Her Name is Sabine

I knew it was a good thing joining FilmMovement and getting early access to some of the best up and coming independent films, but I was completely unprepared for how amazing these films are. Case in point, Her Name is Sabine. Hard to overstate how powerful this intimate documentary is. Painful and yet at the same time celebrant of the joy in life. Do not miss this film if there is any chance you have in seeing it.

4 Generations - Water Buffalo - Reality Self-Check

Take 8 minutes out of your schedule, busy or not, and take a self reality check on who you are, where you are, and the people that are living around you every minute you are here. 4 Generations - Water Buffalo Movie.

The Fog of War Reflections

The Fog of War, a documentary film by Errol Morris on the life and career of Robert S. McNamara, former Secretary of Defense, without a doubt lands on my personal short list of must-see-films before you die.

Actually, it is the sort of film you see as early in life as you can and not wait till you die because your life might turn out that much better for all involved.

Don't just assume that what makes this film great is its relevance to the turmoil of today. As all great films, there is more going on here and at many levels.

Canvased on the backdrop of historical images, video and audio recordings along with a haunting Philip Glass musical score, a personal retrospective is laid bare naked for us to draw our own personal connection to the basic desires in life for accomplishment, meaning, and understanding.

Rent or add this DVD to your personal library and do not fail to include the viewing of all additional scenes cut from the original production, all of it is essential viewing.

I was privileged to meet Errol Morris at Roger Ebert's Ebertfest a few years back, viewing another essential Morris classic, Gates of Heaven, and he is a director you owe it to yourself to follow and absorb his talented work.

Kiva is Social Networking at its best!

Not enough good things can be said about Kiva.

Having first caught details of their work on this FRONTLINE episode, it was obvious this was the best of giving back to the whole world the fruits of our technological advances without leaving any economic minority behind.

Their site implementation is also clean, easy to use and informative. You really owe it to yourself to connect to a truely international social networking site like Kiva.

I visit my lender page every day.

Expand Mathematica 6 Documentation Searching

Mathematica 6 from Wolfram Research has revamped the way previous versions indexed and exposed documentation. Previously blogged in more detail here.

However, if you are a fan or user of the GUIKit package, you may be surpised on how limited the search results are when using the built-in Documentation Center window.
It turns out that although the locally installed GUIKit package contains the updated documentation and indexing files. Mathematica 6 fails to include the Packages/ directory that GUIKit lives in.

You can add these packages, and updated searching results by adding the following in your local Kernel/init.m:


Needs["ResourceLocator`"];

ApplicationDirectoryAdd[
ToFileName[{$InstallationDirectory, "AddOns"}, "Packages"]];


You could update the ResourceLocator package code with this additional application directory but this style of using an init.m keeps your modifications outside the Mathematica distribution in case of updates.

Mathematica 6 + Lucene = Exposed Searching

With the release of Mathematica 6 from Wolfram Research comes an update to their documentation and searching that uses the open-source Java Apache Lucene project.

The great thing about this choice is that it exposes the vast amount of data about the documentation to the end user, allowing customized searching tools using either Mathematica code or Java code.

For example, try pointing this great little Java app Luke at your new Mathematica 6 Index/ directories (recommend opening them read-only). With it, you can browse through all the Lucene documents and see what fields and available, along with doing custom searching from within Luke. It can definitely give you some ideas on alternative ways of tapping into this information than through the existing Documentation Center interface.

Welcome

Welcome to the beginning of my rant blog on technology and computing.
I hope to post on things I find interesting out on the net as well as ideas and code snippets of my own.

I'll probably focus on my interests such as Java, Apple and applications like Mathematica