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Kingdom of Heaven

Year: 2005

Director: Ridley Scott

Kingdom of heaven

Kingdom of Heaven tries to provide a glimpse into the era of crusades. It is a tale of a blacksmith who chooses to serve the christian king of Jersulam and in the process acheives knighthood. Directed by Ridley Scott whose Gladiator was a huge hit.

Orlando Bloom looks more comfortable while digging wells to prosperity out of his dry land, than when he faces the enemies in the battlefield. The doomed king of Jerusalam, who is a leper, King’s sister who falls in love with Orlando .. and a few other characters make the movie interesting.

The movie which goes in snails pace in the first half and turns interesting in the later half. It really catches every one’s attention when they decide to assemble the army and proceed to lanuch an assault on the Muslims.

Orlando who decided to stay back to protect the city of Jerusalem and it’s people finally after a valiant fight negotiates and surrenders Jerusalem to stop the bloodshed. The battle scenes are shot brilliantly but not the best. We have seen better war movies. The background score for the movie is not bad.

With some nice Camera work, locations and some special effects, the overall package makes an interesting watch. The movie runs for more than two hours.

Posted in Movies.


The return of the Ashes

Ashes UrnThe Ashes series for a long time now was a boring one-sided affair. Every year the British used to talk about why their current side are the favourites to win the series that year. But in the end the Aussies used to win the series relatively easily.

But this year the likes of Flintoff, Vaughn, Jones and others in the current English team are proving too much for the Aussies to handle. What an exciting series this year’s Ashes has been so far.

Today is the first day of the final test. With the Aussies striving hard to deny the English team the Ashes Urn, this test has started with a bang. The momentum has already fluctuated to both the sides. If the first session belong to the England team, the Australians bounced back strongly with quick four wickets by Shane Warne.

But Strauss has played a very vital knock with support from Freddie Flintoff. As I write this Strauss(116*) has already completed his century and Flintoff(71*) is fast approaching his century. Just struck a Warne ball for a six.

With England score at 269/4 the match is now interestingly poised. The England team have less pressure at the moment. The Aussie skipper Ponting has alreay shown some nerves with his talks about the captaincy.

The frontpage in today’s Evening Standard reads “Shamed Warne – Aussie star forced to open his bags as he sets off store alarms”.

The best thing from this series is that it has made the youngsters in this country to turn on the tune into Cricket for the first time. I now have a few more friends who talk about Cricket nowadays. It will not be surprising if you look at the recent performances of the English football team.

Posted in Sports.


WordPress 1.6

Just took a few minutes to upgrade this WordPress instance to the latest development version. The new admin interface is too cool that I can’t wait to start using it.

WP 1.6 when it comes out can only be much better than what I see in the current development branch.

Posted in General, Open source.


Minimally Invasive Education

Hole in the wall

Children in groups will learn on their own with little or no input from others, provided the learning environment induces an adequate level of curiosity. This is the hypothesis behind the successful experiment “Hole in the Wall”.

What would happen if we provide poor illiterate children from the slum areas with unrestricted access to computer? How will they react?

Dr. Sugata Mitra the man behind the executed his plan by cutting a hole in his wall and exposing a computer to the children through this hole.

To every one’s surprise the children developed a curiosity within 30 minutes and started experimenting with the computer and soon they taught themselves how to use the computer. The children learnt basic PC operations like opening a folder, opening files, using paintbrush – all by themselves. All of a sudden one child will discover something and then it will share the finding with other children.

What is really amazing is most of these children are illiterate and they can’t even read english. The user interface for the PCs were are all in English and not in any of the local (Indic) languages.

Amazing research .. is n’t it? This experiment not only gives us a few pointers on taking education to poor and under-privileged masses, but also makes me ponder why some studnets in the University are struggling?

Posted in India.


Satellite images – Before and after Katrina

Globalsecurity.org – Satellite Imagery of New Orleans(link)

Posted in General.


Movies.. Movies..

I have never been a serious blogger. I do blog only when I feel to. So it is not surprising that I am not updating my blogs frequently.

In fact, there were three-four nights in the last month when I sat down and started scribbling somthing for the blog, but then decided not to post them.

Off late I am watching a lot of movies. Not counting all the tamil movies that I usually watch, I am watching a lot of new hollywood releases.. at the rate of atleast one movie every week. Most of them pretty boring.

Among those movies that I watched in the last two months, these are my top 5 choices.

* Crash
* Dark Water
* Wedding Crashers
* Sin City
* Mr & Mrs Smith

’40 Year old virgin’ was just OK. The movie started well, but there was a long patch in the later half when it started boring. I expected this movie to be of more fun than this. ‘Dukes of Hazard’ to me was more entertaining than this.

The next movie on my list is ‘Red-Eye’. I hope to watch it sometime this week.

Posted in Essence.


Fans Vs Fanatics

OSS Fans Vs Fanatics – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/16/fotw_1608/

Posted in General.


Photoblog

I am currently playing with Pixelpost for photoblogging. The photoblog is online at http://www.navakrish.com/photoblog/.

Posted in General.


Explosion on London Underground

Several hurt in ‘Tube explosion’

At this moment no one knows what is really going on. It looks like London’s underground network is completely closed. There are news of multiple blast in London Underground, people injured in Liverpool Street station, and explosions in three buses.

Telegraph – Walking wounded after blast Underground

Financial Express – Explosions cause caos

Updates:

– British Transport Police said the incident, reported at at 8.49am on the Metropolitan Line between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, was thought to have been caused by a collision between two trains, a power cut or a power cable exploding.
– Union: ‘Explosive device’ on Tube

– 20 deaths have been confirmed – says LBC radio.

Update: 11:20

Listening to BBC radio… The Police has a very short but clear message for the people in London.

– Please stay whereever you are. The whole of London Transport is in stand still at the moment.
– Do not call emergency unless if it is an emergency situation.

Posted in General.


Being wise

“A clever person solves a problem.
A wise person avoids it.” — Einstein

“Craziness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.” — Tom DeMarco

Posted in So they said.