My journey in non-subtitled English language TV-series continues. After the first season of Starhunter I went on with the second season that is named “Starhunter 2300”.If you have read my post on the first season you could imagine I was somewhat negatively biased and you would be right. The first season was decidedly slightly more than amateurish level. Anyway 2300 dispelled my bias in a few episodes. But I am running.
The season starts exactly at the point where the first ended – The Tulip emerges from the hyperspace with Percy alone on-board. Because of some non better identified hyperspace effects, not only the Tulip changed look, but also the spaceship computer, Caravaggio, changed his hole-appearance.
Dante the former captain disappeared in hyperspace, while Travis, his son, has basically no memories of the first season, he just recalls a different history and does, surprise, bounty hunting for a living along with his friend Markus. Maybe I lost some explanations because these DVDs have no subtitles and TV-series English sometimes proves to be too hard for my comprehension. Anyway, the Tulip soon finds her crew – Travis and Markus, Callista Larkadia and Rudolpho deLuna (yes the former Tulip owner and Dante’s employer).
This second season is definitely better – stories are somewhat more solid, actors play better, characters are more defined. But this is still Starhunter – the divinity cluster (a section of human DNA implanted by some aliens, that, once activated would give god-like powers) sounds very fake, the Orchard still misses the opportunity to do what any serious secret organization would be able to achieve, and the hyperspace stuff is mostly insane.
I found also that Percy character didn’t fit. I mean Percy is somewhat reborn, there should be some struggle – between the first life and the second, the first world and the second. Maybe again I lost something in the comprehension, but Percy didn’t convince me – beyond the lunatic character there isn’t much.
Episodes are more action oriented than the first season and also scenery and props are more credible. Overall I would rate this season 7/10, you could like it if you like sci-fi themed action episodes and you are not too picky about the science aspect. Anyway if you want to watch this season for free, you find it on youtube.
Altre foto
Altre foto sempre dalla nostra settimana bianca.
Qualche metro sotto al cielo…
…e sopra tanta neve. Anche quest’anno, la settimana bianca è sinonimo di Alpe di Siusi (o Seiser Alm come direbbero i nativi del luogo).
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Eccolo qui, la patria di Re Laurino, il dente dello Sciliar |
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Quest’anno Mariana era decisa a sciare. Determinata a recuperare il tempo perduto l’anno scorso (non c’era stato un grande feeling gli sci) eccola qui pronta per i suoi primi 5-6km. |
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Cugini sulla neve |
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Certo che dopo queste due foto è difficile credere che possano anche solo pensare di litigare… |
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Eccoci qui, davanti al Tirler, dopo una lunghissima discesa in slittino. |
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*slurp* Canederli! |
Rispondo a un paio di commenti lasciati da Ba’ allo scorso post:
> davvero il gatto arriva fino alla punta dell’albero???
Be’ non proprio, ma abbastanza in alto, tanto da piegare la punta. Ogni tanto si vede l’albero scupotersi e dopo un po’ lei si affaccia cercando di far cadere un addobbo.
Oppure si siede nel presepe e fa la statuina (in realtà è in agguato in attesa di una mossa falsa delle pecore… dal momento che le pecore sono bravissime a stare ferme, lei si stufa prima e le fa cadere con un colpo della zampa).
> 7 ore in auto? Coi bimbi? Me e Mu avrebbero sclerato solo con la metà del tempo…io in molto meno!!!
Per fortuna i bimbi erano a casa. Siamo andati a recuperarli verso mezzanotte a casa dei vari cugini (per semplificare le cose si erano divisi… della serie: “ci inseguono: dividiamoci!”).
Natale e dintorni
Natale da poco è passato, ma le feste non sono ancora finite.
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Natale inizia dai preparativi… che richiedono concentrazione e dedizione. |
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Colombiani a Milano. Più precisamente in piazza Castello. |
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E anche in piazza del duomo… i passanti si tengono cautamente alla larga. |
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E prima di Natale arriva anche il presepe (e l’albero, la cui punta non riuscirà mai ad essere dritta per l’interesse eccessivo del gatto Alice). |
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Ed eccoci alla festa de “Le Radici e le Ali” dove tra uno scambio di auguri e una fetta di panettone abbiamo assistito allo spettacolo di SuperZero. |
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Ma Natale è anche tempo di recite scolastiche. Ecco un preoccupatissimo asinello che dovrà assistere insieme agli altri animali della fattoria alla nascita del Bambin Gesù. |
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Neve è (almeno in questo emisfero) quasi sinonimo di feste Natalizie. Anche questa neve che ci ha bloccato in auto per 7h nel disperato tentativo di ritornare da Milano a Castellanza è stata comunque sinonimo di feste e più precisamente di festa di Natale della scuola materna. |
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Se si guarda bene negli occhi di Mariana si legge la frase: “Babbo Natale mica esiste: questa è una signora vestita da Babbo Natale!” |
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Il gatto Alice si impegna nei preparativi natalizi facendo le fusa sui vestiti per la festa. |
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Ecco l’agognato Omnitrix, un orologio ancora più grosso di quello che porta abitualmente suo papà e sicuramente più rumoroso. Ma con l’Omnitrix ci si può trasformare in Ben 10 personaggi… |
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E Natale porta anche il compleanno di Mariana. Eccola alle prese con il primo pacchetto da aprire… |
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*ffff* e le candeline sono tutte spente! Auguri! |
Buona continuazione di feste!!!
Jingle Bells…. let is snow
(English follows)Un caro augurio di passare delle stupende feste natalizie e che il 2010 possa vedere realizzati i vostri sogni.
Dearly wishing you to spend wonderful Christmas holidays and to have your dreams come true in 2010.
Starhunter
Having finished BSG, waiting for the movies The Plan and Caprica, I had some empty slot during my lunch break at work. Amazon has actually a good (for them) algorithm to select stuff you may likely be interested in. Given your latest purchases and browse of their site, they are able to present you a small number item that have high chances to catch your attention.This is usually good, otherwise I doubt I could have come across some indeed good books, only seldom it could be somewhat irritating if you just bought something inferior to the item that you are discovering thanks to this Amazon service. So, when Amazon presented me with Starhunter 2300 tv series I was positively biased. By searching Amazon and other sites I discovered that Starhunter exists in two seasons, namely “Starhunter” and “Starhunter 2300”. Comments were overall good, so I decided to order both.
Now I completed watching the first season. The first sensation was disappointment. This is cheap sci-fi, the one that borders dangerously with B-movie. I am used to more shining productions, like the many incarnations of Star Trek franchise or the exceptional BSG. By cheap I mean that scenery and props are unconvincing, often you can recognize nowadays objects just repainted with silver paint. Characters are somewhat unlikely.
Well the story is set in the Solar System around year 2250. Mankind fully colonized the system both by terraforming some planets and by planting orbiting stations or installing colonies on moons of the other planets. Main characters live aboard the Tulip a “Trans Utopian” luxury liner of the past, now a decadent collection of crap and junk that is used to bring around a crew of bounty hunters. Dante Montana is the captain, to him bounty hunting is just what he does (he tells this at the beginning of each episode) he is a father searching the solar system for his kidnapped son. Then there is Percy, the captain’s niece a teenager and mechanical chief of the Tulip. Lucretia is an ex-special corps operative, daughter of Darius one of the chief of the Orchard, a mysterious somewhat secret agency. Last, but not least, is Caravaggio the Tulip computer, which displays himself as an hologram of an old man, disturbingly transparent with arms cut and an even more disturbing visible back spine.
Thats all. There are other recurring characters, but they are just guest of the show.
Characters are shallow apart, maybe, from Percy, who is able to develop somewhat the complexities of a teenager. Dante keeps the same dumb expression always, no matter he is eating a convivial lunch or fighting for his very life. Lucretia is more expressive, and sometimes is able to render the struggle between the tie for her friends and the loyalty to her father.
From scientific point of view the production is really lacking… maybe I lost something because there are no subtitles and my understanding of spoken English is fair, but not perfect. But I am quite sure that in one episode they bring the Tulip into Earth atmosphere after saying that the Tulip wasn’t designed for atmospheric flight. In another episode they say that they traveled faster than light, as it was just unusual.
Story quality-wise I cannot say that this show is far from good – there are some episodes that are quite entertaining, on the converse there are some episodes that are really bad. As they are presented in the DVD order, the first episodes are really harmful to the character of Percy. You are lead to think that she is just a silly girl, that disobeys and causes trouble.
The stuff about the Divinity Cluster, a fragment of human DNA implanted by aliens eons ago, that, once enabled, would give us god-like powers, is an amusing idea that is too often used in wrong or trivial ways. Raiders, a group of people living outside the law and kidnapping children, is much the same.
On the other hand the show deals with unusual themes – homosexuality, surgery and eugenics, teenagers emotional condition just to name a few.
The funniest part for me is how the Italian names are pronounced. Maybe “Caravaggio” is the one that triggers more laughs.
All that said, I would not advise you to buy this, nonetheless it is very cheap and the show got a second season, so it is not that bad, you have just to search carefully for the good.
Z80 vs. PIC
Yesterday I wrote some lines of PIC assembly code to manage interrupt service routine so that I can select from C the code to execute when an interrupt occurs. Just to give you an idea of the pain, I will show you a comparison between a Z80 (1971) and a PIC18 (2002) in an indirect call. Let’s say that you want to jump at a program address stored in two bytes at address TL and TH.
| Z80 | PIC18 |
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jr L1
L2: ld hl,(TL)
jp (hl)
L1: call L2
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bra L1 L2 movff TH,PCLATH movlb bank(TL) movf TL,W,B movf PCLAT L1 rcall L2
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Z80 routine is 9 bytes long while PIC18 spreads over 14 bytes. When it comes to execution times things are not so bad for PIC18 – 36 machine cycles compared to 53 of the Z80. My guess is that a 2002 architecture involves a pipeline that allows the CPU to crank out an instruction for machine cycle. In fact modern incarnations of the Zilog CPU have a revised architecture that runs 4 times faster or more than the original Z80.
I’ve got the PIC
It was 1971 when the first single chip CPU hit the shelves. 4004 was the name. Rough by today standards, nonetheless it featured several impressive features – among which 16 registers and 5 instructions operating at 16 bits. One year later and it was the time for 8008, with 6 registers of 8 bit each. This chip was the base for the 8080, Z80 and 8086. I am quite familiar with 8080 (basically the cpu powering the GameBoy Color) and with Z80 (the heart of many of 80s home computers – ZX Spectrum and CPC Amstrad). Later it was time for extremely elegant and rational architectures – the MC68000 and the ARM.
So I supposed that the evolution of CPUs drove to better chip with rational architecture and with legacy kludges slowly moved into the oblivion. I was happy.
Then I met the Microchip PIC. To give you an idea I would say that the PIC is to CPUs what the Cobol is to programming languages.
PIC has basically one single register, plus a set of memory location with hardwired operations. For example if you want to indirect access a memory location, you write the memory location address at a specific address, then you read another specific address and you got the indirect addressing.
PIC features an harvard architecture that is program memory is separate from data memory. Program memory can address up to 24bits, while data memory holds no more than 64kbyte, but usually you get a few kilos.
The CPU has a 31 level hardware stack for call. That means that on this stack only return addresses can be stored. If you want to use the stack to pass parameters and/or to store local variables you have to implement your software stack. In the latest PIC you get some specialized memory addresses that helps you in this task.
But obviously this architecture is not thought for modern language (if you can call modern C with his 40 years of history). So at microchip they decided that some extended instruction set was needed. I think they had best intentions and that, being engineers, they took the best decisions. But the result leave me headscraping… Basically they added a static configuration bit to the CPU. This bit is stored in the program memory, so you can’t change it without rebooting. When this bit is set the meaning of nearly half of the instruction set is altered so that rather than accessing a fixed memory address, that address is used as a displacement from a pointer half in a given memory location.
Kiss backward compatibility goodbye.
I would add that the harvard architecture doesn’t mate well with C (at least with the compiler you can buy at microchip). In fact, C language pointers may have different size according to the pointed type. But a void pointer is large enough to accommodate any size pointer. With the PIC C compiler this is not true – the size of the pointer depends of a non-standard modifier “rom” or “ram” (ram is the default). So if you point in ram the pointer is 16bits wide, but if you point in rom the pointer is 24 bits. If you move a rom pointer into a void pointer you lose the 8 most significant bits. The drawback is that you cannot write code agnostic to the location of pointed data.
Considering all, the fact that the compiler requires “main” to be declared as “void main(void)” can be well ignored.
New computer and Windows 7
I have just received my new computer – an Asus notebook. Despite all the glamour for the netbooks, I opted for a 17.3″ full keyboard laptop. After all, I no longer use it for recycling commuting time. My daily use is more on the sofa after dining. Better have some muchoflops more than lilliputian keyboard and eye sight test screen.Also I got Windows 7. Since this OS has been launched during the past week in Italy, I guess I am an early adopter. Until now it doesn’t feel so bad. I haven’t been exposed to Vista, but used XP as it was intended (not in Windows 2000 look-and-feel mode).
On the first run Windows 7 asked for 26 update packages for about half a giga of download. Not bad for one week old OS.
Buon Halloween
Con Halloween non c’entra niente… però Mariana (sempre lei) ha detto: “Mamma, ma quando tu sarai nonna, a noi chi ci cura?”La prospettiva è inquietante, un po’ come l’innalzamento dell’età pensionabile…
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Due spaventosi figuri… si, però, Juan, un po’ più convinto! |
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Mamma mia, che fifa! Dolcetto, scherzetto, tutto quello che vuoi! |
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Questo qui, non mi convince mica… |