Monthly Archives: July 2004

How about Legal Guerrilla Drive-Ins?

Drive In!Slashdot is running a story about a N.Y. Times article (registration required, yada yada) that details Guerrilla Drive-Ins, mobile parties that use a DVD player and an LCD projector, and show movies projected against a wall in impromptu locations. This is of course of questionable legality, given the warning that most DVDs specify (that they are for private use only). But here’s a kooky idea: why not use the techniques to show and promote films that are in the public domain?

If you surf on over to archive.org, you can download a bunch of films that are in the public domain, films like:

  • Night of the Living Dead
  • Reefer Madness
  • D.O.A., and
  • The Brain that Wouldn’t Die

Besides the obvious impromptu MST3K-like possibilities, you could use it as an opportunity to show many classic movies and to educate the public on copyrights, fair use and the public domain.

Scientists Create Synthetic Rogue Protein

California scientists have created a synthetic prion, a rogue protein that was used to infect mice with a brain destroying infection.

Prions are the cause of several fatal diseases, including BSE (bovine spongiform encephalitis) and CJG (Creutsfeldt-Jakob disease). It’s a nasty, nasty disease, which was chronicled in Richard Rhodes’ book Deadly Feasts. It’s not exactly comforting synthetic analogs of existing infectious prions have been synthesized in the laboratory. CJD is a disease with 100% fatality, and prions are immune to normal sterilization procedures with are effective against other infectious agents. Not good, not good.

On This Day in Baseball

Red SoxMy baseball calendar informs me that on this day in 1988, the Red Sox traded two of their minor leaguers for pitcher Mike Boddicker. Boddicker was no slouch, going 7-3, 15-11 and 17-8 in his two and one half seasons with the Sox. The players they gave up? Three time All-Star utility outfielder Brady Anderson and four time All-Star pitcher Curt Schilling.

I believe also that Curt Schilling is the active major leaguer with the most at bats without getting a home run.

Great Hackers

Paul Graham posted Great Hackers, an adaptation of his keynote OSCON 2004 speech. He’s also the author of Hackers and Painters, which I haven’t read yet, but probably will pick up shortly.

His comments to me seem rather thought provoking, but should be tempered a bit by a sense of humility. For instance, in talking about individual productivity, it seems rather obvious to me that in a social environment you can’t play it fast and loose with productivity as if it were a property of the individual. It really doesn’t help you to have someone who can code Lisp if you don’t have anyone who can grow wheat. How then, should we compensate the two individuals. Does the Lisp programmer naturally deserve more than the wheat farmer? Graham seems to be arguing for some kind of “ladder of progress”, which is often little more than an attempt at justification of the inequities of the world by the “haves”.

I also found his discussion of “how to detect a hacker” to be interesting. As an example, he listed Trevor Blackwell who coincidently, I’ve met as well. I got a chance to ride Trevor’s Segway Clone at Hackers, and had a long discussion with him. Something was obvious to me that apparently wasn’t obvious to Graham: Blackwell was a good hacker. Graham says that at first he thought he was crazy and an idiot. The hubris is believing that a legitimate dichotomy exists, with idiots and nuts on one side and hackers on the others. Hackers are by and large the nuttiest people I know. After all, what normal person spends $1000 of their money to homebrew their own Segway? Or build a Farnsworth Fusor fusion reactor? Or write their own Unix operating system? Insanity is part and parcel of what most hackers do.

Lots of people have their buttons pushed by Graham. If he poo-poos Java, the Java fanatics come out of the woodwork to call him idiot. If he says he deserves more money because he’s a hacker, people with socialist leanings come out of the woodwork to do the same. I don’t bother getting worked up about it: some of it is obviously true, some of it is insightful, and some of it is probably entirely wrong. But it beats listening to politics…

Athletics Defeat Seattle 5-3

Ichiro Strikes Out!Last night my loving wife took me to watch the A’s take on the Mariners. While the Mariners’ star has seemed to have faded, I still love to watch Ichiro bat. Not enough to see them beat the A’s mind you, but he’s always trouble on the bases. It seemed only fitting that he would have the last at bat, but Dotel got him, striking out the side in the top of the 9th inning to get the save.

Both Crosby and Chavez had home runs. Crosby continues to impress. I was a huge fan of Tejada, but I must say that Crosby is doing a terrific job, and is well deserving of the Rookie of the Year.

I took quite a few pictures, the one on the right being actually cropped out of this one.

Eliza Turns Dirty, Changes Name to Jenny18

Normally I steer this website away from overtly sexual topics, but I’ll make an exception here. Jenny18 is a version of the classic Eliza program which has been tailored to imitate a sort of dumb-blond cyber sex slave. It relies on the fact that many people talk like complete idiots online, which means that even simple programs can seem plausible in that social context. Often it’s hard to tell which side of the transcripts are being acted out by the script and which are real humans. It’s amazing how easily people (well, horny geeks anyway) are drawn in by rather trivial programmed responses, and how absurdly moronic they are.

Oh, by the way, you shouldn’t mix up the Eliza mentioned above with this one.

Aaron Brady, Porno for Pythons – Pixie Weblog Software – Hello & Goodbye

I’m currently using WordPress for this weblog, but I can’t help but feeling that the more that people work on it, the less I’m going to like it. After all, I have rather simple needs, and once those needs are satisfied i don’t really see a huge advantage to adding features that somebody somewhere might think is cool. Because of this, I’m constantly on the lookout for additional bits of weblog software.

Today’s Daily Python URL! brings us Aaron Brady’s Pixie Weblog Software which uses Quixote and Cheetah. I haven’t had the time to review it yet, but it seems to encapsulate some of the ideals which I think are important. Enjoy.

Getting back into the groove

New Life for Old RecordingsThe BBC is reporting that scientists Vitaliy Fadeyev and Carl Haber of Lawrence Berkeley Labs are using non-contact means to reconstruct sound from old records and wax cylinders. They have been funded by the Library of Congress to help in their preservation of the 128 million audio iteems in their inventory.

You can read a bit more about the effort at LBL’s own press release, which includes both audio played with a stylus and reconstructed with their technique. You can go here for even more technical info, including their JAES paper.

Double Header Movie Review

Since I was frustrated by server problems this weekend, this weekend was a double movie weekend: I went out to see both The Bourne Supremacy and Catwoman. So today you get two brief reviews for the price of one.

The Bourne SupremacyMatt Damon returns in his role as Jason Bourne, a government assassin who is suffering from amnesia. There probably is more back story, but since most of the movie is about the revelation of a small part of the back story, it hardly matters. Bourne was hiding in India, and his cover has been blown. He needs to found out who blew his cover and why. And, to use a tired cliche, this time it’s personal.

The plot is actually rather thin in my opinion, but it’s pretty well done. There were a couple of things that bothered me: the intelligence operatives move between Moscow, Naples and Berlin seemingly instantaneously and with little rationale, and the entire Russian connection is pretty thin. The plot ultimately reveals very little about Bourne and why he became what he is.

But what the film does have is slickly photographed action and stunt work. While Carmen found the heavy use of hand held cameras to be nauseating, I thought they added a certain gritty realism. In thinking back, it actually probably resembles the kind of imagery you’d expect from high speed video games. I couldn’t help thinking that they had a pretty high budget for wrecking Mercedes though. Maybe they should be my next car: if this movie is any indication, they can really take a licking and keep on ticking.

I’d give this movie a solid 7/10 rating. If the plot were a bit more engaging, it could have been quite a bit higher. It generates excitement but not any real tension, which I think is an essential part of the thriller/spy genre, at least when they are at their best.

CatwomanThe always lovely Oscar Winner Halle Berry stars in Catwoman: another summer superhero adventure. Berry plays Patience Prince, a young artist working for an advertising agency who stumbles upon (surprise, suprise) an evil plot. She is killed, but is magically resurrected by a cat, and afterwards suffers a kind of split personality: half the time she is the meek Patience, the other half, Catwoman.

While other reviews have been pretty harsh on this movie, I found lots to like about it. First, Halle shows off considerable skill (we’ll get to what else she shows off later) in her feline portrayal. She really does act like a feline: in the way she stretches, moves and walks. I think she does a great job with a rather thin premise.

Ironically, all that grinds to a halt when she dons her final Catwoman costume. First of all, it is just a terrible design. It looks like something a prostitute might wear if you gave her enough money, but most of them would have better sense. Combined with a comical rather than sexy “lead with the pelvis” walk, it makes you lose all sense that she is either a cat or dangerous. It’s simply too over the top.

Sadly, it also suffers from a certain amount of computer-generated silliness: later scenes have a great deal of CG, and most of it has her running, jumping and stretching in a very unconvincing fashion. It looks too rubbery. Spiderman suffers a bit from this malady, but they were obviously trying to play this up even more. I hesitate to say this, but while computer generated imagery is fashionable (and probably cost effective) they do not often help the overall believability when pushed to these extremes.

Despite these shortcomings, I still enjoyed the movie. I’ll give it a 6/10. It’s fluff, it’s not really great, but it’s fun enough. If you must see it, catch it in a matinee.