Graham Glass, etc.

The Island: Review

The Island is an entertaining blend of Logan's Run and The Matrix. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson play Lincoln Six-Echo and Jordan Two-Delta respectively, survivors of biological warfare and living in a futuristic colony; or so they believe.

Every week, a member of the colony is selected at random to travel to "the island", a tropical paradise that is the last remaining place on earth that is not ravaged by the war.

Lincoln starts to question his life in the colony, and gradually uncovers its real purpose as well as the truth of the island itself. Naturally, this involves large numbers of explosions and chase scenes.

I found the connections between the real world and the colony quite interesting, and enjoyed the pace at which the mystery unfolded. Ewan and Scarlett acted their parts well, and the supporting cast was superb. I especially liked Sean Bean as the bad guy, who recently played Boromir in Lord of the Rings as well as 006 in GoldenEye; the guy's filmography is impressive.

Apparently Scarlett wanted to be nude in her love scene with Ewan, but was persuaded not to. If you watch the movie, you'll see that her instincts were right; it just didn't make any sense for her to shoot the love scene wearing a bra. Oh well.

Overall, a fun flick that I highly recommend.

Science and Education

This posting on Slashdot highlights one of the increasing concerns within the USA; that its education system is not strong enough to prepare Americans for competition with countries like China. Specifically, the article focuses on a lack of US investment on science and technology education.

On a personal note, I was amazed when I first looked at a US high school curriculum and noticed that only about 6 hours a week were dedicated to science. Compare this to the UK, where I studied 5 hours of physics, 5 hours of chemistry, and 5 hours of biology every week!

I've always been a big believer in providing kids with a strong background in a wide range of topics, but let's face it, science and technology are critical areas for the future and need to be emphasized more in US high schools.

 

IPod for your Car

I wanted to use my iPod mini in my car, and after a little research, bought the Belkin TuneBase FM. This product costs around $60, plugs directly into your cigarette adaptor, and has a flexible but sturdy neck that ends with a holder for your iPod mini. The holder charges your iPod as well as containing an FM transmitter that allows you to transmit your tunes directly to your car FM stereo. It works extremely well, and its style blends in well with the rest of my car's interior. Highly recommended.

Motorola Q

I love cool gadgets such as the Motorola RAZR, and usually buy them shortly after they're available. So it was exciting to hear about the new Motorola Q, a superthin phone with a full QWERTY keyboard that is being dubbed the RAZRberry. It is scheduled to be available in Q1 2006. The only thing that would deter me from buying one of these babies would be a phone with a QWERTY keyboard and an integrated iPod.

World66

World66 is a good site for keeping track of where you've been and where you'd like to go. I just popped over there to update my travel list and generated three maps for fun. It was quite interesting to see how much of the world I've not explored yet. I'm due to travel to Russia soon, followed hopefully by China.

First, the World map. China, India, Peru, Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Thailand, Maldives, Virgin Islands and Fiji are on my must-see list.

Second, the Europe map. Spain, Ireland, Ukraine, Croatia, Iceland, Sweden and Estonia are on my must-see list.

Third, the USA map. Maine is on my must-see list.

Email Address Change

I recently decided to change my email address from an ISP-dependent address ([email protected]) to an ISP-independent address ([email protected]). I'm using many different methods to alert people of the change, this blog entry being one of them! For a while, email sent to the old address will be automatically forwarded to the new one.

New Venture, Part 1

As some of you might already have noticed from the webMethods 8K filing, I resigned as their CTO effective July 15 in order to pursue other interests. Specifically, I've decided to start a new company focused on education.

Education is an area I've been interested in for a long time. I went to a great high school in the UK, loved the learning experience, and always thought it would be a lot of fun to teach kids. When I was a teenager and people asked me "What would you like to be when you grow up?", my answer was "I'd be a teacher if the pay wasn't so bad."

In the end, I studied Computer Science, earning a BSc from the University of Southampton and an MS from the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). After a short stint as a lead developer for a Dallas-based oil and gas company, I decided to start teaching Computer Science at UTD for a paltry $27,000 a year in order to devote more time to research neural networks and biological systems.

I found that I had a knack for explaining complex topics in simple terms, as well as making classes fun through the use of interesting projects and analogies. Eventually, I published some books that captured what I had learnt during my UTD teaching years, the most popular of which is called UNIX for Programmers and Users.

I enjoyed teaching so much that I then started my first company, ObjectLesson, which taught topics like UNIX, Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, and Object-Oriented Programming to corporations throughout the USA. At this point, I was essentially a professional instructor, although my heart was really into product development. After a couple of years, I'd had enough of full-time teaching and co-founded my second company, ObjectSpace.

ObjectSpace focused on object-oriented technologies and grew rapidly to around 250 employees. I started the ObjectSpace training department, taught full-time for about a year, and then started the company's product group. The most well-known product from ObjectSpace was Voyager, a multi-protocol object request broker that was particularly easy to use. I left the company in 2000 after a disagreement about its strategic direction and founded my third company, The Mind Electric.

The Mind Electric released two products, Glue and Gaia. Glue was an easy-to-use Java web services platform, and Gaia was a web services management platform. The Mind Electric was acquired by webMethods in 2003, where I served as CTO until recently.

So although I've spent most of my career in the enterprise software space, there has always been a significant educational component, whether it was teaching at University, writing books, teaching in corporations, starting a training department, explaining complex topics at seminars, writing articles, or evangelizing service-oriented architectures.

In many respects, my greatest strength is the ability to understand a complex system and then represent it in a simple way. Over the years, I've applied the same skill to writing, teaching, architecture, and product development.

So after many years of working on enterprise software, I've decided to get back to my training roots and start a fourth and as-yet unnamed product company focused on improving the education system. Although the product itself will be an easy-to-use web-based application targeted at K-12 students, teachers and parents, the underlying software infrastructure will be quite complex and utilize many concepts from the semantic web.

Part 2 of this series is here.

Rocky start for Gates Foundation School Reform

According to this article, schools accepting donations from the Gates foundation are having a hard time converting into a group of smaller schools . The foundation has earmarked around $1 billion for education reform, and is expected to commit at least another $1 billion in the future.

I think the idea is a sound one, although it might be easier to build smaller schools from scratch instead of converting existing ones.

Learning Russian, Part 1

I was pretty bad with learning foreign languages at high school; I spent most of my time in French class writing game programs for my TI-58 programmable calculator! The teacher finally caught me hacking during class and confiscated the calculator for the rest of the semester. That was an unhappy day for me, because I was already addicted to programming at an early age and hated to be without my pocket computer.

After a herculean study effort, I managed to scrape together a "B" grade for my French "O" level at high school. German, on the other hand, was a total disaster and I dropped the class after two super-boring years. I think the main reason was lack of interest; I didn't travel to France or Germany so what was the point of learning their languages?

Nowadays, I travel a lot more and some language skills would be useful. In addition, I enjoy the more general study of grammar because it is highly related to the semantic web technologies that I'm currently interested in.

Because I've always had a fascination with Eastern Europe, I've decided to try and learn the Russian language. I chose the RosettaStone product which uses a total immersion approach, so the lessons are 100% in Russian and there is no use of English. In addition, I have several Russian friends who will help me to try out new words and phrases. I'll blog my experiences just in case anyone is interested in how these language courses work.

Pozhelaite mne udachi! (wish me luck).

Part 2.

Google Mooooooooooon

Check out Google Moon, an natural extension of Google maps that allows you to plan your next lunar expedition. I'm sure that Jeff Bezos will find it extremely handy. And while you're at it, select the Apollo 11 landing site and keep clicking on the zoom (+) button; you'll finally discover what the moon is made of!