Andrew Mobbs

I watched Kill Bill Vol. 2 last night. I don't think anybody but QT could have got away with making such a self-indulgent film. It's much less of a slick action film than Vol. 1, and much more of the endless homage to spaghetti westerns and '70s kung-fu films. It's still quite an amusing, fun film to watch; but seems to lack real depth beneath the veneer of irony.

Oh, and there's one really squicky scene.

Oh² - it's also a zombie film.

I like Spring when it's like this. The weather really has made for a wonderful weekend; from cycling around, walking, taking photos, sitting around outside at riverside pubs in the evening, and now a pleasant lunch sitting on Jesus Green savouring the taste and texture of a feta and roasted red pepper baguette, contemplating er… transactional in-memory databases (very poetic).

Scariness - reading through some stuff (via Slashdot) about where MS is going for its front-end in the next version of Windows.

It appears that they're introducing a mark-up language called XAML, which is "based on" XML. This will basically interface to native widgets and their whole .NET distributed objects thingy. They'll use this to write their application GUIs in. They'll also encourage web sites to use it to write their front-ends. I suspect a lot of web sites would like a more functional GUI than HTML provides without the bloat of Flash. Eventually all the web are belong to Gates, and those Linux and Mac users are locked out in the cold, starving to death unable to buy their groceries, books or entertainment, having long since forgotten about real shops.

However, the up side is that none of this is happening in a hurry, and MS failed with exactly the same trick with Blackbird in 1995. OTOH, avoiding an open cross-platform application framework from being developed was exactly why MS squashed Netscape, and there might not be enough non-MS traffic to encourage web sites to go down any other route before MS come along with their solution.