Author Archives: Jeff Porten

John Williams is God

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After two days of heavy rotation on my iPod substitute, I hereby nominate the Superman Theme for best piece of orchestral cheese of the 20th century. For four minutes and twelve seconds, three themes battle for dominance through a half-dozen crescendos and the grandest use of the gratuitious key change in modern music. And trust me, I know from gratuituous key changes.

Yes, I’m counting the days.

Signs of the coming apocalypse

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Just spotted this out the window, which you can’t tell from the blurry camphone is an official Muzak van. I heard William Shatner’s voice in my head, in the tones of “Why does God need a starship?”, asking “Why does Musak need a ladder truck?”

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2020 Computing

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Hat tip to Cliff Lynch at CNI:

Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 12:00:00 -0500
From: Clifford Lynch
Subject: 2020 Science — Microsoft Report and Nature Issue

Microsoft Research has issued a report on the practice of science in 2020 that emphasizes the growing role of information technology, e-science and related developments. You can find information about the report here

http://research.microsoft.com/ towards2020science/ background_overview.htm

and the report itself is available for downloading here

http://research.microsoft.com/ towards2020science/ downloads.htm

In conjunction with this, the journal Nature has done a special issue on computing and science in 2020; all the articles in this appear to be open access, and the table of contents can be found here:

http://www.nature.com/ nature/ focus/ futurecomputing/index.html

Much good reading here. Don’t miss the Nature piece by Alex Szalay and Jim Gray.

jeff@themovies: The Front (1976)

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I followed up Good Night and Good Luck with this one. In case you happened to be in kindergarten the last time it was in theaters: it’s the McCarthy era, and Woody Allen is a small-time grifter who pretends to be the author of works done by people who are victims of the blacklist.

I can only recommend this film for people who are truly fascinated by that era and everything associated with it. For the rest of us, this movie is just two notches too turgid to really maintain our attention. Pathetic result for major character, check. Unlikely love interest with unlikely politics, check. Bad guy who claims he’s serving as a puppet of the system, but who obviously is out for his own self-interest, check.

The best reason to sit through this movie is a wonderfully staged (and highly out of character) denouement. It doesn’t make up for the first 90 minutes.

jeff@themovies: Sherlock, Jr. (1924)

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Man, they really knew how to make a movie 80 years ago.

Yes, you need to have a certain temperament to sit through a silent movie. But they were shorter than today’s blockbusters, so give this one 44 minutes of your life and see what you think. The lengths that Buster Keaton is willing to go for a gag are, quite literally, insane; the Jackie Chan of his day, he did all of his own stunts, and in 1924 all of the stunts were real. IMDB reports that he nearly broke his neck in one scene.

Perhaps parts of the plotline don’t resonate eight decades later, but the slapstick comedy will still make you laugh out loud.

jeff@themovies: V for Vendetta (2006)

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A dystopian future where the government spies on everyone, and everyone accepts it due to fears of terrorism. Clearly escapist fiction is really off the rails these days.

I’m a big fan of the original V for Vendetta comic series, so I’ve been looking forward to the movie for months, and caught it on its first showing in DC. Verdict: a great romp. There’s plenty here for people who loved the comic, and plenty here to piss them off; I can certainly see why Alan Moore distanced himself from the final product. (Although Moore doesn’t seem to understand that movies and comics are very different media with very different audiences; it’s hard to picture a movie that would make him happy.)

I’m going to try to avoid spoilers in the rest of this review, but if you want to go into the movie cold, it’s best to stop reading now. Suffice to say, it’s recommended.

Unfortunately, some of the best parts of the original series were jettisoned for the movie. V is much more mysterious in the comics; his abilities are never quite explained, and the movie version is both more powerful and more straightforward. Anyone who sees the movie and is intrigued about this angle on the character should read the book, immediately.

Evey is a bit older in the film than she is in the series, probably because Natalie Portman isn’t 14 anymore. She’s also in less dire straits in the film, which gives her a bit of moral purity that’s less clear in the series. On the other hand, what happens to her is one of the greatest story arcs in recent fiction, and it was stunning to see this faithfully adapted for the screen.

It’s a bit of a shame to see V drop the asexual aspect to his character—and it would have been even more interesting if they had changed this and had maintained Evey’s age as a Lolita. I suppose that this will never happen in an American film, certainly not a “comic book” film. But for once I’d like to see an adaptation where the hero doesn’t give away his secret identity to the love interest in the first reel. Maybe it’s okay for Superman, since he goes on to marry her, but one of the things that makes Batman interesting is his self-sacrifice. Anyone who doubts this really needs to read Son of the Demon.

This isn’t the best of all possible V movies, but it’s pretty damn good.

An open letter to David Hughes

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Mr. David Hughes
Acting President and CEO, Amtrak

Dear Mr. Hughes,

As a fellow frequent traveler on the Northeast Corridor, I have a few questions about how you might respond to certain hypothetical experiences during your trips.

1) You are running late for a train which is boarding from Gate B at Union Station. You enter the platform from the Metro entrance at Gate A, carrying your ticket out in your left hand. You are within five feet of the platform when you are stopped by two armed police. They direct you to reenter through Gate A, walk around the 200 MARC travelers waiting for their train, and come back in through Gate B. How do you reward your officers for preventing such an obvious threat to safety?

2) Onboard the train, the conductor is approaching and you know you have to sign your ticket. You know from past experience, when your ticket was stolen, that your signature is solely for the convenience and security of Amtrak. You ask the conductor, “Do you have a pen?” He replies, “Yes,” and makes no motion to give one to you. According to your training manual, should he have replied, “Yes, sir?”

3) You move from one seat to another to get out of the sunlight glare, and neglect to take your seat check. A conductor asks you for your ticket again, and you tell her that your seat check is nine inches from her right shoulder. Should she: a) move the seat check for you, or b) tell you to get it yourself? Presume for this hypothetical that you are in the window seat with a laptop in your lap, with luggage in the aisle seat, and the aisle tray table is down with your work spread out on it.

4) You are trapped in an elevator for four hours with the Pepsi-Cola delivery guy. You are thirsty. He proposes to sell you a can of soda for $1.75, which you know to be a profit markup of at least 2,088%. Do you feel warm and amiable towards him afterwards?

My one-way travel today cost $71.25. There is a bus I can take for $15. I take the train because it is a more pleasant experience. Or at least, it used to be.

Best,
Jeff Porten

Jeff is an idiot, entry #4,372

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Don’t you hate it when you write a quick utility AppleScript to automate something you do regularly, go to save it, and find that you’ve already done this, named it exactly what you were going to name the new script, and saved it exactly where you were going to save it?

I wish this were rare.

.mil WHOIS server is offline

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This is an email I’m circulating on a few mailing lists, tracking down a weird problem I ran into today. If anyone knows more, please comment.

I’m doing some routine maintenance on our mail server and tracking back IP addresses with a database that queries various WHOIS servers. To my surprise, the .mil whois server at whois.nic.mil is offline — the domain itself doesn’t resolve any longer.

I spoke to the very nice customer support representative at the phone number I found on the web, who told me the following:

1) he wasn’t sure if this service was *ever* public. Which I find interesting, as it’s a coded flag in the whois man page.

2) he said I should refer all IPs I need to review directly to DoD CERT.

3) he said that he received many calls like this, and it’s “always” people spoofing the IP addresses of .mil computers. I mentioned that since I’m tracking spam flow, it’s likely to be someone with a legitimate .mil address and a compromised computer. He referred me again to CERT.

Anyway, this struck me as *very* odd, and I feel like I’m showing up in the middle of the story. Anyone know more about this?

Your daily dose of blasphemy

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I am currently watching a stunning documentary from BBC4 called The Root of All Evil?, starring scientist Richard Dawkins. Perhaps it’s enough to say that part 1 is titled “The God Delusion,” and part 2 is called “The Virus of Faith.”

I can’t even begin to summarize Dawkin’s points here, except to say that even lapsed Catholics and Rosh Hashanah Jews are likely to be outraged by what he has to say. In fact, the worst thing about the documentary is that his statements are so incendiary that it’s doubtful to me that anyone not already friendly to his point of view will make it through the first five minutes.

That being said, in Jeff’s America this would be required viewing for all school-age children. And it’s perhaps worth noting that in this theoretically secular America there is simply no way in hell that it would ever be originally aired on PBS, let alone produced by PBS or any other commercial network.

I don’t suggest that anyone bootleg this off the Internet, but I understand that it just might be available.

Jeff’s Little Victories

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(With apologies to Keith Knight.)

1. Squirting the bar of soap out of your hand in the shower and catching it in midair.

2. Coming up with the piped Unix commands that gets the job done 10x faster than the equivalent GUI tools.

3. Running late for a meeting and getting to the Metro platform just as the train is arriving. Bonus points if it happens again at the transfer station.

4. Ditto, taxi on Connecticut Avenue.

5. Getting coffee at Starbucks right before the movie breaks and the line goes out the door.

6. Seeing the large clump of people in line at the ATM machine evaporate when the one shlemiel they’re waiting for gets his cash.

7. An AppleScript based on GUI Scripting works on the first try. (This never happens.)

8. Just when you really need it, you discover you’re standing in an open wifi hotspot.

9. The cell phone battery lasts just long enough to upload that huge file on deadline.

10. The local diner actually remembers the meaning of the words “medium rare” when applied to a cheeseburger.