Sunday, 09/22/02
Every six months or so I spend half an hour playing a game of Bejeweled at MSN Games. It's in the Tetris school, with more complex relationships and harder to predict cascade effects. I notice that since the last time, they've considerably stepped up the advertising ringing the board game, often including one of those incredibly irritating flashing-three-time-a-second ads mocked up to trick the gullible into thinking that Windows is telling them something.
This time, the blinking blipvert appeared directly under some text I initially mistook for part of the ad, until I realized it was counterproductive: "Photosensitive seizure warning", linked to this page. I skimmed it, incredulous that MSN would accept advertising that they admit might cause seizures. But then it turned out they're actually disclaiming the potentially lethal power of the game itself.
There isn't that much difference to my way of thinking. The game was unplayable as long as the ad was on the screen. 07:22PM «
I broke my spam database with a careless bit of SQL yesterday, so the sample tokens seen to the right will look a bit odd until late Sunday afternoon. An early version of the Perl module I wrote to manage my spam analysis, Mail::Audit::DemiBayesian, will be hitting CPAN soon.
On Wednesday, among other things, I learned that Brent Simmons is not a giant blond man. Based on zero evidence, I had always envisioned him as sort of a Nordic Paul Bunyan. It's always jarring to meet someone in person and give up my whimsical mental pictures. However, he does have very precise diction, which was another of my unsubstantiated assumptions. 11:24AM «
Wednesday, 09/18/02
Barring an unprecedented intervention from the Job Fairy, I'm leaving Seattle at the end of October. In the three years I've lived here, and the two years I've been looking for work, I've never made a dime from within Washington State. The weather's lovely, the music's grand, I shall miss Two Dagos and the Asteroid and a good number of folks, but I can't keep living off savings, and even minimum-wage work isn't available. (Jen, who's moving to Massachusetts for work, tells me a story about her similarly unemployed brother, who lost out on a clerical job at Jiffy Lube to a guy with a law degree.)
The only positive economic news is that, contrary to my understanding, Washington hasn't actually had the worst unemployment in the nation for the last year or so. Of course, we do now.
So I'll be right under the wire for the Seattle blogging face-to-face. I think I met Kindall once at a Macworld, when he was boothing for Bare Bones, but I'm not sure I introduced myself. 12:37PM «
Friday, 09/13/02
Operating on the same principle of diminished expectations that allowed me to enjoy Attack Of The Clones, I picked up Battlefield Earth when it started running on HBO recently. There are several things about this flick to which I'd like to call your attention.
First and foremost is Forest Whitaker, as the second in command to John Travolta's conniving alien overlord. Whitaker's great, as always. If you watch it, as I hope you will, he lightens the load throughout his considerable screen time.
Parts of the first half-hour show flashes of wit, presumably lifted from the L. Ron Hubbard novel, as the cave-dwelling humans of a thousand years hence draw funny conclusions from a mishmash of Greek myth, the confused legends of fast food, and wrecked department store mannequins believed to have got what was coming to them. And I enjoyed the sequence where the aliens try to gain "leverage" over a group of humans by figuring out homo sapiens' culinary preferences, settling through flawed methodology on uncooked rat.
That's pretty much the list, but those aren't the reasons I think you should see this movie. They're twofold.
First, there's the specter of old daddy Hubbard. Battlefield Earth's first half is dominated by human preoccupation with "the gods", who purportedly built Earth's cities and abandoned humanity to alien tyranny when humanity did something to piss them off. Bear in mind that L. Ron Hubbard founded a prominent cultlike religion, which continues to enjoy tax-exempt status and abuse federal copyright law to this day. Scientology counts among its adherents the star of the film, which makes it all the stranger that he'd use his box-office clout to produce a picture about humans worshipping and eventually routing false gods dreamed up by sci-fi writers. It's as if James Dobson produced a TV show about the Second Coming, in which Jesus goes to work for People For The American Way.
The real kicker is Battlefield Earth's perspective on terrorism. Released in 2000, there's no way this movie could be made today, because it presents the villains as profit-obsessed monsters with a labor relations problem, namely the good guys, who are set up to succeed only through terrorism. Suicidal terrorism. Nuclear suicidal terrorism. The coup de grace (I'm giving away the ending, but you won't mind) is when a human footsoldier volunteers, clutching a keg-sized nuke, to teleport back to the aliens' home planet and light it up like Krypton. Without taking this step, which our heroes agree on in less time than it took you to pick out breakfast this morning, the aliens will send in their "gas drones" and kill off the resistance, which is to say the whole human race.
I'm not sure if the gas drones in this scenario are supposed to represent American military might, or American popular culture, but the metaphor is amazingly effective either way. Watching this movie the day after Bush's inept Ellis Island address, in which he chides the world's terrorists for insufficiently valuing life, was a revelation.
The terrorists in this movie didn't need the lure of an afterlife with scores of sexpot virgins to send themselves into the breach; they did it to rid themselves and their fellow man of the corporate bastards who were bolloxing up the planet for profit. This movie's subtext couldn't be any clearer if it had Ralph Nader superimposed in the corner translating in American Sign Language. It's a remarkable film. 10:35AM «
Thursday, 09/05/02
O'Reilly authors occasionally pen introductions to their books, sort of a literary debutante ball. The article a few months ago for the awe-inspiring second edition of Mastering Regular Expressions was a terrific pitch both for the book and the state of regular expressions, and I was curious about what Perl for Oracle DBAs would have to say for itself. Despite a hint in the article's blurb, I did not expect it to justify itself in terms of a loving paean to Ayn Rand. This is the first oreillynet piece I've ever read that made me want to hurl something nice and heavy through something big and shattery.
It absolutely did not put me in a frame of mind to buy books. I'd be reluctant to buy this one, partly because I don't much like the idea of putting money in the pocket of smugly oversimplifying markets-über-alles goons, but mostly because I'm afraid the book's full of the same rubbish. What's next, "Perl and Web Services for Scientologists"? "Kool-Aid in a Nutshell"?
I also wouldn't buy this one because it seems pitched at people coming the other direction. I find this a little odd. There have to be a lot more Perl hackers than Oracle DBAs out there, and with the economy in the dumper, more than a few formerly employed perl purveyors are probably looking to upgrade their skills. Why isn't it "Oracle for Perl Programmers"? For that matter, why isn't there a whole line of O'Reilly books aimed at the further education of the legions of Perl hackers they helped bring up? "C for Perl Programmers" would sell like chocolate puppies. 12:17PM «
Wednesday, 09/04/02
I spent a bit of time today trying to get the FTP-as-filesystem support in Mac OS X 10.2 operational. In theory, one can mount an FTP-accessible volume in the Finder by plugging in an FTP URL at the Finder's "Connect to Server" dialog, which prompts for a password if the URL takes the form, "ftp://username@destination.com/path/". There's also a /sbin/mount_ftp terminal command, alongside the many related mount commands that existed in 10.1.
mount_ftp, unlike its binary brethren, is a Perl script. It wraps /System/Library/Filesystems/ftp.fs/csmount, and the author was evidently a C bloke not too sure of his perl chops, as it includes this adorable commented block:
#print "this is a test:" . @ARGV . "\n";
#for (my $i = 0; $i < @ARGV; $i++) {
# print $ARGV[$i] . "\n";
#}
Unfortunately, both FTP mechanisms seem outrageously buggy. Volumes mounted from the terminal are functional but resist unmounting through the normal 'umount <path>' mechanism: umount complains that the path isn't currently mounted even when 'mount' claims otherwise. Like all volumes mounted from the terminal, the mount points aren't usable from the Finder, which sees only a unix file there.
The Finder support, in about half a dozen tries, succeeded once. Once it had no apparent effect, and four times the computer locked up to the point that the Dock wouldn't appear and inbound SSH sessions couldn't complete. I had to use the hard reset button.
The one time Finder did successfully mount an FTP volume, I brought up my home directory at my web host. Infuriatingly, the only directories I could traverse were the ones in which group and/or universal privileges were set. There's no earthly reason why it can't let me into a directory whose privileges were restricted to owner, because I was logged in as the owner (otherwise I wouldn't have been able to see the directory at all).
I had expected that the moderately tricky bit would be protecting the password with an SSH tunnel, but I didn't even get to that point. Here's hoping this stuff works better in the inevitable 10.2.1 release. 02:46PM «
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