Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

A couple of months ago I was pontificating about, among other things, how UMD movies were failing in the marketplace, and how I believed it was purely due to the poor price point. Well, I was in Future Shop last weekend, and it turns out they have a bunch of UMDs on sale for $8.99, and not only are some of them not crap, they even ones I'm interested in. I'd call nine bucks cheap enough that I'm willing to bite, so I bought Robots and X-Men. I've only watched a little of Robots so far, but I'm pretty impressed by the disc. It has a couple of previews, extras, subtitles and even the French soundtrack (it's the Canadian release). That's pretty much what I'd expect on a DVD.

As it turns out, they're all Twentieth Century Fox releases. I don't know how they came to be priced so reasonably, but I'm not going to complain. Of course, even at $9 I'm not going to buy just anything - some of the stuff on UMD is truly terrible (well, IMHO anyway), but as long as they're putting out some decent animation or sci-fi at reasonable prices I'll probably continue to buy.

TV Gem #1: Ben 10

I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons. Back in those days there was no cable, at least not where I was. We didn't even have a proper antenna, just "rabbit ears". I remember getting up at the crack of dawn and spending most of the morning fiddling with that antenna trying to get a decent picture from some station just south of the border (I grew up just a couple of miles north of the US border so I actually had a decent chance of getting something). It wasn't that there was nothing good on the Canadian stations, because often there was (little did I know much of it was just older stuff from the US) but being a young boy I was more interested in action-y shows than comedy.

As I grew older, animation (can't call them "cartoons" any more as it has the connotation that they're just for kids) was harder to find. The Simpsons didn't have their own show yet, but I did discover Robotech. This show seemed to be made for me. The animation quality was amazing, it had a real story, and characters actually died (none of this robot-plane or ejecting from helicopters crap). Only years later did I find out the true roots of the show, and that got me hooked on anime.

Ever since, I've kept my eyes open for weird little TV shows and movies. Sometimes these shows are domestic, like Titan A.E., and sometimes not, like Kaena. They don't even have to be animated - The Returner is a load of fun. There is so much out there that's not North-American produced-for-the-masses that I can't hope to keep up.

Luckily, that's where Chuck comes in. Chuck runs On Location, the first video rental place in Winnipeg to rent only DVDs (the store opened when Blockbuster still rented only VHS tapes). Chuck doesn't carry 50 copies of the latest releases - he might have five if he thinks it will really move. What he does have is an awesome collection of older titles, and an even more awesome collection of independent and foreign titles. If I walk in and say "Hey Chuck, I want to watch something weird" he's always got something. Most recently, he put me on to Nightwatch and Daywatch - Russian vampire movies. If you have seen Ultraviolet and liked the bit with motorcycle (you know the bit I mean) you should definitely check out Daywatch - there's a very similar scene with an RX-8. I don't know who got the idea first, but I'm sure that one inspired the other (at least for that scene). The weird thing is, I can't seem to find a mention of this anywhere on the 'net. Can it really be that no one else has made the connection?

This is all a very roundabout way of getting the my latest find: Ben 10. I can't believe how cool this show is. Follow that link and read about it. Watch it on Cartoon Network if you're in the US, or Teletoon here in Canada. Just watch it. When I saw the ads I was intrigued, but I figured it would likely be a "kid gets super powers and has to hide them from everybody". Nope. Ben has an alien device glom onto him and the first thing he does is run screaming for Grandpa. Maybe he suddenly matures to become the responsible steward of his newly-acquired powers? Heck no, he uses them to play pranks on his geeky cousin. Ben's still a 10-year-old kid, and he acts like one more often than not. I love it. It's a great blend of humour and action. I think this is one of the best animated shows I've seen since Cybersix.

Taking the Evening Off

On the off-chance that there's been a sudden in-flux of readers from mytinker, there may not be a wmamp/WMA11b update tonight. I'm getting together with a friend for an evening of junk-food, video games and with any luck Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Yes, I do in fact have other interests besides hacking - hacking the WMA11b just so happens to be the most blog-able.

I'm hoping that while I am out uClibc buildroot will run to completion and I will have a cross-compiling uClibc environment when I get back. If I do, I'm skeptical that I will be able to wait until tomorrow before I start trying to rebuild wmamp's support libraries and ultimately wmamp itself. Note to others who may try to follow this path: make sure that bash is your login shell, or the build process will fail. I could probably have had this working days ago if I wasn't so enamored of tcsh (no link, because as much as I love it, I don't want to hose someone else).

Finding the Root Cause

Like every other programmer, I spend a lot of time debugging. One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn is the value of finding the root cause. Put simply, the root cause is the bug in the program. Sounds easy enough, find the bug and fix it. But unless a program is very simple, the observed bug and the true bug may not be the same. The difference here is the difference between a stuffy nose and a cold. The observed problem is that you can't breathe easily because your nose isn't clear, but the real problem is a virus in your body. You can take something to clear up your nose, but it won't make your cold go away any faster.

There's a similar principle that is taught in first year psychology: if you perform an experiment, and you see a correlation between the two variables you are testing, the first reaction is to say that one causes the other. For example, let's say that a survey indicates that people who own pets also recover faster from heart surgery. The first conclusion one might draw from this is that having something to care for is motivating these people to get better. And this might be true, but what if there is a third factor that causes these people to heal faster and also have an affinity for pets - perhaps they are just more active in general than people who do not own pets. The only way to find out is to construct another experiment to that will eliminate other possible causes.

Finding the root cause can be hard, and it's made no easier when there's pressure (like a deadline) to get it fixed. It can be very tempting to slap a bandage on the problem and just fix the symptoms. My experience, however, has been that when this is done the bug invariably comes back again and again, appearing as different symptoms until you finally find the root cause and fix the real bug.

The whole "root cause" thing seems to be pretty popular in the scientific world. I have to wonder if it could be applied to other different fields of endeavour, like oh, I don't know, the business world perhaps.

About a month ago there was a flurry of articles about how Sony's UMD movie format was failing. Wal-mart is dropping them and studios are releasing fewer titles on UMD because for the most part they aren't selling (comedies are apparently the exception). I've heard a number of reasons for this: UMD only plays on the PSP and holding a PSP for two hours while watching a movie makes your arms sore are just two of the more common complaints. It's obvious that the former is true, and I've watched Spider-Man 2 on my PSP, so I can confirm from personal experience that the latter can also be true. But are these really the reasons why people aren't buying UMDs? I suppose it's possible, but then how does one explain the success of "Video Now!" and "Juicebox"? Unless you have kids (or nieces, nephews, etc), you may not be familiar with these products. Both of them are personal video players for kids. The screens are low-res (I don't think they're even 320x240), and the quality of the video is pretty bad. But, both of them retail for about $50, and the media is $5-10. And what can you get to watch on them? Well, they're for kids, so big surprise, it's mostly cartoons. Both have been around for a couple of years, they both use media that doesn't play on anything else, and they are apparently quite popular. So Sony wasn't really doing anything new. Mattel and Hasbro did it first, and seem to be making money at it.

Sony has outlined a two-part plan to try to revive UMD. Part 1: sell a device that allows you to hook up your PSP to your TV so you can watch your UMDs on "the big screen". Part 2: bundle the UMD and DVD for about $10 more than the DVD. IMHO, the TV adapter treats a symptom. If I want to watch a movie on my TV I'll just get the DVD so I can have surround sound, subtitles, commentary and other extras. Bundling is a good idea, but Sony's flubbed the execution. All the bundles coming out are movies that have already been released on DVD, and so anything I'm interested in I already own. Also, the "bundling" seems to be just shrinking-wrapping the DVD and UMD cases together. I was hoping for a single DVD case that held both. Will either of these things keep UMD a going concern? I suppose they might help, but I'm skeptical that they can turn it into a roaring, or even niche, success.

So if the various complaints Sony is trying to address are just the symptoms, what is the root cause? I have an idea, inspired by Hasbro and Mattel: UMD is perfectly viable if it's a good value. If the functionality is limited, the price should be as well. There's nothing wrong with discs that play only on the PSP, but they shouldn't cost as much as (never mind more than) a DVD. At $10 I'd be buying them, even if I already owned the DVD. As for the arm thing, well, I've seen an eight-year-old hold a Video Now! box (that weighs at least twice what the PSP weighs) for hours. If they can do it, so can I. Funny thing too - I don't think I've read a single comment about how hard it is to hold a PSP for two hours while playing a game.