Movies: Truth in cinema or Cinematic truth?

Three weeks elapsed without blogging. Admittedly blogging is an innovative modern way of expressing ones inner feelings. Even three weeks is a long period without it. I thought of writing about some good movies I watched over last few years. I am not a fan of typical Hollywood model of movies. They usually try to tell some serious story with lot of puzzles in the middle. All those puzzles are solved in the logical ending (if the movie is GOOD in Hollywood standards). On another side we have Bollywood movies that are complete entertainment packages containing glamor, action, horror, romance, humor, etc. Both models are well suited for today's consumer-centric world where a movie is a product consumed by people who expect a thrilling experience in return for their money.

However, there is a totally different third model of movies developed particularly in Europe and Iran. Few less popular Hollywood movies also fall into this category. While still being consumer products under the capitalist economy these movies are significantly different from Hollywood and Bollywood movies since they are not made to be entertainment packages. If a typical Hollywood movie lover watches one of these movies he may blame the producers for wasting his money. Some common characteristics of these movies are long and silent scenes, illogical screenplay, irrational dialogs, unattractive characters,  less usage of music and technical gimmicks. This category has been my favorite for a long time.

When in Sri Lanka I watch movies either in the computer or in occasional film festivals (thanks to embassies that organize them). When I was in Sweden there were some theaters that showed only this type of movies and I made the maximum use of it. There were many good movies among these and like many other viewers I had my own criticism after watching each one. I only have a fake memory on them now. I try to assemble those broken pieces before forgetting them forever.

1. The Piano Teacher [Michael Haneke]

This is one of the best movies I ever watched. It's about a middle aged piano teacher with pervasive fantasies (well, we all got them, huh). She is unmarried and lives with her mother. She is an excellent musician and a tough teacher. On the other side of her life she maintains an absurd relationship with her mother and does many things that even a typical European woman would not do (such as going to watch erotic movies in public places). She gets paired with a handsome young student of her. After a certain period of this relationship she tells him that she needs him to humiliate her severely. The guy becomes sick after knowing this. 

2. Eyes Wide Shut [Stanley Kubrick]

This is a long great movie. An upper middle class american man jeopardizes his psychological balance after participating in a sex ceremony. The story is anti-logical and the plot contains many excellent symbolic meanings.

3. Dogville [Lars von Trier]

This is a very different movie. It revolves around the concept that people do not really need physical things to concretely stand for meanings. The complete movie is shot in a stage representing a village. Houses, roads, environment, etc in the village are represented by lines drawn on the stage. Actors play as if those lines are real things.

4. Last Days [Gus Van Sant]

Van Sant is a director who introduced a new type of movies into the world. His movies contain long still scenes with nothing significant happening. Scenes are not logically connected and in some places the same scene is shown many times in the perspectives of different people. You will not see a great story or enjoy a thrilling experience by watching his movies. It's only a unique cinematic experience. I have watched many of his movies and "Last Days" was the best of them. It is centered on the last days of the life of Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of the rock band Nirvana.

5. The Castle [Michael Haneke]

This movie is based on a novel with the same name by Franz Kafka. A person named "Mr. K" enters into a village with the intention of going to a nearby castle in which he got a new job. However, strangely he is not allowed to enter into the castle. The plot is full of his attempts to get into the castle. The events in the plot have absolutely no meaning. They are completely ridiculous. Like in all writings of Kafka, the story centers on the concept that all serious things in the world, at their roots, are purely ridiculous and meaningless.

6. Brown Bunny [Vincent Gallo]

This is another Van Sant type movie by a different director. The plot is about a guy who desperately tries to recover from a broken relationship (the reason is unclear). The director tries even to go beyond Van Sant in the screenplay. This is a movie full of emotions. A great one to watch after having a drink.

7. Crash [David Cronenberg]

Cronenberg is one of my favorite directors. I have watched many of his movies. Another good one is "M-Butterfly". But this one is unique. It's about a small cult in US where people experiment to find the greatest sexual pleasure. They assume that it should be similar to the feeling of a victim of a car crash just before death. They simulate reported car crashes and get injured too. They think that one needs an accident to feel the greatest sexual pleasure. In the last seen of the movie, a guy crashes his girlfriend's car deliberately to see whether he gets the "maximum sexual pleasure". However, he feels that this too is not the maximum pleasure. While having sex with his wounded girlfriend he says "May be the next time". Fatally this is what we also say after feeling that what we achieved at the end of a long chase is not the pleasure expected.

8. Children of Heaven [Majid Majidi]

This is a beautiful Iranian movie (a must watch in my standards) centered on children. A kid misplaces his little sister's only shoes which she is supposed to wear to school. They belong to a poor family and the kids are afraid to tell this to their father. The movie is about their struggle to handle the situation in their own way. This way, which makes us laugh and cry at times, is common to any child in the world I guess. The movie is beautifully plotted around a simple story. The beauty stems from the honesty of the film maker in bringing elements of humanity to the screen. Pedar (Father) and Baran (Rain) are two other very good movies by the same director that I can recommend.

9. The Girl in the Sneakers [Rasul Sadrameli]

This is another very nice Iranian movie I watched in a film festival. A girl belonging to a rich family in Iran gets friends with an interesting guy in school. He talks rebellious things that amaze the girl. She gets fascinated when he says that he hopes to walk to infinity someday. The girl is bored by her lonely life at home under strict rules by parents. She decides to leave her family and does that by escaping after the school one day. After a long journey with ugly experiences she finally manages to meet the guy. The things change after that. The guy tells that walking to infinity is easier said than done and begs that she goes back to her family. The guy who talked rebellious things looks far less brave than the docile girl who had guts to leave her rich family.

10. The Pervert's Guide to Cinema [Sophie Fiennes]
This is a documentary starring the well known philosopher Slavoj Zizek. He talks about masterpieces in world cinema by directors like Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kieslovsky, Hitchcock and Lynch. His psychoanalytic perspective is superb and is several levels beyond the ideas of conventional critics. It's an enlightening 2 1/2 hours. He formulates the idea that cinematic masterpieces try to bring a cinematic truth which is unique to cinema rather than trying to represent an already existing truth in the everyday world. 

Bolero: The beauty of repetition

Some time back I got the opportunity to work in Goteborg (Gothenburg in English) which is the second largest city in Sweden. I was amazed by the rich culture of the city and was used to go to some event everyday after work with the intention of exploring the city as much as possible. Goteborg opera house was one of my favorite places. I watched about 10 shows in it. One of them was a ballet named 3xBollero. It comprised 3 dance performances to Ravel's Bolero. I particularly liked the third performance which was called "Episode 17" choreographed by Alexander Ekman. I guess other two performances were too advanced for me to grasp. It was the first time I listened to Bolero and I started liking it. 

Bolero is a orchestral work by Maurice Ravel which is known to be ultimately romantic. Special thing about it is that it repeats the same short theme over and over again. Instead of a complicated long theme we hear the same piece repeating in different melodies. Each repetition adds a new color to the work and the listener does not get bored by the recurrence. I do not know much about music and I can describe my feeling as "A masterpiece highlighting the beauty of fine details of a simple thing using repetition". Bolero is said to be inspired by a painting created by Valentin Serov (Painting is the one in the beginning of the article).  A brilliant performance of Bolero is available here:

In the modern world we get continuously bombarded with lot of stuff and usually are not given a chance to stop and look at something closely. Repetition is regarded as waste of time and people always ask for "new" things. We have been trained for fast moving TV screens for a long time. However, my experience is that I need some time to feel or understand something properly; even a really simple thing. I get emotionally attached with a thing only after keep looking at it for a long time. The same goes with problem solving too. I solve a math or engineering problem only when I have the patience to think about it repetitively for 100 times. After the same problem revolves in the head for a prolonged period, the patterns associated with it  and the very reasons that made it a problem start emerging. After this stage the solution appears like a obvious one that should have been uncovered in the first see.

My opinion is that the overwhelming amount of data we get exposed to does more harm than it helps. Serious encounter with anything needs close attention and patience. Works like Bolero just remind this fact to us who are compelled to run with gigabyte speeds.

Did somebody say "It Depends"?

In a toast masters club, there is a role named "Ah Counter". The duty of this person is to listen carefully to the speakers during a session and mark the gap filler words and sounds that appear between meaningful phrases. They call them "clutch words". It includes sounds and words like "Ah", "Um", "So", "but", etc. In addition, if the speaker habitually puts words such as "kind of", "sort of", "you know", etc everywhere they are also regarded as clutch words. After the speech, Ah Counter provides a report of the number of clutch words uttered by a speaker. This helps a speaker to identify the most frequent clutch words used by him (mostly unknowingly) and to put a conscious effort during next speech to minimize them. I know that this feedback approach helps greatly from my experience. I was surprised by the high clutch word count reported regarding my initial speeches in the toast masters program (conducted in our company) because I did not utter any of them intentionally. However, after being cautious about them I was able to reduce the number significantly. During my last prepared speech I uttered only one or two clutch words.

Toast masters community says that the clutch word count is an indicator of the preparedness of a speech. The argument is that a speaker will tend to put those words to fill in gaps in his speech while thinking about the next thing to say if he is not well prepared. This is a sound argument and I realized the truth in it after noticing that I always get a significantly higher clutch word count in my unprepared speeches (there is a separate session in toast masters for quick topics) than I get in prepared ones. Almost every speaker in the club exhibited an improvement in clutch word usage throughout the program indicating that they are preparing better for speeches and are becoming better public speakers.

I think there is another meaning to the clutch word count too. In my opinion, a speaker may use a gap filler word like "kind of" or "sort of" when he is not sure about what he is saying. This form of clutch words can appear even in written forms like articles. For example, I used the term "gap filler words" in the beginning of the article when introducing clutch words. If I was not certain about the appropriateness of that term I would have written "sort of gap filler words". Ideally what I should have done in such a doubtful situation is to put some extra effort to verify the appropriateness of the term or to find a better alternative term. Instead of doing that I hide this uncertainty inside the term "sort of" so that I am not responsible even if the term that follows is not a good fit. This is none other than cheating. I am cheating to the listener or to the reader by concealing my laziness. After getting to know about clutch words, I noticed that many of my previous speeches and writings exploited this cheat trick and everyday I see other speakers and writers doing the same thing. The general rule is that if you use terms like "kind of" and "sort of" unnecessarily you really do not know what you are saying.

We all have heard people using the term "it depends" during technical discussions. Some of them put it in the beginning of every fact they talk about particularly when answering questions. Is there any meaning to this term whatsoever? As a listener, I already know that "it depends". Specifically I know that everything in the world depends on something else. I do not need to read Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" to understand it. What the heck is the need for a speaker to utter this term? I guess the reason is the same as mentioned in the previous paragraph. They say "it depends" because they do not really know what they are talking about. After saying "it depends" one can say anything. He is shielded from any criticism or questioning on what he says because he dilutes it with the first two words and hence does not stand for it. I suggest to regard "it depends" as a clutch word in technical speeches. It is okay to be used when the dependency really counts where the speaker is responsible for explaining each dependency and its effect.

The toast masters program helped me to get rid of unnecessary words in public speaking and to identify unprepared and dishonest speakers (and writers). I hope this article helped you, the reader, to be cautious about this. Your feedback is much appreciated. So please use the Comments section.

Breain teasers

Here are two interesting problems I came across recently. Take my words; they are worth giving a try. You might not come up with a correct answer quickly. The key is to keep on trying and never to give up. Providing this sort of exercises to the brain from time to time is a very good practice particularly to fight against decline of thinking power with aging.

(1) The problem of circles

I read this problem in a web site. It is really interesting. The challenge is to find the maximum number of closed regions that can be formed by overlapping a given number of equal sized circles. Each region that counts must fall within at least one circle. The answer for the case with two circles is obvious; we can form 3 regions. It doesn't even deserve a pictorial illustration. 3 circles is also a pretty simple case. It is shown in the picture in the beginning of the article. The result is 7 regions. What about the case with 4 circles? Now the problem is getting more challenging. However, I guess anyone with average thinking ability can come up with the answer after few minutes of brainstorming. The answer is illustrated below.

What we have done is placing the forth circle between the 3 circles in the orientation for the previous case. The result is 13 regions. However, there's a little problem. How can one be certain that this is the orientation yielding the maximum number of regions? 13 is the correct answer in this case, but how can we prove that it is?

We clearly observe that the difficulty of the problem problem grows exponentially with the number of circles. Furthermore we do not have a proof even if we come up with a decent solution. The issue is that the ad hoc thinking we used for the simple cases just do not work when the problem gets more complex. Ad hoc methods generally do not generate proofs either. The problem asks us to come out of the frame and think smarter to arrive at an enlightening solution. Can we do it? Yes, it is possible. All one needs to do is to defeat the inertia to engage in thinking and continue with willpower. 

Here we go...My challenge is: What is the maximum number of regions that can be formed by overlapping 10 circles?

(2) The problem of Aluminium plates

This is a practical engineering problem. One of my friends who works in an Aluminium factory came up with this question regarding a problem encountered in their day to day operations. They get fairly big square shaped Aluminium plates and are asked to cut rectangular pieces of various sizes out of them. The requests come at different times so they do not know the sizes of all the pieces they need to cut from a single square. When they get a request for an Aluminium piece, they cut it from one of many available half cut Aluminium squares by guessing the best one to cut from. When few pieces are cut from a square it might look like this.

At a given time our friends have many plates with this type of shapes. The pieces are always cut with parallel edges to that of the initial square. Therefore there are no slant cuts. After a square is consumed to a level that is no more usable (no pieces with a given minimum size can be cut from the remainder) they add it to a recycling phase where those remainders are melted to make new squares. Understandably, this melting process is quite costly and optimum usage of an Aluminium square before recycling will definitely save them a good amount of money. Therefore the problem is to come up with a systematic way (an algorithm..forget this word if you are not a computer engineer) to cut pieces from Aluminium squares in an optimal way.

We can formulate the problem like this. Given all the shapes of remaining Aluminium squares and the size of the rectangular piece to cut, how to find the best square to cut from and the best place in it to cut the piece? Remember that figuring out the optimality criteria is also a part of the solution. After all what our friends in the Aluminium factory need is to cut more pieces from squares.

I will post my analysis and solutions to these problems in a later post. Until then, happy thinking.

My challenge for new year

I have just finished a workout and feel fresh and energized after the shower. During the workout, a question was stuck in my mind. What will happen to my health program during the next two weeks? The biggest festival in Sri Lanka falls next week. It is called the Sinhala new year (or "Sinhala Avurudu") which is aligned with an astrologically significant event. Everybody goes on leave for at least one week and it's party season. Everybody wears a new cloth in the auspicious time and follows certain rituals in an astrologically determined time. The intention is to renovate relationships with family, relatives and friends whom you might not have met for quite a time.

Well...No festival is complete without exotic food. Sinhala new year too is celebrated with lot of sweets that are unique to the season. Some of them are unique to areas as well. The good (or, may be the BAD) thing is that everyone gets unlimited access to all these food during the whole season. Let it be home, office, filling station or may be even the gym (he he). Food is exchanged between households so that everyone tastes every flavor. People wait for this season to fill their appetite with this fascinating collection of foods. My favorite is "Mun Kevum" which is made with flour, sugar and oil; a deadly combination..he he. In each season I usually eat more than 100 of it.

The problem is the conflict with my usual food discipline which is a part of my health program. Lot of oily sweets means lot of fat. I really don't want to end up jeopardizing all my long term health achievements during a period of two weeks. However, missing the exotic food doesn't sound like a smart option too because this is the only period to have them. Tom Venuto's (visit http://www.burnthefatblog.com for his excellent health blog which greatly helped me in shaping my health program) "Christmas Challenge" came to my mind when thinking about this. Recalling it, his main point was something like "extra effort to burn the extra fat". This is apparently a smarter approach since it doesn't ask you to be a food fanatic during the party season. Rather the advice is to account for the extra fat intake during the burning phase. Simply put, one has to do more exercise during festival seasons. 

Ok...The ask is...More exercises please. I do not get intimidated by that because I enjoy most workouts. I need to plan for more workouts for the coming weeks. Usually I do workout for about 5 days a week. Now I have to target 7 days a week, and more than one session per day when possible (Aim for the moon, that way, even if you miss you'll still be amongst the stars! - W. Clement). One target of writing this article is to put more pressure on my self to stick to this discipline. Something in written form is more effective than a thought, isn't it? Even more effective is when you write it in a public place. Now I'm accountable. I think one more thing I can try is eating only the foods that I'm crazy about and keep my self away from others. It might help to keep the damage within accountable limits.

I'm ready for the season. I will pamper my taste buds with the exoticness of new year food and will stay more active to compensate. Welcome new year!!    

If you don't swim, you miss!!

I'm trying to write an inspirational story. It is based on a recent experience of mine. I stole my theme from Osho. The heading of his one beautiful article was "If you swim, you miss". I twisted the title to match my topic.

I have been trying to learn swimming at least for past 7 years. I made several attempts from time to time. Each time I started with much enthusiasm and tried hard to learn the basics during the first few days. However, I hardly made any progress beyond floating in the water and drifting couple of meters as long as I could hold one breadth. I thought that swimming is not my thing and there's something terribly wrong in my body which hinders me from becoming a swimmer. This thought lead me to give up every time.

However, many incidents compelled me to give another try to learn it. Whenever I got into a swimming pool, may be after a pool side party or in a hotel during a trip, I had to keep my self in the shallow end standing on the pool like a kid which posed me in utter disgrace. Last year I bought a new swimming pool membership and thought to me, "This time you are either going to learn swimming or drown in the pool and die". This time I made a change; I got the help of a professional trainer.

I started with the same desperate condition. However, my coach gave me the most important advice in learning swimming: "Don't expect progressive results and never give up". This meant that I should not be discouraged if I do not see any progress within days of training. I asked him how long should I be trying to become a swimmer with basic skills. He said "about 30 days". At that point I realized why I was not successful in my previous attempts. In any of those attempts I did not try even closer to 30 days.

Having received the correct advices I started training with a huge will power. I did not care whether people laugh at me or whether I look ridiculous making lot of sounds and drinking pool water. I believed that there should be a light in the end of the tunnel. Even in the twentieth day of my training I did not perform much better than my first day's workout. However, my coach was correct!! When it came close to thirty days...suddenly and totally unexpectedly...I could swim a good length while performing all the basics well. I could not believe it for a moment. It was one of my happiest days in that year. After all those years of struggling I became a swimmer.

It is interesting to note that many changes in the human body take place in leaps but not as ramps. Many people misread this behavior as unresponsiveness. A medical book I recently read, "The secrets of miracle doctors", suggests that this fact is true for many health aspects. What you need to do is keep making small quantitative changes even if you don't see any response. Those small changes add up and trigger a significant qualitative change somewhere down the line. It might be an amazing coincidence that Marx and Engels say that "Continuous quantitative changes lead to sudden qualitative changes in the society". This might be what keeps the agitation of courageous socialist leaders even when they get almost no response from the society.

Learning swimming inspired me to try out the same strategy in other things too. Even if none of them works, I'm a happy regular swimmer now.

Automatic log file analysis

keywords: log data extraction, record expert knowledge, mind maps, expert systems, Application Verifier

I'm currently engaged in a research on automatic log file analysis. I came across this idea during my MSc research on software quality verification. When it comes to black box testing, there are many handy tools that analyse a certain aspect of an application. These aspects may be CPU utilization, memory consumption, IO efficiency or low level API call failures. One prominent problem associated is the requirement for expertise for using these tools. Even for experts the process takes a lot of time. For example, I have been using a free Microsoft tool called Application Verifier which keeps an eye on an application's virtual memory errors, heap errors, access failures due to improper access rights, incorrect usage of locks (which may result in hangs or crashes), exceptions, corrupt Windows handles, etc. It is a very useful tool to capture application errors that are impossible or extremely difficult to identify in a manual QA process. Even with experience it takes me about 2 days to test a product with this tool before a release. Given the hectic schedules close to a release, what happens more often than not is that I do not get a chance to do this test. One other problem is that there is no good way to record my analysis knowledge so that someone else or "something" else can perform the analysis if I'm busy with other stuff. Sequential text, which is the popular form of recording knowledge is not a good option in this case due to several reasons. First, it is difficult to write documents in sequential text form (I think most developers agree with me in this). Then it is difficult for someone to understand it due to the inherent ambiguous nature of natural language. Furthermore, a program (this is the "something" I was referring to) cannot understand it for performing an automated analysis.

Almost all the analysis tools that are out there generate some form of a log file. Big majority of them are text files; either xml or flat text. If we can come up with a mechanism to extract the information from these log files then the analysis procedure can be partly automated. The challenge here is to devise a scheme that can deal with the wide variety of proprietary structures of these log files. Though there are a bunch of tools available for log data extraction all of them are bound to a specific log file structure. All the log analysis tools I found are web log analyzers. They analyze the logs generated by either Apache web server or IIS. One cannot use them to analyze any other log file. An additional restriction is that the reports generated after the analysis are predefined. One cannot craft customized reports for a specific need.

There's one more dimension to highlight the importance of automated log file analysis. The majority of software products themselves generate log files. These logs are analyzed by product experts in troubleshooting. Each product has its own log file format and the knowledge required for reading the logs and making conclusions lies only within a limited group of product experts. With the maturity of a product, it is highly likely that some troubleshooting patterns emerge over time. However, there is no means for recording the knowledge on these recurring patterns for later use of the same expert, others or an automation program.

The tasks associated with log file analysis are information extraction, inference, report generation and expert knowledge recording. What I'm working on is a unified mechanism to automate all these tasks. I'm trying to do it with a new simple scripting language based on mind maps. I will write more about the solution in future with the progress of my research. Please keep me posted (dilj220@gmail.com) about:

• Any automated log analysis tool known to you
• Any other reason or scenario that comes to your mind for automated log file analysis
• The features that you expect as a developer / QA engineer / product expert / manager from an automatic log file analysis tool