Monthly Archives: December 2005

Kong is King at the Movies

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If you haven’t seen it yet, go see King Kong. It is a tribute to old-school captivating movies that take you away into a different world. A remake of the famous classic was a big feat, and although we’ve all seen remakes done before (and poorly, at that) I think this remake was really something special.

What made me happy was to see a fresh and seamless use of today’s special effects. Jackson was able to integrate some cutting-edge graphics without spoiling the realism or flow of the story.

I think the use of these effects was responsible and well done, because I often see today’s directors choosing to scenes just for the effects instead of using effects to improve an already great scene.

The characters are palpable, and are built well over the course of the movie, which is about 3 hours. Yes, three hours. A bit long, you might say, but if you stop and look back at all the truly great classics, they are all longer than 90, even 120 minutes.

It’s probably because the theatrical epic needs to have substance. It is a journey that should take you out of your world for longer than just 90 minutes. It’s a movie that is long, but doesn’t seem long, and when it is over you are a little sad that your journey has ended.

Overall, King Kong was a tribute to the epics — great movies like Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Casablanca — because it has brought back imagination to the big screen that has recently been suffering a complete lack of ingenuity in the wake of rapid special effects advancements.

I’d like to see more movies coming out like this one. It reminded me of how far our imagination can take us, and that’s something we should always appreciate and cherish.

A giant ape has feelings too. It takes a great director to show it.

College Basketball Doesn’t Measure Up to the NBA

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The NBA is the best basketball league in the world. It’s primetime, best-of-show, extreme, nail-biting, you name it. It tries to make basketball what it was supposed to be: exciting.

You might disagree. You might enjoy little league, high school or college games more for some reason. But not me. Give me a good NBA game and I’m happy. Here some reasons why:

  • Arguably the best overall athletes in professional sports. NBA players are tall, quick, strong and intelligent (most of them — on the court anyway).
  • Traditional rivalries. They go way back, I guess you get this in college, too. But come on – Lakers vs. Celtics? Bulls vs. Pistons? That is what legends are made of.
  • One-on-one battles between great players. Defensive matchups between a great defender and great offensive talent are often seen on a nightly basis. It is hard to have these marquee matchups when you’re playing a box-and-one or 2-3 zone.
  • No boring zone defense. Defenders have to be better at one-on-one assignments, and have to be smarter during rotations. Teams have to be smarter about who they commit to, and they pay a price for overloading and picking on one particular player.
  • Shorter shot clocks. Seriuosly, 35 seconds to run a play? The NFL has twice the players on each team and it only takes them 25.
  • No three-point shooting contests. No zone means players get guarded on the perimeter more closely. Teams don’t play four-courners and end up chucking threes all game because the defense is plugging the lane.
  • Three-pointers are actually worth three points. Instead of the traditional 20-foot 3-point line that was introducted in 1961 by the American Basketball League (ABA), the NBA now has a 22 foot perimeter. Because of the 2-foot increase, the shot is a low-enough percentage that it is used as an additional weapon, not the main focus of today’s offenses. In contrast, college games are typically decided at the 3-point line because of its relative closeness. For example, Illinois hoisted over 40 3-point attempts in the 2005 NCAA Finals.
  • Post-up moves? Hook shots? Pick and rolls? Three reasons why college basketball lacks some of the fundamentals. Zone defenses put a strangle hold on all three.
  • Better refs. They make more money, they are professionals, and they miss less calls.
  • Better coaching. Plays, defensive and offensive, that have been proven at the college level or elsewhere in the NBA to be effective. No standing around looking listless. The troops have a more capable general.

Now don’t get me wrong. A great college game is as good as a great NBA game. But what I won’t agree with is saying that _overall_ college basketball is way better than NBA. That’s bullshit. In my mind there is no comparison. March Madness, yes, I think it is awesome — but the fact remains — there is definitely a lot of shitty basketball being played every week around the country, and it’s pretty sad.

Here are some reasons why people hate the NBA:

  • Illegal defense? You don’t even understand the whole point of it. First off, illegal defense no longer exists, and hasn’t for over 4 years. The NBA board realized that the rule was hurting basketball and it was rescinded at the beginning of the ’01-’02 season. The only standing rule that regulates defenses is the defensive 3-second rule that prevents defenders from sitting in the paint for longer than 3 seconds when they are not guarding an opponent. The violation is hardly ever called.
  • Egos, which don’t really matter to me when it comes to great basketball. So the guy is a punkass? So what, sometimes a baller just schools your honor student. Get over it and tell them to practice more.
  • Over-hyped? What isn’t?
  • Other rules and regulations? You probably haven’t read the rulebook, so this probably isn’t a good point for you.

Why college games tend to piss me off:

  • It sucks having to watch inexperienced players make mistakes I wouldn’t make. Some college players are just that dumb.
  • I don’t like watching guys who made the team “just because they were tall”.
  • I hate watching a good team suffer because they have a first-time crappy coach who doesn’t know what a pick is, or doesn’t know how to run a defense that is anything but a 3-2 zone.
  • Defenses cheat. They sit back, don’t guard the three, and most of the time rely on the fact that college players can’t shoot threes very well, which leads us to…
  • Three point contests. Sooner or later a team realizes the other team is sitting back, and they give it to their best shooters and just chuck threes all game instead of trying to play basketball. Or, they lack the ability to play real basketball and are satisfied with throwing up 40 3-point attempts.
  • Flukes. In the round of 64, believe it or not, sometimes the best team doesn’t win. The NBA playoffs keep flukes from happening. There are no cinderellas, just great teams who deserve a championship.

You know, in the end, it’s about the game. I personally don’t give a shit about who likes what, and I don’t necessarily believe that the NBA is better in all aspects. I think it’s more fun to watch, and that’s my opinion. Just don’t count out the NBA when you don’t really understand what it’s about or fully recognize the difference between the two leagues.

Overall, though, give me a good ball game that is well played and I don’t care about where the line is, who is coaching, or what silly rules there are. I’m happy, because all things aside, on most nights, the best team usually does win.

Rulebooks are interesting to read. More people should try it sometime.

AMO Year-end Summary

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During the Firefox Summit, there was a lot of healthy discussion regarding the immediate future of addons.mozilla.org (AMO). We came up with a solid plan and timeline for top-priority items. The general idea is:

  • Split public and admin pages into two separate appliations.
  • Re-use core libraries, store them in a separate place in CVS.
  • After the rewritten public site is re-launched in January, start development on admin CRUD pages and inremental rewrite of all developer tools.
  • Profit! (just kidding)

random picture

The topics covered in the AMO breakout session ranged from standing problems, project overview, and additional resources needed to improve progress. I think it was a valuable discussion. Mostly I was happy that people recognized the importance of AMO. I left the room with a much better feeling about the future of the project (and also the knowledge that I need to work on my public speaking skills).

That said, I’d like to talk about why AMO is actually so important, because I don’t think everyone truly understands how vital it is to Firefox and Thunderbird, and consequently the entire Mozilla Foundation and Corporation.

It comes down to feature coverage, really. Most projects can hit 70-80% of the core feature requests. Firefox or Thunderbird don’t differ from this norm — Mozilla as an organization can only get so much done until they have to make the decision on where to draw the line for the next release. At some point project managers have to say, “Ok, these features are the most important and they will be what we focus on. These other ones will be slated for the next release, or whenever we get to it.”

And it’s not something unique to Mozilla — it happens everyday in projects across the world. The key, though, is managing what happens to the other 20-30% of the features. You might want to read a Wired article passed to me by Scott Kveton called The Long Tail — it explains the concept in more detail.

Successful projects today realize the value in developing for the developer — empowering the community to improve the application on their own. And I think that so far we have hit the tip of the iceberg in terms of getting a return on the ingenuity and open-mindedness of the general community.

We are already seeing a trend in more popular projects like Flickr or Google Maps where these services kick ass and deliver some awesome features just out-of-the-box, but what makes these apps _really_ special is their APIs. It’s also what makes Firefox and Thunderbird so special.

Coming down the pipe we are starting to see uses of these APIs that are mind blowing. With Katrina we saw an interesting use of the Google Maps API to report area status updates in Louisiana. On AMO we have seen some awesome extensions that have actually been integrated into 1.5 because they were so, “Duh, we should have done that from the beginning”.

For Mozilla, AMO is the playground for the determined user to do their thing and get exactly what they want to get out of their web browser or email client. It covers the extra 20-30% and best of all it benefits the product, the community, and the world (yeah, melodramatic, I know) by improving an already sound base of features.

Over the past year I’ve developed an appreciation for the importance of AMO. I’ve learned about its challenges, all the players involved, and hopefully we’ve come up with a solid plan for 2006. I’d like to see us provide a better tool for the community to develop, submit and distrubute great ideas. With that in place, Firefox and Thunderbird will continue to have a community-centric family of extensions that sets them apart from all competitors.

Oooh. Shiny.