Obesity of the Daleks

Doctor Who Episode 5.3: Victory of the Daleks

As you see, here I follow the tradition of setting the titles to "xxx of the Daleks"...

• Bringing Daleks back once and for all is clearly the right thing to do. You just can't keep on
  killing them off completely (apparently) after 45 or 90 minutes every year, only to invent more and more convoluted ways of bringing them back again next year...
  
  
• Redesigned Daleks: I don't really like them, but clearly I have no say about this, I don't even watch the classic series. The main problem is that they are now too plastic-y; they should be metallic. Also the head and the neck's proportion isn't quite right w.r.t. the rest of the body. But I'm not too bothered by it: in any case, Daleks are the sillyest alien that humankind have ever created (come on, pepperpots?? with a sink plunger?!) so no matter how ridiculous looking they are it doesn't matter too much.

• Plot: the story barely makes sense, but this is like other alien stories where the aliens always create incredibly convoluted and stupid plans when they could just blast the Earth out of existence in 30 seconds (or 20 minutes... according to the Doctor anyway.) But then you don't have a story to tell so I suppose this is not avoidable.

• Spitfires in space: I can just about accept the "gravity bubble" technobabble; after all the purpose of the episode is to put all British icons (Churchill, daleks, spitfires) together.

• Daleks with union jack: this is pure genius.

• I don't like Mark Gatiss' writing. Last time "The Lazarus Experiment" was a disaster to me. In that story and in this one, it is like "Crisis 1 arises, solved after 10 minutes, then Crisis 2 arises, solved after another 10 minutes, and so on", rather than developing slowly towards one big climax near the end. Daleks pretending to work for humans is a potentially very interesting idea, but they revealed their true intention after 15 minutes or so into the episode!
  

• I don't know what Steven Moffat is doing in this series: they are releasing far too many trailers so that when you watched the episode, it feels empty because all the good stuff have already appeared. I mean he was the one who put in the "spoiler" joke in the Series 4 Library episodes! Imagine if the Smilers and the spitfires in space were never in any trailers...
  

All in all, we have 2 fairly weak episodes. I hope the next one will be good; even half as good as Blink will be magnificient. Otherwise I should probably stop writing this as it is going to
embarrass myself...

Snooker World Championship 2010

So I was at Sheffield again to watch the first session of the Marco Fu vs Martin Gould match.

I arrived very early and while walking up there, Mark Allen (who was going to play at the other table) walked right across in front of me.

I sat in row G this time, a bit closer to the tables. Probably wasn't caught on TV, I hope.

As for the match itself... well. Fu never failed to disappoint me. It started quite well for him, but perhaps it was only the other guy starting rather shabbily. At one point Fu was leading 4-1, but he did not manage to take advantage of this; during the latter half of the session Gould clearly showed sign of much increased confidence and pull it back to just 4-5 behind. It was therefore not surprising that when the match resumed the next day Fu eventually lost 9-10.

It appears to me that Fu's playing style has always been very "forced" and uncomfortable unlike many other players who play much more naturally. He is having a dreadful season; I have no idea how he managed to get into top 8 last year, and it looks like he may still be lucky enough to hang on to a top 16 place.

On the other hand, I can't quite believe what I'm seeing about that Martin Gould: at the time of this writing he is already 11-5 up against Neil Robertson. He just gets down and makes all sorts of insane pots and never misses a thing!

"Forget" or "Protest"

Doctor Who Episode 5.2: The Beast Below

The following is the message I recorded for myself. After typing them, I will press the "Forget" button and forget about this episode...

• There is one thing good about this episode: the pre-title opening sequence was brilliant. Probably the best since, er, Turn Left? Genuinely terrifying.

• Plot is the most important thing I look for in any science fiction/fantasy. One of the reasons that I like Steven Moffat's scripts is that they all begin in a completely mad and bizarre manner but by the end of the 45 minutes everything fit together and actually make sense. Unfortunately, this episode doesn't make any sense, as already pointed out by so many people so I won't bother repeating. What a disappointment when this is something from Moffat.
  

• He has another usual problem of tending to put too many ideas into one story when any one of them is good enough for an entire episode, resulting in many good ideas being casually thrown away. Sometimes it works great like Blink: time travel and several "predestination paradoxes"; "quantum locked" stone statues; DVD easter egg with one half of some dialogue; that half dialogue fitting in two different situations; all in under 45 minutes! But perhaps there are cases that don't work... I had thought that these brilliant ideas will be "diluted" as he took over and became executive producer with 6 stories to write instead of 1 or 2. However here it is not diluted, in fact there are enough stuff to give 2 episodes. The Smilers are terrifying, but do not tie to the plot whatsoever.

• The part where Amy votes is confusing: the fastforwarding gave the impression that the information is somehow fed to her so quickly that she made the choice subconsciously, when in fact (apparently) it isn't the case.
  

Amy (is about to be) in Wonderland

Doctor Who Series 5 Episode 1: The Eleventh Hour

I don't usually write Doctor Who reviews since (i) so many people have done this and there is really nothing original I can add and (ii) this will take too much time. Instead of writing a coherent article I will just write down some random points.

• As usual Steven Moffat has a remarkable ability to turn everyday objects creepy. From stone statues in Blink, to cracks in the wall this time (by the way, there is plenty of that in my flat...), and invisible (or rather unnoticeable in this case) room in your very own house. Enough to scare any kid. This also taps directly into kids' terror, like the "monster under the bed" thing in The Girl in the Fireplace.

• At the same time, as the Grand Moff and many others have said so many times, it was indeed also very "fairytale", not just the story concept but also the visual effects and music.

• Moffat has created a complex character in Amy Pond; there is much more to analyse then her skirt length. Unlike most other stories, time travel is always an integral part of Moffat's plot, and it is "The Girl in the Fireplace" all over again. This time the little girl was disappointed by the doctor, and her personality was consequently shaped in subtle ways while she grew up, which are all very reasonable when you think about it, and gives a more natural explanation as to why she is willing to go with the doctor, comparing with previous companions (a kid believing in a time machine is much more plausible; and she waited 14 years...)

• The heart of little Amelia, though, was still inside the grown-up Amy. The doctor's return allowed Amy, and the viewers, to let out their "inner child" again. This is best summed up in the dialogue:
  

  "I grew up."
  "Don't worry, I'll soon fix that."

  Moffat is in fact the one who fixes this for every grown-up viewer!

• I was skeptical about Karen Gillan's acting, but it seems so far so good. The "then why did you say five minutes!" speech was quite powerful. And the girl who played young Amelia deserves special mention; her performance was so excellent it is hard to believe she had no prior acting experience.

• Murray's Gold's music for the episode is once again superb. (Sometimes you have to wonder why these people are working for the BBC; surely they are destined for bigger things?) From the scene where Amelia packed her little suitcase waiting the doctor to come back; to the TARDIS left Amy behind for the second time; to Amy finally walked into the new TARDIS; all are accompanied with little sequences of music that are exceedingly simple but very effectively conveys the emotion and that are also, once again, very fairytale, very Tim Burton, very Alice in wonderland (never in my life have I thought of writing these words in my blog! "Alice goes down a rabbit hole" is the first and last thing I know about it. I know the other Alice, the one who cryptographically communicates with Bob, better...)

• The alien plot was somewhat disappointing. Although many would say this is not the main point in this episode, one would expect Moffat to pull out something better than this, given the quality of all his previous contributions. Still, you never know; numerous mad conspiracy theories are already being rumoured, based on (quite reasonable) observations like contradictory signposts on which years the events happened and the crack pattern shown on the TARDIS console etc. In the past it was always fans reading too much into these, but this is Moffat, he never put things in for no reason. The "silence will fall" etc are far too straightforward, clearly Moffat is up for something more twisted than this?

• Nobody seem to question why this is called the eleventh hour? Even this makes sense, in three different ways at the same time!
  

Daft

Every year, around this time, I have the most frustrating work of marking these people's programming assignments. Which is even worse this year, because for the first time ever, the cryptography module has become the most popular third year module. The frustration arises not just from of the amount of work, which is bad enough, but also from other things.

(1) Why do people insist, year after year, assignment after assignment, to write something like this?

File privateKeyFile = new File("C:/Users/ChanTaiMan/Desktop/ChanTaiMan.prv");

Am I supposed to create a directory like this to run your program? Or am I supposed to edit everybody's program for such things before compiling it? And there are always a few people to offer a "user friendly" option of popping up a dialog box to input such things. To them

java ProgramName ChanTaiMan

is as alien as the Martian language. (Not to say options like -a, -b: I suspect they never did an ls -l in their life.)

And that is because they say their IDEs can't do this. All IDEs are evil! Nobody know how to use command line arguments anymore!

I would so much love to give these people just a zero mark! If only I could!

(2) OK, you can't write programs, you can't even understand sample programs given to you, so you copy your classmate's program. But why, why people can't even use "find and replace" properly? Rename one occurrence of the variable and leave the other unchanged?

從前有一隻青蛙...

很久以前，我看過一個短篇科幻故事，名叫 "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed"。看完後我覺得那故事很 disturbing，不過我也沒有深究為甚麼。

* * *

還不過幾年前，大家還恥笑董建華這句話：

「香港好，中國好。中國好，香港更好」 --董建華

... 最後連董建華也承認他曾去信中央，請求京官幫忙。但他這一下「求救」，教香港人無地自容，恨他無本事帶領香港擺脫困境，怨其丟盡香港的面子－－明明是全國最富庶的地方，卻公然厚著臉皮向「阿爺」（北京）伸手討好處。其實香港人雖然都在北望 神州，欲在中國崛起之際分一杯羹，但很多人卻覺得交往過程應是公平地互惠互利，而非中央單方面的「偏愛」，無條件不斷施予優惠，做中國的「敗家兒」...

-- 特區十年史 １．１２　北望神州

幾年後的今天，人人都已從心底裡由衷相信，香港必須要和中國融合，不然便會死。

他們說， 90後的一代將來畢業後，香港必已被邊緣化，沒有高鐵，他們就不能方便地回內地工作，沒有出路。 --蘋果日報, 引述某被訪者

... 宜家香港上至政府下至小市民個個淨係識背靠祖國做寄生蟲...
... 真正既邊緣化唔係有冇高鐵
而係香港政府同香港人自願放棄經濟上既獨立性...

-- extracted from 某高登 post

隨著中國「發展」，香港必將淪為中國一個普通城市，這是歴史宿命，多一條少一條高鐵，也差不了多少。不幸的是人的想法也變了。今天還有誰會覺得「求救」是令人「無地自容」？

* * *

那個科幻故事是說，有一些地球人滯留火星，其中一人有一天突然發現，花草樹木的顏色不同了， 慢慢的連別人和自己的眼珠顏色、頭髮顏色、甚至說的語言都變了。他想離開火星，其他人卻不介意那些轉變，或者「詐唔知」不去面對那些轉變。那人最後也不再堅持...

很多年後，地球才再有人來火星，卻找不到原來的地球人，只發現一些「火星人」 ...

* * *

青蛙心想，跳出去沒有水，會死的，其實熱水也很好呀！火力愈來愈大，青蛙卻愈來愈興奮。它死前的最後一句話，是：「 嘩哈哈！ 」

每日新聞圖片

兩名內地大款得戚地表示支持興建高鐵。





工聯會立法會議員王國興向會外高呼「撐高鐵創造就業」的示威者表示，工聯會成功爭取「反對高鐵工程優先聘請本地工人」，至於「示威工程優先聘請本地臨記」則在泛民拉布下暫未成功反對。





和諧黨副主席檢閱首名乘高鐵來港的女兵。

「西班牙人」

再說，就算有極少數廣東人吃貓，也不能泛稱「廣東人吃貓」，就像不久前，有北京人殺了他自己全家（父、母、子、女、妻、妹），絕不能延伸說「北京人殺自己全家」，若形成「北京人殺自己全家」的說法，自然和「廣東人吃貓」一樣，是大大的謬誤。

倪匡，《「廣東人吃貓」》，蘋果日報 10/1/2010

倪匡大概對「新中國」的「現代漢語」還是不太了解，網上就充斥著類似以下的大陸文字：

利物浦糟糕的戰績讓領隊賓尼迪斯本賽季承受著巨大的壓力，歐冠盃提前出局讓球迷們對西班牙人的失望之情到達了頂點。媒體也一度把賓尼迪斯和皇家馬德里、國際米蘭聯繫在一起，有消息稱西班牙人很可能在今夏取代摩連奴在國際的位置。

你不知就裏的話還以為球迷對所有西班牙人都感到失望，所有西班牙人一起取代摩連奴！這大概是從英文「翻譯」過來，英文可以說 (在文中提到過該人之後) The Spaniard, The England international 之類，你譯成中文，最少也應說「該名西班牙籍領隊」、「該名英格蘭國腳」 。就是英文也有那 the 字啊！不過大家也見怪不怪了...

反高鐵，保香港

...
第一個假設是，假設內地的有錢人不斷來香港幫襯，帶挈香港地產發達，小市民可以分享唾餘，有份掃地捧餐做實Q。內地（主要是廣東）的人民和商人要來香港交 易，是因為香港有內地買不到的商品、服務、治安和生活品質。然而，這不會長久如此的...
...
高鐵的第二個假設是，香港長期維持優秀可靠的服務，可以吸引內地人幫襯。...
一旦香港的服務與內地拉平，內地人也毋須幫襯香港。
...
愛國者應理解國情，內地大勢不妙。香港應該保持適當距離，自求多福，而不是去銜接危機。內地人發達繁華，不稀罕你去銜接；內地災難爆發，香港去銜接也沒用。高鐵是一塊雞肋，不是一塊肥肉。一塊雞肋何須稀罕？
...

陳雲：《反高鐵，保香港》，信報 7/1/2010

我不認為甚麼菜園村之類是反高鐵的強力理由(雖然是些比較冠冕堂皇的理由)。

反而支持興建的那些甚麼「促進中港融合」，「接上內地發展」之類才是最危險的糖衣毒藥。

不論物質上還是文明上，香港都比大陸先進 - 至少現在還是。這正是香港的優勢。你快快「融合」 掉，香港就和大陸一模一樣，沒有獨特之處，只會「死快D」。所以香港應盡可能減慢被大陸同化的速度，作一個好榜樣給內地學習。

再說，那是個每天都在殺人的政權啊！你跟它「融合」幹甚麼？你沒聽說人家要出兵了嗎？將來有了高鐵，石崗軍營出市區也很快捷嘛。

PS1.

出賣香港利益的，時時見報，就是這一伙了，七百萬人，記住他們的樣子。時機成熟，一起跟他們算賬。

陶傑，《賣港》，蘋果日報 16/12/2009

PS2. 咁鐘意起, 起成咁好唔好? (我見到果洲個圈真係笑到停唔到...)
http://w3img.westkit.net/0286b67a82a0da64237c0d25c061c357.img

Going into 2010 the cold way (almost)

At this very moment, I could have been typing my final words in 2009 in a zero degree Celsius room, with a torch, a mobile phone and a 2-hour laptop battery being my only power source. Thankfully it wasn't like that.

On this very last day of 2009, I lost electricity at home. It's the stupid laptop power adaptor again; this is already a replacement but this time it even brought down the power of the whole flat. The circuit breakers inside the flat did not trip, but every socket and every light switch was dead.

I was fearing the worst and planning how to endure a long dark night in this holiday period without lighting and without heating - surely an unconventional way to go into a new year - when the guy from the letting agent came over and fixed that. Which I'm very grateful to and perhaps I should just slightly change my view about the agent.

An unusually nice journey

You don't often hear me say that, but my return journey this time could not have been better. Having picked a closer and smaller airport this time (which I should have done years ago - you see, the algorithm running in my head does produce something that converge to the optimal solution,
just very slowly), it turns out that one leg of the flight is less than 1/3 full, the passport control and baggage reclaim was exceedingly quick, and the train timetable somehow allowed me to catch unexpectedly early trains. The only worrying bit was that there were actually officers from customs standing there inspecting passengers' stuff, but I even managed to escape that. (Why can't they learn from Heathrow where there's nobody inspecting anything round the clock?)

「港足奪金」之曾蔭權在做甚麼

曾蔭權真是一個X街...

... 當晚唯一的遺憾，是行政長官曾蔭權於頒獎禮期間突然宣布有話要對記者說，害我「拿拿臨」仆過去採訪而錯過親眼看港隊站上頒獎台最高一級的機會。...

伍家謙, 《歷史會記住這天》

Bring in video technology into football!

Is it just me, and nobody else really cares? So many blatantly wrong decisions have been made by referees over the years and that FIFA lot of people insist on not doing anything about it. It is beyond stubbornness, it feels more like something dirty is going on behind the scenes. And if not from within then what about the fans? On facebook, the largest group about this has, errr, less than 2000 people there, with most other groups less than a hundred. Even groups about 港女 etc. can get into tens of thousands much more easily and quickly.

Referees are humans and in such a high-tempo game, it is simply impossible to ask referees to make correct decisions instantly. Almost all other sports is using video technologies now, even snooker does!(*) An organisation that keeps on saying "fair play" is the same one that tries everything possible to stop referees from making correct decisions. Is it ironic enough? How much longer do we have to tolerate this?

FIFA stands for Football Injustice Forever Association. It is a total disgrace.

(*) To be precise, snooker only uses replays for replacing balls, not making decisions.

James May's Toy Stories

"He is completely insane!"
"That, and a bit magnificent."

- Valerie and Brannigan, Doctor Who "Gridlock"

This is a completely mad TV programme. The show takes several no-longer-fashionable toys (well, most of them), and blow them up to build real-life-scale things. You may not realise their names, until you see them. The first episode is about making an Airfix model (something like this) of a Spitfire, except it is 1:1 scale, and they asked a group of kids to do it, at an old factory where real Spitfires were produced. Other mad ideas include making a garden out of plasticine and actually putting it in the Chelsea Flower Show, and building a over 4 km long track out of Scalextric and actually run slot cars on it.

Other than satisfying the nostalgia of us "old" people, the best thing about this show is that it at least tries to do the impossible of tempting children of this generation to do things that require long hours of concentration without looking at a computer/TV screen. These toys are no longer fashionable precisely because they take time. I also like its engaging factor, where it often involves hundreds or even thousands of people to build the thing and to participate. The Scalextric episode for example, (not aired yet but from the lots of youtube videos flying around) involve lots of people, since one person can only be looking at a very small section of the track at one time. Very much like a community event where every kid living around are out, running along the track. Seeing people getting excited about such events at least gives a (however small) hope of reversing or stopping the trend of the dumbing down of toys (and everything else).

Update: here, before it gets removed...

In memory of a youthful heart

I suppose I owe quite a lot to him. Many years ago, since we lived relatively close to them, our family often visited theirs. My childhood memory mainly consisted of playing toys in other people's homes; this one was no exception.

There were probably some lego sets around, although my main activity appeared to be reading lego catalogs. For some reason this cement mixer and this classic space set had left very deep impression in my mind.

During that time I had one of my early encounter (if not the earliest) of a computer; in fact it might be an Apple II but I'm not so sure now.

He used to work in the UK for some time. Every time he came back he brought us lots of UK stamps, in two categories: those used for regular everyday mail, in large quantities and with many duplicates, and those that were relatively rare and only have a few copies in each batch. Then we have the task of splitting these stamps into 4 sets "fairly" (one for each of the kids there). We could spend an entire afternoon doing this.

He once gave me a thick and heavy book (the biggest book I had at that time), something like a Reader's digest compilation on topics related to the Earth, and a 1970-ish atlas used by Geography classes back when he was in school (in which you can see the version of Hong Kong coastline before the more recent landfills, and a whole lot about the British Isles).

I also stole, from the books he left behind after he emigrated, a (I believe?) C. J. Tranter's A-level Pure Mathematics textbook; it's very "British" and certainly treats topics very differently from a modern-day text (for example it starts with the question of what happens if we integrate 1/x, shows that it must be "log-like" and from this defines the constant known as e before finally moving on to its numerous other properties). Among other things it gave me my first exposure to the convergence of series and the natural logarithm.

These were probably useless stuff to him anyway, but were good to me. I really appreciate this because I myself hate to give things away to people; if you ask me to give you my atlas back in secondary school, I won't be too happy about it (even worse if you have taken it without me knowing it).

During all these years he never seemed to get old; he always spoke in a slow, cheerful and somewhat child-like tone. This probably is a reflection of an youthful heart.

In the past year or so, somewhat being kept out of the loop, I have only been barely aware of what has been going on with him. During a certain period of time there appeared to be positive progress, but the inevitable eventually happened. At least I believe he didn't have much regrets. He can rest assured the books had made their impact on a kid.

正音??

這 post 未免太遲 ，但遲到好過冇到 ，即管輕力一推，略盡綿力...

「購」、「構」二字讀音：讀「救」還是讀「扣」

挑戰何文匯

二數相乘，有口訣云：天天，地地，人人，天地人，盡負一...

怪哉，於此二十又一世紀，中學國文科尚棄文言如糞土之時，若干有志之士，竟以文言編維基大典，所涉更非限孔孟老莊、唐詩宋詞，諸般數學，凡 Quaternion 至 set theory 皆具文誌之，誠可貴也。

more delays

As usual, this is the place for my rant about flight experiences. But this time I found out it may serve a new purpose: it might help some other people feel better by knowing other people (me) have even worse experience than them.

I won't bother you about what the trip is for, what exactly does the airport code DUS stand for etc, but instead just go straight about the travel itself.

Outward flight: LHR->DUS

The outward flight only had, relatively speaking, minor troubles. The flight was delayed by roughly 2 hours, but it is not the interesting part; the reason for the delay is more interesting. It was because "the toilets are not fully operational", resulting in a need to find a replacement plane.

When we arrived at DUS another trouble surfaced: all except a handful of the passengers lost their checked luggage. I didn't have any checked luggage, but other people travelling on the same trip did, and I got to see a hundred people hanging outside a small room filling forms etc. In fact, it looks like another flight also had the same problem...

Inward flight: DUS->LHR

I need a bullet list for this:

• During the whole week the weather was fine, but just when we were about to get a train to the airport, there was heavy rain. As a result, the train to the airport was delayed by 15-20 minutes. This was still fine, but...
  

• At the airport, we found out that the flight was delayed by "only" 50 minutes. This was still ok, except...
  

• I needed to catch a train at St Pancras. I've put in 2 hours between the original landing time of the flight and scheduled train departure time, which should be more than sufficient, particularly with Heathrow Express. And normally the plane can fly a bit faster to catch up at least some of the delay. But
  

• The plane circled at least 3 times above London before finally landed. And after landing, as the pilot put it, "to add to the misery", the air bridge to the terminal didn't work and we had to take a shuttle bus even though it was just 30 seconds walk away from it. And the shuttle bus needs (due to some ground traffic regulations on the airport ground) to make a big detour and travel round a loop.
  

• Then, long queues as usual at UK Border. Actually this time it was slightly faster with some more counters open.
  

• (If you need proof that worst-case analysis is useful:) then I missed a Heathrow Express train, and had to wait exactly 15 minutes when they have one every 15 minutes.
  

• Then there were further delay on the Hammersmith-and-City tube line which means overall it is actually not faster than taking the Piccadilly line directly to St Pancras.
  

• I was fearing the worst (I seem to recall the only other train departs at midnight and arrive at 3am or something like that), when actually there was one at 23:15 which I was able to catch. Usually such late trains stop at every station and takes about 1.5 hours, but this one was even worse due to construction work which required a hugh diversion costing some extra time.

• So I finally arrive Leicester at 1:38am. This was "only" 98 minutes later than scheduled, and when you take all these incidents together, it isn't too bad.

The irony is that I went to a scheduling conference...

當年今日 (2)

瑣事兩則:

(1) 原來本校有這位校友... 不過很明顯她不知道甚麼是甲組乙組...

(2) 這真是大快人心，人家ATV 已夠左的了，不過反正沒人看，沒關係，你 CCTVB 又左，結果...

當年今日

今天是「中國網站維護日」 這個大日子，但本網站並不「被維護」，特別在此轉貼一段當年今日(1989年5月35日)的片段:

譚耀宗強烈譴責中共六四屠殺



PS. 我想在此讚一下生果報的一系列六四報導，以跟著當年每日事態發展的方式報導，重現出當年局勢如何日漸惡化。