sorpigal

07:52 pm: avengers
Just saw avengers and all i can say is OMG WOW. I actually have NO quibbles or complaints, which if you know me and movies is basically a miracle. My thought as the credits rolled was "I have GOT to see that again," which is in contrast to my more usual reaction of "Okay, whatever guys."

Further comment will have to wait until I can type them on a real keyboard and not my phone's soft keyboard.

03:03 pm: Galactic Scale Energy
Here's a little thought experiment on the consumption of energy and the problems with an growth-oriented economy. It just doesn't scale. There's a part two linked at the end, too.

05:59 am: Suckerpunch
I think I speak for everyone when I say: whatthefuckamireading.jpg

Gloriously fun but totally meaningless battle sequences placed awkwardly between a set of scenes. There's a weird double-framing that isn't explained and the fantasy sequences are only half-heartedly justified. I am not a stickler for comprehensibility, normalcy, or any kind of sanity in my movies. That said I found this confusing to the point of being boring.

The problem is that there's no sense of consequence within the fantasy sequences. There is some shoe-horned in toward the end (but in a really obviously telegraphed way). I don't really care if the good guys will obviously win and never get hurt, but to mix and match in that awkward way is annoying.

Because there's no real plot in the fantasy sequences (go kill things! is not really a plot) there's no connection between them. Because there's only the most idiotic dialog there's not much character to it. You get a visual feast, but that's it.

It all felt really pointless after the first jarring and unexplained jump--from loony bin to whore house. What's going on there? Then from dance sequence to fantasy and back. What? Where's the connection? What does it all mean? The actors act quite well, but the script is crap. Why do the other girls agree to help Ms. Protagonist? One of them has a motivation, the rest all act weird. Is that because this is an unrealistic environment based out of someone's delusions? This is never explained, barely hinted at. I would have been much more interested in not going into the second frame and seeing the story of the inmates in the asylum. That would have made more sense.

The end. Oh boy, then end. Was there really no other way to get past the guards? What was the evil orderly doing, really? Was he planning to kill her? Rape her? How did we get 5+ cops there in what had to be a mere few minutes at most? What the fuck is with the guy on the bus? Don't say "Guardian angels!" just because the voice over tried to imply something like a plot existed.

Is there some grand metaphorical something going on here that I'm missing? If there is and even I missed it then they went for way, way too subtle.

11:26 pm: Idiocy
Reality: Some people want to put in a islamic community center two blocks from the former site of the world trade center towers.

How it's being talked about: Terrorists want to put a Mosque on the former site of the world trade center towers.

The rationale seems to be that a lot of people getting killed by islamic terrorists at this site made the location, and an area round it extending out at least two blocks, some kind of sacred ground--sacred to Christians, it appears, but not to the muslims who also got killed there. This sanctification would be desecrated if a gathering place for people sharing the same religion were permitted to reside within the ill-defined sacred radius.

While this is all crazy from start to finish, especially the highly disingenuous way a lot of reporters insist on referring to the building as a mosque, which it is not and never was intended to be, there is a certain logic at play here which has some merit and ought to be considered. If this the above logic is correct and this isn't just a bigoted anti-islamic crusade then the principle surely should be applied evenly in corresponding situations.

I have heard that many people were killed in Oklahoma City when a Christian from a radical sect blew up an office building, which even included a daycare in which there were children. I also hear that Christians from other radical sects have bombed clinics where abortions are performed. I therefore propose that there is a similar "sacredness circle" around the site of the Oklahoma City bombing and each of these abortion clinics. I am told that there are several Christian-run centers, including daycares (!), within the limits of Oklahoma City and, indeed, quite near the site of the bombing. Since these people share the religion with the responsible party I feel offended by these centers and think that it is highly inappropriate that they be within such a sacred space. I similarly call for any churches or other Christian-run operations within two miles of any abortion clinic which has been bombed.

If any of the supporters of this farce can agree with that then I will concede that they are not hypocritical, bigoted xenophobes.

03:45 pm: Insights
I suppose everyone notices these things sooner or later and that it's just as much of an astounding insight to each of us. Perhaps I should feel foolish for having lasted this long without realizing it. I blame Perl 5's funky OO system for confusing me on this and related topics for many years (perl is great for a lot of things, but don't try to use it to learn what OO is all about!)

The thing that I've gradually realized over the last several months is this: classes are not good for defining interfaces. Classes are good only or primarily for code re-use. Classes are for things that share implementations, not things that share interfaces.

It's simultaneously a small thing and not at all a small thing. It's a tiny point of theory with giant implications when you're designing a program.

08:00 pm: GIF forever
Something interesting just hit me today during a discussion of VP8 on osnews.

GIF is and will remain the only image format supported by all major browsers that can do animations.

The MNG format, which is produced by the same people who make PNG, does support animations but is (so far) essentially unsupported by any browsers. The APNG format also supports animations and is supported by Mozilla browsers (Firefox)... but not by anyone else. JPEG2000 supports animations but most browsers don't support it at all, much less its animations. I won't even get in to the lesser formats. Today GIF is still the only image format with animation support which can be expected to work in most browsers.

And, I assert, this will never change. Why? HTML5 >video< is why.

With the introduction of the video tag in HTML, which is now more widely supported in browsers than any of the above non-GIF animation formats, the primary use of animated GIFs has been superseded. Most animated GIFs fall in to broad categories: "simple UI effects" and "mini videos." Some youtube-like sites use GIFs as preview thumbnails for videos, for an example of the latter. The former is little things, like on occasional glint on a button or an animated smiling emoticon.

For the video case the eventual use of the video tag, together with a very small video file, is obvious and unremarkable. The other use I believe will quickly be switched over to the video tag, too, with tiny videos instructed to repeat in a loop. Partially transparent animations can be achieved with some relatively simple CSS trickery. Given these abilities the demand for an alternative animated image format will quickly fall off as most users find their needs met otherwise.

And so there was GIF: The first, last and only widely supported animated image.

05:21 pm: Ironman 2
So i saw ironman 2 today. It's less fun than the first one, but still a fine way to spend a couple hours. The technicals are all superior and it didn't seem like too much was crammed in.

Plus, there were copius hints at future marvel movies. Can't wait for The Avengers!

I give it 4 triangular power sources out of 5.

Sent from my n900 so forgive me any errors.

07:23 pm: A word on Sarah Palin
Sarah Palin is not herself a problem. What she is, herself, is a very genuine idiot. Completely lacking in any form of education, intelligence, wit or wisdom she appears to have operated thus far by saying whatever it is people have been telling her to say, albeit somewhat garbled by her lack of ability to comprehend what was said to her in the first place. She is not a threat, not of any interest other than a source of some pity. (Don't we have drugs to treat disorders like this?)

The real problem is the many thousands (millions?) of American citizens who seem to be sufficiently brain dead, or descended recently enough from sheep, to look at Sarah Palin and not immediately be moved to laughter, pity, scorn or some other dismissive disposition. It's quite frightening to see people who one presumes are otherwise quite human be reduced to the level of intelligence required to compliment Palin on her political chops, writing, policies, or anything not having to do with objects you have shown her and not yet hidden again.

It's far worse than the masses who supported George W. Bush, because at least he was a less-obvious moron--excuses being possible for many of his more obvious problems--and a lesser moron, he being capable of at least saying nothing and instead pausing when he gets himself in trouble. People supporting Bush II could at least sometimes be given the benefit of the doubt! But not so with Palin's supporters.

Palin has quite clearly become a religious figure. Only in religions do I find a corollary to the reliance on total faith and denial of evidence like that found in Palin's supporters when confronted with her blithering flaws. Detractors just don't get it, or have been led astray by sin and Satan--portrayed here by the liberal media and people with education.

It would be fascinating if it wasn't so terrifying. Imagine if these masses of glass-eyed lemmings spread their disease widely enough that they managed to actually elect this person, or another of a similar ilk, to the presidency. Look out, Nero, and break out another banjo! We'd be in for a hell of a time.

I have been watching way too much talking head TV. I say these things 'cause the guys on TV are too polite (or want to keep their jobs).

07:37 pm: Men Who Stare At Goats - A review.
What?

09:14 am: Bad user interaction
At work the restrooms are automated. The toilets flush themselves and the sinks turn on and off without knobs. When one stands up and steps away from the toilet, or when it seems to a motion sensor that you have done so, it flushes. When one goes to wash ones hands a motion sensor turns on the faucet and when one is done the same sensor turns the faucet back off again.

This sci-fi convenience has a couple of simple drawbacks.

First of all, there is no user control of water temperature. Normally this might not be a problem, but for whatever reason the sinks are not adjusted to a single, or even a range, of sensible temperatures. In the summer the first sink in the line gives out scalding hot water, in the winter they all get much colder.

The other problem is the reason I am writing all this down: The faucet and I do not agree. Often when I attempt to wash my hands it refuses to come on. I place my hands in think sink area, under the faucet, but I get no water. I know it's a motion sensor, so I wave my hands back and forth trying to activate it. Sometimes this works and I get water, sometimes it doesn't and I eventually move to another sink.

If I do get water, either immediately or from my hand-waving, it will inevitably shut off before I'm done with it. I like to give my hands a quick rinse in plain water, then squirt some soap on them, lather up, scrub, wash thoroughly with water, rinse, and be done. This process normally takes about 15 seconds and requires me to re-start the faucet after I get the soap--no problem there. Except... since it probably required hand waving the first time, it probably does the second time, too. Even if I got water without hand waiting the first time, sometimes I have to do so the second time for my real washing. Typically the duration of the stream, once activated, is sufficient for the initial rinse (say, one to three seconds) but insufficient for the full wash, where I prefer 5-10 seconds. This leads me to repeated restarts of the stream, sometimes two or three times, complete with the accompanying, foolish-looking hand waving and possible sink-switching.

Needless to say the entire process is very frustrating. Not being able to do what I need and want to do (hand washing is mandatory, of course) annoys me. To be thwarted by the whim of a machine over which I have no control makes me sometimes a little angry.

To make matters worse, not all sinks are created equal. Some seem to just work better than others, giving a longer stream more often with less hand waving. One learns, after a while, to go to these sinks (when available) and use them; it decreases frustration levels and makes the whole experience much more relaxing. But even the 'better' sinks have variable behavior, bizarrely, and will occasionally frustrate.

I say all of this so that I may make a comment about user interaction and the importance of expectation and expectation management. It has been said that GUIs should follow the principle of least surprise, which is true as far as it goes, but it is better to say that behavior of an application and its UI should conform to the user's expectations. I, as a user of these sinks, have an expectation about what they should do and how they should work based on my assumptions about how they do work: Motion sensor activates, water comes on. Hands leave, water turns off. When the sink appears to not follow the expected pattern of behavior I react with hostility and frustration, even though what is at fault is my expectation and not the sink itself.

I am not especially stupid, and the sink's UI is not at all complex, but I worked here for over two years before I figured out what was really going on and how to properly operate the automatic sinks. What I eventually figured out is that the motion sensors did not cover the sinks generally but were narrow focused, were on each sink zeroed to different distances and that the distances were generally too high for me; that is, they were above where I normally hold my hands while washing them in a sink. Thus, when I behaved 'naturally' I was instructing the sink to turn off its stream, but getting annoyed because it did so. After adjusting my behavior--hold hands closer to facet--the sinks now behave as expected and my interaction with them is pleasant.

It gives me a new appreciation of the difficulty of using an GUI for someone who has the wrong expectations or, worse, an inaccurate model of what the application is doing.

04:59 pm: Linux, wpa_supplicant and WPA
Ok, since this stumped me for hours and required
* turning on -ddd verbosity
* even then running wpa_supplicant manually
* reading the man pages and two READMEs
* multiple reboots of my WAP
* google searching

And since I only found the answer in a random gentoo forum thread, quite off-handedly at that, amidst much unhelpful advice I will now impart one critical item of information to anyone attempting to connect his laptop to a WPA or WPA2 laptop from Linux via wpa_supplicant.

In wpa_supplicant.conf if you specify group=TKIP CCMP and your WAP offers both TKIP and CCMP and you are using pairwise=TKIP, or for whatever reason have your WAP configured for TKIP only, then your laptop will fail to connect and you'll receive the helpful message:

GTK cipher mismatch

In printed to stdout of wpa_supplicant (but not in the -f log file, even if you have -ddd specified. Why? No idea why).

What this means is that you tried to use the wrong group cypher, CCMP instead of TKIP. Group cyphers are for broadcast packets, it seems.

So, the correct answer is to always make pairwise= and group= match and--importantly--have only one option! Throwing a bunch of things in on the idea that it will be more compatible is, as it turns out, a mistake.

That's 3 hours to decipher this, mostly due to not having a way to check google with no connection. No need to thank me.

To anyone who is about to reply "But it worked just fine for me--and right away--when I connected my [favorite desktop oriented distribution name here] laptop to my WPA WAP!" -- To you I say, shut the hell up. That just means your distribution vendor figured it out for you. What about the next guy who has that job? Or, what if you're like me and like to have the kind of total control that you just don't get from a Xandros, an Ubuntu or even (horror!) a SuSE?

It's always better to know how it *really* works. Because, eventually, everything breaks in ways the distribution vendors did not anticipate. Eventually someone will have to get greasy fixing it.

02:10 pm: it would be nice
Sometimes I don't know what ye olde spec writers were and are thinking. CSS is a good example which I think everyone who is ever likely to read this
message will be familiar with. It's not that the CSS people are stupid, it's just that they had/have no concept of how the stuff they design is and is
going to be used. Why can't we get viewport-relative positioning such as vertical centering? It's because the problem they were solving didn't involve
worrying about how things looked. Strange, I know, to think that the developers of /style sheets/ didn't think people would want to control how their
pages looked, but it's true. A page was supposed to be a *printed* document represented either on paper or (sometimes) the screen. So, they included
text justification, fonts, margins, padding. It might be used for papers or journals or even reports, so they included images and tables. It needed to
dynamically respond to different paper and screen sizes, so some things were added to apply to (say) the first line of a paragraph. But it was never
supposed to be a professional layout system, so they never thought that position on the page mattered much. On paper or the screen vertical space is
infinite, so they didn't care about vertical alignment. The viewport? Not important!

HTML4 and even XHTML are also good examples, but less obvious. I wont go in to it but it is sufficient to say that the people behind HTML5 are not
suffering from the same problems. These seem to be people who are not trying to design the theoretically-best content markup system, but instead
people who are trying to make HTML be better for what it is used for in the real world.

The thing that makes me post, though, is the DOM. I can't complain too much, because unlike CSS it does improve, but here are some questions anyway:
* Why did it take 10 years to get a method to return elements with certain CSS classes? Why do we still have no way to select by attribute value?
jQuery is taking over for a good reason. This stuff should be moved into the spec.
* Why was so little of the mouse and keyboard event system mandated? I know every system is a little different, but I don't like needing to know
in which browsers which keys send which events at which times. If you've ever tried to write any non-trivial cross-browser key navigation you know
what I mean.
* Why isn't .open() better? I'd like to be able to specify window size and position in a CSSy-way: centered, percentage of available space, min width
and max width, etc.. Given the way options are specified these things could be added without breaking any APIs, but they aren't.

It's over, the web browser is the platform for the next few years. Now it needs to be a good platform. It wouldn't take much. Fix CSS layout to
actually do layout. Fix HTML to actually be useful. Fix the DOM to not suck. They're already makinr JS faster. Throwing away Trident wouldn't heart
either...

07:33 pm: awesome
This is awesome.

03:32 pm: A brief digressionw hile I present an open letter to Nathan Fillion
Hello,

Lurk less.

Thanks.

07:19 pm: Firefly Season 2
More information here: http://www.fireflyseason2.com

If there is the smallest chance we must try. Spread the word.

08:09 pm: Harry Potter
Just finished book number seven. Took me about nine hours... some yesterday, some today. I must say that it's a worthy successor to book five in a way book six really wasn't. Still somewhat predictable, but not boringly so.

Something that could be construed as spoilers follow in the next paragraph. You have been warned.

I made three predictions in the months, weeks and days leading up to the books' release. These were: Whether Harry would be dead at the end, whether Dumbledore was all-dead and whether Snape was a bad guy in the end. I predicted two of these three correctly, but I will avoid saying which ones in case you did not heed the above warning and are reading this spoiler ahead of the book. Shame on you.

Having enjoyed some of the Harry Potter series and seen it come to an acceptably satisfying conclusion I can only hope that the franchise really will end here. Produce movie-form and game-form versions of existent material, by all means, but please! No more new material! So few people have the taste and discretion to leave well enough alone. Let us hope that Rowling has it and that she has not signed away any significant rights to it.

06:56 pm: movies
Some weekends--or other days off--I think to myself. I feel like seeing a movie in a theater. I wonder what's playing? Sure, I could just watch my netflix, or even pirate the latest whatever-I-want, but sometimes I just want the theater.

On these occasions I will pop over to Google's movies: listing and see what's playing in the closest theater--no reason to go far on a mere whim! On many occasions I find, to my dismay, that nothing which I have the slightest interest in seeing is playing. All movies showing are of the "I'd prefer not to see it," kind, when one of the "Maybe I'll rent it," would be sufficient.

Today when I got a hankering for the something theatrical I found that all five films now available were of some strong interest to me. Bloody luck! Now I have to pick between too many good choices! I'd sooner split today's results in half and share them out with the days I find nothing on.

It was too hard to pick just one so after a little indecision I elected to make it a double-feature day. I settled on Pixar's latest, Ratatouille, because Pixar is Pixar and I have to see them all sooner or later anyway--I think I'm still missing Finding Nemo and the last Toy Story. I also chose Transformers, because I want to know what I'm talking about when I say "Transformers is a bad movie," but also because I used to like Transformers and if I don't find out what kind of a mess they've made of it I will become increasingly tense until I do.

Ratatouille:

Pixar has done it again. Not their best film, but good. Better than the industry average, no question. I give it five five-star restaurants out of five.

Transformers:

I had to see it, just to see. Structurally the biggest problem is that it's three movies, one of them good, two of them bad. The directing is pretty bad. There are huge problems with scale--just how big are these things? Overall, sadly, it is good enough to make enough to make a sequel profitable.

Let me first say that the representation of technology is vomit-inducing bad. I know not everyone knows enough to tell the difference and few who can tell care. I know that almost no movies are close to accurate in the way they do computers. But Transformers is... way, way off. They hacked a firewall in 30 seconds. That was why they had access to the entire network. What? They hacked it using an audible signal. How? You can tell from the sound what they downloaded. Really? You can "cut the hard line" and prevent access, but other than that once the firewall is breached you cannot prevent the signal from accessing all computers everywhere. No power switches? I wont go into the virus... it makes me want to cry.

How big is a Transformer? Optimus Prime stands three stories tall, easily. He can pick up two teenagers in one hand. But, he can also pick up a pair of glasses by the earpiece between his thumb and index finger. Maybe it's possible, but if you compare the two shots you can see the scale is off. Megatron is also three stories tall, but he can break through a one- maybe two-story window into a room which cannot be more than two stories tall and stand upright. When the transformers transform their expanded humanoid form appears to have much greater mass than their vehicle form. These kinds of inconsistencies were all over the film. Sure, a lot can be hidden or fudged, but not as much as I saw.

I was only a passing fan of the original Transformers, so maybe there are things I don't know. But... I don't remember any of this plot. Did they make up something completely new? Why?

The plot is all over the place. The boy-meets-car-meets-girl part is all right and pretty enjoyable. It is somewhat abbreviated, however, for example: the falling out between the girl of the story and her previous boyfriend is sudden and without significant cause. If there had been more time her character and background, along with that of the protagonist, could have been fleshed out. It would have added a lot.

The other parts, the alien-machines-attack part and the quest-for-the-box part, are okay but also too short. This would all have been much better if the first part had been a different movie, stopping perhaps with the bad guys recovering Megatron, and then picking up with the quest for the box part as the second half of a second movie.

The exposition was half good, half bad, as if it came (again) from two different movies. Characters suddenly knew things we didn't see them get told and which they were not likely to learn off-camera. I found myself assuming that what one good guy learned they all instantly knew. Some things felt quite forced, and rushed, in a you'll-just-have-to-hang-on-we-haven't-got-time-for-finesse kind of way. It would be easy for the viewer to get lost in the confusion, if there were very much to keep track of.

The explosions and whatnot are nice and big like an action movie is supposed to do. A few car chases... I wont call them gratuitous in a movie like this, but let us say that they were better for eye-candy than plot advancement. In the second Matrix movie, or any of the Terminator films, car chases did something plot-wise. That mostly didn't happen here.

I'll have to give Transformers a grudging pass... you will enjoy it, if you're not picky about technological realism, cinematographic quality, strong plot or realistic characters, And, let's face it, most of the action movie audience wont care. Three ambiguously sized robots out of five.

09:35 pm: Is anyone really surprised?
Bush commutes Scooter Libby's sentence. Is anyone really surprised? Not me. A little awed, maybe, at the apparent size of Bush's balls, that's all. I mean, it's one thing to logically expect a certain kind of disingenuous behavior from our presidential weasel but it is quite another to see him so publicly and openly give even the appearance of justice the finger. Frankly takes my breath away; it is literally awesome.

Here's the scenario as I see it. Bush, via Cheney or not, sends Libby out to answer questions. His instructions: Say whatever you like, but don't say anything that hurts the President or the Veep (inasmuch as this is possible). If you get in hot water you'll get a Presidential Pardon.

So Libby goes, and he lies, and he doesn't care if it makes him look bad. The Big Guy is watching out for my back, he says to himself. The charges are brought up, the trial happens, the conviction comes down. Months and months of prison time. Oh no! Just before he is about to begin serving time, after an appeals court says "No, really, you need to get locked up pronto," Libby panics. This wasn't supposed to happen! Where's The Big Guy? He makes a phone call and, I imagine, says something like:

"Look, I went out on a limb for you! Don't leave me hanging here. You promised me nothing would happen. You said you'd take care of this. They're about to throw me in cell; do something!"

So Bush promptly commutes his sentence, Bush knows that a pardon would be outrageous at this point in the legal proceedings, but something had to be done to reward loyalty as promised and keep Libby out of prison. The courts are now free to meander their way through the slow appeals process with Libby safely not behind bars.

When Bush's end-of-term approaches Libby will stop appealing and 'accept' a sentencing. Bush will pardon him as part of the traditional fuck-you pack of parting pardons presidents seem so fond of. As for justice... she wasn't looking anyway.

07:17 am: no fun
So once upon a time I bought a car. It was a Ford Escort for which I paid about $2700. It had its quirks and problems but it was mostly okay, except for the electrical issues, the battery I had to replace, the heater that had to be fixed, etc.. After a while I got rid of it, mostly because I don't think it will ever pass emissions inspection again. Or, if it will it would take more repair money than I wanted to put in to it. When all was said and done I had put about $6000 into the car and had it for two years.

For my next trick I decided to buy a newer vehicle with (hopefully) fewer problems which would require no major (expensive) maintenance up front. I bought a 2003 PT Cruiser for $14000; this time I had to borrow money to do it but I figured it would be worth it. If a used somewhat-crappy car lasts me two years for a little over $3k in maintenance, surely this will last me longer for the same or less.

A month after I bought it I took it in. The engine was roaring loudly when accelerating and other unpleasant noises were coming from under the hood. Long story short: After keeping the thing for 7 days, including a weekend, I got it back with a replaced turbocharger. It seems the thing had died a horrible death, when I couldn't say because judging by the performance I got afterwards the turbo hadn't been working right when I got it. Fortunately it was all covered under warranty and all I had to shell out was $100.

Precisely two weeks after I got the car back, also known as yesterday morning, I was driving in to work when I noticed smoke coming from under the hood. As I found out standing on the side of the road almost precisely half way through my hour-long drive in to work, something had punctured a tube somewhere and coolant was pouring rapidly onto the ground. The smoking had been the stuff hitting hot metal somewhere and burning up.

What caused the problem? Was it an incompetent turbocharger replacement/installation which allowed a tube to touch something it shouldn't, thereby melting it? Was it a piece of metal or a sharp rock thrown up from the road causing this problem? A manufacturing defect? As yet I do not know.

So there I was, along with the two people I carpool with, standing on the side of a busy road with a car that did not work becoming steadily later and later for work. One of my carpooler friends has a brilliant idea: We will go get his brother's trailer, load the car up onto it and tow it ourselves. He's done it before, it will save me money. Sounds good. We get picked up, dropped off, grab a trick and find that the trailer is locked in place and the key is in his brother's pocket back up in D.C. (also known as "40 minutes away"). His brother offers to tow the car after he gets off work, which will be within the next hour, so we change plans. We head in to D.C., I hand off the key, and we go to work.

Our usual arrival time is between 9:30am and 10:30am. Yesterday we got there at 1:30pm. Three and a half hours of leave for me and, worse, my car pooling buddies, eaten up just like that. I call up the repair place my car is being towed to and tell them to expect it.

Eventually we get called back by the brother, who has finished towing the car and reports that it is at my favorite repair shop. The fact that I have a favorite repair shop ought to tel you something about my last car's reliability.

After work traffic sucks. It's been raining, you see, and everybody loses several IQ points when they're driving in the rain. At least, that's my theory. Accidents are greater, speeds are slower, and dumb weaving in traffic is much greater. As we do what some crazy people might call drive through the resultant mess, the headache I have been nursing all day decides its time to get the party into full swing. The stress probably helped there. We witness only one accident but it still takes two hours to get home.

Once home I commissioned my brother to drive me out to the auto repair place. It was closed by then, but I wanted to verify that my car was actually there. The guy who towed it is not the most reliable person in the world and could easily have taken it to the wrong place. but, no worries needed, it's there. I removed some valuables and headed home.

By the time I'm done it's been a 14 hour day of non-stop fun. I am now beholden to some friends for their help, about to lose a possibly large amount of money in repairs (or not, depending on the cause of the problem), and my head feels terrible. I pop on some movie and zone out for a while, then fall asleep.

Sometimes life is no fun.

08:10 pm: 300: Skippable
Needless to say there are spoilers. But you knew how it turned out already, right?

I am not familiar with the source material, the comic book, so I cannot comment on how much is the movie and how much is the comic. Maybe the comic is better. I have read Gates of Fire which is, as far as I, or any review I have read, can tell is about as historically, culturally and otherwise accurate an account of the battle of Thermopylae as we are ever likely to get.

Americans tend to view the ancient Greeks as their philosophical forefathers, what with Greek city states being a kind of democracy. By praising the Greek culture they praise themselves for being clever enough to be its successor. 300 takes this self-glorification-by-proxy too far, way too far.

If you want to get a good sense of the real motivations for the Spartans read the novel Gates of Fire. Better yet, read it anyway.

Many shots were very pretty, but a lot of the slow-motion holds seemed more designed to mimic a frame from the comic than to communicate anything in particular. I got a strong trying-to-hard vibe.

A lot of the gratuitous sex stuff is just that: gratuitous, adding nothing to the story. The whole bit about Sparta not marching is complete bunk: The whole Spartan army, as well as both Greek federations, were always going to march, it was just going to be too late. The deaths of the 300 were to buy time for the rest of Greece to assemble its armies.

Which brings up another good point: All we see of other Greeks in the film are some few Arcadians, all of whom are cast in a bad light, fail to fight with any kind of effectiveness and who ultimately retreat. In reality many non-Spartans defended the gates with them to the last man; in fact, they outnumbered the Spartans by at about three to one.

Furthermore, the real key to the eventual defeat of the Persian army was the Athenians, not an inspirational story about how badass Spartans are. While we do see a storm ravaging the Persian fleet as it attempts to land, what the movie fails to mention is that Athens' part in the defense of Greece was to send out its warships and sink ships. it was the Athenians sinking of hundreds of supply ships, not even mentioning troop ships, which forced the eventual Persian withdrawal. You don't have an army if you cannot feed it.

A lot of good opportunities were lost to add little touches. When asked for a message to deliver to his wife, Leonidas should have given her the line he gave at their parting in Gates of Fire, or something close to it, which was something along the lines of asking her to remarry and breed replacements.

A lot of the behavior of the Spartans was very non-Spartan. Spartan mothers don't weep when their children are taken off at age 8, at least not in public. The Spartans were all hard people, men and women and children. Those who are not hard do not last long.

The line "Come back with your shield or on it" is not especially Spartan, it was more of a general Greek warrior thing of the time. The message: Do not disgrace your home city by throwing down your shield and running away.

All of the pointless intrigue back in Sparta was distracting and ruined the buildup. It was distracting, did not further the overall plot and certainly did nothing for the message of the film.

And another thing... Leonidas is far too young. He has to be at least 45, though as I recall he was closer to 60 at the time of the battle. He does not look 45, much less 60!

The battle sequences themselves were fine, except that the fighting was all wildly inaccurate and unrealistic. But, it is a movie after all. I was not expecting realistic fights. I was expecting pretty and pretty is what I got.

I liked the gore. Very poetic, very picturesque.

The main problem with the movie is that it totally fails to be anything but a minor spectacle of violence. Since there was essentially no chance of it educating anybody about Greek or Spartan culture, politics or values (most of which would have been met with disapproval anyway) the film's only hope was to deliver a message about what I shall grandly call the Warrior Code. Duty, honor, sacrifice and all of that. They could have pulled out a powerful story which glorifies the military and the people in it, makes fighting and dying for ones country seem honorable and cool, and caused many an army recruitment officer to lick his chops.

Instead you have a self-aggrandizing mess of pointless sex and entertaining violence.The bad guys are one dimensional, the girls have Girl Power!, the good guys are all noble freedom fighters fighting for some higher ideal. It's all badly done nonsense.

I give 300 three piles of corpses out of five.

07:16 am: RMS must be thrilled
I've just read via OSNews that Solaris is to be released under GPLv3, when it comes out.

And I have to wonder... I wonder how Stallman feels about this? He set out to promote Free software with his GPL license and, though he would surely like everyone to relicense all existing code, he was perfectly happy to gradually reimplement all useful software to secure people's freedom.

Then along comes Linux and it steals some of his press, leading to the "GNU/Linux" terminology wars.

Then along come the Open Source people. They put forth an economic argument for programs whose source code is available and freely shared. They miss (or ignore) Stallman's morality arguments and a quiet little ideology war erupts.

Skip forward a few years and Stallman's annoying attention-getting competition, Linux, combined with hordes of business-driven Open Source pragmatists have begun making serious inroads into the existing Unix server market.

The inroads are to an extent that they present Sun, a company with a long history of proprietary development, an economic incentive to release the source code for their operating system. After a short time the source code is not only released but also relicensed under Stallman's own GPL (v3) license.

What just happened? Did Stallman just win? Did Open Source economic pressure accomplish what reasoned moral arguments could not?

Is he happy or annoyed?

04:29 pm: Pro Noun
The real problem with English is that it is English and any attempt to change it makes it not English.

That said, I was pondering the English pronoun mess recently and decided to devise a sanitized version, with some help by Wikipedia. It is of course hopeless in its chances of adoption, but getting it adopted was not one of my goals. I did this purely as therapy for myself, but since the results are interesting I thought I'd share them.

The result is not English, but it is fun for me.

For 'Unknown gender' TH is always soft. S is always soft. Nominative Plural -e is pronounced as schwa and normally would be written without the hyphen. The hyphen is in all cases inappropriate and ought to be omitted; it is included as an aid to pronunciation only. Stress is on the first syllable, up to the hyphen, then the remaining is pronounced as a separate syllable or syllables.

<th>The Problem</th>

Gender	Nominative		Accusative		Possessive Adjective		Possessive Pronoun		Reflexive
	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
Male	He	They	Him	Them	His	Their	His	Theirs	Himself	Themselves
Female	She	They	Her	Them	Her	Their	Hers	Theirs	Herself	Themselves
Neuter	It	They	It	Them	Its	Their	Its	Theirs	Itself	Themselves
Unknown	?	They	?	Them	?	Their	?	Theirs	?	Themselves

<th>A Solution</th>

Gender	Nominative		Accusative		Possessive Adjective		Possessive Pronoun		Reflexive
	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
Male	He	Hy-e	Him	Hy-im	Hos	Hy-os	Has	Hy-as	Himself	Hy-imself
Female	She	Shy-e	Shim	Shy-im	Shos	Shy-os	Shas	Shy-as	Shimself	Shy-imself
Neuter	Te	Ty-e	Tim	Ty-im	Tos	Ty-os	Tas	Ty-as	Timself	Ty-imself
Unknown	The	Thy-e	Thim	Thy-im	Thos	Thy-os	Thas	Thy-as	Thimself	Thy-imself

10:23 pm: It's time for another installment in our continuing series "Ten Things I Like About Linux"!

In today's episode...

Even the most complex thing is or is controlled by a simple text file.

That concludes another exciting episode! See you all next time.

07:59 pm: Ten Things I Like About Linux
It's time for another installment in our continuing series "Ten Things I Like About Linux"!

In today's episode...

If you don't like how it works you can make it work how you like.

That concludes another exciting episode! See you all next time.

08:30 pm: G&S
Why is it so bloody difficult to find good renditions of G&S operas on DVD? I'm not talking about Mikado; I've seen a number of versions of that around and some of them are sure to be good. It seems that by far the most commonly available productions of Gilbert & Sullivan's operas are a set done by the BBC in 1982 which are, to be polite, bloody awful. So far I have seen two: Penzance and Pinafore. While Pinafore is watchable despite bad acting, overacting, bad choreography and horrible camera work Penzance is such a mess that I couldn't even get all the way through it; I switched it off in embarrassment before it was half over. I do not intend to risk seeing any others from this set--at least not if I have to pay for them.

I did finally manage to locate, via amazon, copies of Penzance and Pinafore which don't look bad, We shall see.