There are multiple problems with Star Trek Enterprise that doomed the show from the beginning. One, I am sad to say, is Scott Bakula, who I couldn't really see as a smart and resourceful captain till the very end of the show. Another reason was the name, making people confuse Star Trek Next Generation with this series.

Yet another, and perhaps the most important reason, were the producers who abused their station to steer the show into an impossible position: an Earth ship that is older than Kirk's starship stuck in the middle of epic conflicts through time and space. Even the writers complained that it should have remained a show about early exploration and abstain from the flamboyant temporal cold war or the Xindi saga.

You see, the show started very nicely, with the launch of the first warp 5 capable human starship. The Vulcans are still not sure whether the humans should attempt this, if they are ready for the big bad universe, while humans react like teenagers that have been forbidden something. We get to see the birth of technologies so important in the Star Trek universe: the transporter, newly invented and feared (maybe rightly so, considering the multitude of episodes that involve some accident with it in the other series); they use grapnel hooks to tow; they use explosive torpedoes at start and phaser cannons that they constantly upgrade; the replicators can only manufacture simple food and they have cooks on board for the rest. The interactions of the crew were also welcome, as all of them seemed perfect for the job.

That is why the first season was good, promising a very interesting show about the beginning of human exploration. Then they botched it, with the introduction of a silly and pointless race, the Suliban, who have a faction of people receiving instructions from the future, while other future people are trying to stop them interfering with the "proper" timeline. Basically they should have asked Jean Claude VanDamme to come. This almost destroyed the second season.

A strange decision, which I can't quite say was bad or good, was to make a season that is continuous, rather than the individual episodes of Star Trek until then. They introduced the Xindi, another intriguing concept, of a coalition of species: reptilian, arboreal, simian, insectoid and aquatic. This probably wreaked havoc with their budget, so only the humanoid species usually appear. Somehow they wanted to write about terrorism, since all Americans were being influenced by 9/11, therefore the theme appeared throughout season three and quite a few episodes in season 4. First were the Xindi, who (for no reason that I can see) tested a small variation of a weapon on Earth, in preparation for a bigger one that they were still constructing. Rather than compare it with the American atomic bombs, which were the natural analogy here, they, of course, compared it with the 9/11 attacks.

A strange patch of the universe where the laws of physics are warped by huge metal spheres that have weird effects is the stage for the entire season three, while Enterprise goes to find the Xindi and stop them from destroying Earth. I felt that it was an interesting season, the only bad bits being some inconsistencies of the overall story, rather than individual episodes.

Then they had a religious sect that threatened to blow themselves inside Enterprise unless Archer destroys their enemies. The caricatured religion and condescending jabs at Palestinians should have angered Muslims more than cartoons of Mohamed. Then there was the final act of terrorism, when a faction of xenophobic humans take over the Verteron array on Mars. That script was a mess, probably because it was the last episode before the show ending one. Too much terrorism for a show that defines the transition of humanity into a peaceful future.

And then there was T'Pol, played by the lovely Jolene Blalock. That was probably the problem: she was too damn sexy. They had, therefore, to make her have emotional issues, get into relationships with everybody, make regular trips in the decontamination chamber and rub her body with antiseptic cream and so on. It is a disgrace for women in Hollywood that her role was massacred by all of these preconceptions and easy ways to get audience attention. And she was a Vulcan, the precursor of Spock, for crying out loud!

In other words the powers that be exaggerated everything and allowed Archer to be moving through time or singlehandedly creating the federation, while trying to keep something for Kirk and Picard to do. I know it is difficult to make an enticing and modern prequel to series that you watched and loved as a kid, but randomly choosing themes and ideas to "fix" the show to be more something or another is not a solution. That is why, while it the newest series of Star Trek, it was also one of the worst.

The disappointment comes, for me, when I see several portions of the show actually being great. The MAKO concept, for example, highly trained military personnel that accompanied Enterprise in the Xindi story arch was a good thing and the interaction with the regular security personnel. The controversial decisions that Archer had to make to protect Earth lent more character depth than most of the moral cardboard crap that usually infests Star Trek. The old school technology made the voyages of the new starship bring smart new levels of excitement to the exploration of space. I liked the "In the Mirror Darkly" episode, which was not a crossover to an alternate universe, but only a show about the Enterprise of the alternate universe where there were all ambitious and evil. Even the start credits looked different, showing the glorious history of Earth conquests.

My conclusion, especially today, when the number of sci-fi shows explodes as the audience requires more and more fantasy, is that Star Trek represents the hope of humanity for a bright future and that allowing it to be defined by money hungry Hollywood production companies was ultimately a mistake, no matter how much soul the writers, directors and actors put into it. A space exploration show made by Europeans, something that would mirror Star Trek's United Federation of Planets in cinematography, bringing talent and ideas from Britain, Germany, France, Russia, etc, and borrowing from the sci-fi legacy of all. I would love to see that.

Your Inner Fish is a very nice book, popularizing the science behind paleontology and anatomy and making a surprising and thorough connection between the two. In short, Neil Shubin describes the way bodies are built and how our ancestry, from single cell organisms, fish, amphibians to primates, influences our design. It is a rather short book, and also easy to read. From field stories of discovering fossils in the wild to the anatomy classes that he teaches in university, the pages take one through a journey of true discovery and makes us understand so easily some things that very few people consider simple.

I could review Your Inner Fish for you, but someone did a lot more effort of it here. Also, the University of California Television YouTube channel released a one hour video presentation of the book which I am attaching to this blog post, as well as what seems to be the book's Facebook page. What I can say is that I liked the book a lot and I recommend it to everybody, science minded people or not.

Update: I recognized the voice of Brad Dourif as Piero (how can one not?) so I went to see who the other voice actors were. If you, like me, felt a strange attraction to Callista Curnow, that's because her voice is that of gorgeous Lena Headey. Also you might recognize Susan Sarandon as Granny Rags (hee hee!) or John Slattery as Admiral Havelock. But pretty much no one comes close to Brad Dourif, except perhaps Roger Jackson, who is the voice of Mojo-Jojo!

As you may know, I am a great fan of Arkane Studios games. They did Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, Might and Magic X (which for all intents and purposes was Arx Fatalis 2) and now they did Dishonored. You will probably say that Ultima Underworld was actually a Looking Glass Studios game, but when they dissolved, some people from their team went on to work for Arkane and the resemblance of the games is pretty obvious. Anyway, I am now in a small village in Italy and only have Internet at my work. Imagine my great surprise when I discovered a kit of the Dishonored game on my laptop. I immediately installed it and played the game for a non stop 20 hours until I finished it. However, it was my desire to see the entire story (and to get some sleep in the weekend) that made me finish so quickly. You see, the game is a first person shooter-adventure that follows a storyline. However, on each stage you can explore and find a lot of secrets and side quests and even influence the story a little bit through your actions. The universe in which the game is played is a wonderfully crafted steampunk world, driven by whale oil and technology invented by mad scientists and filled with political intrigue. I can safely say that the game is a combination of Arx Fatalis, Thief/Assassin's Creed and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.

For an analysis of the game, there are a lot of things to be said. One of them is that the 3D world was, as far as I could see, almost perfect. I didn't get stuck in some fold of the wireframe, I didn't reach places I shouldn't have reached even when having the power to Blink, I didn't see through textures or seen any major bugs, actually. The game is a huge collaboration of companies, with people from all over the world, they could have screwed up anywhere: design, storyline, sound bits, software, 3D world, etc. It did not happen. You can also see the love that was poured into the game when the story does not end with an obvious finish, but continues on for a few stages. They could have worked less for the same money, but they somehow chose not to.

The gameplay is a joy. You have different ways of solving problems: you can kill anything that moves, you can choose to not kill them, but perform a chokehold on them and hide their unconscious bodies so you can avoid detection or you can go on high ledges and sneaky paths to avoid conflict all together. An interesting component of the story is The Outsider a supernatural being, probably a god, that looks like a normal guy, dressed normally for the age, but having black eyes. He is treated as the Devil in the official religion of the country, but he acts like your ally in the game. His only obvious interest is to have fun watching the chaos. For these purposes he gives you his mark and the gift of magic, which allows you to teleport, possess small animals and humans, summon a pack of ravenous pack of rats to devour your enemies and other fun things like that. The world if very interactive. You can, for example, take a random item like a bottle and throw it away. This would either unbalance your enemy, if you hit them directly, so you can deliver a deadly sword strike, or cause them to go to investigate the noise of the bottle breaking. One interesting option is to take the head of the enemy you have just beheaded and throw it into another opponent. Each level had hidden magical artifacts which you can find using a special Outsider device, a living heart with mechanical bits which you hold in your hand and that talks to you - told you, fun stuff. This usually prompts you to go out of your way to find said artifacts. The complexity of each stage is staggering. The first two stages I tried to play as completely as possible, which took me a lot of hours. After the first level ended I felt pretty good about myself. I had explored a lot of the map and I felt pretty smug about it. In the final summary of the mission I saw, to my chagrin, that I had found about half of all the valuable objects that I could have found. The rest of the missions I just breezed through, in order to see the ending. If I would have played this game as thoroughly as I possibly could, it would probably have accounted for many tens of hours of gameplay. Well, maybe it's me, but emergent gameplay is the coolest thing since fire was invented.

The devices you possess are old school enough to be a lot less effective than magic. You have your trusted one bullet pistol, which you must reload after each firing, you have your crossbow, which can fire darts, sleep darts or incendiary bolts, you have delicious bombs which, when triggered, fire a fast winding metal wire that cuts your enemies to pieces, grenades are always fun, and so on.

There are some issues which I had with the game though. It seemed to me that the magical spells were rather unbalanced. I cannot tell you how much they are unbalanced until I play the game again in another way, but it seemed to me that you absolutely needed to have Blink and Dark Vision and that the best offensive spell was the summoning of the rat pack. The rest were almost useless, at least by description: something that allows you to attack stronger and more enemies at once if you have enough adrenaline, something that allows you to possess animals, but there aren't that many animals in the game, and only partial possession of people, something that causes a gust of strong wind. Well, I will try them soon so I can tell you more in an update. Another thing that felt useless to me were the bone charms who gave me stuff that didn't really seem important. I did play the game on Easy, since I didn't have a mouse for the laptop, so that may explain my disdain of the things.

It is important to realize that the game has downloadable missions and content through Steam. This means the story can go on. I intend to explore this avenue. Also, after playing a second time I have to say that I was amazed of the option to not kill anyone the entire game. Even the assassination missions have ways of getting rid of the characters without killing them (even if their fates are usually worst than death). If you want to go that way, please always check that the unconscious victim is actually unconscious. Otherwise you end the mission with one or two dead people and there is no going back. One example is if you choke one guy, then let it fall with the head in the water. He dies even if you immediately remove him.

All in all I cannot recommend the game enough. Add to this that after you buy it, you also get extra chapters as downloadable content and, who knows, maybe they will allow the community to make their own chapters. It was just fantastic. Go play it!

I embed here an example gameplay from someone who is obviously more skilled than I am.

I've reviewed two books of William Golding already and both of them were complex analyses of the human nature. This little novel, The Double Tongue, is similar in complexity. A note at the beginning of the text is explaining perhaps best why Golding's books are so great in details. You see, the novel was published posthumously, after a draft of it was found in Golding's belongings. He has already finished the book once, wrote another version and had started on another draft. No wonder his books were so reflective and self referential and connected to so many other works of literature or philosophy.

About the content, it is rather interesting, as it details the story of a girl in ancient Greece, just before Romans started dominating the country, who becomes the Delphi Pythia. The story quickly goes to the decorative role a "well bred" female would have had in those days, carefully instructed how not to draw attention, kept in total ignorance, all for the moment when she would be offered to a husband. After attempting escape from this fate, the only option her father has to "do with her" is to give her to a priest of Delphi called Ionides. Thinking she was going to become a servant of the temple, sweeping floors, she becomes the oracle. This is used to analyse concepts as religious sentiment, political use of faith and to describe the parallel system used in this world of superstition and showbiz.

I thought that it was a really short story. Told from the point of view of an octogenarian woman, it dwells on the adolescence, the initial shock of coming to Delphi, but very quickly skips entire decades to bring the conclusion. The title is relating to both the Python that the god Apollo killed in the Delphi cave, which gave him the forked tongue that said two things at once, but also to the double system of religious ecstasy backed by very real intelligence networks and the duplicity of people who either declare themselves religious while lacking the sentiment or the other way around . The story is inspired by Ion of Euripides and the ending is revealing only to a select few who understand the reference to a passage of the Bible (see here and here).

I can say that I liked the novel. It wasn't a "wow" thing like in the case of Lord of the Flies, nor did it cause me to feel more enlightened with the final reveal. Being that short and the last novel of Golding, there is really no reason not to read it.

Kara no Kyōkai, translated in English as Garden of Sinners, but literally as Boundary/Border of Emptiness, is a strange little series of seven Japanese anime films. The lead is a girl who has a double personality, conveniently both named Shiki, but written with a different Japanese character. One of the personalities likes to kill people brutally, while the other is afraid of human contact. Enter Kokutou, a guy in the same class as Shiki, who falls in love with her and accepts her as being split like this and even covers some of her murders as he, after all, is in love with the one personality that does not kill.

Now, this is the least weird bit of the films. This story that I have been telling you is not told as linearly as I present it, but starts from the middle, then shows what happened in the past and future by flashbacks, prequel movies, and something that I can only call experimental movies, since they show scenes from what actually happens, but not in their normal order.

You see, after Kokutou starts camping outside Shiki's house to stop her from killing anyone, she attempts to murder him, only she can't and attempts suicide by throwing herself in front of a car. Only the murderous personality actually dies and when she awakens from a two year coma, Shiki has the Mystical Eyes of Death Perception, which see the seams that bind things to existence. Once you cut those, the thing dies.

In order to make her understand and control her condition another chick appears, one that is a magus. Yes, magic! I told you it was going to get weird. In the end, these three characters form a sort of private investigator agency that often deals with the supernatural and rogue magi.

All in all, the animation is rather good, the characters weird, most of them displaying some sort of emotional detachment bordering on psychopathy, but the story leaves a lot to be desired. just like the erratic order of the films, the story also jumps violently from brutal murders, criminal investigations, magic, philosophy and romance, making a mess of it all. It's not that i did not enjoy watching the films, but at the end of the seventh, when Shiki says "this is the end of my story" I couldn't actually feel it was any end at all. Perhaps the manga makes more sense, but as such, I can't really recommend watching it.

When I first opened the ASP.NET MVC 4 Recipes, by John Ciliberti I was amazed. It seemed to transcend the reference book and go into a sort of interactive path thing. You know interactive books, where you read the book and at certain points you get to choose what the characters do by going to read one page or another? This is what Recipes seemed to be. You get to a point where the author tells you which chapters to read and in which order based on your role in the organization. That is and will remain a wonderful concept and I would see more books steal it for themselves. However, the actual content of the book did not feel as great as its presentation, I am afraid to say. This is not to mean it is a bad book, only that I expected a lot more from it from reading its "mission statement". The book is Microsoft centric, obviously, but it says very clear that it will solve problems with Microsoft products as a rule. For example it favours KnockoutJS as a JavaScript framework. But that's not really annoying, though.

I think what bothered me most was that the content was all over the place. There are some chapters in which there are specific problems. The problem is described, then the solution is provided. Very nice. But then there are some problems that are vague and general with a very specific solution, lending a lot of lines to some issues and moving past others in a hurry. Of course, I would have liked all of the problems to have their own book and that was impossible, but the compromise here did not feel as great; I thought some of the problems were not really something someone would have more than once, and sometimes never, so using the book as a reference helps only so much. Some examples of problems to be solved: You would like to begin working with ASP.NET MVC Framework, but you do not understand the MVC pattern and why it is beneficial. - why would you start reading an ASP.Net MVC book if you don't even understand the MVC pattern? You would google something first. Or: You have started using the new .NET asynchronous programming pattern and love its relative simplicity compared to other programming models. However, you would like to have a better understanding of the code generated by the compiler so that you can improve the designs of your asynchronous methods. So you jump from not knowing what MVC is to wanting to read IL. Maybe I am just mean, but it soon turned into a very hard to read book from jumping from one issue to another like that, from level to level. Not to mention some "loaded" problems that have a description several lines long in the form of "you have found that your company strategy sucks, because of 1,2 and 3, and you want 4,5 and 6 because 7,8 and 9". It doesn't sound like my problem at all :)

Bottom line: I have not started working with ASP.Net MVC, yet, nor do I believe that my first job with it would be as an architect, so I will have an opinion on how it works in real life in a few months, probably. The book seems useful now, but not the ASP.Net MVC start to end tutorial that I wanted when I started reading it, and maybe that is why I had such a critical eye for it.

This is the second book about LSD that I read, after The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space, by John C. Lilly and it is also the autobiography of a scientist, but unlike Lilly, who seemed to have gone bonkers while writing his book, Hoffman maintains a scientific attitude about the whole thing, objective when needed, subjective in more personal chapters that he clearly delimits from the others. LSD: My Problem Child is the story of the invention of the drug, straight from its inventor, Albert Hoffman, a then chemist for pharma company Sandoz. In a nutshell I loved the book, the style, the author's integrity and the fine ironies that he slips from time to time. As you can see in the link above, the book is already free online so there is no real reason not to read it.

Hoffman explains in the book how, while researching the chemical properties of the ergot and attempting to potentate substances already discovered to have positive medical effects, he created Lysergic acid diethylamide. The substance had no visible effects on the test animals so he went on testing other substances. Five years it took for Hoffman to return to LSD in order to further understand its function. Usually a very thorough chemist, he touched some of the substance and only then the effect was understood. This simple anecdote hints on how many interesting chemicals we might have gone unnoticed, even after someone created them.

The method by which chemists work to find useful chemicals in nature is also very interesting. They take a plant, let's say, that has a specific effect that is testable via animal experiments. They isolate the active substance that produces that effect. Then they attempt to recreate the substance synthetically. After doing that, they test all kinds of related substances that they create via simple chemical operations from the original substance. This often leads to more powerful drugs or even completely new effects. Quoting from the book: "Of the approximately 20,000 new substances that are produced annually in the pharmaceutical-chemical research laboratories of the world, the overwhelming majority are modification products of proportionally few types of active compounds. The discovery of a really new type of active substance - new with regard to chemical structure and pharmacological effect - is a rare stroke of luck."

It took another five to ten years for LSD to reach mainstream. Until then psychologists and psychiatrists were using it to more effectively reach the patients and LSD was considered a wonder-drug. Sandoz was extremely happy with Hoffman's discovery. But then it became a subject of abuse. A counterculture of recreational use for LSD led to an institutional backlash that made the drug illegal, even if it was not addictive, not toxic and one could not overdose accidentally. However, it was essential to take it in a controlled environment, with someone to act as a guide and safety net. Many people did not do this and hurt themselves or others or had psychotic breaks. To get someone out of an LSD trip was simple: either guide them via calm words or (the technical solution) give them a calmer agent like cloropromazine which immediately cuts off the "high".

How come the black market is filled with toxic, addictive, nasty drugs, but someone considers LSD to be a problem? Anyway, I am quoting again from the book, a little bit that talked about experiments on primates, but one that I took to be a fine ironic jab at society's reaction to the drug: "A caged community of chimpanzees reacts very sensitively if a member of the tribe has received LSD. Even though no changes appear in this single animal, the whole cage gets in an uproar because the LSD chimpanzee no longer observes the laws of its finely coordinated hierarchic tribal order."

What I liked about the book very much was how thoroughly and objectively Hoffman researched LSD and other psychedelics (he also identified and separated psilocybin, another psychoactive substance present in "magic mushrooms" used by native Americans in religious rituals). He not once preached the recreational use of the drugs, deplored the misuse of these kinds of substances, but he also kept a strong position that they do no harm and can have amazing effects when used for medical purposes and the correct way. Far from being a "druggie" book, this is one of those autobiographies that you can't let down from your hands until finishing reading it. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The sixth book in the Dexter series is not really better than the others. I would have thought that five rehearsals would have resulted in a slightly better book, but instead it seems as if Jeff Lindsay is slowly losing the inspiration he started with book after book. In Double Dexter, the police is impossibly incompetent and this time even Dexter falls into the same category. It takes him chapters to do and act like he was supposed to and a lot later than even an average reader would see it coming. The opponent is inconsistent and not really a challenge, if it weren't for Dexter's apparent drastic drop in IQ.

If you have not read any of the books so far and maybe just watched the CBS series, be warned that they are completely different beasts. The show writing is clearly better and the plots are divergent to the point of being different stories altogether, but with the same character. Not that this eighth and final season is great writing anymore, but that's a different subject altogether.

Bottom line: Having read Double Dexter, I cannot say that I hated it, I really like the character, but I think Lindsay is bored with Dexter. Maybe he should just invent someone else and start writing better books.

I have been hearing about the AngularJS library for a few months now, people often praising it as the new paradigm of web development. It is basically a JavaScript MVC framework that makes heavy use of markup language in order to declare the desired behaviour. Invented at Google by Miško Hevery, it uses cacheable templates, databinding and dependency injection to combine the various components that otherwise are independent and testable. It also comes with its own testing framework (unit and end-to-end) and a way to describe unit tests Jasmine (BDD)style.

So I started reading about this new framework in the book intuitively called AngularJS, written by Brad Green and Shyam Seshadri. They start with an anecdote, discussing how they were working on a web application at Google. They have already written 17000 lines of code in about 6 months and it was almost finished, albeit with great frustration related to development speed and testability. This guy, Miško Hevery, tells everyone that by using a framework that he wrote in his spare time (you gotta love devs!) they could rewrite the whole application in two weeks. He was wrong, they did it in three weeks and at the end the whole thing has only 1500 lines of code and was fully testable. This was a great beginning for the book, as it starts with a promise and then (sorry, couldn't help the pun - you will see what I mean if you read the book or know AngularJS already) it describes how to achieve your goals. The book itself is not large, about 160 PDF pages, and can be used as both a primer and a reference. It describes the basic concepts of AngularJS and how they can be put to work, with some small app examples at the end. Of course, you have a link to where to download all their code samples.

What do I think about the book? It was pretty good. It shows the authors' preference towards Linux setups, but it is not annoying. Each chapter is clear and to the point. The framework itself, though, is original enough that after a few chapters it is almost impossible to understand everything without tinkering with the code yourself. Unfortunately I didn't have the time and disposition to do that, so just because I've read the book doesn't mean I know how to work with Angular, but I am confident that when I will actually start working with it, it will all come together in my mind. Also, as I was saying, the book can easily be used as a reference. It is not a complete overview, not every AngularJS feature and gotcha can be found in its pages, but it's good enough.

What do I think about the framework? It seems pretty spectacular. My only experience with JavaScript MVC frameworks is from a short brush off with BackboneJS. At a time I thought I would be working with it a lot and was boasting here that interesting posts would appear. Alas, it was not to be. Sorry about that, maybe better luck with Angular. Backbone was pretty interesting, but it had a horrendous way of working with data models and it was very easy to break something and not realize where it came from. There seems to be a lot more thought put into Angular. An interesting point is that the writers advertise TDD as a way of actually working and claim they do so themselves. I have seen many people trying and giving up, but I have hopes for JavaScript. You don't need to compile things, you don't need complicated servers or time consuming deployment steps: just change stuff and run the tests and/or refresh a page. I like the fact that the creators of AngularJS put this much work into making everything testable.

So go ahead: read the book and try the framework!

Update 24 Aug 2013: I've started reading dev blogs again and I've stumbled upon a 70 minute video by Dan Wahlin presenting AngularJS. His explanations seemed a lot more down to Earth than those in the book so I felt that his video really complements rather well what is written there. Here it is:

Old Man's War is the first book in a space opera series that spans five books (at least at the moment). People recommend it highly and I do have to admit that it is well written, with an easy going style that is also well read. John Scalzi is not trying to create the perfect world, with details that always make sense and with crushing emotional depth, though. The book is something that you can finish in a day or two, with no sleep lost on what the characters are going to do next. For a while it did remind me of the excellent, if repetitive, Seafort Saga, by David Feintuch, but while that series felt dated because it was inspired by the British navy and was written in 1994, Old Man's War was written in 2005 and had no real reason to, but it did. If you haven't read Seafort's Saga, especially Fisherman's Hope, the fourth book, I would recommend it over this.

What is it Old Man's War about? Well, in the future, old people from Earth are joining the army when they are close to death because the CDF, or Colonial Defence Force, has the technology to rejuvenate them in exchange for a limited conscription. I won't spoil for you the exact method, but let's just say that it has a lot of logical problems that are compounded by the concept of the Ghost Brigades. So you have this main character, a funny old fart that joins at 75. One can assume that in the future 75 old people are still humorous and reasonably mentally and physically fit, as opposed to now, but even so, Scalzi was 36 when the wrote the book. What made him feel like he could pull off a character twice his age, with all the wisdom and particularities one gathers at that age? In my opinion, he rather failed, as John (why do people use John as their leads in books and scripts? Is the name really that common in the US? I have to admit that Lost ruined that name for me. Every time I hear about a guy named John I hear the phony people in Lost intone it with grave meaning while they're saying absolutely nothing important. Arrgghh! Anyway...) comes off closer to the writer's age (and having the same name, too). I might even have an issue with the title, since John is an old man for a third of this first book and then he's young and fit.

The rest of the book is about how he intelligently and valiantly rises from the rank of corporal (which he earned in training in an equally smart way) to captain in a few months and has a series of unlikely events happening to him (and here I am not making a pun of their explanation of "skipping", either). He makes connections to some people, which the writer attempts to infuse with meaning, but somehow fails, as when some died I didn't feel anything. Scalzi gets it right towards the end of the book, but then the book ends, and ends in a less satisfactory manner than I would have expected.

To summarize: I will probably read the next books to see what happens. However, it does seem a bit too light, too rational (in writing style), to make an impact. I do feel that John Scalzi has a lot of potential as a writer, but that somehow he misses the emotional component necessary for a book to "click" with the reader. On the other hand, I've seen a lot of rather failed first books that only led to the writer blossoming in the following publications. I do hope that's the case here. The fact that Paramount Pictures optioned the book in 2011 only shows it is rather shallow, as the really deep ones never make it to film. This doesn't mean I didn't have fun reading it, but most of the time I waited for something to happen. I felt that everything was a setup for something grand. When the book ended I was a bit shocked, as I thought I was in the middle of the story at least and still waiting for that big thing to occur. It's not a hard sci-fi book, it's not a personally jarring one and it is not a military heavy story. The obvious bias towards the human hero makes it all feel surreal.

ASP.NET MVC 4 and the Web API, by Jamie Kurtz, is the one of the new breed of technical books that read like a blog entry, albeit a very long one. The book is merely 100 pages long, but to the point, with links to code on GitHub and references to other resources for details that are not the subject of the book. The principles behind the architecture are discussed, explained, the machine setup is described, the configuration, then bam! all the pieces fit together. Even if I don't agree fully with some of Kurtz's recommendations, I have to admit this is probably a very very useful book.

What is it about? It describes how to create a REST web API, complete with authentication, authorization, logging and unit testing. It discusses ORM (with OData), DI, Source control, the basics of REST and MVC, and all other tools required. But what I believe to be the strength of the approach in the book is the clear separation of modules. One can easily find fault with one of the pieces recommended by the author and just as easily replace only that component, leaving the others as is.

The structure of the book is as follows:

• Chapter 1 - A quick introduction of ASP.Net MVC4 as a platform for REST services, via the Web API.
• Chapter 2 - The basics of REST services. There are very subtle points described there, including the correct HTTP codes and headers in the response and discoverability. It also points to prerequisites of your API in order to be called REST, like the REST Maturity Model.
• Chapter 3 - Modelling of an API. This includes the way URLs are formed, the conventions in use and how the API should look to the client.
• Chapter 4 - The scaffolding of your Visual Studio project, the logging configuration, the folder structure, the API DTOs.
• Chapter 5 - Putting components together: configuring NInject, designing your classes with DI and testability in mind.
• Chapter 6 - Security: really simple implementation with a lot of power provided by the default Microsoft Membership Providers.
• Chapter 7 - Actually building the API, making some smoke tests, seeing it all work.

The complete source of the project described in the book can be found on GitHub.

My personal opinion of the setup is that, while all seems to fit together, some technologies are a bit over the top. NInject, I had personal experience with it, is very good, but very slow. The ASP.Net Membership scheme is very verbose. While I wouldn't really care about it as implemented in the book, I still cringe at the table names and zillions of columns. Also, I am slightly opposed to ORMs, mostly because they attempt to mould you into a specific frame of thinking, that of CRUD, making any optimization or deviation from the plan rather difficult. I've had the experience of working on a project that had all of its database access in stored procedures. To find what accessed a table and a column was a breeze, without knowing anything about the underlying implementation. But even so, as I was saying above, the fact that the author separates concerns so beautifully makes any component replaceable.

I highly recommend this book, especially now, when the world moves toward HTML and Javascript interfaces built on web APIs.

I have very fond memories of the games Star Control and Star Control 2, played on my PC when I was but a wee boy. They were DOS games released in 1990 and 1992, respectively, and were absolutely marvellous: large universes, with many star systems, each of them with planets and moons; many alien species which were strange and funny and obnoxious; storylines that were both absurd and very captivating. I had a great time.

I want to open a parenthesis here and talk about the quality of games back then. Click here to hide the following rant, if you are not in the mood for it. I really have no idea how the PC game market was working in the US, but here in Romania, there were very few PCs, no Internet and the distribution of games (all pirated) was done via friends who would recommend and share what they thought was great. There were no walkthroughs, rarely any printed maps or special instructions (since they were not original games) and the only way to finish up a game was to actually play it. Sometimes it got frustrating enough that after hours of trying to find something, you would call friends and ask them what they did. I can only imagine that even in a country were they were a lot more computers and games were bought, rather than copied, the game play situation was similar. In other words, the relationship to the game played was personal: someone that you know and respect came to you and recommended the game. This was the only thing that made you play it other than seeing the cover in some window and feeling like you have to try it. Also, not having any Internet (or very little on it), you would not have access to many reviews and neither to game updates, if something was wrong in the game. And you also have to think of the state of affairs in software programming: every software firm was basically a gang of enthusiasts inventing and trying their own way in which to build software.

Yet, a lot of the games back then were great. Not all, maybe not most, but certainly the ones reaching me through "the grapevine", probably because the bad ones would be filtered away. One has to ask oneself how games back then required a number of hours of play orders of magnitude larger than present ones. How their stories had the complexity of movie scripts (often a lot better) and so much intricacies like alternate game modes, humour and so on. And the answer is, of course, the Internet. Once the gameplay is too complex, players swarm to online walkthroughs, often in video format, to tell them what to do. Atmospheric gameplay where one has to walk for hours to find something are considered antique and wasteful of time. And of course, if they are not social enough, they aren't even worth playing. The advertising is done via the web, with "stars" or other such whimsical method of rating a game, often resulting in simplistic orgies of graphical design with repetitive action as the only thing to do, humour provided by caricaturesque icons of birds or zombies.

That being said, as a software developer myself, I played The Ur-Quan Masters for only two days, using said walkthroughs and being nagged by the wife and dog for not spending time with them. I also had moments where I cursed the necessity to move towards a planet or a star by actually waiting until the ship got there, and often by manually controlling the craft to reach there. Also very annoying was to manually look for star names, until I downloaded the map from ... the Internet. So I am not just a geezer that hates the new, all melancholic about the past; the present has its boons... few as they are. Anyway, to the game!

In 2002, ten years after its release, the makers of Star Control 2 made released the source of the game as open source. Maybe this should be heeded by other game and software makers: create a copyright licence that voids itself ten years after the release of the software. The world would be a better place! Anyway, some people decided to port that to different platforms, including Windows. Now I know that DOS and Windows are made by the same company and that the port sounds easy, but you should look at the bugs for this port like 'Not thread safe' or 'Not safe for 64 bits' and so on.

Accidentally I found out about this port for Star Control 2, called The Ur-Quan Masters. Why was the name changed? Because even as the source code was free to use, the name was copyrighted. Weird, right? I installed the latest version (0.7.0.1 - you gotta love these open source versions that tend to reach 1.0, but never do - a bunch of perfectionists, all of them :-) ) and I couldn't start it. It threw an error no matter what I did. In their defence, I was trying to play it on an Athlon 2500+ processor running Windows XP (I know, geezer!). But I did manage to install and run version 0.6.2, which seems to be working on my machine. This is part of the motivation for writing this post, since I found no one on the Internet complaining about the same problem as me. I did try all the compatibility modes for it, BTW, and it didn't work. Maybe I should have tried running in Windows 98 (yes, I still have that installed as a secondary OS).

You see, the plot is that you are the descendant of an exploration mission that was never picked up from the planet they were supposed to investigate. They did find an ancient alien starship factory and managed to build just the skeleton of a ship to send you back to Earth to see what had happened. Getting there you find the Earth encased in an impenetrable shield with an orbiting station around it. The crew of the station tell you the story: alien race called the Ur-Quan came for enslaving all sentient races, won the war and gave earthlings two choices (well, actually three, if you consider total annihilation, but let's not get technical): join them as their slaves or relocate all resources to Earth and be trapped under the slave shield. Humans chose the latter. Now, your mission is to find alien races, make them join you in defeating the Ur-Quan and ... well, defeat the Ur-Quan. You have to do that by exploring amongst hundreds of stars, each with their own solar system of planets and moons. You get fuel and extra modules for your ship at the human station, but you need to bring materials (minerals) in order to get them. Minerals are gathered via manual missions to the surface of each planet and moon, while fires, lightning, earthquakes and alien lifeforms are attacking your landers. Aliens are diverse and most very funny: a cowardly race that speak like Italians, an evil spider race, a sexy race called the Syreen, warrior type race (that is weak and stupid), automatic probes that declare their peaceful intentions then attack you, mean spirited aliens that consider all harm done to you as a practical joke and so on. There is even an Emo race, although the term became popular a long time after the release of the game.

Oh, the memories! The vibrating music originally thought for PC speaker or maybe AdLib cards brought back feelings of old. The witty dialogues and the immersive nature of the game made me relive a lot of past pleasures. Unfortunately, as I was saying in the rant above, there was a lot of immersion that I really didn't want, like waiting for minutes to get from a star to another, then manually navigate to reach a planet or moon. I couldn't help thinking as a software developer and consider how I would have done the game - of course, online, in HTML5 and Javascript, and actually it wouldn't be so hard. Playing the game I realised how different the perception of time was then compared to now. It was obscene how much time I had back then, and completely devoid of responsibilities, too.

Well, because of the time constraints I quickly hacked the game, added infinite money and proceeded to finish the game using a map and a walkthrough. I also was unable to finish the game due to two bugs: one where the Spathi should have given me an Umgah Caster and did not, and another where the Mycon were supposed to go to Organon and did not. Even so, it took me two full days, about 16 hours of gameplay. Anyway, I was close to the finish and I did watch the ending on YouTube (how nouveau of me! :-( ) For the people that loved playing this game in the past, maybe you should try it again. Old memories often bring complexity to present perspective. And for those who did not know of this game until this post, maybe you should try it, see what people of old considered a good game, even if they played it on 33Mhz 386 PCs with 4MB of RAM and 120MB hard drives.

Also, there is another attempt for a port to Windows from the same source called Project 6014, for some reason. I think it stalled, but maybe it brings some surprises to the table.

I leave you with a YouTube video gameplay by some guy (frankly the first I did find) if you are unwilling to take the trek yourself.

[youtube:KOndm_1w1ws]

I am a complete fan of the Ghost in the Shell franchise. For those unfortunate enough to not know what that is, it is a series of manga and anime stories that describe a near future where integration with machines is the order of the day, giving rise to cyborg bodies, mind hackers and all that stuff. It is also a police procedural, where the heroes are an independent force designed to counter cyber threats. It is also an espionage thriller, since many of the actions in the stories are not linear, but have many political implications and intricate plots. But what I thought was better than a beautiful and detailed sci-fi world with deep characterization and complex storylines is the exploration of the human soul and mind in a background that is mechanistic and science squeaky clean. To manage to do this repeatedly in manga, films and anime series is truly wonderful.

For me it all started with the movie. With impressive music by Kenji Kawai and a complexity and beauty and care for detail that I had never seen before (and rarely since), Ghost in the Shell blew my mind. Then there was the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a two season series that went a little more toward the police procedural, but overall was just as wonderful as the film. And then the second film: Innocence. And now they made Ghost in the Shell: Arise, a four part OVA series, prequel to the film. Having seen the first one hour part, I can say I am very pleased and can't wait to see the entire series. It details the roots of major Kusanagi and what are the roots of her team. Very nice indeed. The only thing that I miss is Kenji Kawai's music.

I leave you with the trailer for the series and my recommendation to see all of the Ghost in the Shell animes, even the Tachicoma OVAs :)



Update September 2014: I've watched the entire series. The episodes are almost stand alone and totally worth watching. I liked the fourth one most, as it was clearly created to made the connection with the film and series. I loved the small tips of the hat to hallmark scenes in the film: the cloaked jump from a skyscraper, the destruction of the cyber hands while pulling on the lid of a battle tank and so on. Does that mean that a new series and/or film will be created? I certainly hope so. My only problem with the new OVA is that the music of Cornelius is not even close to the haunting quality of Kenji Kawai's.

Having seen the film, I decided to read the book. Now I can understand why so many people said the film was not like the movie, but also why the film itself seemed so episodic. In a nutshell, World War Z is a collection of more than 50 interviews of witness accounts about a fictional war against the zombies. This makes the only connections between the book and the film be the zombies and the episodic nature of it. In rest the stories are different, the way zombies behave, the take on how humans react and of course the shitty ending.

Now, about the book... It was easy to read, mostly because I could just take the PDA in my hand and read one of those mini stories in 10 minutes and then do whatever I wanted to do. Some of them were really great, too, but after reading the book I think I can safely say that it wasn't about zombies at all. Instead it was about the way people live now and the war was just a prop to make us see things clearly from a different perspective. Of course, some things never change: the great American spirit, the Russian brutality, the narrowmindedness of Asians and so many other clichés. Not that they are not believable, but it so shows that the author is American, even when he makes fun of his own country's flaws. Anyway, I encourage you to see the book as social commentary rather than a zombie or a horror book. That is also because the threat of "regular" zombies - you know, slow and dumb - can't really be that scary. So there are a lot of technical flaws with the zombies in the book. The situations described show the difficulty mainly in fighting millions of city dwellers now turned zombies and the war of attrition that the zombies were actually enabling, since they destroyed everything in their path, yet needed no food or supplies. Also a lot of the stories have this "I don't know why zombies don't die from bombs, water pressure, frosting, etc. I am just a dumb whatever telling a story". At some point it got a little annoying.

The bottom line is that I enjoyed a lot more the personal descriptions of how people live in other countries than the zombies, stories about them or the rather weak speculations on how people would react to their attack. The book was nicely written, but clearly amateurish; it lacked the depth of seasoned writers and had too many "props", like you see in screenplays. No wonder: Max Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks, he lived in the world of movies his entire life and this is only his second book.

I've had the opportunity to play these games on the work XBox and I just had to make the blog entry to compare them. The thing is that, even if some corporation wants DC Comics and Mortal Kombat to merge somehow, they are completely different both in concept and audience.

I've been a player of Mortal Kombat since it first appeared on PCs. Me and school friends were spending hours playing it (rather than go learn something useful, obviously). Even then - or maybe it is better said that especially then - it was clear that the game had soul, that someone really spent their time and love to make it. No matter who bought it and what they did to it, Mortal Kombat never completely lost that soul. You see, the game idea is clear: two players face each other in combat, they use different characters who have different abilities and in the end someone wins. Unlike other games that start off neutered by the present socio-political situation in the States, MK started off as brutal and bloody. You could use all kinds of magic and utensils to hit your opponent, chained combos and see lots of blood, but the hallmark of the game was that, in the end, after you have defeated your opponent, you had the opportunity to perform a Fatality, something that was truly gruesome like ripping their heads out with a bit of the spine, or cutting them in two or setting them on fire.

Now you will probably ask why has my sick brain made the connection between a brutal combat game and true love and having a soul. The thing is that the first MK started out with 8 characters, plus some bosses and hidden characters, then MKII has twice as that, and the various incarnations of the game saw up to 65 characters. And yet you will be hard pressed to find any major version where a player could not win with any of the characters against any other if they were good enough. That sense of balance shows the dedication of the developer teams that endured the various corporate transformations of Mortal Kombat.

The ninth version, Mortal Kombat IX, has a lot of characters, over 30, although some are DLC and make little sense in the Mortal Kombat universe, like Freddy Krueger or Kratos. Of course, you had to pay for them. Later on the Komplete Edition of the game had all the characters and all their skins available. Except for a little overpowering of Noob Saibot, MK IX was pretty balanced. The graphics were awesome, truly, and had various fatalities and X-moves - the super move one could execute with three bars of power, which showed anatomical X-ray like details in slow motion like cracked skulls and ribs. The only problem was the controller. I am a PC user and it took a long time to get used with the XBox controller and even more to understand how pressing forward would sometimes make my character jump up and backwards or some other thing like that. I know the controllers at work were pretty messed up, but I swear there had to be something to do with the programming as well. Also, as far as I could see, the game dropped frames. If you moved fast enough, the other player would have difficulty making their special moves, probably because some part of the data or processing was lost. But overall the game was great, the story was nice and the combination of different characters, skins and violence was delicious.

To make the transition easier, I will also mention another game, also featuring Mortal Kombat characters: Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. It is an older game, launched in 2009. This weird crossover featured fights between the likes of Raiden and Shang Tsung versus Superman and the Joker. It is the last game made by Midway Games, the creators of Mortal Kombat and the first introduction of the "evil empire": Warner Brothers, who brought with them DC Comics. After that Midway went bankrupt and sold the rights to Mortal Kombat to WB. Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe had a bit of faux 3D movement, stage transitions (like punching someone through a wall and getting to another stage) and no fatalities. In fact, it had almost no blood, while the "powers" of the MK characters seemed oddly and randomly assigned (Shang Tsung had a punch teleport, Jax had a machine gun, etc). The playability of the game was OKish, with the major problem of in flight hits. One would jump toward an opponent, punch or kick and the character would stop in mid-air and perform the punch or kick there, which made it very unrealistic and static. Also, and that probably made it unpopular in the game room, it was unbalanced. Sonya Blade could kick everybody's ass just by jumping and kicking.

Enter Injustice: Gods Among Us, a game that is also made by NetherRealm Studios, who made Mortal Kombat IX, and also copyrighted by Warner Brothers. NetherRealm is actually what remains of Midway Games plus what remains of WB Games Chicago. In Injustice there are only DC Comics characters, the graphics are really good, a lot of stage interaction, flashy "social" statistics and "ranking", downloadable characters, obviously, and so on. The game play, though, total crap. Now, I may be very biased when it comes to Mortal Kombat type games, given by all love for the original game and concept, and I also understand that this wasn't supposed to be Mortal Kombat in the first place, but in my mind it represents everything that MK developers and players fought against. First, it has violence, but no blood. You get a lot of punches, kicks, explosions, object traumas like things falling on you, being thrown on you or through you (like arrows), only no blood. There are no parts of the body that get broken or smashed. It's like a good old fashioned cowboy brawl that results in someone saying "awwh, shucks!". Then there is the completely weird system of hits and blocks. You have to press Back to defend up and Down or Back-Down to defend down. Combine that with the fact that jumps are mainly vertical and so do not bring you closer to your opponent than walking, and you get a very asymmetrical game play where range fighters have to just run and shoot, while power characters have to dash a lot through bullets to get to their target. Even so, among similar type of characters there are huge differences. I would say that Deathstroke followed by Aquaman are by far the strongest characters, like lame-ass Green Arrow is a weakling. My favourite, Doomsday, had a lot of problems getting to anyone, even if it was supposed to be indestructible and on par with Superman. Well, they were on par in the game, Superman sucked, too. So: no blood, game imbalance and poor playability when there was obviously a lot of effort put into the shiny aspects of the game.

So you see, I had to write this post. Not because I didn't enjoy playing Injustice or because I think it is a bad game, but because it is like taking a cool 80's horror movie and turning into a 2010 remake that scares no one and can be played in cinemas to children. All Flash and no Meat, so to speak. MK is for gamers while DC games are for kids. All we need now is some Mortal Kombat game with parental controls on it. That being said, I can hardly wait Mortal Kombat 10! I hope they don't mess it up completely. As homework, you should try to read on the history of Mortal Kombat and of Midway Games. It's an interesting read. There was a really nice video with the developers of the first Mortal Kombat telling the story of the inception of the game, but I couldn't find it. Instead I leave you with the komplete :) history of the game from MKSecrets: