1. The Sixth Sense (five stars)
2. Unbreakable (four stars)
3. The Village (three stars)
4. Signs (two stars)
5. Lady in the Water (one star)

The characteristics of a good M. Night Shyamalan film are:

• A coherent plot, with a premise based on the supernatural.
• A twist toward the end that changes our perception of the foregoing events.

The characteristics of a bad M. Night Shyamalan film are:

• A plot relying on science - or a fictional representation of science - rather than the supernatural for its premise.  Typically, even if I accept the initial premise hook, line, and sinker (which I generally do), I end up finding it pushed beyond the limits of reason later on.  I have questions about developments later in the film, which are not resolved in the script, and make so little sense as to destroy my willing suspension of disbelief.
• A preachy message.

(Or a plot so confused that you can't even understand the premise without 20 minutes of exposition and discussion of it -- cp. Lady in the Water.)

Based on these criteria, if you have seen The Happening, you can already tell about where on the list it will rank.  While it did have all of the characteristics of every M. Night Shyamalan film (great performances, chilling moments, scenes with building suspense, etc.), it had the latter characteristics rather than the former.

Two stars.

BPA has been a topic of some debate on Capitol Hill, where shills for the chemical industry disguised as public officials spent time before Congress today saying that the level of BPA in consumer products, including baby bottles, was safe.

The pain point for these products is that we can't tell what impact they are having except through measures that few people understand.  That the anogenital distance decreases in boys born of mothers exposed to phthalates is enough to prove to me that so-called "endocrine disrupters" (substances that emulate or interfere with the action of hormones in the body) are messing with our bodies in ways we would have trouble predicting accurately or properly assessing the risk.  BPA is another endocrine disrupter.  But the degree to which it impacts me as an adult doesn't concern me nearly as much as the way it may be impacting Gameboy, and even his kids.

The thing that clued me in to this debate was Discover magazine's special report on plastics in May.  It presents a balanced, but still scary, view on these miracle substances that both are unavoidable in everyday life and may be harmful to us in ways that we won't understand for decades yet.

I'm more concerned about consumption than I am about skin contact.  Thus, we have started using milk from glass bottles, rather than the plastic jugs or the plastic-lined cardboard containers.  It's not much, but without knowing the risks, reducing the known exposure points is better than doing nothing.

Today's topic is how to create a fileshare on a remote server using a C# program.  I searched and searched for C# code to do this, and the best I could find was code for the Windows Scripting Host (WSH).  Well, I was finally able to piece together something from a number of different C# samples I found, and the code at the bottom of this entry is the result.

The problem is that this type of management is done through WMI, and WMI objects can be tricky to manipulate in C# because they are one level removed from being typical managed code objects.  For example, you can't just instantiate a "Win32_Share" object and invoke the "Create" method.  You need to go through the managed code interfaces into WMI.

I have posted this code at the entry for the Win32_Share Class at msdn.microsoft.com.  I have successfully tested it running on .NET framework 2.0 against a Windows Server 2003 server.  I was an admin on the remote box; of course the code wouldn't work if my account didn't have sufficient privileges to do this.

// begin sample code

using System.Management;
private static void makeShare(string server, string filepath, string sharename)
{
    try
    {
        // assemble the string so the scope represents the remote server
        string scope = string.Format("\\\\{0}\\root\\cimv2", server);
        // connect to the WMI on the remote server
        ManagementScope ms = new ManagementScope(scope);
        // create a new instance of the Win32_Share WMI object
        ManagementClass cls = new ManagementClass("Win32_Share");
        // set the scope of the new instance to that created above
        cls.Scope = ms;
        // assemble the arguments to be passed to the Create method
        object[] methodargs = { filepath, sharename, "0" };
        // invoke the Create method to create the share
        object result = cls.InvokeMethod("Create", methodargs);
    }
    catch (SystemException e)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Error attempting to create share:");
        Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
    }
}

In May of 2006, Discover magazine reported that the ultracapacitor may be powering your cell-phone within another three years or so (five years from the date of the article).  The advantages of ultracapacitors over chemical batteries are twofold:

1. They recharge in seconds or minutes instead of hours.
2. They can be re-used indefinitely, so you will no longer need to dispose of them after a few dozen charges.

With any luck, lithium-ion batteries like the one pictured here will soon be a thing of the past.  And if they can scale the technology up enough, the electric car may see new life very soon.

This was not a problem watching You Don't Mess With The Zohan tonight.  Whether because the movie was funny and engaging for nearly the whole time, whether because the people behind me using my row of chairs as a foot rest made me want to stab their shoes, or whether because of the double-tall non-fat mocha I consumed about half an hour before showtime, I saw this movie starting at 10:00 and stayed fully awake through its midnight ending.

A few random observations:

• I was amazed at how many people of non Middle-Eastern heritage I saw playing Middle-Eastern characters in this film.
• The performances were mixed, with some being natural and effective, and some being totally uninspired.  Kevin Nealon was totally forgettable in a throw-away role.  And Rob Schneider was very un-Rob Schneider like, but also not convincing, in a role as a rival to Adam Sandler's Zohan.
• I was happy and relieved I didn't have Gameboy with me, as this is the most sexual PG-13 film I have yet seen.  Gameboy can take a lot of sexual innuendo in his entertainment, but both he and I (when he's with me) are uncomfortable with the level of overt sexuality in which this film indulged.
• For a film promoted as an action comedy, the film lacked an action center, and was utterly missing an action or comedic climax (although there were plenty of sexual climaxes inferred, or even indirectly shown).
• Emmanuelle Chriqui (best-known from the HBO series, Entourage) is insanely beautiful.  And happily, her character managed at the same time to be a sex symbol and to avoid a good number of the overt sexual references (and all of the sexual behavior) in the film.

As I mentioned, it did suffer from a lack of a climactic action sequence, so that when it ended, I was surprised, and inclined to think "that's it?"  And while it wasn't particularly predictable, I did have a moment of rolling my eyes at the ease with which long-standing hatreds, both racial and personal, dissipated in the face of a mere moment of solidarity.

On the whole, I was amazed at how funny, and how consistent in its funniness, You Don't Mess With The Zohan was.  It was only slightly too long.  It did have a coherent plot thread and a solid script.  And in spite of lots of squirming moments, a few boring moments, and a sudden ending, its overall entertainment value was adequate.

Three stars.

I don't have really high expectations for such creations.  It's just fun seeing the old characters in an all new adventure.  There are certain things we do come to expect because of the way that the original films were.  In an Indiana Jones movie, we expect there to be some type of banter between Indy and whoever his "partner in crime of the day" is, with mayhem ensuing all around.  We expect lots of amazing stunts, and at least one vehicle chase (and possibly several).  We expect some type of supernatural element, which changes the course of the film before it's all over.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has all of these in spades.  The story thread is thin, the characters completely undeveloped, and I can't imagine any fan caring.  The stunts are amazing to the point of being completely unbelievable, and isn't that what they are there for?  The banter this time is with Karen Allen (remember her in Starman?), who looks remakable after all these years, and was a most welcome addition.  And the supernatural element was as completely ludicrous and totally unexplained as it was spectacular.  (The "unexplained" part was not true in the first and third films, where at least you understood why the supernatural events occurred because they were religious in nature.)

So from the standpoint of movies in general, this is a mere spectacle with no substance.  But what a spectacle!  Three stars.

But it's so much fun getting to see these characters again that I have to give an extra star just as a stroll down memory lane, with all the rewards that come from that.  Even the inevitable "haven't seen you for so long, and why not?" argument didn't really last past one scene, and the scene was brief and watchable.  So for anyone who has seen the series and enjoyed it, you'll like the cap it puts on the series enough to like it better than its mere value as a movie unto itself.

Four stars.

My approach was more direct:  "He needs botox all right: in his ax-wielding muscles."

I can't help but think that I sound like a typical old person.  But there's something wonderful about silently waiting for something worthwhile.

I remember when I was a kid and could spend hours just looking out at the window at the trees waving in the wind.  Believe me, I found nothing fun about that as a kid.  It was sheer boredom.  But as I get older and busier, and my life gets more stressful, I appreciate, more and more, the delights of having nothing better to do but sit and think without too much external stimulation.

It was.

One of the things to which I most look forward when a live-action film of an animated series (or comic book) comes out is this: I get to see things which had previouly only been depicted in animation in live action.  With Speed Racer, the anticipation was to see the Mach 5's jump jacks in action.

What I didn't expect was to see them animated, and that's what Speed Racer gave me.  To be honest, that's the reason I had misgivings after seeing the trailer - it looked like bad CGI animation, and that's what it was.

Oh, I don't doubt that no expense was spared on this animation.  But it had all of the worst qualities of bad CGI:

• It looked fake.
• It had too many surreal, primary colors.
• It was hard to tell what was happening.
• It never gave me the impression that I was even looking at a real setting for the cars, let alone real cars.

I realize that all of this was intentional.  I just think it was all a mistake.

In the film's defense, it was very well-cast, and had some worthwhile human moments.  I loved Matthew Fox as Racer X.  And it had a couple of good hand-to-hand combat scenes.  But since the film started with, ended with, and all of its action hinged on the in-car racing action, the fact that none of those shots worked was unforgivable.

The critiques I saw suggested that this film was better than either of the two sequels to "The Matrix".  It wasn't.

After seeing this film, I am tempted to go back and watch the DVDs of the original series because its animation was so much better than that in the film.  How screwed up is that?!?

Two stars

For example, when astronomers were looking for large objects in the outer solar system in the early 20th century, this is how they did it: a telescope would take a long-term exposure on a photographic plate.  On a later night, another such long photographic exposure would be taken of the same tiny window of sky.  Then astronomers would meticulously, with their naked eyes, compare the plates from exposure to exposure, looking for one of the dots to have moved from plate 1 to plate 2.

By this painstaking process, the telescopic search for a new planet started in 1905 and Pluto was found in 1930.

The LSST will do this for hundreds, perhaps thousands of as-yet uncharted solar system objects, in under a year.  It does the same thing: take a photo of an expanse of sky, then take another photo of the same expanse at a later time.  However, since its exposures, using a new type of CCD (charged coupling device) camera, will last only 15 seconds, it can cover the entire visible sky in only three days!  In this way, it can literally take movies of the sky.  Computers can then search for moving objects, or people might even do so based on images of the same section of sky strung together like a movie.  (An example of using distributed human brain power to find stuff in images taken by automated means would be Stardust At Home.)

One of the most exciting aspects of this project is that the data will be made public immediately.  So for those of us who want to do make new discoveries using data from this telescope, instead of having to wait for a time-slice the way astronomers typically have to with big observatories, we can merely download the data (i.e. the pictures) for the sky segment and time-frame in which we are most interested and start analyzing as we see fit.

Applications go well beyond mere discovery of objects in the solar system (including objects that might one day collide with Earth, changing the course of life on our planet forever).  The data can also be used to discover and observe supernovae just after they occur, rather than relying on their occurrence when a large telescope happens to be pointed at them.  Physicists can use it to map the mysterious (and still theoretical, i.e. not directly observed) "dark matter" in the universe by its gravitational lensing effects.  The possibilities are more numerous than I can mention here.

The tricks will be figuring out how to select which data I want, how to download them, how to view them.  But those challenges aside, we're now in a world where I no longer need my own telescope to make astronomical discoveries.

It's enough to get an amateur astronomy fan like me all tingly inside!