing going through exactly this process with the images. The effect is much more chilling than the condemnation of the media - the body language and the words of the soldiers speak volumes but nothing gives you enough distance to simply switch off and say “I’m not like them.”

The people in the film who feel they can say that do not always appear as morally distinct as they might hope to. The title comes from one of the things that had to be done when examining the images during the investigation - the investigator had to decide which of the images showed things that were perfectly normal interrogation techniques (the standard operating procedure) and which were crimes. His verdicts aren’t always what you might expect.

Syndicated 2008-07-20 20:51:02 from Technicalities

Release day churn

The 2.6.27 pull request for ALSA was something of a surprise to read - a large proportion of the changes in there are for ASoC. Not what I was expecting given how many ASoC changes there are still to be merged, but it’s nice to see, especially given the general problems with embedded users contributing code back.

In other kernel release news, I’m glad to see some of my other work is making people happy.

Syndicated 2008-07-15 20:03:59 from Technicalities

Seeing what’s in front of you

One of the things I keep noticing in Q&A sessions for documentary films is that some people seem to have a hard time relating to the people they see on screen as being actual people.

Today I watched The Order of Myths at the EIFF. The film is a documentary about the Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, Alabama which are currently racially segregated, though one of the major themes of the film is the ways in which people are gradually changing things for the better. It’s a very good film - lots to think about and I recommend seeing it. I imagine it will at least appear on one of the documentary strands on terrestrial TV in the UK.

During the Q&A session several of the people who appear in the film were present, including Helen Meaher who had been the white Mardi Gras queen and who is a descendant of the last person to bring a slave ship to the US. Someone in the audience had been very angered by what she’d seen in the film, including the fact that Meaher had been given that role. What struck me most of all about this was the way it was expressed: Meaher was not named or addressed in a way that acknowledged her presence (she was referred to as “the white queen” if I remember correctly) in spite of the fact that she was standing only a few meters away. It was as though this was an actress in a fictional film.

This was a striking example, but the general failure to connect with an actual person surprised me less than it should. Obviously, people in documentary films do play parts (as we all do in the various roles we fulfil) and the film may choose to represent them in a particular way but still there’s always at least some connection with the person depicted. I find it very distrurbing when that appears to get lost.

Syndicated 2008-06-27 02:23:24 from Technicalities

Wii Fit a month on

As I wrote previously, my first impressions of Wii Fit were good. A month and a half on and I’m still using it - at this point I’m fairly happy to say that it’s not just novelty value that I’m getting from it. Of course, one way or another I do spend an awful lot of my time doing exercise of some kind so I’m right in the target audience for something like like this. Using the very broad definition that it uses for exercise I’m having a slothful day if I only spend an hour “exercising”.

Mostly I’ve been playing some of the balance games and doing yoga poses. The games are silly party game style things - it’s a bit of a shame that the interface is set up for lengthy sessions with an individual Mii rather than allowing you to easily switch between them or set up competitions. The yoga I find relaxing - something physical and meditative to focus on - and it seems to be having a bit of a positive impact but it’s hard to say for sure with these things. The balance board works fairly well with both - with the games it’s the control method and with the yoga most of the poses use it to provide feedback on how stably you’re maintaining the pose. I’ve also been doing the body test daily; it’s fun if you’re in the mood for it and the feedback mechanism is useful.

The strength exercises are less successful. Most of this seems to be due to the difficulty in constructing things that do much for the upper body and can be monitored by the balance board (some things do try to use the remote but aren’t able to offer the same kind of detailed feedback that the balance board gives). The aerobics I can take or leave - it’s all fairly low intensity so good for a bit of a warm up. Again, the things that work best are those were there is an appropriate controller like the Dance Dance Revolution knockoff and rhythm boxing.

There does seem to be an odd variation in the difficulty levels of the activities it offers - much of it is targeted at people who are totally sedentary and don’t get much more challenging than that, making the inclusion of yoga poses like shoulder stands with no obvious differentiation strange. There’s also a tendency to praise you for things that aren’t actually being directly monitored (like form) which is annoying when you know you’ve actually done badly. There’s also rather a lot of prompts one has to click through every time, which get more than a bit wearing after a few iterations.

Overall, it’s a useful tool but I’m not sure it’ll appeal to people who don’t enjoy exercise.

Syndicated 2008-06-07 20:19:30 from Technicalities

PS3 and Wii Fit

Recently I bought a PS3, partly because there are a few games due out shortly that I’m rather looking forward to (mostly GTA and Civilization Revolutions) but mostly for the Blu-Ray DVD player and the Linux support. I’d been hoping to also use it as, for example, a MythTV front end. First impressions are that the gaming side of things is fairly nice, as is the UI for DVD playback. The down side is that I’ve not been able to convince the system to run quiet or fully muffle the fans. When my fridge and central heating aren’t running there is no noise at all in my living room. It’s quite usable but it’s not ideal for quiet things - I’ll have to experiment a bit with placing of the system to see if I can improve matters.

On a brighter note, Wii Fit (which I got yesterday) is a lot of fun - the balance board works surprisingly well. I’d not been sure how well it would work in practice but it’s effective, especially for tracking stretching and balance style exercises. Some of the activities would probably work quite well in as the standard Nintendo party style games, though that’s not really what it’s good at.

Syndicated 2008-04-26 21:07:45 from Technicalities