Folks, we watched *The Martian* last night on a friend's huge TV with 3-D glasses (which really work, it's a technical marvel). Fabulous looking movie, a bit too long, clearly targeted for the big screen and those sorts of audiences, science stretched to the limits of credibility but you don't really care.
I noticed that IT played a small co-starring role. One astrophysicist boffin was huddled in the corridor of a super-computer centre with his laptop plugged directly into one of the racks running slingshot orbit simulations (is it faster that way?). Matt Damon communicating with a camera pointing to base-16 placards (he shamefully needed an ASCII chart to decode the digits). Matt is using a hex editor at one point to directly to allow cross-probe communication. I'm not sure if that hex was actually anything like recognisable machine code, or it was real Mars Rover code from 2006 (did it use a well-known chip and OS?) One lady in the mothership's crew must have been a highly skilled programmer, as she had to do some emergency drastic refactoring of some sort (I can't remember the details now). A bit of cryptography/steganography ... a NASA guy sent a secret message to one of the crew using a fake broken email attachment, but the message was simply encoded as hex digits. There were lots of quick screen-shots showing nice graphics and source code. Luckily they avoided the cliché of having ludicrous complicated meaningless screens full of little windows and scrolling hex dumps (as in most action movies, like Die Hard 4). I'm sure I noticed some actual LISP code at one point, it was quick, but there were many lines of giveaway (((()))). A few other times I saw function definitions in lower case with underscores, so perhaps it was Python, but it was too quick to be sure. *Greg K*
