Film: The Piano Teacher directed by Michael Haneke

A dark and powerful film about a repressed middle aged female piano teacher. She has not quite made concert grade pianist but is still a strict and severe teacher of piano. A pupil arrives who is self confident and has an eye for her. Initially she rejects him, but then lets him into her warped world and repressed/dominating personality.

Certainly not an easy film to watch, and has some very controversial themes.

Film: Code Unknown directed by Michael Haneke

This is a rather intractable film that is really a sequence of scenes stitched loosely together. The main theme of the film is consequences of our seemingly meaningless actions. A pasty thrown into the hands of a beggar in Paris links the central characters. There is no strong story line or plot, just observational scenes. An interesting film but you have to work hard to understand any of it.

Personalised Search

A lot of coverage of Google changing their privacy policy and sharing information about users across their services.

Personalised search, although seemingly an obvious thing to offer I think misses the point. Ideally when you search for something, typically you want the same results any other person would get (if only so you can easily say "search on this"). Personalising kind of robs you of that. What I think is missing is some sort of context input to your search, allowing results to be filtered by that. That has the benefit of being interchangeable between people as well as allowing fine tuning on what is being searched for.