A scary movie with a doll in it

When I was a kid I saw a movie that really scared me. I spent months before I could sleep unafraid at night.

I would like to watch that movie again. The problem is that I don’t remember the title or the actors or anything. Just the plot and some of the scenes. I will give you some data:

I saw the movie at the cinema around 1979, so I imagine the movie was made at some point in the 70s. It started with a family happily cruising on a nice boat. There is a girl in the family and they suddenly spot a doll floating on the water. The girl asks her dad to retrieve the doll so they bring it on board and the girl keeps it. From that moment, very scary things start happening on the boat. And, you are right, the doll is to blame!

Some people get shredded to pieces by the boat’s propeller. Some people just disappear while rowing on a dinghy and a huge shadow swims under them (the cenital shot showing the shadow swimming under the little dinghy was really good). Some divers get trapped underwatter when a tremour fells ancient columns on the seabed. And so on and so forth.

Can you provide the title of the movie for me? Or any other details? Thanks!

Demanding the Church

I come from Galicia, a small region in the north-west corner of Spain. Because I am Spanish to most non-Spanish people, I often get asked questions about catholicism and religion in Spain. It seems that many non-Spanish people think of Spain as a country dominated by religion and, specifically, the Catholic Church. Sometimes, I find that people just assumes that I come from a strongly religious environment and therefore I must be religious. I feel the personal urge to debunk this myth, and I actually enjoy doing it. I must admit, though, that Spain has achieved this image because of some well-deserved facts. Most often than not, I feel embarrased and ashamed of coming from Galicia (which, after all, is part of today’s Spain) and being associated with reactionary and intolerant ideas.

However, something is going on in Spain that makes me feel a bit proud. A law will be passed tomorrow that will give homosexual couples the same civil rights as heterosexual couples. That means that homosexual couples will be able to get married, adopt children and inherit from each other, for example.

What? In Spain? In such a religious country? Oh well… Perhaps Spain is not that religious.

Hackers & Painters

I’ve just finished reading Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham.

The book is a mixture of IT-related and non-IT-related chapters. There is an ongoing theme about computing and “hacking”, but the main topic in some of the chapters is not IT definitely. I loved these. He talks about secondary education in the USA, heretical thoughts, distribution of wealth, spam and design. He is insightful and sometimes brilliant. 9 out of 10 for these chapters. I am not giving him a 10 because I have my reservations of his application of blatant neoliberal ideas (as if they were the only alternative) to the discussion of wealth generation.

The really bad news is, the chapters on programming are extremely poor. After reading the table of contents and the first two chapters (on non-IT topics), I was thinking to myself: “well, perhaps this book contains the first serious approach ever to defending open source software”, and “maybe this guy has a chapter as good as this on the philosophy underpinning different programming languages”. What a disappointment! 1 out of 10 here.

Disclosing info on blogs

Now that I’ve been blogging for a few days I’ve realised that I have a problem I’d never thought of before: I need to think whether or not I can say something in my posts before publishing them.

I work full-time for a university, am Visiting Fellow at another, co-own a company and, to make things more complex, I am involved in research projects with private companies. All this means that many of the issues I would like to talk about here (or in other blogs) may be regulated by non-disclosure agreements or simply by professional ethics.

So, each time I type a new entry in a blog, I think twice before hitting “Publish”.

With blogging becoming such a popular activity, I wonder what its effects will be, in the long term, on non-disclosure and privacy issues.

OutlookConfig

Regarding the SMTP settings problem in Outlook 2003 that I reported a few days ago: I have uploaded the little app that I wrote myself to my website. You can download it here.

Let me know if you have any comments.

Can’t use encryption on my wireless LAN

I have a 3Com OfficeConnect Wireless 11g Cable/DSL Gateway at home, which acts as main network hub and also as a gateway to the Internet through a separate ADSL modem. It supports both WPA and WEP encryption standards, but both of them are disabled because, as soon as I turn one on (and adjust the laptops’ wireless LAN cards accordingly), something very odd happens: I can still access the Internet (i.e. the gateway routes laptops to the Internet) but computers in my LAN cannot see each other!

I have tried using different configurations for both WPA and WEP but the problem persists. Only when I disable both encryption methods can my laptops see each other in the LAN.

Odd??? I will go on researching.

Can you identify this bird?

Isabel took this photo in September 2001 near Ortigueira, Galicia (north-west corner of Spain). She was carrying a low resolution digital camera and no binoculars, so she could not see the bird any better than this. She reports a groups of over 10 birds like the one in the picture flying between the ground and the wire when she walked towards them, and then all leaving but one.

Odd Bird

I would like to know the species of this bird or, at least, the family. Can you help?

Thanks.

EOTI

Have you seen the End Of The Internet?

http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm

SMTP server settings in Outlook

I have been struggling with this one for some time now.

I am using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 in my laptop for my e-mail and calendar. I have 7 e-mail accounts configured, including my work account, a personal one, two or three for some websites I am maintaining and some other “legacy” accounts. For each of these accounts, Outlook needs an SMTP server and, optionally, some outgoing mail settings such as the SMTP server authentication mode.

The problem is that I carry my laptop around. That’s what laptops are for, right? When I am at work, I use my workplace’s SMTP server, but when I am at home (connected to the Internet through 1.5 Mbps wireless ADSL) I cannot use my workplace’s SMTP server because it only accepts relaying from its own network. I have to revert to use my ISP’s SMTP server, which is fine, but I need to bring up Outlook’s E-Mail Accounts configuration dialog box and change the setting for each of my 7 accounts. Something similar happens when I visit other university where I am a Visiting Fellow. Or when I go to a conference. Or…

It would be nice if Outlook accepted some kind of profiles depending on you location or connectivity parameters.

I reverse-engineered the registry keys where Outlook saves the SMTP configuration and I have written myself a little .NET app that stores location profiles and lets me apply one or the other as needed. Beautiful.

But how can this basic functionality be absent from Outlook 2003? Is it there and I haven’t seen it?

Allocating people in a small company

Some years ago I used to work for a small software development company. This company was composed of 6 developers plus some additional staff. One of the developers was also some sort of project lead for the others. At any point in time, the company was handling between 5 and 8 projects, which meant that most projects were allocated to a single developer more or less full-time, plus a small timeslice of the project lead’s brain.

Is this an optimal strategy?

Most projects were small enough not to need more than 1 (or perhaps 1.5) developers allocated to them, which was good because the absence of real teams made coordination issues and overheads practically inexistent. However, it was also bad, because a single person was usually carrying the load of a whole project, and nobody else in the company knew enough on that project to be able to work in it if needed. This is particularly dangerous if we think that a developer falling ill or having an accident meant that his/her associated project was completely halted until further notice.

I didn’t like this way of doing things, and neither did the project lead. But we could not find an alternative organisation strategy that was efficient enough. Any ideas?