The film is about a group of total Star Wars fanatics so keen to see the Phantom Menace that they decide to try and steal an advance copy of it from George Lucas.  The characters are always discussing and quoting from Star Wars, several scenes are pastiches from the films, and a few Star Wars actors crop up in cameo roles.

Unfortunately, and despite being exactly the right age, I didn’t see Star Wars when it came out and in fact didn’t see the films all the way through until the DVD box set came out – in fact I think I may have seen the Phantom Menace before seeing the original films, so I didn’t appreciate the film as much as many of my contemporaries would.  Anyway, here is what I wrote about it:

As might be apparent from even a quick look at the picture on the front of the box and the plot summary on the back, this film is made by Star Wars fans for Star Wars fans and as such it surely has quite a large audience for it out there.

It is a sort of road movie, with a group of Star Wars nerds or fanboys, deciding to drive 2000 miles so they can break into George Lucas’ Skywalker ranch and get a sneak preview of the new Star Wars film. Along the way they meet their arch rivals (Star Trek fans), various people played by Star Wars actors in cameo appearances, and the mighty Danny Trejo.

Unfortunately a lot of the in-jokes and references went over my head a bit as I have only seen the Star Wars films once. I didn’t even spot the cameo by Carrie Fisher or realise that the judge was Lando Calrissian until looking it up on IMDb afterwards.

As a non-fan I thought the film was OK. It was enjoyable enough and it had me laughing out loud a few times, though I’m not likely to watch it again – unless I watch Star Wars a few more times first so I get all the jokes, which is also unlikely. Even so, I did appreciate the cameos by Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes and I thought that Ethan Suplee (Randy from My Name is Earl) as Harry Knowles was an inspired piece of casting and an outstanding performance.

The extras are about average. Several promotional interview films, with the same clips of the film included in all of them. It looks like one big feature split into half a dozen little ones. Not awful, but not fantastic either.

I reckon that Star Wars fans will love this, but even their long-suffering partners will be able to enjoy it albeit in a different way.

It all seems like a bit of a busman’s holiday but they do appear to enjoy it and from what I can see there are some very positive results.  All of the attention goes to people who fly out with supplies and get their hands dirty at disaster sites, but there is an increasing number of people making a valuable contribution at home in the evenings and at weekends.

The whole setup is very egalitarian and open source, with every bit of activity being blogged, tweeted, webcammed or put on a wiki and it looks like anybody can start their own event and plug into the CrisisCommons network.  My colleagues have been going to the London crisis camps, but anyone further afield can just start their own if one doesn’t exist.

For well-meaning techie types with time on their hands it might be a more productive use of spare time than writing snarky political blogs.

Catch it while it still looks good – i.e. before he gets carried away with plug-ins and widgets like what I did.

In theory, you should refresh your data archives every few years or so, moving it onto newer media and newer media formats, and converting it to different file formats if necessary.  But that costs in administration and in the actual execution.  If you never have cause to recall any of that data it is money down the drain so you have to decide whether to just keep the physical media refreshed.

You could then incur some serious cost in restoring any data – either getting it converted into readable formats or re-creating your 20-year-old server environment to load it onto.  But if you only have to do that rarely it could cost you less.

And even if you reach that point you might decide not to bother.  You might find it cheaper to recreate the files from scratch in some cases.

Admittedly the whole topic of data storage and archives is terminally dull, but that does not make it unimportant and many people don’t appreciate the scale of the problem and the inherent irony – that we could find a lost 100-year-old manuscript and be able to read it perfectly but a 25-year-old backup would be hugely impractical to read.

For a start there is the risk of physical degradation of the media.  If that was OK you would still have to find a compatible media reader: not everybody still has 8-inch floppy drives, QIC tape decks or the giant decks for reading tape reels.

Depending on the nature of the data you could then have to find the original application, and possibly the exact right version of it.  (Do you still have the original install disks or tapes for 25-year-old software?)    As that isn’t bad enough, you might have to create the operating system to load that application onto, and that means either finding some old hardware of the right type or software to emulate it on a virtual machine.

So, generally a good thing to have a universal emulator.  Even better if it includes Sinclair Spectrum emulation

Never mind what it is a test of – its just a test. I have been tweaking in areas beyond my competence so I will be very surprised it it works!

Update: It only bloody worked! I am beside myself with geeky glee.

I couldn’t believe how quickly it installed and how fast it runs. All the little things which were behaving strangely in IE6 now behave properly, and I get the tabs which I particularly liked in Netscape, plus very nifty search bar. I’m an instant convert.

Best of all, there is another whole world of plug-ins and extensions to explore and install, to keep my inner anorak happy for hours.