Archis's Blog

My my, three blog entries in a single day and two more to follow. I’m on a roll here. The reason is that lots of projects are now switching from planning and design into implementation phase. My Ph.D. applications are in full swing and lots of other developments happening in life very fast this week. Gotta blog it all for future reference.

Anyways, back to the topic. We live in the IT industry. This is our life. And the industry is a winner-take-all system.

Please understand that in IT there are no half-way measures. There are three rules on which the game is based:

1. It has to work – nobody gives a damn about philosophy or principles. MAKE IT WORK! Don’t show me your face if it doesn’t work.

2. I have to be able to use it: If I have to depend on too many gurus or wierdoes, I don’t use it. Better use Windows that I can handle instead of Linux that I need to depend on Gurus to handle for me (doesn’t seem like much freedom when they begin talking).

3. If my friends are using it, then I’ll buy it: This is common. Software cannot be tested like cars. I won’t trust anything until someone else trusts it.

This is how the industry works. This is how mentality works. Mark my words on this – if and when Linux becomes the dominant OS on the Desktop, it will become the dominant OS on _all_ desktops. The IT world moves like a flock of pigeons. There won’t be a gradual transition.

Remember wordperfect? Everyone I knew used it in the early ’90′s. Then came MS Word. Everyone I knew used it. Everyone I knew used Lotus 1-2-3. Then everyone used Excel. Everyone used QBasic. Everyone used C. Everyone used VB. That’s how the world works. If your product adheres to the above three rules better than any other product, _everyone_ uses it. If it falls short, nobody uses it.

If we try to change the rules of the game, them we lose. Look at CSLinux. It was popular so long as it was Fedora-based. It ahered to the three rules above. Then came the philosophical people who moved it to Ubuntu for no reason (and even while admitting that Fedora boots up much faster, and GNOME runs deadly fast). Now, nobody is using CSLinux. And due to the low usage, volunteers don’t work since the release cycles aren’t justified anymore.

I’m going to push for a move back to Fedora. I don’t care about philosophy. I will deliver a product that works. End of story!

The Chronicles of Narnia! Of course! In all the book-to-movie translations that I’ve seen so far, this one comes really close. It’s actually perfect. There wasn’t ONE SINGLE suggesstion I could have made to change the movie to reflect the book any better.

You can read my really long review about this, but the fact is that they really did not make it more Hollywood-ish like the Harry Potter books were made when turned into movies. Narnia is just what it was supposed to be. No changing of spell names, no changing of characters and preserving the basic theme.

Most of you will criticize me that the Harry Potter books were way bigger than the Narnia books – and this is true – the Narnia books are possibly one-fourth the size of the smallest harry potter book. But it’s about the basic theme. There’s that internal gut feeling that you get. The Narnia movie completely portrays _what_ it’s all about – the whole concept of the Narnian world, the concept of the books, the principals behind the story. The Harry Potter books are great – they have this element.

The movies, however, are pure entertainment. I mean, for people like me, that was the major downer in LOTR. I’m a guy who wants a strong story line, a strong underlying principle, and if you can cram them in, loads of special effects. But a compromise in the story’s weight to increase battle scenes or to have Harry fighting dragons and all just doesn’t impress me. I like dialogs. I like philosophy. I like to see characters in challenging situations, as humans where they must use their brains, their courage, their wit, their personna to escape. That’s what books are all about. The Narnia movies did a great job of it. I feel Prizoner of Azkaban is the best HP movie so far – a really great one where the story is kept strong.