Rob Bevan

The Orange British Academy Film Awards take place tonight. For the record, here’s the complete list of screeners dispatched to BAFTA members this year. Considering we were all sent Cinea players even before last year’s awards – and how quickly unencrypted movies started appearing on the web this year – it’s curious that only about 20% of DVDs were encrypted (using Cinea’s S-VIEW Award Consideration Screener Program). Mind you, from the point of view of the studios, encryption can obviously backfire, as those co-ordinating Munich’s BAFTA campaign discovered when 5000 totally unplayable discs were shipped out, a story that even made the front page of The Guardian. Munich is the only movie Oscar-nominated for best picture not also on the BAFTA shortlist.

Best of the bunch for me was Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener, (conversely the only BAFTA-nominated movie not also up for best picture in the US) a near-perfect exercise in direction, performance and cinematography and hyperlink movies Syriana (good) and Crash (better). Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon were both outstanding in Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, as was Felicity Huffman’s extraordinary woman-plays-man-becoming-woman performance in Transamerica (but sadly overlooked by BAFTA) and you can’t fail to enjoy Piers Brosnan’s trashing of his Bond history in The Matador.

Shame not to see Cronenberg’s A History of Violence in the running for more than adapted screenplay (although William Hurt is Oscar-nominated for his supporting role) or the hilarious A Cock & Bull Story, the endlessly prolific Michael Winterbottom’s attempt to film Tristam Shandy and a role call of current British comedy stars. Deservedly ignored in the UK though was Woody Allen’s Match Point (see Lloyd Shepherd’s post on why we Brits think this movie is ‘lamentable’).

Like Shozu, new S60 app Merkitys (Finnish for ‘Meaning’) allows easy upload of images from your phone to Flickr (or your own server). Merkitys however also automatically adds ‘context’, which includes location (i.e. GSM location information: Mobile Country Code, Mobile Network Code, Location Area Code and Cell ID, but also GPS data if you also have a supported receiver) as well as the usual user-defined description and tags etc., and – curiously – the addresses of all bluetooth devices in the vicinity.

For the past year Brett Lider has been blogging the food he has eaten at Google… Pipette + dressing + tomato + mozzarella = Appetizer, Google-style Originally uploaded by Brett L..

PolarView have released a .kmz file for Google Earth providing more Antarctic data, including the location of drift buoys, larger identified icebergs, selected research vessels and research stations, as well as some higher resolution imagery. Naturally I was drawn to Troll, the Norwegian base on Queen Maud Land (named by a popular vote of Norwegian schoolchildren). Who knows whether I’ll ever make it to Antarctica for real, but in the meantime my name at least will be heading SOUTH with the Ben Saunders’ sledge.

In a first step towards allowing users to maintain “personal mobile websites”, Nokia research has announced it has ported Apache httpd and mod_python to the S60/Symbian platform. (The code is so far only free for use within Nokia.) My head is still reeling from the implications of this last paragraph, which seems completely farfetched and yet perfectly obvious at the same time: We believe that being able to run a globally accessible personal website on your mobile phone has the potential of changing the Internet landscape.

From The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook: I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone. I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, and instead they taste like cheese. (via Memex 1.1)

Apart from the obvious need/desire to post more often, here’s a bunch of improvements I want to make to this blog in the coming weeks. I was hoping to get some of this done during ‘ketchup’ week, but family, friends and a bumper crop of BAFTA screeners were welcome distractions. Upgrade to WordPress 2.0.1 I’ve been localhostin’ the beta for some time, and keeping up with it on wordpress.com, but now it and Steve Smith’s Tiger Admin plugin are out and there are fixes/workarounds for the WP 2.

Whilst searching the Opera Mobile forums, I came across this fairly comprehensive list of free software for S60 phones. Some of the links are broken and there’s nothing on the development side, but a useful list nonetheless. Also, if you’re excited by the prospect of Flash Lite 2.0 announced back in November, you’ll also be excited to hear from this official forum post that this will be available to developers from Macromedia Labs in January.

Something that seems unnecessarily cumbersome to me is getting a url from my Mac to my phone (a Nokia 6630). So I knocked up a simple solution using QuickSilver and Framework Labs’ Bluetooth Object Push Automator Action stuck together with a little AppleScript. After you’ve installed the action, create an Automator workflow using the Push File to Bluetooth Device action, configure it for your device (assuming you’ve already set up your phone for use with your Mac using the Bluetooth Setup Assistant) and save this to your desktop as an application named Push2Phone.

15 months after its initial launch, Rails finally reaches 1.0. Maybe now the constant stream of innovation will slow down long enough for some of us to catch up… oh, wait, perhaps not… “1.1 is already pretty far along in development and will see some of the biggest upgrades of any Rails release”. Can’t wait.

The Opera Platform: is this the Konfabulator for mobile? The Opera Platform™ SDK is an SDK for developing rich client-side web applications on mobile devices such as Symbian Series60 phones (MS Smartphone support coming soon). With the Opera Platform™ Application Player, developers can create applications that interact with the phone’s native functionality, such as the phone’s address book, calendar or message store. In addition, developers can, using Ajax technology, interact directly with a multitude of web services, both home-grown and pre-existing.