Enough to drive you to distraction.

Eventually I discovered that these pauses corresponded to the ‘fontd’ process taking large amounts of the processor (70%–100%). Tried killing the process; that didn’t work; tried moving my “~/Library/Fonts” directory out of the way—in case it was a corrupt font causing the problem—and that didn’t work either.

Finally figured that there might be sone kind of font cache I could clear out, and sure enough: Macworld’s How to clear font caches in Leopard (also applies to Lion) proved to be the solution. To summarise (or in fact quote):

To clear the current user’s font cache, first quit all running applications (otherwise, you may see font oddities after using the command), then open Terminal (in Applications -> Utilities) and run this command:

atsutil databases -removeUser

If you want to remove the font cache for all users, use this command, and provide your admin password when asked:

atsutil databases -remove

Once you’ve cleared the caches, you should stop and restart the ATS server with these commands:

atsutil server -shutdown

atsutil server -ping

It will take a second or two for the server to restart, but when it does, you should be good to go. If anything still looks odd, a logout and login should take care of any lingering issues.

Because I live on the edge, I didn’t bother closing applications, I just ran the commands, and it seemed to instantly fix the problem.

If you fear the command line (but you should not fear the command line), the Macworld article also notes:

(note that there are third party programs, such as the $10 Font Finagler, designed to clear font caches).

People keep telling me that Macs never have problems; they’re lying out of their big fat faces. Mine keeps having odd problems. Beginning to suspect that it doesn’t like me keeping my home directory on an NFS share. Heigh ho. Anyway, this was the latest one.

For posterity, here is the text, not precisely as delivered of course. In fact it probably reads better than how I delivered it, since I did not have time to commit it to memory or work on the presentation.

Good evening,

Traditionally the Immortal Memory is a reflection on Burns’ life, combining scholarship with wit and anecdote. Unfortunately I’m a not very knowledgeable about Burns, and Wikipedia was down mid-week, so I’ve had to make some stuff up. Hopefully you won’t notice.

But maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t know much about Burns. I’ve been to loads of Burns suppers, so I should know his story quite well by now, but before this week, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you very much about him at all. So consider this the cliff-notes version in case you weren’t paying attention before either. Instead of The Immortal Memory, this is an Immortal Crash Course / Refresher.

So:

Born in 1759 into hard work and poverty on a farm in Alloway near Ayr.

Burns got a pretty good education, from his father (1721–1784), from his own reading as a child, and at an ‘adventure school’ between about the ages of 6 and 9. An ‘adventure school’ is not nearly as exciting as it sounds. It’s worth saying that the Victorians downplayed his education, because it made the story of a poor ploughman producing sublime poetry so much more romantic. But, really, he was a smart lad who did well in what schooling he got.

When their old landlord died, the new factor, who was an asshole, made dreadful demands of Burns’ family. Burns writes:

My indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel tyrant’s insolent, threatening epistles, which used to set us all in tears.— This kind of life, the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of RHYME.

He joined a Country Dancing School at age 20, primarily to meet girls. At 21 he founded the Bachelor’s Club of Tarbolton with his brother Gilbert (1760–1827). Rule 10 of the Bachelor’s Club of Tarbolton: “Every man proper for a member of this Society must be a professed lover of ONE OR MORE of the female sex.” (The first rule of the Bachelor’s Club of Tarbolton was You do not talk about the Bachelor’s Club of Tarbolton.)

He wasn’t just a lover, though, he was an enthusiastic—in the parlance of the time—‘wing man’. He boasted of “curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity”.

When he was 25, his father died. His mother (1732–1820) on the other hand outlived him by 24 years.

Age 25 he met Jean Armour. I never really paid attention to this bit before, and had it in my mind that she was Burns’ great love. But it seems that Burns had a habit of falling in love quite a lot—or convincing himself that he was falling in love. (It’s worth pointing out that while he was trying to woo Jean, he got his mother’s servant pregnant and she bore his first child.) Jean and Rabbie’s eyes met when his dog walked on her laundry, and he wooed her, got her pregnant, she was sent to Paisley in disgrace. He wrote a letter promising to marry her, thinking it was the honourable thing to do—but Jean’s father was an outraged wealthy stone-mason and ripped up the letter. In later years they did eventually marry. He describes her as “a delicious armful” and admires her singing range—up to B-natural, apparently—but that’s no basis for a relationship. “I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her,” he wrote to a friend— but then married her a couple of months later. Jean herself said that Burns really should have had ‘twa wives.’

Anyway, that wasn’t for a few years. Back to 1786 when Burns was 27:

While he was out of favour with Jean and her family, he fell in love with Mary Campbell—Highland Mary (1763–1786): They pledged their troth; they romantically exchanged bibles— and he offered to take her away from all this, to a new job managing a slave plantation in Jamaica.

He released a book of poetry to raise money for the voyage, but the book (“The Kilmarnock Volume”) was a lot more successful than he’d hoped, and he was flattered by praise from Edinburgh’s rich, literary set.

So he went to Edinburgh instead.

But before that, Jean Armour gave birth to twins, and Highland Mary died of typhus aged 23.

In Edinburgh he met Walter Scott (1771–1832), who was 16 years old at the time. Walter Scott was… not known for understatement:

His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish, a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity which received part of its effect perhaps from knowledge of his extraordinary talents.

And:

[His eye] literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.

Not just a talented poet, but he had glowing eyes too.

About this time he started a relationship with Agnes Maclehose (1759–1841) aka Nancy Maclehose, alias ‘Clarinda’. She was the woman for whom he wrote “Ae Fond Kiss” when she left the country to try to patch things up with her estranged husband. Their relationship was passionate; it was firey; but it was all letters and nothing physical. He didn’t manage to get her into pants. Though he did manage to get her servant pregnant.

After his publishing success, he bought another farm. He took in Jean Armour, who was living in poverty and disgrace— and then he married her.

He got a job with the excise.

He continued to write poetry and also collected folk songs, and continued to drink hard and courted scandal by supporting the French Revolution, but in less than a decade his health was failing. After a some dental work in the winter of 1795 he died in the spring of 1796.

He lived hard, died young and left a good-looking portrait.

Burns won fame through his poetry and his songs, but I think the reason that he has stayed so relevant to us, and why we celebrate his life and not just his poetry, is because we do know so much about him. Our other national Bard, the one from Stratford upon Avon (1564–1616), is an enigma; we don’t know his birthday, we know very little about his life.

By contrast Burns is an open book; there are plenty of parish records, third-party reports; poems he’s dedicated to real people in his life, and we even have a lot of the letters he wrote—including love letters—and in some of these letters he writes about himself. We know that he was outgoing and popular—when he came late to an inn, the servants would get out of bed to hear him talk. We certainly know that he slept around a lot, that he married Jean Armour, probably for the wrong reasons, and kept getting her pregnant, whilst falling in love with other women.

To indulge in some national stereotyping, the English keep stiff upper lips, and Americans are loud and bombastic. At its best, the Scottish psyche favours directness. And as a nation we scorn pomposity and social climbers. Rabbie Burns embodied that tradition of plain speaking and egalitarianism, and more than a little bit of romantic idealism. I propose that this is part of the reason he has remained so popular in his own country, and has represented Scotland so well abroad.

As a nation, we love him because we feel we know him. He was a man who wore his heart on his sleeve. Or possibly on his trousers.

Rabbie Burns loved blindly; loved kindly, and spent a lot of his life broken hearted—in between the loving blindly bits.

Thomas Carlisle (1795–1881) summed up Burns’ life thus:

Granted the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged, the pilot is blameworthy … but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the Globe or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.

Burns’ voyage in life was a grand one—and it is a testament to his life and talents that since his death, his standing around the globe has only increased. Also, all the evidence suggests that his tackle was in fine working order.

He is commemorated by statues and memorials from Kilmarnock to Canberra, Stirling to Nova Scotia and Mauchline to Massachusetts. (And lots of others, but these were the most alliterative ones.) In Russia he is known as the People’s Poet, or the ‘Socialist Poet’. Russia was in fact the first country to put him on a postage stamp.

He has inspired 20th Century greats, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger and Bob Dylan. In 1996 he was even immortalised in a stage musical by John Barrowman.

After spending a couple of days mining the Internet for information about Robert Burns, it’s not difficult to see why Scotland, and the rest of the world, has installed him in the pantheon of great poets; why he is our national bard. Burns’ poetry still speaks to us. His life of course was romantic and scandal-ridden enough to be interesting, but he himself emerges as a kind and honest man, honest enough to speak to farm labourers and lords alike.

As the last lines of one of his most celebrated works—A Cotter’s Saturday Night—basically a paean to staying in—goes:

O never, never Scotia’s realm desert;
But still the patriot, and the patriot-bard
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard!

Steve Jobs has died, and the media and the… Blogosphere? Social Nethood? …is showing an outpouring of, well, grief is the wrong word, but praise and love. Maybe grief is accurate, actually.

Not the kind of grief you have for your grandparents dying, but perhaps the kind of grief for a friend of a friend.

I can understand the technology world coming together to mourn him. He radically shook up the industry. What amazes me is how many people I know, not IT people necessarily, are posting small tributes to this man. His 2007 commencement address to Stanford Uni is getting millions of views on YouTube (and it is brilliant, by the way). The trending topics on Twitter yesterday were mostly tributes to him: “iSad”, “stay hungry”.

Google and Samsung, companies who have recently been in bitter dispute with Apple over mobile phone patents, have called a temporary truce, and, amazingly, have postponed a product announcement which was due next week, as a mark of respect.

In many ways this is his second remembrance in two months; he was eulogised and commemorated by the press when he stepped down as CEO in August too.

What other CEO would get this much press coverage, and this many genuinely affectionate tributes? Few.

Apple themselves announced a new iPhone on the day prior to his death. Jobs must have been at death’s door and they proceeded with the announcement anyway—but then Steve Jobs was a showman, and the show must go on.

I have a huge amount of admiration for what Jobs did; on a practical level, turning round a failing company and making it a world-beating success, but more for the care and craftsmanship he nurtured at Apple. Their stuff isn’t perfect, but it is by-and-large insanely great. His enthusiasm, and perfectionism, and values were quite clearly genuine. He cared about getting it right, and creating delight in his customers. Apple customer support is second to none.

I also admire his more or less complete lack of bullshit, despite being famous for casting his own reality distortion field. He delivered on his distorted reality. The iPhone really did change mobile phones, the iPad really is slightly magical, iMovie really is kind of amazing.

But the bullshit he avoided: clutter, and caring what journalists think, and DRM on music (eventually), and copying competitors, and unnecessary features, and incomplete features, and shitty packaging.

Opening an Apple product is like opening a present.

And Apple’s visual design!

Apple’s website tribute on the day his death was announced exemplified the product design he nurtured. Simple black and white photo and his name and ‘1955—2011’. (In fairness they had plenty moody black-and-White studio shots to choose from.)

He was a giant. He will be missed.

And perhaps, just perhaps, when Google and Samsung cancelled that product announcement, it was in respect for more than just his death. Wouldn’t it be nice to think that they cancelled the announcement because their tribute to Steve Jobs was to say: ‘This isn’t good enough. Our customers deserve better. We want to make this phone a little, insanely greater.’ It’s what he would have wanted.

The criticisms of this movie seem mainly based around the central premise: that a beautiful, successful, etc. woman should in the first place hook up with a slobbish, chubby, Seth-Rogen-esque man. Given that the last film I watched was Transformers*, in which giant alien robots duke it out of control of a magical power-cube, this complaint seems mean-spirited.

Interestingly, both reviews on S1Play.com, from The Herald and The Evening Times, state that “two hours is too long for a comedy”. This is apparently a law of filmic nature of which I’d been hitherto unaware. Note that they don’t state that this film is too long (okay, they imply it), merely that it breaks the comedy-2-hour rule. It didn’t feel too long to me.

*Actually, in that film too, the hero is a spunky, but un-cool youth, who wins the way-out-of-his-league girl. Of course, he had a cool car which transformed into a giant robot and, I believe, some girls go for that sort of thing.

I’m here to tell you that they are deluded. Apple software generally is not bad, but it’s not infallible. In particular iCal and Address Book have over the years caused me endless hassle and pain.

Anyway, this post is an aide-memoire for me, if nothing else, about how to fix infuriating iCal issues.

De-Dup

Firstly download and install the brilliant iCal Dup Deleter. Various iCal issues, including duplicate entries, missing entries, the appearance of things which you thought had been deleted, and general flakiness, can be solved by running this tool on each of your calendars.

Download it here: http://www.nhoj.co.uk/icaldupedeleter/

I’ve even seen my calendars go completely blank—all the entries disappear—and that’s a bit frightening the first time you see it, if you depend on iCal to keep track of your appointments—and it can often be fixed quickly and easily by iCal Dup Deleter. Loverly.

Restoring from backup

On recent versions of OS X, calendars are stored in “~/Library/Calendars” (not in “~/Library/Application Support/iCal”, though if you’ve upgraded through several versions, that directory may still exist).

In addition, the program preferences are stored in “~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.*” You can safely delete the preference files. Sometimes that flushes out problems.

Hang on startup (iCal and AddressBook)

Had an issue today whereby I lost all my events, but iCal Dup Deleter didn’t work either.

Tried restoring the directory from backup, and that failed: iCal would hang on startup. I had a nightmare attempting to restore individual calendars, deleting lock files; nothing worked.

Turned out to be a problem with AddressBook(!). AddressBook hung on startup and (I’m hypothesising), iCal hung waiting for AddressBook. Deleted the various lock files:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook
rm .database.lock
rm .skIndex.ABPerson.lockN
rm .nfs.20051025.00d1
rm .AddressBook-v22*


…and AddressBook started normally and so did iCal. Hurrah!

“They [computers and digital media] just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

His new album is available only on CD, and not iTunes, Amazon, eBay… and he’s closing (closed) down his own website (presumably because he doesn’t want to fill other people’s heads with numbers and thus contribute to the problem). So he’s promoting it on MTV? Ah, probably not, since MTV is ‘outdated’ the same way the Internets are.

So expect his ship-to-ship–semaphore–(or possibly telegram)–based marketing campaign to commence in 3… 2… 1…

(Good thing noone’s told him that CDs are digital.)

Incidentally, his cover of Radiohead’s Creep is brilliant.

One of the commenters, by the wonderfully named Quinn Detweiler cannot buy the idea that morality can exist without a god:

“Fry essentially makes the assertion that atheism does not logically lead to moral relativism. Unfortunately, he does not provide any logic-based argument for this assertion because it seems counterintuitive to me. If there is no God and humans are merely the product of random chance and natural selection, where does a basis for morality come from? In a truly naturalistic universe, wouldn’t the only “right” thing be whatever helps me to survive and the only “wrong” be something that harms my ability to dominate others?”

This is something I’d chewed over in my mind before. I tried to distill it into a pithy, non-insulting answer, so I wrote the following:

@Quinn:

I don’t know exactly what argument Stephen Fry was referring to, regarding his statement that morality does not depend upon God, but here’s the argument I’d make:

If you depend upon a god (or religion) for morality, you are in danger of following a wrong god; you must form a moral judgement about god to determine that His morality is sound (i.e., that you are following a good god).

For example:

Let’s say you worship Odin, and Odin is a bad god. (His morality is all about invading Scotland and raping villages.) If you depend solely upon religion for your moral compass, how will you know that what the priests are telling you is right (that raping and pillaging is Good) is in fact wrong?

Conversely, if you follow the Christian god, and you believe that he created the Universe and that he is all-powerful, that does not automatically imply that, morally, you can take his rules for granted. He might be a bad god, or people might have corrupted his rules. You can’t form an opinion unless you have your own morality.

I’m assuming that you’re Christian and American—(sorry about that, but your name sounds very American!)—so I imagine you might have heard of the God Hates Fags lot. Most people would agree that their moral philosophy is a pretty corrupted form of Christianity, but—and this is the important thing—they firmly believe that it’s god-given!

A third point, which follows from the above, is that without a notion of morality separate from religion, it becomes impossible for people who disagree on religion to agree on law or morality. But somehow we can all mostly agree that theft and murder are wrong (for example).

“In a truly naturalistic universe, wouldn’t the only “right” thing be whatever helps me to survive and the only “wrong” be something that harms my ability to dominate others?”

My (and most other people’s) morality comes from the Golden Rule: “Treat others as you would like to be treated.”

I think that’s a good basis both for forming ones own moral judgement, and for assessing the rules that are claimed to come from god.

This is the story of how I got on.

So I’d better explain…

What I was actually trying to do.

I’m not a very heavy spreadsheet user in my day-to-day work, but I use Microsoft Excel at work from time to time. Anyway, it right royally annoys the tits off me every time I use it. Some specific frustrations:

• It’s difficult to keep visual styles consistent. When I copy and paste cells around, I find I have to fix up borders and background colours. In fact, it seems I spend half my time fixing up the formatting.
• Formulae are error-prone. When making changes to a formula, it’s easy to make a change in one place, and forget to apply it to all the other places the formula is used.
• Formulae are hard to understand and the ‘language’ they’re written in is horrible. For example, what does “F$3+E483*7” mean?

There are lots of minor annoyances too—why, for example, does Microsoft Excel disallow you from opening two files with the same name? It’s 2010 fer crying out loud!—but it’s the big annoyances that prompted me to start to think: In an ideal world, how should spreadsheet applications work?

I’d been chewing over some of these ideas, on and off, for the best part of a decade.

The problem

My fundamental problem with Excel (and those of its ilk) is that all it gives you to work with is a big, flat grid of cells. The user—you—is obliged to impose some kind of meaning upon these cells. The ‘meaning’ is implicit in how the cells are used and how they’re formatted. Therefore it is incumbent on the user to apply formatting to each cell individually, and to copy formulae around all over the place.

I remember reading a factoid once, along the lines of, 30% of all business spreadsheets contain errors. (Perhaps the percentage is higher.) The way spreadsheet applications work nowadays it’s easy to create spreadsheets which contains faults. And which look hideously ugly.

The spreadsheet application does not know the shape of your data; it does not distinguish headers from cell data; it doesn’t know that this cell’s value is litres, while this one is miles-per-gallon.

When you want to add a new column to your data table you have to copy all the formatting and cells yourself, because the spreadsheet application doesn’t know that you intended to shade every other column yellow—or data rows should have a white background, but total rows should be coloured blue. If you try to add x litres to y miles-per-gallon, it will happily let you, with nary a warning. If your sum row at the bottom of your table doesn’t include the first and last values in each column, the application cannot flag it up as a mistake… because it might not be a mistake.

The idea

So my idea was to take an entirely different approach to spreadsheets. Instead of presenting the user with an infinite grid of anonymous cells, onto which the user projects meaning, the application would instead allow the user to explicitly construct tables, naming rows and columns, and denoting certain parts of each table as ‘repeated elements’ (like a column for each week) and others as ‘distinct’.

New columns and rows in such tables would inherit the correct formatting automatically, and a formula which says ‘sum(all of the weeks)’ would automatically stay up to date, no matter how many new columns or rows are added.

No longer are there just ‘cells’: there are data cells, and column headers, and calculations—and the application knows which is which because it has been told.

Because the application knows the structure of your data,

1. you don’t need to repeat yourself, brainlessly applying the same borders to all the cells, and
2. the program can prevent certain kinds of mistake (mistakes such as omitting values from totals, or summing the wrong column or copy-and-pasting a formula wrongly).

In addition, because the program knows what is data, and what are labels, and what are totals, it becomes possible for it to apply visual styles automatically which look halfway decent. Spreadsheets which you create in a hurry need no longer look like a confusing jumble of numbers.

Sounds like a big project?

Yeah, turns out it is!

Naturally, in addition to figuring out how the thing fundamentally should work, I would have to consider how to make it easy to pick up and use. (Nobody reads instruction manuals any more.) Also, Microsoft pretty much control the market for spreadsheets, so persuading people to use a new, different one is going to be tricky (to say the least).

I decided to concentrate on the core ideas. I didn’t know how far I would get, really, but hoped to have something which was minimally useful by the end of my 9 months.

How did I get on?

To cut to the chase: 9 months on I have a kind of proof-of-concept, (though very much a proof-of-concept; nothing usable).

I didn’t get as far as I wished (a usable product), but I did develop some interesting ideas.

May–June: Worked on an initial idea of how tables might fit together, and how the user might drag table axes around to rearrange them. The idea was that each table would be composed of ‘slabs’ of data cells and labels and totals. I came up with a demo which let you drag axes around. It looked quite impressive, but unfortunately the underlying model just wasn’t practical. So I put that aside and…

June–August: Worked on a language for spreadsheet formulae. I learned a great deal about parsing and type inference, and all sorts of things that I’m sure you’re not terribly interested in. It was like going back to University. I realised by the end of August that this could easily eat up all of my time and I still wouldn’t have something ‘interesting’ to show to people, so…

September–Jan: Back to the table model again. This time I had a mechanism which seemed to work, so I worked on a demo which would allow the user to build up tables from rows and columns, group rows/cols together, repeat them, navigate with the keyboard and the mouse, and enter data. Still no calculation ability, but it does demonstrate some of the basic ideas.

If nothing else, the last 9 months has crystallised in my mind broadly how the damn thing should work. My brain is bursting with ideas of how to develop it further.

Where next

So I have created a rough proof-of-concept, and I’m back to full-time employment. Where should I take it from here?

My plan (for the time being at least) is to spend the next year working on it in my spare time. Even as a demo I think it could benefit from:

• Being able to do calculations. I mean, that’s pretty fundamental for a spreadsheet application, the calculation bit. There’s no getting round that, really. However, I’d keep it really simple at this stage, enough to do simple arithmetic, summations and averages, probably. The point is to show off how my scheme makes formulae easier to write, easier to understand and less error-prone.
• Making it look prettier. That sounds really trivial, but I think it’s important for 2 reasons:
  1. If a bit of computer software looks awkward, clumsy and ugly, people assume that it’s difficult to use. I want to see if people can genuinely use this, so I have to make it more approachable.
  2. I want people to look at it and see the potential, not concentrate on the fact that it looks like a really rough demo!

Then what? Maybe I’ll manage to get a bit more time off from my wonderful employers. Maybe the magical Open Source pixies will help me work on it. Maybe Google will give me 3 million dollars to finish it.

Currently my most practical plan for completing it rather hinges on my winning the lottery, which, given that I don’t play the lottery is quite a long shot.

Summary

I didn’t get as much done as I’d initially hoped, but then I didn’t know how long it would take.

I’ve explored the concept, and I want to work more on it. I think it has potential. From this angle alone, it’s been a worthwhile endeavour.

I’ve learned a lot about managing myself. Also, from working 3 days a week on my own project for 9 months, I’ve really grown as a programmer, as well as gained experience of a few interesting technologies (listed below if you really care about that sort of thing).

If anything more comes of it, or I have something to show on YouTube, or something you can actually download and play with, I will of course let you know.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks too…

…to everybody who’s asked about it and listened to me while I perfected my elevator pitch for the product.

…those of you who’ve sent me examples of spreadsheets. They’ve been really useful to see what people actually do with Excel. I’m still collecting spreadsheets, actually, if you have any you could send me.

…to my very flexible employers, Cygnet Solutions.

…to my fine project manager for the last 3 months, Miss KB.

Additionally, if you’re interested

I wrote it in a (relatively new) language called Scala, using the SWT windowing toolkit (both of which turned out to be fine choices). Started off using Netbeans as the IDE, then recently migrated to IntelliJ, once IntelliJ went Open Source. (And I much prefer IntelliJ—it’s fantastic.) Using git for version control, Trac for bug/feature tracking and Maven as the build tool. Lovely.

Notably, the effects (aliens, space-ship) are handled very naturalistically. You forget that they’re effects. (All the ‘prawn’ aliens were CGI, apparently, except the dead ones being dissected in the lab.)

Some of the characters seemed less than convincing, especially a couple of the vox-pop talking heads which top and tail the movie. I think it’s particularly noticeable because most of the performances are very natural, particularly newcomer Sharlto Copley as lead Wikus van de Merwe. I also wasn’t terribly convinced by the violently insane mercenary Koobus (David James). He seemed awfully one-dimensional. Yeah, and some of the dialogue seems a little stilted (though apparently it was largely improvised…)

Also, they could have ditched the subtitles when the Nigerians are speaking English. Their accents are pretty heavy, but the subtitles are kind of patronising.

Something about the movie I felt was a little off. Perhaps I didn’t quite buy the conspiracies of the Nasty Corporation. Maybe it seemed strange that the aliens had all that futuristic weaponry and had never used it to gain power for themselves (or else had more of it confiscated). Or that the fuel for the spaceship was also some kind of biological/genetic agent.

These seem mean charges to level at a scifi movie, but this one sets itself up with such a high degree of verisimilitude and down-to-earth-ness, that the slightly less-real-seeming elements really stand out.

I enjoyed it, anyway. And it was thought-provoking. I wouldn’t rate it at 89%, but very worth watching.