"TRON & 3D"

I went to see Tron:Legacy last weekend.  In brief it is a good film, with fantastic visuals and an excellent soundtrack, but a far weaker story.  This was the first 3D film I saw, I never got round to seeing Avatar, so this was my introduction to the visual technology of the future.

To be honest, I was far from impressed.  The glasses were strange and made my eyes water dreadfully throughout the first part of the advert.  I found wearing them to feel very unnatural.  I also thought that, although the use of 3D in the film was quite clever it looked slightly wrong (in the same way that blue screen sections of a film look wrong).  For example, at one point CLU addresses a large army he has amassed.  3D effects are used to make him and the podium he is speaking from jump out of the screen to add to the depth already gained from having the army in the background out of focus.  I got the impression that he looked like a cardboard cutout, or one of those books where parts of the pictures jump out.  Although he appeared to ‘jump out’ of the screen, CLU himself didn’t appear 3D.

The most effective use of 3D I saw was in one of the adverts, which was entirely CGI.  I suspect that entirely CGI’d films like Toy Story will be able to take the best advantage of 3D as the computers will be able to make the calculations to render the scenes to appear properly 3D rather than post processing, which will struggle to make scenes appear truly 3D rather than just as layers of cardboard cut-outs.

"The Empty String vs. Null"

One of the people I sit next to was taking part in some training today, for an End-User Report Writer course.  This course trains clients who buy our system how to write their own reports.  As you can imagine, some people excel at the course and others flop miserably as they fail to grasp the underlying themes of databases, computers and reports.

One of the more academic parts of the course is distinguishing between null and an empty string.  A string is a sequence of zero or more characters.  A string of zero characters is known as the empty string, but is still an existing string.  Null means that there is no string.

If the above explanation was a bit confusing, think of it in terms of fruit bowls.  A string contains a collection of characters just like a fruit bowl contains a collection of fruit.  The empty string is like an empty fruit bowl; the bowl is there but there is no fruit in it.  Null is where there is no fruit bowl, so we can’t even start to look in it to tell if anything is there.