S1lent weapons for quiet wars

Martyrs: Film parody

2011-10-29T02:59:00.001-04:00

I had no other purpose in mind than telling a story I felt connected to, doing a film I had faith in, and doing it with all my heart. When I was writing MARTYRS, I couldn't see another way to talk about all the things that were surrounding me. On a metaphorical way, horror was the perfect tool to react to the feeling I had, like a sad intuition, that the world we're living in right now is a brutal and unfair one. I mean, very brutal. It seems that the cynism and the power of the winners has killed everything. It seems that our urban societies are more than ever driven by the forces of jungle laws, by rules created by the strongest and the dominant people. I'm not saying anything original about injustice of our times, but it was strong enough in me to create the necessity of doing that film. The system creates a lot of losers, a lot of suffering weak people I feel very close to and MARTYRS in its way tells about them. So I would say that the horror genre is a way to talk about things that preoccupy me a lot. As a fan, I always took the films from the masters Argento, Carpenter, Polanski and dozens of other great artists as their own personal visions of life. That's why I liked them humanly too. And that's why I love horror so much.

Pascal Laugier

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/interview/474

So visionary

I really wish I had known a bit more about the film Martyrs so I could have skipped wasting the 1 and 1/2 hours I put in trying to watch this. Just word-of-mouth that it was supposedly "one of the best horror films ever made" made me decide to watch it. I'm not a fan of horror particularly but I enjoyed being scared by films like The Exorcist and Poltergeist, and I'm interested in good films regardless of genre. I did not catch on to the fact that the same people who were praising Martyrs probably thought that August Underground's Mordum was a masterpiece, and this naivete is what led to the experience I ultimately ended up with.

My experience watching this film was similar to the expereinces I had trying to watch El Topo and 120 days of Sodom and is probably the last attempt I am ever going to make to objectively view or understand anything in this niche of European films. I sat through a huge amount of gratuitous violence, torture, and depravity in the hope that at some point I would begin to find the beginning of the thread the director was trying to spin to at least justify all the crap that had gone before. Once I got to the point where I realized that such a moment was not coming and that despite the director's claim , there was actually no story being told, I stopped watching. In Martyr's case this occurred around 1:20:00. I really wish it had been less.

Martyrs is basically a snuff film that uses a 5 min monologue by a nameless character on a ridiculous paper-thin premise to justify the extended scenes of graphic torture and abuse of young girls. Here's a synopsis of the film : a shadowy organization systematically drives young girls insane with hideous torture and abuse till they begin to 'see things that others can't'. That's it. fin. If a 16-year old high school student had written the screenplay of Martyrs for a term paper she would have gotten a D-. In this regard it's very similar in execution to 120 Days of Sodom. where depiction of the kidnapping, sexual abuse and murder of a group of teenage girls and boys is justified by the kind of idiotic liberal moralizing that makes your ears bleed listening to it.

It's society that's killing you, stupid.

It's not the fact that Martyrs is exploitation torture porn that bothers me - there's hundreds of films made and being made like it, and films like Saw and Hostel are constantly trying to push this so-called genre into the mainstream. But the fact that people actually consider this film to have any kind of creative merit says a lot more about human nature than what was depicted in the film. And it's the cynicism of the director/writer of this film that is a lot more disturbing than watching teenage girls in their underwear getting tortured. So apparently the trend in horror no is to see how many extended scenes of graphic torture can fit into 2hrs and just under an 'R' rating. And then some idiot on the Internet gets to write about how the destruction of innocent girls represents the death of God and of innocence and so on and so forth...

Maybe torture porn should become a recognized and clearly-labelled genre like XXX (TTT?) so stuff like this would not have to share the same space with The Exorcist and Poltergeist and The Ring. Directors could celebrate nihilism and depravity all they want without having to carry the bourgeois burden of plot, character development, etc. All that would be required would be a simple 5-minute setup scene - an analogue to the beginning of movies where a 19-year old girl dressed in short shorts and stripper heels walks in on 5 guys playing pool and tells them her car broke down and she doesn't have any money for a mechanic or taxi.

In films like Evil Dead or Alien the violence and fear and gore provided a visceral experience, but one whichwas always embedded in something larger - a fantasy about some unknown thing in the dark that we all have this primeval dread of, like the supernatural or alien species. The ordeal the characters went through always had a rationalization you could accept as necessary to the fantasy. Films like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th and Halloween have always been about nothing more but entertainment - the kind of stuff you go see when you're 19 and with 10 people and you immediately forget as soon as you leave the car park. Nobody tries to sell House of Wax or Final Destination or I Know What You Did Last Summer as anything but 2 hours of teenagers getting killed in ways which were similarly gruesome and comical. But to me Martyrs is less horror film than parody. It's just a vehicle for sadism and depravity; that's all I can say about it. There's no difference between and it and any movie starring Lisa-Ann as Sarah Palin or Sasha Grey as a doctor.

Better than Martyrs

At least movies like the above don't insult your intelligence and pretend they're anything more than pandering to people's desire for visceral excitement. People who enjoy watching torture and abuse will like Martyrs and praise it just as they did Cannibal Holocaust and every Italian and French exploitation film they come across. But here's a question to anybody who sees any artistic merit in Martyrs: why did the writer choose young women to be 'the most sensitive' to the supposed 'transformation'? Why couldn't it have been old men who were chosen to be 'martyrs'? The answer is that nobody wants to see old men in their underwear tortured, abused, and degraded. I guess that's not artistic enough.

Sure Martyrs is disturbing. But if I wanted to be disturbed all I have to do is get on the net and pull up pictures and news about the Somali famine or the DRC or Sierra Leone or Liberian civil wars. There's enough real-life suffering and depravity in this world to last 1000 life times. I really don't need films like this to supposedly tell me how screwed up life is

Jamey Rodemeyer

2011-09-29T20:32:00.000-04:00

Watching this kid you can tell that he never tried to hurt a soul in his life. It's so ridiculous the answers he got on the survey he did - "Gay marriage shouldn't be allowed because it's wrong and disgusting and goes against the Bible." Right but psychologically abusing a 14-year old boy to the point where he commits suicide is A-OK. But that is the wisdom of the foolish - it's just this way in Trinidad and Uganda and Nigeria and other 3rd-world countries. People will condone and participate in the most immoral and unethical and evil things but God help you if you are LGBT. Jamey Rodemeyer may only have been 14 but he had more courage and strength than most people I know.

It's not really surprising, actually, what happened to him and then after his death. When I was younger I used to believe that stupidity and hypocrisy and evil somehow arose in people's hearts after they became adults. Like that part of humanity that had its logical termination in Nanking and Dachau and Stalin's Gulag and Pol Pot's Cambodia, somehow is absent when we are children. But obviously this isn't the cause. People like Charles Taylor and Bosco Ntaganda and Robert Mugabe didn't just decide one day to act as they did. A lot of people, maybe the majority of people are born evil. It's just their Purpose I guess - to appropriate a line from The Matrix. The only way that humans can move forward is to understand the way not to live - to cull people like those who bullied and tormented Jamey from our race. At least with technology we can now put a face on some of the nameless victims, whether from New York or Liberia or Sierra Leone or Rwanda.

I really don't know why things like this are allowed to happen, or even if a question like that makes sense. I don't know if his parents and friends should look above for a hand that could have intervened and stopped something like this. Death is part of life - only reason I'm here is that billions of people died before me. A lot of those people were like Jamey - innocent victims of evil people. But I mean from Death comes Life: stronger, smarter, more creative, more compassionate, more giving, more beautiful. Jamey Rodemeyer is dead but the innocence and courage he had inside of him will live on. I think everyone who listens to his Youtube channel videos or reads his blog and understands what he went through, will carry a piece of him wherever they go in life.

Under the vine

2011-09-07T00:36:00.002-04:00

So Jonah gets pissed off at the world, forsakes mankind, retires to a hill above Nineveh to ponder and reflect while awaiting the fireworks which he had been promised, and which, suffice to say, he had been considerably inconvenienced for. And a gourd vine grows over the sulking Jonah and gives him shelter from the sun for which he is quite happy about, but curses when it dries up and dies. And then God shows up and goes LOL Y U MAD THO?

This day my major concerns were:

Taking care of my dog who had surgery on her ear yesterday and convincing her to wear an e-collar.
Worrying about finishing work for this open-source project I'm horrendously late with.
Debating whether backbone.js and/or JavaScriptMVC is worth learning and using over plain old JavaScript.

This day the biggest issue for tens of millions of men women and children in Africa, and hundreds of millions all over the world, was whether or not they're going to get a drop of water or a bit of food, and whether or not they're going to be alive tomorrow.

So I've been pondering how many gourd vines have been sheltering me. I am so accustomed to thinking that everything I have is somehow the result of my own efforts, but the reality is far from that.

It's the kind of circular existential question which is strictly illogical and makes no sense, but still plagues us: What if I had been born somewhere else? What if instead of sitting here in my yard feeling the breeze, watching the sunset and writing a blog post, I was trudging dozens of miles in the desert with my emaciated children to get to a horrendously overcrowded relief camp on the off-chance I might get some grain or water, which would postpone starving to death another day.

I didn't build this house - my grandparents and aunt did. The only reason I'm sitting here is because they worked all their life to provide for their family. The only reason I can read or write or use a computer is because they sent me to school. Having the chronic pain of depression and dissociation and social phobia is pretty terrible and leaves me wrenched and exhausted at the end of each day, but still why do I have the use of my two hands or two eyes or two legs or anything that works properly on my body, when so many people in this world don't? At least I have the ability to work towards getting better - while so many with chronic, debilitating illnesses have nothing. My life is a long way from perfect or even happy but why do I even have the things that I have when so many people don't? My family doesn't have a lot but still, why are our cupboards and fridge always filled? As much as evil has touched my life, why have I been spared the kind of horrors I see on the news every night - violence, destruction, death? Luck, chance, fate, karma, what is it? It's nothing I did, that's for sure. It's sort of frightening how little I have actually contributed to my own existence. The truth is that, like Jonah, I haven't had anything to do with the vines that have grown up to shelter my life.

It's like the older I get the list of things that are really important shrinks, while the list of things that aren't important grows and stretches by orders of magnitudes. But the list of things that I realize are in my control also shrinks, while the list of things that are really outside my control also grows. Not coincidentally, each list aligns with the other.

There's so many people who go to such extraordinary lengths to acquire the things that are not important. The ignorant ones bow down to their idols: money, cars, clothes, parties, sex, approval, popularity, recognition. The evil ones lie, cheat, steal, injure, slander...every abomination and inequity their conceit can fashion, to acquire what their stupid small minds lust after. They both stack these things up like some massive altar and gaze on them, as if it can compensate for how stupid and empty they are inside. Everyday on these call-in programs on TV you hear people lamenting on how bad things are in this country. And I feel like if we could question the politicians and magistrates and lawyers and doctors and engineers and business owners and everyone in this country who have been given responsibility for other people's well-being, and force them to answer truthfully what they consider important, we might see the reason why things in this country are the way they are.

I've always wondered what it is people see in these meaningless things. It's just like Wallace said in the quote in the last post: when you've drunk your fill of these things what are you going to do? I can't understand how people can be so uncaring and selfish and ignorant. If you think life is only about having the most money and driving the best cars and having the most people comment on your Facebook profile, then do you realize what little control you actually have over what you acquire in this life? And when you lose them, which for most people is inevitable, then what are you going to cherish and hold on to? What about the people like in the picture above? Do people realize how close they are to being in a state like that: how easily fate could have given them that burden to carry? Do the billions of impoverished and disadvantaged people in this world really mean anything to anybody?

But I suppose that while most things in life change, a few things don't. The sun and moon and stars and planets change. The earth itself changes - the day that comes tomorrow is never the same as the one before. Knowledge changes, science changes, technology changes. But people don't change. I guess that's one of the main reasons I picked up reading the Bible - the recognition that the stuff that goes on today is exactly the same as the stuff that's been going on for thousands of years.

The truth is that as much as I want the same things other people want, I'd rather work for $20 an hour and go home to a one-room hut by myself and read all night, than to covet what most people in this country covet, and to act as they act. Because what is in my heart is the only thing in this world I can control. Whatever life brings or takes away I have to accept. I can't even control my own health or emotions or thoughts. But the one thing I can control is whether or not I do evil towards anybody else. And as much as so many things weigh on me, just like they weigh on everybody else, the thing that is most important to me is that I try to keep a clean heart. Covetousness, selfishness, deception, hypocrisy, ignorance, and all the myriad ways of evil people - whatever vines grow over me or fall down and dry up, the only thing that I can really control is how far I distance myself from these things.

I always remember back in July 1990 A.N.R. Robinson declaring "Attack with full force!" fully knowing the thing he heard next most likely would have been the gunshot that killed him. It was like the first time in my life I had ever really seen a politician in this country who believed in something beyond their own existence. It was like for one minute somebody put something greater before themselves. Patrick Manning and Basdeo Panday, two of our greatest sons of the soil, had managed to find themselves elsewhere on that day, when their country needed them the most. I have a hard time seeing them do something like that. It's not really hard to see what they really believed in inside - what they thought was important.

If somebody asks me to help them and it's within my power to do it then I usually do it. I've had so many people including my supposedly close friends take advantage of me for this, but it's cool. Because I believe it is what we were asked to do. And the truth is that I actually am an extremely selfish person. Whatever other people want or take from me they can have it - if it wasn't worthless I wouldn't give it. But see I'm not doing it for them. And I know that is something they will never understand. The real reason I do it is because maybe one day when I really need help, somebody or something might help me. Maybe if one day I'm stretched out hungry, emaciated, dying somewhere with the sun beating down on me, a vine might grow over and shelter me.

Even in darkness

2011-08-23T00:47:00.000-04:00

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

David Foster Wallace-Kenyon Commencement Speech 2005

Sooner or later in life you're going to realize that the only people who have the opportunity to not believe in Something are the people who have been spared something really terrible happening to them. For the rest of us belief and worship of something good - some intangible thing inside of us that seems beyond reason yet everyday tells us to take another step forward, to bear it one more time - belief in something like that is sort of mandatory for survival.

The crimes perpetrated against human beings like Jaycee Dugard and Elisabeth Friztl are so staggeringly enormous as to be impossible to comprehend. Everyday in this world we read about things like that and ask the same thing - how could men be so evil? Why are these things allowed to happen? That's one of the main reasons I suppose I always rejected believing in Something. There's just no way that something all-powerful but benevolent could allow what happened to those innocent people. But watching and hearing Jaycee Duggard get interviewed about living through an experience so horrifying as to be unimaginable, you can't escape one fact: she survived. Or rather the thing inside her, the thing that she believed in, kept her alive.

The knock against Generation X'rs - people like me who came of age in the late 90's and 2000's - has always been that we believed in nothing. We had no war to fight, no country to build. Most of us had sex as soon as could - we stopped believing in family and God and everything our parents held on to. The music we liked was subversive, counter-culture, a general FU to the whole pristine world of being an adult, transmitted by Nirvana and Blind Melon and NWA and Dr. Dre and Naughty by Nature and Soundgarden....We had nothing to test us and the things we believed in most.

This is why, as much as I rage against it, I can't really fault entirely all the people in this country who worship the incredibly stupid and banal things in life - money, cars, clothes, cell-phones, looks, sexual allure, and sitting on top of the totem pole: the opinion of others. It's just I suppose a logical extension of what I used to believe. But what we were criticized for ten years ago seems a lot worse today. The kind of nihilsm that pervades the culture of young people today is frightening to me. At least people from my generation believed in creativity, being individual, making something new. Pearl Jam and Wu-Tang Clan were all about a new sound - something that had never been done before. But it's like the thing that people in this country fear most is not being part of a crowd. Like in our society there's two default roles: you have to be the guy on stage waving the towel or in the crowd following his directions. There's no place for real creativity or wanting or believing in things different from everybody else.

The kind of stuff that people worship today - it's not just, as Wallace says, that it's going to consume them and leave them broken and impoverished and disiilusioned in the end. But when something really terrible happens to them then they're not going to be able to hold on to anything.

In the Quran and the Bible and I imagine every major religous work is written the same thing: God sends the rain to fall on the good and wicked alike. He alone chooses on who He sends blessings and tragedies. Some people can live their whole life and never meet the psychopaths and sociopaths that stole so many years from Jaycee Duggard and Elisabeth Friztl - the kind of people who believe preying on the weak and vulnerable is what the world was made for. But a big part of the reason I like war films like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, is that they teach us in the midst of destruction and cruelty, human virtues shine through. Courage, loyalty, hope...even in darkness the best of what's inside us, what we believe in, shines through. It's a strange duality but the older I get the stranger life becomes. It's as if the things my family believed in and tried their best to teach me might actually have been true.

Elisabeth Friztl and Jaycee Duggard survived the most horrible atrocities imaginable, but it's like even in the darkest hour they found a way to fight through, to survive. That's really all the human race has been doing, from the beginning of time. And whether we know it or not there's no such thing as peacetime. We all fight, every single day, against evil, darkness. And maybe there is Something that could have intervened, but didn't, in order that something brilliant and dazzling could be discovered. If people choose to offer themselves up to the false idols that will consume them then I can't help them. But I'm not like that and I will never be. I went through the darkness. I know what I believe.

Rick Ross - Teflon Don

2011-06-22T22:28:00.001-04:00

Rick Ross gained considerable notoriety after he was outed as the only rapper in the known history of hip-hop to have fabricated and/or exaggerated his drug-selling, crime-kingpin past. It is a well-known fact that rappers never make songs claiming things they never did nor adopt exaggerated cartoonish personas for the sake of their music. Many a loyal fan were aghast at the incredible revelations that Ross (not even his real name) did not in fact move cocaine between Miami and South America in such massive quantities that he was friends with ousted Panamanian dictator Manuel Noreaga, and Colombian drug cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. It was also suspected that Ross does not have million-dollar piles of cash laying round his house nor does he sleep with a different XXL Eye Candy model every night. Even the title of his latest album - Teflon Don - was controversial since no rapper till then had ever taken on a name or used an album title or spit lyrics that paid homage to past legendary and sometimes fictitious gangsters.

Suffice to say this is the only Rick Ross I find worth listening to all the way through. It's not that the songs are any different in theme or content from his 3 previous albums - but what Ross does on this album is hit harder than he has ever before. From the first track to the last Ross rips on the high-flying beats spinning incredible tales of crime and debauchery and death. Ross' rhyme skills have come a long way from Port of Miami and it seems he can hold his own against anybody these days.

I'm not particularly a fan of the message that rappers like Ross send kids about what's important in life, but I mean you don't send kids to watch Scarface or The Godfather in order to learn life skills (or at least you shouldn't.) This is adult entertainment for adults.

It's not very original or ambitious but the point is that Ross has finally done a complete album and pretty much answered his critics. To me this is what I like the most about him - he refused to back down in the face of criticism and attacks. There's a couple of weak tracks like M.C. Hammer and the B.M.F-style pounding beats get used too often but this is clearly one of the best rap albums of 2010 and should have gotten Grammy nod.

The really ironic thing is that Ross might be the most genuine, 'realest' rapper in the game today. The music and videos of Teflon Don are so over-the-top and dramatic that no-one could really connect any of it to what real-life is. Rick Ross delivers pure unabashed entertainment and that is what rap should be about.

It's better to be good

2011-06-06T17:35:00.002-04:00

There's a phrase that people use in every arena of competitive human life, from pro basketball to warfare: it's better to be lucky than good. When two NBA superstars battle each other to a standstill with their supreme skills, and some 36 year-old washed up veteran on a minimum contract hits the game-winning shot from way outside his range, you hear it. When the newest, greenest kid in the squad gets shot at point-blank range and the round ricochets off his helmet and into ground leaving him without a scratch, you hear it. 'Good' meaning smart, skilled, experienced, strong. But there's another way to look at it - the other meaning of good - something that you can apply to the whole of life I think.

When I was in Standard 4 - I guess I was 8 or 9 - I had this teacher called Miss Nagir. I can't remember if she was married or not because we called all our teachers Miss, but anyway she was very forward-thinking about some things. I say this because I remember we had a spelling test where we had to spell the words PENIS and VAGINA and CLITORIS; which for many of us was the first time we were hearing those words and had no idea what they meant, which caused all kinds of hilarity for the rest of kids who knew what they were. I can't imagine the looks on some of the parents' faces when they asked their kids what they did in school that day. But anyway she had this policy where all desks had to be co-ed - one boy and one girl to a desk. Which was quite exciting for many of us because it would be the first time we would actually not be sitting with somebody who was the same sex as us. Growing up as we did in a small village, we were always shy and tentative with regard to the opposite sex. Maybe it's different in the schools in bigger places. So anyway I had to sit next to this girl named Maria and we started talking and at some point she showed me how she could whistle with her fingers and asked me if I knew who taught her how to whistle. I said no and then she said "my boyfriend." All I remember doing is picking back up the thing I was reading and thinking to myself what an odd thing that was to say to somebody you just met and what a curious thing it must be to be a girl.

I didn't get it then and I still don't. I've never been good with that stuff and I never will be. Part of the reason I like working with computers and math and stuff is that it's always a binary, black-and-white thing: you're either right or wrong. Your program either works or it doesn't, your proof is either correct or flawed, you either understand something or you don't. A model or theory or design either succeeds or it doesn't. Even with trying to write it's always you either suck at it or you don't and most people can't really conceal it one way or the other. My whole life I've always loved knowledge like that. I really never had any opportunity to practice those shadow arts of looks and signs that men and women use on one another, speak in secret alphabets as Jim Morrison put it. People who really know me know that I'm pretty blunt and forceful with regard to showing my feelings. I also never had much use for deceit or manipulation or scheming. You can't scheme your way in or out of set theory or system administration or quantum physics. So this is the model I always applied, quite disastrously, to everything in life when I was younger.

I know, now, that many if not most women wake up in the morning and before they put on their makeup they put on this lying mask and they go through the day with it on, lying to their parents and friends but most of all to themselves. They try their best to cover up how ugly and deficient they are inside with pretensions and charm, and many times they succeed. This isn't something that I knew when I was younger because I was just fortunate or unfortunate enough not to grow up with women like that. The women who raised me, for whatever reason, had very little use for artifice or deception or even nuance, either for the sake of their family or the men who loved them. If you did good they told you and if you screwed up they told you, usually several times, in quite a loud and forceful voice, and that was it. Whatever their faults and shortcomings my family was always open and honest about everything. Coincidentally or not these women didn't seem to invest much time in envy. When the people they knew were happy, they were happy for them, and when they were hurting or brought low, they tried to comfort and pull them up.

So, for better or worse this is how I was raised. I'm not being simplistic when I say that I don't understand envy because it is the truth. I guess I envy Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or whoever's dating Taylor Swift...except that I really don't and I never will. I want to get my own things in life - I want to create new things. I want somebody who loves me for who I am - the real things inside me. I don't have any interest in what other people have and I never will. The three things that I have always wanted to do in life from since I knew myself were to understand, create, and love. I don't have a lot of interest in anything else. But there are a heck of a lot of men and women who seem to be only interested in destroying things, deceiving people, hatred, malice, and envy.

I also don't understand women who like to hurt their friends because of envy. For better or for worse I've always been very black-and-white with my friends. It is inconceivable to me to try to hurt in any way somebody who I thought of as my friend, especially for the sole reason that he or she had something that other people liked and I did not have. Of course people aren't black and white and part of the wisdom that you get as you get older is that there are different types of friends - different levels of trust. Women I guess if they're lucky learn this from early on, but I daresay many men do not not. I can never understand why somebody would actively work towards hurting her own friend who trusts her a lot, just because of envy. This is the one thing I find unforgivable about envious people - they have no concept of what it means to create your own destiny. They see life just as whatever you can get by whatever means. But I mean that's just how the world is. If you're lucky enough to be smart and wise you might be able to avoid trusting these people, but if you're not then you will basically end up hurting yourself and the people who really care about you.

The wisdom of this world is survival of the fittest - you have to be smart and strong to survive. But it seems to me, no matter how smart you are, you are always going to meet people who are just stupid and low-minded enough to connive and scheme and do and say anything to satisfy their small minds. No matter how strong you are, you're always going to meet people who are going to exploit your vulnerabilities and betray your trust. But I believe, just like C.S. Lewis wrote in his Narnia books, that there is a wisdom that is older than this world. I believe that the one thing you can teach your kids to equip them for dealing with this world, the most important bit of wisdom you can impart to them, the thing that my family always taught me, is that goodness always wins in the end. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far you fall, no matter how irreparable the things you do may seem, in the end life is a circle. Everyone will get what is coming to them.

I really, really used to wish I was smarter and stronger when I was younger - I might have been able to avoid a whole ton of hurt and pain both for myself and for the people I really cared about. But the thing that I've realized is that it's not really about that - those aren't the most important things. I'd like to posit that trying your best to do the right thing, to help others, to at least avoiding harming others, to be sympathetic with other people's joy, to not be envious, to believe in the right thing; to me that is more important than being really smart and really strong. Samson was the strongest man in the whole Bible - no army could defeat him - but he still got deceived by somebody he thought he could trust. But in the end God still crushed his enemies; not because he was the strongest but because God believed him to be good inside. And the truth is that I've never seen the stupid, small-minded, ugly women who wanted to hurt me and their friends for no good reason except pure malice and envy, succeed in anything they do. And I have never seen the women who were pure and beautiful and perfect inside not be blessed and happy. So as far as I see, I'm not very strong or smart especially where women are concerned, but I did always try my stupid black-and-white best to do the right thing. And that has always been the most important thing.

Lil' Mama - VYP (Voice of the Young People)

2011-05-09T22:49:00.129-04:00

This album actually surprised me. After hearing Lip Gloss, G-Slide, and Shawty Get Loose I figured I knew what to expect from Lil' Mama, but it turns out that the first 3 singles, for some strange reason, aren't really representative of what the whole album sounds like.

It was actually surprising to hear how 'normal' the rest of the album sounds. Like she chose to drop the whole cartoony high school diva dancer schtick and just tried to be a normal person. The fact that she writes her own lyrics are enough for me to give her props. But it's also good to hear a female rapper who doesn't feel the need to maintain an over-sized personality all the time, and wants to be judged just by her music alone.

Musically the album is pretty varied, thankfully, and it's quite decent. What It Is, Swim, Truly In Love, Broken Pieces, College, L.I.F.E, Girlfriend Remix are all quite good. VYP isn't The Catcher in the Rye, but just really good songs about what young people think about these days. Ironically the songs I usually skip are the first three singles I mentioned above, but I'm a dyed-in-the-wool music snob and every debut album needs songs that get made into videos that the kids listen to that push sales. The fact that she made a track called One Hit Wonder and stuck it at number 02 on the album, to me says she's at least given some thought about who she wants to be career-wise. Rap is all about bragging and made-up persona's sure, but even in her videos Lil' Mama isn't projecting something that's catering to the lowest denominator. She is who she is - and who she wants to be. All in all it's pretty good - like I said it's just good to hear a female rapper who doesn't need wigs and fake voices and rapping about shooting up clubs or selling drugs or how many places they've had sex in.

This is freaking hilarious

2011-05-02T20:00:00.001-04:00

NMA continues to be the most awesome news show ever.

EDIT: The original vid seems to have been pulled due to fear of backlash...but I think today is one of times we should embrace and cherish free speech...

Perfection

2011-05-02T12:58:00.000-04:00

Like other people have said, I still can't get over this dress. It just takes your breath away. It's like something out of King Arthur. I'll never get tired of looking at it.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me,
‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is sort of like this dress: short, simple, perfect, deadly, unforgettable. It's a book you can finish in a few hours and no matter how many times you read it you never get tired of it.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—

then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

‘I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.’

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of

11

apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me. I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

It's passages like this you read that make you want to be a writer.

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening with a few Chicago friends already caught up into their own holiday gayeties to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This or That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances and the matchings of invitations: ‘Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?’ and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate. When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

My friend reminds me from time to time, in an indirect way, that one of my biggest problems is the inability to accept that perfection doesn't exist in this life. There's no perfect solution to any problem, no perfect computer code you can write. No perfect situation, no perfect people, no perfect friends, no perfect relationship. The only thing that's going to happen to me if I don't drop this obsession with perfection is that I'm going to smash myself into bits and have nothing to show for it. Which is true to a large extent - and has happened to a large extent. A lot of times I wonder just how much the components of my pathological personality - avoidant, borderline, narcissistic, obsessive, self-destructive - are just manifestations of my inability to accept that myself and other people and the whole of life can't be perfect . Like I start a dozen things and abruptly leave them 1/3 finished because I can't bear to not get them absolutely right. I see people in very black-and-white terms - I either like them and go all out for them, or I don't even acknowledge their existence. In anything I create I can't stop myself from searching out the tiniest imperfection and then throwing the whole thing out and starting over.

But it's cool. Because the first act of creation - that act of giving birth - is always painful as hell. I am all these things and I am trying to do better, but I'm prepared to accept that these things will always be part of me. And whatever I go through, to me it's not really that important. Because I might not be a good person, but I'm not an evil person either. I know this for a fact because evil - envy, selfishness, deceit, malice, hatred, hypocrisy - is purely about destruction. Regardless of what I've done in this life there isn't anybody on this planet that can say that I partook of these things. Every day I try my best to avoid these things, to do what is right, to do no harm to anyone. I don't always succeed and a lot of times I end up doing the exact opposite of what I intend to do, but I do try. Because I have knowledge - that wisdom that was given to humans to know the difference between good and evil - to understand the difference between creation and life, and destruction and death. I try my best, every day, not to hurt people. A lot of times I don't succeed but whenever I hurt people, the vast majority of the time it's just an indirect way of hurting myself.

I'm pretty sure that Sarah Burton and F. Scott Fitzgerald got called a b---- and an a-- frequently and had people who hated them, who felt they were too arrogant, too sure in their own ability, too obssessed with getting it right all the time, too impatient with other people. But I'm pretty sure they had that knowledge and wisdom to understand the difference between good and evil. And the fact is that the people who pretend not to know the difference, who pretend that they never received that wisdom, who say in their heart that this world is, was, and will always be the same so let me get everything I can regardless of what I have to do to get it - those people are the absolutely worthless ones in life. They are born, live, die and are forgotten. They care not about making something new, something that will be remembered, something that will last when every stupid thing their small minds crave has passed away. This planet needs new things, new creations, new solutions. There's billions of people in this life who go to bed every night wishing somebody, somewhere would find something new to help them - maybe some new technology to help them get enough to eat from their land, or some new cheap hardware and software they could use to organize their villages into a potent enough group to fight the politicians who oppress them. Or even just some book or essay or op-ed, written by someone somewhere letting the world know that not everybody fights on the side of darkness, not everyone is blind and doesn't care. Some new, small thing to help them and give them hope.

So maybe I will just end up as debris, victim of a massive implosion caused by a fruitless lifelong search for the things that are perfect and right. But if, just one time, I can ever create something perfect; something that takes your breath away; something people never get tired of looking at or reading or using or listening to; something that causes a spark inside someone, somewhere, that reminds them that perfection and wisdom and truth and knowledge and beauty and love do exist in this life; if I can ever create a moment like this for someone, then it would have been worth it.

The Strokes - Room on Fire

2011-04-22T15:15:00.003-04:00

This is the first Strokes album I ever listened to and it's still my favourite so far. They really do remind me of the Beatles, or how the Beatles must have sounded to music listeners back then.

Their music relies on melodies and original instrument and recording techniques instead of driving heavy riffs like the Creeds and Pearl Jams. of the world. It was one of the first pop/punk/alternative/whatever records I listened to and I really like it. The lyrics are throwaway, mostly, and it seems like every album they put out they put out Julian Casablancas' delivery becomes more and more lackadaisical. But it's still entertaining.

There isn't a song on the whole thing that I don't like. It's really a great album - one of my favourites.

Wu-Tang Clan - 8 Diagrams

2011-03-25T07:50:00.000-04:00

The very first time I heard 8 Diagrams, I admit I was disappointed. It sounded, weak, I guess is the word, the first few times I listened to it. A lot of it was minimalistic and stripped down, which was especially surprising after the busy, amped-out flamboyant production of Iron Flag. A lot of it had these big orchestral arrangements with R&B crooners like Eryka Badu and (a feature of hiphop which RZA himself had apparently dissed on the intro to the 2nd disc of Wu-Tang Forever.) It was so unlike anything Wu-Tang had ever put out as an official group project - and it was their first album in 6 years. I wasn't the only one not really feeling it; not just some fans but some members of the Wu-Tang spoke publicly about their dissatisfaction with the album. Let Rae break it down:

It's the perceived shortcomings of 8 Diagrams that led directly to Raekwon's Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang which has been called an unoffical Wu-Tang group project. The title says it all I guess. But after two or three years I've been going back and listening to it and now, I really, really like it. It's not just that music has grown on me - but after I heard RZA on Carry It, it pretty much confirmed something for me about RZA.

The thing is this: RZA is a genius. No doubt about it. The depth and scope of his musical talent is amazing. He had and always will have this massive vision for Wu-Tang - a large part of which has been realized.. He always has had a very clear idea of what he wanted to - both musically and professionally. And unfortunately, having a big vision and single-mindedly aspiring to it will always put you in conflict with other people that don't see what you see, even if they are your fam. and you love them the most. 8 Diagrams is a lot more melodic and finely-crafted and experimental than the previous Wu-Tang albums but it's still pretty good - better than Iron Flag and The W in my opinion.

The only other producer that could/would put out a song like The Heart Gently Weeps is probably Kanye. In fact it was right around the time I started getting in to 808s & Heartbreaks that I put 8 Diagrams back on heavy rotation.

The funny thing is a lot of the real hardcore hiphop fans actually like it - it's something different and progressive and when you decide to be different and progressive you're always gonna have people who don't quite get it.

Brett Walker

2011-03-18T10:34:00.000-04:00

Brett Walker on Flickr - guy makes some amazing stills.

The Black Keys - Brothers

2011-03-10T19:49:00.000-04:00

Holy crap, listening to Brothers by The Black Keys for the first time just blew me away. I can't remember the last time an album just wowwed me on the first listen. Their videos are insanely funny and crazy too.

Atlas Shrugged Trailer

2011-03-09T06:26:00.000-04:00

Oh boy. Well, I'm looking forward to it. It'll be interesting to see what they did with it because Atlas Shrugged is like one of those books that defy film adaptation. But I'm psyched for it.

thirtysomething

2011-03-01T01:50:00.000-04:00

When I was 7 or 8 I couldn't wait to be 10. Just imagine, I'd have two whole numerals for my age. Now I actually seem to dread birthdays. So many good memories since I turned 30:

Adieu hairline, I hardly knew ya. I wish we could have done some more fun stuff together.
Those gray hairs make you look mature and experienced...yeah right
I'm how many pounds overweight???
Congratulations on your first root canal!!
The girl in the shop "Lemme go in the back and see if they have your size."
No this shirt will not fit, no really nope no forget about it, wait maybe if I pull it...no no just stop
What exactly is this on my face - is it a mole? a wart? a pimple? good grief
Women hit their sexual peak after 30 you know... and?
Just like Martin Amis wrote in Yellow Dog, chicks in their teens and twenties seem to look thorough me rather than at me.

Bur there's like so much stuff I understand better now than when I was in my twenties. I'm not just the same person inside, I'm better.

The Beastie Boys

2011-02-28T02:43:00.002-04:00

One of the funniest and most original and creative crews in hip-hop: http://www.vevo.com/artist/the-beastie-boys

Carmelo Anthony to the Knicks: it was worth it

2011-02-22T20:43:00.000-04:00

Most of the negative reaction about the trade is just buyer's remorse. Ok Melo could have been had for less, just like you could have paid less for that 2nd-hand car you bought if you had waited till summer. Or it could have been gone forever. Do you really want Donnie Walsh to say he passed on 'Melo for Timofey Mozgev? Nope. Yeah the Knicks went all-in for 'Melo and maybe it won't work out, but it's the kind of gamble every NBA team has to take in order to make themselves into championship contenders. As Donnie Walsh said in a radio interview, you have to choose whether to get your superstars now and build the supporting cast later, or vice-versa. The Knicks chose the former. Miami is probably going to contend for the next five years at least - the Knicks aren't getting out of the East without superstars to match the Heatles. That's how the game is today - you need superstars to win. Even if the Knicks don't win in the near future, the chances of CP3 or Deron Williams signing here in 2012 with 'Melo and Amare and forming their own supergroup just increased massively.

Billups, if he comes ready to play, is an upgrade over Felton until 2012, especially in the playoffs. Billups ran the Team USA offense under D'Antoni very well or so they say. Chandler was most likely gone after this season without a much bigger contract that would have eaten into the Knicks cap space, so that's no big loss. Gallinari had potential...but that's all he had. He's just very inconsistent and only D'Antoni would probably play him as a starter. Anthony replaces both those guys, plus the Knicks got a whole gaggle of swingmen like Walker and Azubuike and Williams and Brewer to step into that position. The biggest loss to me was at C and PF. Mozgev...well he looked like he had potential, but D'Antoni's ridiculous small-ball system froze him out for most of the season. Ditto Randolph. So I mean it's no point holding onto guys that your coach isn't going to play. The real test is for D'Antoni to effectively utilize Anthony in his system. If he can't do it he's most likely gone after this season. Donnie Walsh is also gonna have to work some more magic to get the Knicks a legit big man up front.

But to me one of the most appealing things about the trade is just simple karma. The pieces the Knicks gave up represent fair value for Denver. They can keep them, or flip Gallinari and Mozgev to New Jersey for first-rounders. But there's no way Denver fans can say 'Melo stiffed them and left them with nothing or less than what he was worth. So maybe the basketball gods will smile on New York, just for once.

The most puzzling question is exactly what part Dolan and Isaiah Thomas played in this and how much Walsh was on board with the bigger offer that was made. But I doubt very much Walsh will consider this a bad trade. He's the guy who pulled the trigger on Amare for $100 mil in the summer, when everybody said it was overpaying the guy. And so far Amare has been worth every penny - when last did a New York Knick start and drop 29 in a All-Star game? My respect for Donnie Walsh has grown a great deal - he's not impatient like Thomas but he's also not afraid to go all-in on a true franchise player when a real opportunity arises.

2011-01-08T18:15:00.001-04:00

Honestly the best thing about this movie is naked Kate Winslet followed in 2nd-place by old Kate Winset. I understand where it was trying to go - a polemic on German guilt juxtaposed with an unconventional love story but it just didn't pull me in, except right down to the end. Everything in this film has been done to death before. Just like Revolutionary Road - fantastic individual performance by Kate Winslet over a pretty plain film.

Revolutionary Road

2011-01-08T13:50:00.000-04:00

Well I imagine the book is probably a lot better. The most interesting thing about this film was supposed to be "Kate and Leo" 10 years after Titanic, in their thirties living in suburbia. But the dialogue between them for most of the film was just bland and stilted and unnatural and sounded forced a lot of the time. I guess they tried to stick to the book's dialogue - which probably wasn't a good idea. This needed a better screenplay The worst thing about this movie for people who haven't read the book was its predictability. From the opening scene you could easily guess what was going to happen in the next scene, and the next and the next...and less than 1/3 of the way in you could probaly guess how the whole thing will turn out.

All of the dialogue and scenes were just bread-and-butter American post-war fiction. If you read John Updike then you have a good idea. There's nothing new here really. Winslet gave a fantastic individual performance but that was it.

On the Project Runway finale

2010-11-02T15:37:00.000-04:00

I know fans of the show are up-in-arms about Gretchen winning over Mondo, but honestly I thought it could have gone either way. Yes Gretchen made a lot of fugly, uninspired clothes over the course of the season and yes she shouldn't have been picked over April and Michael (and yes the producers definitely just threw her in the final cuts just for the sake of drama,) but I mean the decision had to be made based on the final collection the three of them showed. Andy was probably ranked higher than Gretchen in most people's minds based on his previous work, but his collection was significantly weaker than hers. I thought her final collection was the strongest out of the three. The designs were edgy, sexy, cohesive and were accessorized beautifully. It really looked like a collection you would expect to see from a top-tier designer. Mondo's was brilliant but you could see that he was veering to close to fantasy and fashion pantomime. The fact that he chose the unaltered polka dot dress to be his statement piece to me buried him in the eyes of Nina and Michael. The dress was brilliant but too costumey - it would have been fantastic with a slit and skin to break it up but Mondo stuck to his vision, and went down with it.

I really disliked Gretchen because of her taste and her attitude towards Michael C. but you can't deny that for the final show she knocked it out of the park. And that's the reason, rightly so, that she won.

Hannibal Rising

2010-09-27T01:56:00.000-04:00

This film could have been much better with a better lead actor. Gaspard Ulliel's Hannibal is completely unconvincing and with that horrible accent is utterly amateur. But the story overall was good. For the first half of the film it's really an intense story that really gets you thinking on the nature of revenge. You can actually see the point where Hannibal tranforms from seeking vengeance to actually enjoying his killing. Gantz's revelation that Hannibal too took part in the act that drove him mad was a really good twist. It would have been nice if the story didn't just peter out though. A lot of the killing shown is just gratuitous - you could have made a whole film about Hannibal Lecter without showing any blood.

Red Dragon

2010-09-21T07:58:00.000-04:00

It was decent - Hopkins was great, Fiennes was pretty good, Norton was kinda mediocre though. His character just didn't have any personality at all in this. The focus was on Hopkins and Fiennes. It was a decent Hannibal movie but they could have explored the Red Dragon mythology and the origins of the Tooth Fairy more..

Google and Apple continue to make Microsoft technology obsolescent

2010-08-15T16:20:00.000-04:00

It's just not fair. In every single online technology arena, from search to mobile devices to cloud apps, Microsoft is getting its lunch eaten by Google and Apple. Every new technology brought to the market by Microsoft hass been late and inferior to what Google and Apple are doing. Right now I really can't think of a reason to not use Google Docs in favour of MS Office 2010. I'm sure Office 2010 (and its non-free Web counterpart) have a lot of features Google Docs doesn't...but all the stuff I need to do day-to-day, including drawing diagrams and making presentations, is in Google Docs. Plus I have zero work to do publishing documents online or real-time collaborating with others, or even just worrying about if my documents are backed up. These features alone are worth more than any sophisticated formatting features in Office 2010. I'm pretty sure a lot of small and medium-sized business owners around the world are evaulating whether buying yet another relase of Office makes sense compared to the power available from Google Docs
.
Meanwhile Android's 2Q sales outpaced the iPhone...while Microsft's Kin was an embarassing failure and Windows 7 is threatening to be the same. Bing is...well maybe some people like it, but in searching the Web for programming articles or technical information which I mostly do, Bing is horribly inferior to Google. I just like the fact that Google is catering to more tech-savvy users than MS. Gmail is perfect for following mailing lists and Android and Chrome OS will be hacked and customized and enhanced in infinite ways to provide the ultimate level of control which open-source users crave.

Chrome OS will probably become the standard on non-Apple tablets and e-readers and netbooks - which I suppose Apple isn't too concerned about since the people who use Android and Linux are in a different segment from the people who use iOS and OSX. I doubt Apple execs are losing much sleep over Android and Chorme OS - they already have their hands full figuring out how to spend the billions and billions of dollars their iDevices are generating. I'm sure there were massive grins in Cupertino when Apple's market capitilization outpaced Microsoft - quite a milestone in the company's history.

Where does this leave Microsoft? It's already losing developer mindshare to Google and open-source (which no doubt generates loud cackles from Google as it licenses more and more of its technology as FOSS and gives developers less and less reason to use Microsoft's proprietary stuff.) Windows 7 is great - a real step forward after the Vista debacle. Selling OS licenses are Microsoft's bread and butter - but what's going to run on the hundreds of millions of mobile phones and tablets and e-readers and netbooks out there all over the world? Microsoft STILL doesn't have a worthy answer.

Fallout 3 journal

2010-08-10T13:56:00.000-04:00

Set out on some damn fool quest to find this boy's dad...notice a sewer plant, decide to investigate, this freaking HUGE scary radoscorpion attacks me...meet up and kill some ghouls...go down into sewers poke around...see door...with two LAWN GNOMES in front...wtf...next thing I know this crazy looking ghould runs out and starts shooting...shoot up his ass...he runs away...realize I stumbled on his hideout...sleep in his bed...rifle through all his stuff...take all the valuables...leave...feel bad I stole all this dude's stuff, after all he was just hiding down there trying to get by like everybody else...

Fallout 3 is one of the games that's generating real emotions in me - like feeling scared and disgusted and depressed at the state of the world.

Knicks making moves

2010-07-17T22:16:00.001-04:00

Even though the Knicks didn't land Lebron, (which was a longshot anyway,) I really really like what Donnie Walsh has done. He's added significant depth in the frontcourt and at point guard, something they desperateky needed. Probably more importantly, all the new pieces have reasonable contracts that can be used in trades, well all except Stoudemaire. But even though I feel they significantly overpaid Stoudemire, given that no team was going to give him that much, I understand Walsh's thinking. He needed to get Amare locked up as soon as possible in order to entice Lebron and that's how much it cost. And hey if Amare can play at an All-Star level and entice impending FA like Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony, then it certainly would have been worth it. Yeah I know the Knicks have had terrible luck gving contracts to people with bad knees but you'd think the Knick's legendary bad mojo must end at some point. We've suffered enough...

Besides Amare, we got Felton, Anthony Randolph, Ronnie Turiaf, and the Russian guy Timofy Mozgov. Toney Douglas is a decent PG but he's still learning and from what I've read Felton can really thrive in D'Antoni's system. Randolph if healthy could be the next NBA big man to break out, just like Amare did. The offense of Stoudemire and defense of Randolph could make a very imposing front court. And with the length of Gallirani and Chandler on the court the Knicks could finally be able to compete with the bigger teams, Plus it will be really interesting to see what the young guys - Bill Walker, Azubuike, and Landry Fields - can do. And of course everybody's waiting for Gallo to breakout, which he could do this year.

With all this the picture is even better. Curry's salary comes off the books this year, meaning in 2011 the Knicks will have a good chunk of change to sign a top-tier FA outright, or they could use Curry in a trade. Plus Felton's contract is only 2 years meaning they will have room to sign Chris Paul or Deron Williams. They might even be able to sign one of these elite PGs through a trade using Felton and Randolph and Gallirani and Curry's contract

As far as Mike D'Antoni goes, well I give him one year to prove himself. He finally has the roster he wants including one of his favorite players so now he has to deliver. I really don't think much of him as a coach at this point, he mad seome terrible decisions personnel wise starting with the Knicks' best player and coming down to the tail-end of the season he was starting to look desperate. So we'll see.

So for once I'm optimistic about the Knicks this season. The bad luck has to end at some point.

Steam 'Perils of summer' sale ends...finally

2010-07-05T15:31:00.002-04:00

Before I was forced into selling my blood or some even more degrading action to get money, the Steam sale finally came to an end. Although it would probably be shorter to list what I did not get, here's a list of the games my grandkids will have to finish before they can buy any more games:

Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising

Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey and Abe's Exodus

Order of War

Dogfighter

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Ultimate Sith Edition

Hearts of Iron III

Supreme Commander 2

Overlord

Left for Dead 2

Introversion Complete Pack (Defcon, Uplink, Multiwinia, etc.)

Left 4 Dead

Killing Floor

Half Life Source

Blazing Angels 2

Grid

Just Cause 2

Civilization IV

Trine

Beat Hazard

Borderlands

whew...well I spent less than $150 in total and it was definitely worth it.

Windows 7 page file size

2010-07-05T00:18:00.000-04:00

Even though I know 4Gb isn't really a lot for a developer PC, especially one that runs several VMs, one thing that I didn't understand is why under heavy usage my desktop would just suddenlly fly off to la la land - thrashing and thrashing and thrashing for literally hours. It seems that I've found the cause - the size of the swap file. It seems that Windows started off with a relative small page file size (probably because it detected 4 GB of physical memory,) and was attempting to dynamically allocate the swap file and shed physical memory load at the same time - this lead to the machine being rendered unusable until cold restart.

Bottom line is that with only 4 GB RAM and impending heavy application usage, the Windows page file must be set to a minumum size of at least 4GB to avoid excessive paging. If your system pages incessantly and becomes unresponsive under heavy memory load, setting a large enough minimum pagefile can work wonders. It won't be a s nice as upgrading to 8GB or more, but if you blew all your money on the Steam summer sale, it's a good temporary fix.

McChrystal the latest casualty in the Dirty War of Afghanistan

2010-06-23T14:27:00.002-04:00

The original article:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

This mess about Gen. McChrystal is way overblown. If you read Blackfive or any other mil-blog you would come to conclusion that any officer above the rank of captain in that theatre has similar views to McChrystal on the civilian leadership in Afghanistan.. And any cadre of military men in Afghanistan, from the lowest boot privates to the COs, probably would express the same attitude and make the same snarky marks that McChrystal's inner circle did if given the chance. Obama and his diplomatic adjutants would have to be extremely thin-skinned to get offended by this interview.

The biggest mistake McChrystal made was putting his trust in a journalist who clearly had the sole intention of furthering his own career - even at the cost of McChrystal's. The whole media too is now after his head for some reason - Keith Olbermann last night even went so far as to quote the UCMJ about officers bad mothing the civillian leadership. I mean COIN is a dirty and costly and lengthy business with no guarantee of success but it did eventually succeed in Iraq.

I mean c'mon what does Olbermann or Michael Hastings or any of us know about the war in Afghanistan? McChrystal was the commanding general of Special Forces - the best of of the best. He made his whole career about unorthodox tactics, thinking differently, and speaking his mind. Maybe he overplayed the whole rebel-warrior thing for this reporter and deserves to be pegged back. But not lose his job.

McChrystal is not beyond, reproach far from it. His actions in the Pat Tillman case many view as reprehensible. But there are no clean-cut G.I. Joe heroes any more. All that stuff came to an end on 9/11.The War on Terror is about as dirty as it can get. And maybe McChrystal is just the guy for the job. His actions going after the insurgency structure in Iraq probably broke a lot of rules, but as one famous WWII admiral remarked "When the going gets tough they send for the sons of bitches." And he succeeded.

It's really ironic that neither Al Qaeda or the Taliban nor the despicable Hamid Karzai could cost McChrystal the most important job of his militrary career, but one Rolling Stone reporter. But that's the dirty war that's being fought today. Those are the rules of the game. Just like Vietnam the war is being fought and lost in the hearts and minds of the Afghan and American people. And one mistake in the eyes of hostile media can be more costly that a whole regiment of Taliban.

UPDATE: It's official - McChrystal's done.

Cross of Iron

2010-06-20T12:58:00.000-04:00

Caught this on TCM last night and I thought it was pretty damn good. I think this is the first WWII film I've seen from the POV of German infantry. It really takes you through the pathos and trauma of soldiers, especially in a desperate, hopeless situation like the crumbling German Eastern Front. It doesn't try to be ultra-realistic and historically accurate like Band of Brothers and modern war epics, but the story really isn't about the combat. It's mostly about ordinary men in an unnatural situation and the extremes they are driven to - both good and evil. It is ultra-realistic about the insanity of war. A lot of the stuff that's depicted, Saving Private Ryan and most American films wouldn't touch.

Views Datasource 6..x-1.0-BETA1 released

2010-06-09T20:21:00.002-04:00

Just released a new version of my Drupal module. Views Datasource. Way too many changes and fixes to list, check the README.

Filtering join/quit messages in Irssi

2010-06-04T21:42:00.002-04:00

Even though I followed the instructions in the startup howto, I couldn't seem to filter all those join/quit and nick change messages in any of my channel windows just by setting /window level -JOINS -PARTS etc. This write-up shows you how: http://wouter.coekaerts.be/site/irssi/wclf

My Steam games so far

2010-05-30T21:49:00.002-04:00

I bought the THQ pack when it was $50 last year, the Total War pack this year, and now I just bought The Orange Box. I have no idea when I'm going to find time to finish all these games. Steam is like "k buy 25 KILLER GAMES for only $49.99" and the intended victim is like"Wow what a great deal..." What they don't tell you is that most of the games are so engrossing you'll only have time for like 2 or 3 at most after. Only thing I've played out of all these is Rome Total War and it could easily take a year to finish everything in it.

Reall Ms. Rand, really?

2010-05-15T07:46:00.001-04:00

I shall be the first man in this valley to hire a servant." He got up, reached into his pocket and threw a five-dollar gold piece down on the table. As an advance on your wagess," he said.
She was startled to discover, as her hand reached for the gold piece, that she felt the eager, desperate, tremulous hope of a young girl on her first job: the hope that she would be able to deserve it.
"Yes, sir," she said, her eyes lowered.

sigh...

Still was good though.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU

2009-05-20T17:17:00.001-04:00

Oh man, finally got CDT and MinGW working. CDT 5.0.2 is not installing properly for me - if You get errors like "Cannot run program "gcc": The system cannot find the file specified." or "Cannot run program "make": The system cannot find the file specified." you may need to get the Eclipse/CDT simultaneous release

Monzy performs at Stanford Univ.

2009-05-14T02:30:00.001-04:00

This is hilarious.

Max Payne

2009-05-06T13:12:00.003-04:00

It was a decent action flick - engaging. Kind of sputtered out at the end though. Would have liked to see more bullet-time sequences. Made me want to play the game.

Punisher Warzone

2009-05-06T13:09:00.003-04:00

Started out good but sputtered. Spent too much on melodrama. It needed way more violence and gunfights. The villains were pretty obvious and one-dimensional. Max Payne was much better.

The Wicker Man

2009-04-11T11:44:00.004-04:00

A beautiful film. The music alone is worth seeing it. I wouldn't say it's a horror though - more suspense. There's only one really scary moment - beautifully orchestrated I have to say.

Hot Fuzz

2009-03-12T00:59:00.003-04:00

I enjoyed it - the latter scenes were great. Need more Pegg and Wright in my life.

Threads

2009-03-08T09:52:00.003-04:00

Hey look who's back...
Everybody that holds positions of authority in society - government and industry leaders - those who would wage war and treat human life like pawns in chess, should watch this movie. It reminded me of Grave of the Fireflies. An exquisite, chilling, horrific tale of the human cost of nuclear war.

A nuclear exchange of 3000 megatons sent the world back to the Dark Ages. The scary thing is that some studies have shown that even a regional exchange between India and Pakistan would send enough dust and smoke into the atmosphere to realize the nuclear winter scenario

Automatic Mario - Kumikyoku

2008-06-03T02:28:00.001-04:00

Music video made inside Super Mario World.

Programming is pain (sometimes)

2008-05-24T22:09:00.003-04:00

Last night I went to bed completely frustrated. I had spent probably 6 hours staring and poking at a piece of code and thinking what on earth could be wrong with it. It seemed functionally identical to the code I had been using as a guide, yet it didn't work. It didn't do anything - generate error messages, any messages at all - it just got silently ignored by the framework. Why, why, why, is all I could think about before going to bed.

But what I've learned and seen reinforced over and over again is - if you get completely stuck, step away from the problem for a while. Take a nap or a shower or watch a movie or do something to take your conscious mind away from it. Sure enough, when I woke up and went back at it, less than 1 hour in I spotted the discrepancy. I had a function included in a class definition, while my example code had the function outside the class. So I took it outside and hey presto it worked perfectly.

It still sucked though to have to go through all that frustration.

projectM - Finally audio visualizations for Amarok

2008-05-24T06:11:00.003-04:00

The one area where my trusty WinAmp had Amarok licked was visualizations (although Amarok outshines it and nearly everything else I've tried in most every audio library category.)

Enter projectM :

projectM is an LGPL'ed reimplementation of Milkdrop under OpenGL. All projectM requires is a video card with 3D acceleration and your favorite music.

FINALLY I could get trippy fullscreen milkdrop visualizations. I talked about how I pulled libvisual-projectm from Debian lenny here. The two gotchas I had with getting the libvisual-projectm plugin to work with Amarok are:

The config.inp file projectM drops in your home points to fonts from ttf-bitstream-vera - Vera.ttf and VeraMono.ttf. If you don't have these fonts installed then all you will see when enabling the plugin under Amarok is a brief projectM window flash and then disappear. You can get these fonts in debian by installing the ttf-bitstream-vera package. In theory you should be able to modify config.inp to point to whatever fonts you want but this runs into the second issue:
Currently libvisual-projectm appears to ignore some parts of config.inp I got it to set directives for Preset Duration but it ignores other directives like Window Width and Fullscreen and FPS.

No biggie, but it is kind of irritating to have to resize the vis window to 640x480 and then right click in, whenever I want fullscreen visualizations. But milkdrop is so worth it. Maybe these issues will be resolved with the 1.1 release of projectM which I'm soon to build and install.

Great moments in Views 2 coding history

2008-05-23T00:07:00.002-04:00

After scrabbling through source files and scrutinizing tantalizing yet incomplete docs, I finally got Views 2 to disdainfully acknowledge that yes, I was in fact a views style plugin.

MAN U 6 - CHELSEA 5 PK

2008-05-21T17:56:00.003-04:00

To quote Vincent Vega, now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go home and have a heart attack.

Friday's no-comment pic

2008-05-16T19:34:00.003-04:00

From Ball don't Lie

Getting fresh meat for Debian Etch (and solving the Dynamic MMap ran out of room problem)

2008-05-10T21:12:00.003-04:00

Oddly enough the I don't recall ever installing anything from the Debian testing repository so far, but an opportunity presented itself when I discovered projectM. Getting projectM to work in Amarok is another story but for now, just the details of the pull from the testing repository:

1. SOP - Just add deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib to sources.list in /etc/apt. I also added deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib which probably contributed to the problems I had later.

2. Run apt-get update. Processed and downloaded the repository packages' metadata fine, until it ran into:

E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room
E: Error occured while processing sqlrelay-sqlite (NewPackage)
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.us.d.........contrib_binary-i386_Packages
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

So I googled the error and found a partial solution at the cached version of http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html:

You may find that you receive an error like the following:

E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room
E: Error occured while processing sqlrelay-sqlite (NewPackage)
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.us.debian.org_debian_dists_woody_contrib_binary-i386_Packages
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

This is caused because apt's cache is too small to handle all of the packages that are included with stable, testing, and unstable. This is also very easy to fix. Add the following line to /etc/apt/apt.conf

APT::Cache-Limit "8388608";

Thanks to R (Chandra) Chandras for pointing out this problem

Now it turns out in my Etch there is no apt.conf...there is an apt.conf.d directory with two conf files containing directives. So I followed the pattern, named mine 80aptcache.conf and added the CacheLimit directive above. However I had to set it to some insane high value - 200000000 (I suspect because of including the src packages) to finally get apt-get update working. But it did work and I got a the 1.01 version of libvisual-projectm. How I got that to work with Amarok is another post for another day.

Setting up sudo

2008-05-08T15:46:00.006-04:00

su and sudo don't come setup out of the box with Debian Etch (for good reasons I guess) so I had to set it up myself. The way I want su and sudo to work is:

Let me run any command as root, but only when I supply the root password
Always prompt me to supply the root password. This is different from the default sudo behaviour.

The example sudoers files I dug up on the net were complex, but didn't really answer my query about how to run it as described above so after some digging and head-scratching this is the sudoers file I came up with (you only edit sudoers with the visudo command):

Defaults env_reset,runaspw,timestamp_timeout=0

# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
myuser ALL=(root) ALL

The syntax for each line in sudoers is:
initialuser network = (targetuser) commands
The initialuser is the logged-in user who will be sudo'ing to the targetuser. In this case it's a user called myuser so replace that with the user you login as. By specifying ALL you're allowing the user to sudo on any network interface currently active. (root) means you want to run as the root user and ALL means you can run any command as root.

Thre are two important additions to the Defaults entry. runaspw indicates that you want to be prompted for the targetuser's password, not your own. timestamp_timeout=0 means that everytime you sudo you will have to provide the password; otherwise you will be allowed for a certain time to perform su without requiring the password prompt.

For a single machine with mostly a single user this is a useful sudoers setup. If I feel the need to add anything more useful I'll post it.

Links:
http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/man/sudoers.html man page for sudoers
http://www.sudo.ws/sudo/sample.sudoers Example sudoers file

Happiness is DIY computing

2008-05-03T15:54:00.008-04:00

Finally exams are over...what an ordeal. I'll have to do over Combinatorics in the summer or next year. It's a really interesting course but I didn't put nearly enough work into in this semester to pass.

So, de-stressing now, I got to tinkering with X-MAME. I finally got it up to it's proper performance by using the OpenGL mode of the xmame-x11 build, instead of the xmame-SDL I was using. I was getting horrible framerates even though the box I'm running on is powerful enough (1 GHz + nvidia GeForce 440MX) to run most everything full throttle.

This experience is one of many that reinforces for me the difference between open-source computing vs. Windows or Apple. It's pure DIY fun. Setting up the Linux box will eventually become my multimedia/retro-gaming machine took a lot of head-scratching and researching on the web and experimenting, but I have got it tweaked perfectly to the point where it's a lot better that it would be under Windows. Every time I look for an open-source alternative to a piece of Windows software, like a video player - I've rediscovered the same principle - it takes more time to tweak and setup properly FOSS software, but in the end it will have way more technical capability than the Windows variants.

So if you just love fiddling and digging into computers, FOSS is the only way to go.

SoC 2008 is on

2008-04-23T19:14:00.000-04:00

This year I'll again be participating in Google's Summer of Code program and again with the Drupal org. My mentor will be Gordon Heydon. My project is adding output for microformats and RDF and JSON to Views, so content on a site can be easily exposed to semantic web agents and mashups. I'm really stoked about this project because it's going to be really interesting programming for the Semantic Web and I can envision countless uses for it when it's brought to fruition. I've been wanting to explore the fascinating world of semantic web data for a long time and now I'm going to get paid for it - how cool is that :D

This is my second SoC and just like last year I'm looking forward to meeting all types of brilliant interesting folk. I've always felt that one of the most important bits of SoC, besides the $4500 paycheck and the cert and the prestige (and of course the swag,) is the really cool people you meet on the way. I've already made friends with really brilliant people hanging out on IRC and hope to make more. So props to Google for giving students this fantastic opportunity.

2 more very different movies

2008-04-12T02:13:00.003-04:00

The Last King of Scotland didn't grab me at all. I was hoping to find some insight into Idi "The Butcher of Uganda" Amin's life and some psychological justification for what led this man to slaughter hunderds of thousands of human beings. Instead I got an adventure story starring Nicholas Garrigan as the protagonist and Amin his evil insane foil, with gratuitous sex and gore thrown in. The film doesn't even try explore the ordinary lives of Ugandans during the regime. Every panoramic scene is full of the same tired cliches of Africa - colourful clothing, women singing and men drumming in rural villages, tense unstable soldiers with weapons drawn...I just got tired of it really quickly. I really can't see what got Forest Whittaker Best Actor Oscar - he just put on an African accent and acted just as you would expect some insane African dictator buffon to act.

The Mist didn't win any awards but it was an outstanding film. The story, characters, acting, and special effects were top notch. Easily one of the best films I've seen for a while, probably one of my all-time favourites. The story is just perfectly paced - for most of the film you have no idea what the hell is really happening to the characters, and you share their confusion and fear. The scene where the fire-trucks and police car race by and then some Cold War siren starts blaring a futile warning is just brilliant - this is what would happen in real life you think.

I know I'm partial to sci-fi flicks but this is the second time a critically-acclaimed film
flopped and a lesser-known film ran away with me.

Google responds to Yahoo Pipes

2008-04-09T00:27:00.004-04:00

I've always thought that Yahoo Pipes was one of the coolest (if not the coolest) web applications I've ever seen. It's no surprise that the big G, owner of quite a few web applications in this category, has responded with it's own data mashup builder - Google Mashup Editor. It's still in limited testing but it will be interesting to see where its similar and where it differs from pipes.

The most likely reason Windows does dumb stuff sometimes

2008-04-09T00:12:00.003-04:00

http://blogs.technet.com/robert_hensing/archive/2007/04/04/dep-on-vista-explained.aspx

Let's start with Explorer - on 64bit versions of Vista - by default your shell, Explorer, is a 64bit version of the binary (explorer.exe) and thus it has DEP enabled by default. But as it turns out - we have provided a 32bit version of this binary and many other system binaries in a special folder for you to ~~shoot yourself in the foot with~~ use. Why? For the same reason we do anything seemingly stupid - for backwards compatibility and application compatibility reasons beyond our control. :)

It's a good thing 64bit versions of Vista default to running the 64bit version of Internet Explorer by default right? Oh wait - they don't. What what WHAT!? Why on Earth not?! Well, for the same reason we do anything seemingly stupid - for backwards compatibility and application compatibility reasons beyond our control. :)

This is the 2nd time I'm reading a Microsoft blogger lameting on sacrificing common sense for app compatibility. The first was Raymond Chen http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/23/45481.aspx explaining how MS would rather bend-over-backwards to support older programs that are buggy or using undocument stuff, than have those programs stop working. I understand their point of view - as both Robert Hensing and Raymond Chen note, if you upgraded to the newest version of Windows or IE and then programs you absolutely depend on like Flash crash who would you blame, MS or the app manufacturer? So in an atempt to keep a pristine out-of-box experience, new versions of MS products sometimes leave your head scratching and you thinking "Why on earth did they do that?"

This is also the driving force in the ongoing IE8 saga, which is excellent treated by Joel on Software
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html This essay is what clued me into to Microsoft's eternal stuggle with backwards compatibility.

Elephant Paints Self Portrait

2008-04-08T15:38:00.001-04:00

This is freaking unbelievable. I had no idea elephants were so intelligent. This can't be real; can it?

2 very different movies

2008-04-06T13:02:00.004-04:00

I watched two very different movies this week. I honestly can't see what got NCFOM all that critical acclaim including 4 Oscars. The acting was really good but there are logical gaps in the plot and in the overall concept that just aren't filled. I guess you have to be a Cormac Mccarthy fan to enjoy it. It did make me go and borrow Child of God from my library though, just to start getting into McCarthy's work.

Sunshine on the other hand was a movie you could just sit back and enjoy. It constantly left you in awe of how amazing the Sun is; the all-enveloping white light just hypnotizes you, just like it did one of the characters. Sunshine didn't win any major awards and flopped at the box-office but for my plain tastes it was a lot better than NCFOM.

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

2008-03-18T02:23:00.001-04:00

Tale of what it feels like to lose your left brain hemisphere.

Del tha funky homosapien-made in america

2008-03-17T19:06:00.001-04:00

Can't believe I slept on this guy for so long.

Man I feel terrible

2008-03-17T18:55:00.002-04:00

...missed school today. Not that I can afford too - midterm on Thursday, SoC applications start next week, tons of reading to do for sociolinguistics and Structure of the English Language...*sigh* pop some Vitamin C suck it up and go go go

The real-world backpack nuclear weapon - the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM)

2008-02-28T03:27:00.001-04:00

Tsar bomba is serious business

2008-02-27T03:04:00.005-04:00

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_bomba

The device offically designated RDS-220, known to its designers as Big Ivan, and nicknamed in the west Tsar Bomba (and referred to as the Big Bomb by Sakharov in his Memoirs [Sakharov 1990]) was the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed or detonated. This three stage weapon was actually a 100 megaton bomb design, but the uranium fusion stage tamper of the tertiary (and possibly the secondary) stage(s) was replaced by one(s) made of lead. This reduced the yield by 50% by eliminating the fast fissioning of the uranium tamper by the fusion neutrons, and eliminated 97% of the fallout (1.5 megatons of fission, instead of about 51.5 Mt), yet still proved the full yield design. The result was the "cleanest" weapon ever tested with 97% of the energy coming from fusion reactions. The effect of this bomb at full yield on global fallout would have been tremendous. It would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%.

A shock wave in air was observed at Dickson settlement at 700 km; windowpanes were partially broken to distances of 900 km. All buildings in Severny (both wooden and brick), at a distance of 55 km, were completely destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed, and stone ones lost their roofs, windows and doors; and radio communications were interrupted for almost one hour. The atmospheric disturbance generated by the explosion orbited the earth three times. A gigantic mushroom cloud rose as high as 64 kilometers (210,000 ft).

The Tu-95 was painted with a special white reflective paint to protect it from the thermal radiation of the fireball. The airborne laboratory plane was also covered with the same paint. In clear air, the 50 Mt test was capable in principle of inflicting third degree burns at a distance of up to 100 km.

The area of effectively complete destruction extended to 25 km, and ordinary houses would be subjected to severe damage out to 35 km. The destruction and damage of buildings occurred sporadically at much greater ranges than this due to the effects of atmospheric focusing, an unpredictable but unavoidable phenomenon with very large atmospheric explosions that is capable of generating localized regions of destructive blast pressure at great distances (even exceeding 1000 km).

It is safe to assume that the 100 Mt bomb was a very conservative design - one that pushed no technical envelopes save for size. The two principal reasons for thinking this are the extremely compressed development schedule, and the very high profile of the test

Wonderful...

There was no previously existing military requirement for a 100 megaton weapon - such weapons are virtually useless for military purposes. The Soviet Union had only one delivery system capable of carrying a weapon of this size - a handful of the relatively slow prop-driven Tu-95 bomber - and it was incapable of intercontinental range with a payload this large. A 100 Mt weapon can level urban areas in a zone 60 km wide, cause heavy damage in a zone 100 km across, cause 3rd degree burns in a region 170 km across (only a bit smaller than the width of West Germany) and eye damage to 220 km. Such a weapon can only be used as a means of destroying an entire urban region - a major urban complex including suburbs and even neighboring cities. This scale of destruction is much larger than any discrete urban area in Western Europe. With its dense settlement, use of such a weapon in Europe is equivalent to an attack on a major portion of an entire nation and its population. Fallout from a low altitude or surface burst in central England could produce lethal exposures extending into the Warsaw Pact nations; a similar explosion in West Germany could create lethal fallout as far as the Soviet border. Even in the United States there were only three urban regions at that time large enough to conceivably merit attack with such a weapon - New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. On any smaller target it would be simple overkill. Even if the Tu-95 were able to reach Chicago, the closest plausible U.S. target, (which is doubtful given the enormous payload, far in excess of normal for long-range missions, and the added drag from the belly bulge required to house the bomb) it would have been detected crossing the North American early warning line and then been over U.S. and Canadian territory for 8 hours - ample time for jet fighters to intercept and shoot it down

This made me feel a little better until I realized they were talking about this with reference to military technology 50 years ago. I wonder how hard it would be to come up with a delivery system for this class of weapon today.

So there you have it, the most powerful weapon of destruction ever built. I can't hide my recent fascination with nuclear weapons of the most murderous kind - it just feeds off the fear I get watching and reading this stuff.

George Dyson: Let's take a nuclear-powered rocket to Saturn

2008-02-26T02:55:00.001-04:00

Fascinating and funny talk about the state-of-the art (or lack there of) if nuclear powered space rockets.

Deborah Gordon: How do ants know what to do?

2008-02-26T02:53:00.003-04:00

Part of TEDtalks

Evelyn Glennie: How to listen to music with your whole body

2008-02-26T02:53:00.001-04:00

Incredible talk by a deaf percussionist virtuoso.

Pamelia Kurstin: Theremin, the untouchable music

2008-02-26T02:52:00.001-04:00

Part of TEDtalks series

Richard Dawkins on the strangeness of science: TEDTalks

2008-02-26T02:51:00.001-04:00

This is the first video I watched in the amazing TED talks that my friend Casswina told me about.

The rotten foundation

2008-02-04T01:26:00.000-04:00

All over this island, little knots of intelligent men get together and talk as we are talking now, deploring the systems and methods of education, labour, politics, social services. Then they finish their cigarettes and go off to a film or a football match. There is a lot of fury and indignation on the surface, but no one does anything. It's a pity about Trinidad. She builds on a rotten foundation, introducing new ideas to fool herself and the world that she is progressing.

-Samuel Selvon An Island Is a World

This was written in 1955 and it's true today as it was then, probably more so. Take our nation's roads - the roads and highways are so choked with cars that almost every day there is a fatal accident. So what is a government to do? Well they could invest some of those oil dollars and bring traffic control officers and vehicles up to the required strength so that they can discourage excessive speeders or drunk drivers or any kind of breach of road rules. In the States and other countries we aspire too, you can't drive half-a-mile without seeing a police patrol car. Here you can drive the length of the Solomon Hochoy and Churchill Roosevelt highways and back without seeing a police car. But what do they do...well they bought a blimp. A fucking blimp for US $10 million dollars plus maintenance. So that the police can cruise around and watch the carnage below.

Surfacing

2008-01-19T03:14:00.000-04:00

Wow I haven't written anything since July last year. That's half of a year. What happened - well GSoC was great, fall semester exams weren't too great, going home and packing away ham,turkey, black cake and every culinary xmas tradition by the plateful was great. It was good to be back home - I should go more often.

But time - 7 months? - It's like sand running through your fingers. Which incidentally is the point of this post. Here is my fix for people who have todo and idea lists miles long:

An hour is a lot of time

2 or 3 hours is a huge amount of time. I've always thought I couldn't do 1/10th the stuff I wanted to do because I didn't have time. But if I spend 1 hr a week on learning Gimp or practising piano or writing short stories or coding your dream project, it gets done. The hours add up. Over weeks, months, years an hour a week can get you to a place you never imagined.

So that's my New Year's resolution. Start doing all the stuff I want to do starting 1 hr a week or less.

Now with Blogger rolling out new features I gotta fix up this place. Finish my Google Maps mini-widget for one. Think I'll do that now.

The value of FOSS

2007-07-11T15:21:00.000-04:00

Damn, I was just looking Ubuntu's help page and I realized something. In Windows we're accustomed to each Windows Server System product as a separate product delivering some kind of functionality - database server, systems management server, Email / collaboration, firewall...each coming at a hefty price with strict licensing on how and where you can use the software.

Contents

Network authentication

Web servers

Web Applications

Mail, Groupware, and Chat Servers

Database

File Server

Remote Administration Access

Installation Servers

Security Servers

Folding@Home

Monitoring

Accounting

Image boards

So checkout the functionality that comes with a typical Lunux distro:

Network authentication

OpenLDAP server and LDAP client authentication - Authentication on an LDAP directory (server and client parts)
SettingUpNISHowTo - Authentication via NIS

Web servers

Apache PHP MySQL - Setting up a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) web server
Ruby on Rails - Setting up RoR (Ruby On Rails)
Apache Tomcat 5 - Java Servlet 2.4 engine with JSP 2.0 support

Web Applications

Blogging with WordPress - Blogging (web publishing).
Drupal - A robust content management system.
Joomla - Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websites and other powerful online applications
Hive - How to set up a Digital Life Management System. Hive was formally known as Ubuntu Center.
Moodle with MySQL - Installing Moodle to run on MySQL
PhpBB2 - How to set up a PhpBB forum.
PunBB forum - PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board.
MoinMoin - a powerful and highly configurable wiki.

Mail, Groupware, and Chat Servers

Email - The starting point for mail servers - covers the different software used, how they relate together, and more. Read this first if you're unsure of anything.
Mailing List Server - Set up your own mailing list server with Mailman, as used on the Ubuntu mailing lists!
Groupware with Kolab - Setting up this complete mail and calendar server system.\
Groupware with Hula - Setting up this modern mail and calendar server
Lotus Domino - Setting up Lotus Domino groupware server.
IrcServer - Set up an irc server.
SettingUpJabberServer - Set up a Jabber server.

DNS

BIND - Setting up a DNS server with BIND
Dynamic DNS - Set up DNS for your home computer.

Database

MySQL 5.0 - Setting up a MySQL 5.0 server in Ubuntu
PostgreSQL quickstart - Setting up a PostgreSQL 8.1 server in Ubuntu
Installing Oracle 10g - Install Oracle 10g Enterprise Database in Hoary
Installing Firebird 1.5.x How to install and set Firebird server in ubuntu
Installing JDBC for MySQL 5.0 Install and setup of Java Database Connectivity for MySQL 5.0
Using MySQL, JDBC and OpenOffice Using Java Database Connectivity, MySQL and OpenOffice
Ingres 2006 - How to build, install and set up an Ingres 2006 server in ubuntu.

File Server

NFS Server - Setting up Ubuntu as an NFS server.
Samba Server - Setting up Ubuntu as an Samba server.
iFolderEnterpriseServer - Setting up an iFolder server.
GPFS Cluster - Setting up a GPFS Cluster.

Remote Administration Access

SSHHowto - Setting up SSH remote access.
SerialConsoleHowto - Setting up serial console access.
AjaxTerm - Ajax Terminal access.

Installation Servers

PXEInstallServer - Set up a server to bootstrap installations.
Apt-Cacher-Server - Setup a local cache to speed up package installation.

Security Servers

IptablesHowTo - Set up a Firewall using iptables.
VPNServer - Setup and configure a VPN server.
DansGuardian - Setup an Internet Content Filter.

Folding@Home

Folding@Home - Do some good with your idle CPU cycles.

Monitoring

Nagios2 - Installing and configuring Nagios2 for system and network monitoring.
Zenoss - Installing Zenoss network monitor on Ubuntu Server
Internet Traffic Monitoring - Monitor bandwidth usage on an Internet link.
Logwatch - Installing Logwatch to monitor your system logs and have them emailed to you

Accounting

Quasar - How to install Quasar Accounts, a fully featured client-server business accounting application.

Image boards

Danbooru

A mind-boggling set of functionality in one 'product' And yeah I know the licensing only makes up a fraction of the TCO of software, but still, the fact that the functionality you can get from one distro that frankly is way better than a lot the stuff that would cost you $100K + from MS (ISA? Sharepoint? MCMS?, please...) has a lot of implications for the future of commercial software.

Ok, this isn't rocket science - why am I now realizing/writing about this. Well I'm not. But I was chatting with my SoC mentor Rok Zlender, who's from Slovenia, and he mentioned that all his CS program at uni uses is Windows. Which is exactly the case at UWI. For some reason, some of the countries that could probably benefit from the nature of FOSS are the ones where MS is firmly entrenched.

Now I'm not being cyniclal - I think MS is doing a good thing with its low-price desktop suites for developing countries and programmes like Microsoft Unlimited Potential and its initiatives in Africa, but it would be really good to see people developing hard skills in software development and administration using FOSS. FOSS offers the opportunity for developing countries to create a set of highly knowledgeable IT workers at a very low cost.

The main problem is, I think, that all the consulting firms in countries like ours only know how to make a profit selling licenses for software and implementing MS infrastructure. They are making their money with commercial software so there's no incentive for them to turn to anything else, regardless of whether it would benefit the country or not.

Alan Becker - Animation vs. Animator

2007-06-22T20:56:00.000-04:00

Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviant ART

This is unbelievable - best short animation I've seen for a while.

Welcome to the $ocial?

2007-06-17T11:39:00.000-04:00

http://zuneinfo.com/zune-marketing/oh-the-life-of-a-zune-ambassador/

A party was going on a few doors down from my friend’s apartment complex in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. My friend said that she’d been invited to the party earlier in the day by the tenant of the apartment (with whom she was only a casual acquaintance) with promises of “Guitar Hero on the XBox360, great tunes coming from the Zune, and free beer.” When we stopped by we found two dozen college students relaxing, drinking, playing Guitar Hero, in a room covered with posters for Microsoft’s mp3 player, the Zune. After some free social lubricant (MGD), the host told us the whole story: Microsoft paid him to host parties like this. As long as he documented the party with pictures, he was reimbursed for all the expenses and paid a little extra for his “trouble.”

Flickr - Brett Walker

2007-06-17T01:17:00.001-04:00

, originally uploaded by [brett walker].

GIANT - ONE DAMN BIG GOOD MOVIE

2007-06-12T01:23:00.001-04:00

Damn, I can't believe a month has passed since I last did a blog post. I've been pretty unproductive since exams shut down. This pretty much validates the idea of journals as therapy. When you're ok, you work, you write, code. When you're not ok you don't do much. The basic idea is to invert the relationship - when you work and write and code you will feel ok.

So I grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars and Rambo and Predator and those kind of movies and I never was enamoured of Golden Age movie stars like Liz Taylor and Katherine Hepburn. But I saw Giant on TCM and it was a hell of a move. Good acting is just timeless. And Liz Taylor looked fine. And at 200+mins, yeah they probably don't make them like that anymore. I now kinda understand the saying about Texas. Everything is just huge - the land, the money. The coolest thing was that my aunt recognised Rock Hudson straight away - I guess he was like Brad Pitt back in the day. It was also cool that a 1956 movie had racism as a subplot.

Friday's(err..Saturday's, err...whenever no-comment picture

2007-05-12T13:17:00.000-04:00

This one takes a while - look at the 2nd line above the bar code - if you ever coded SQL you're going to chuckle. Ok so that was one comment. From Worse Than Failure

flickr: Brett Walker

2007-05-07T21:49:00.000-04:00

Brett Walker - amazing stuff
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brettwalker/

Friday's no-comment picture

2007-05-04T14:55:00.000-04:00

If you follow the NBA then this needs no explanation.

Ruby and a clue on DAST

2007-04-29T11:48:00.000-04:00

Probably the best thing about GSoC is going to be the fantastically talented people you get to meet along the way. This week I had a short chat with yuesefa from Ruby and he pointed me in the direction of Ruby Rake (make done the Ruby way.) Reading up on Rake, I realized three things:
1. Ruby is a very cool and and very conceptually advanced language. Martin Fowler is a Ruby and Rake fan. It's not praised in a utilitarian way like Python, which is used every and has tons of libraries and bindings. People talk about Ruby more like it's literature than code.
2. A significant segment of Ruby programmers may be insane. This Ruby book - Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby reads like Bruce Eckel on acid.
3. DAST is just a build tool. It's like a Ant project for Drupal. You have build inputs, configurations, outputs and targets which you specify in an XML file. You just write tasks for the build process.

Further investigation along (3) turned up Phing - a PHPized Ant variant which seems to be exactly what I need to create DAST. So, for now at least, it seems my GSoC project has been conceptually reduced to writing Phing tasks.

Hmm..already Ruby seems to be altering my brain in subtle ways...

From Google Operating System: Collecting Imagery for Google Earth

2007-04-29T10:36:00.000-04:00

GOS has a link to an article by Keyhole co-founder Mark Aubin explaining how satellite imagery for Google Earth is compiled. If you're like most Google Earth users, you'll always remember the sound of your jaw dropping as you flew in from outer space, through the clouds and right down to hovering above your modest apartment complex.

From Drupal Dojo: Drupal Live! - Live-CD/Portable-App/Virtual Image project

2007-04-28T22:34:00.000-04:00

Drupal Live! - Portable Drupal project

I've had this idea for a portable stand-alone version of Drupal + server stack for a while now; it was part of my initial SoC proposal:

At ~50Mb or less, a Drupal appliance is a perfect way for potential users with no system administration experience to evaluate Drupal.
Advocacy for Drupal can be extended by distributing the Live CD with magazines and in trade shows. Drupal companies and consultants can rapidly prototype and demonstrate a Drupal a solution to their clients starting with the base appliance image.

I've come across a few suggestions for a Live-CD project on d.o:
http://drupal.org/node/40780
http://drupal.org/node/40786

This one caught my I though: http://groups.drupal.org/node/2208#comment-10316

Given my recent experience, I think we may missing out with a largenumber of the hobbyists and small businesses hoping to graduate from their first foray into the web - a static HTML website. They want an incremental approach to avoid burning manpower on a mistake.

After a dozen years of doing all my markup stuff by hand in Notepad, Istarted looking at CMS systems in November. Drupal looked like the best choice after comparing the features and activity levels of the open source CMS communities. I spent MANY hours trying to determine what the core tasks were going to be. Overwhelmed by all the conflicting information, I decided to just dive in and find out if I could swim.

Setting up a minimal Drupal implementation took several tries and I ended up crippling my existing personal webspace in the process. My hosting service has their own MySQL management tools which added to the fun.

This is Wikipedia's definition of a portable app:

To be considered truly portable, a software program must:

Not require any form of formal installation to be carried out on any computer before it can be used, with the release package only needing to be decompressed directly to removable media before use (if it has to be installed first, and requires its files to be manually copied to removable media, it is clearly not designed to be portable!)
For example, software which is supplied as an InstallShield package should not be considered portable, though a ZIP archives containing an executable would be.
Settings are stored with, and can be carried around with, the software (i.e. they are written to the USB drive)
If the registry is used to store settings, the application's configuration isn't portable, and must be set up on every PC it is used on
Leaves a zero (or near-zero) "footprint" on any PC it's run on after being used
i.e. All temporary files/registry settings should be removed once the program has exited, and files created by the user can be saved directly to the same removable media as the application is stored on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_portable_software

A portable Drupal app capable of running from a Live-CD, flash drive, or as a virtual image would be a great tool for Drupal advocacy - a nice, knock-your-socks-off Drupal site, people can play with and evaluate and add/change stuff that they want without having to install anything or worrying about breaking their install.

Basically this project will have three objectives:

Create a Drupal distro profile called Drupal Live! (or some cool name) featuring latest stable core and a selection of the coolest modules from across the spectrum of Drupal functionality, pre-configured and tested. The primary audience for this profile are people who want to know what Drupal is and how it stacks up against other CMS. So the modules included should cover all of Drupal strengths:

Content authoring
Content Management - workflow, revisions...
Collaboration
User interface
Themes
Customization
User Management
Authentication and access control...
Administration - Backup, logging
...others

Create content that uses all off the Drupal distro's capabilities - So the initial actual content of the site would serve two purpose - provide a rich information on Drupal, and show-off the differen't bits of functionality used to create the content. we could make using this content or just running a clean site an option in the profile.
Create the portable delivery system for the distro. In order of increasing difficulty there are:

Portable flash-drive app: We just need a portable user mode web and database server, a script (and optional GUI) to reset the site back to its original state, and optionally any one the of flash-drive app-launchers for auto-running the app.
Virtual image Since virtualization technology is a commodity, a VMWare or VirtualPC image hosting Drupal Live! would also be another plug-and-play way of distributing drupal. There are a lot of ready-made LAMP virtual appliances out there like those from VMware community and Virtual Appliances - http://virtualappliances.net
Live-CD: This is the hardest to do - it's a choice between remastering an existing one or building one from scratch. Typo3 has one though - http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/193 One cool thing about a LiveCD is that there you can use existing virtual machine software to run it without rebooting - so it could supercede 2. There are a couple of specialized virtual machine hosts for running Live-CDs directly

I can work on the delivery systems but the contents of the Drupal Live distro itself would have to have input for the whole community + marketing people, consultants, etc. What do you guys think?

Fridays (..err, late) no-comment picture

2007-04-28T19:36:00.000-04:00

From fukung.net, some pretty hilarious stuff here, check them out.

Desktop widget fun

2007-04-24T16:41:00.000-04:00

Past two weeks I've been playing / working with Yahoo! Widgets and Google Desktop - I really did doubt the value of this technology beyond eye candy, but I have to admit - it does add a great deal of functionality and plain coolness to to daily computing for us Windows XP lusers. (No I'm not upgrading to Vista...that's a whole 'nother post.) I'm still tweaking and exploring widgets more than actually using them...but gosh darn it, my desktop looks sw33t...

BBC News article - Cricket World Cup - hit or flop?

2007-04-19T17:01:00.000-04:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6571457.stm
Snippets:

Has cricket's World Cup, the game's biggest tournament, turned out to be a flop?Local cricket fans here in the West Indies, as well as commentators and followers of the game feel so.

...

Organisers now accept the 16-nation, 51-match tournament over a marathon 49 days will not be able to meet the targeted $42m in ticket sales.
By Wednesday, at the tail-end of the Super 8 matches, only $29m worth of tickets had been sold.

...

A new IMF report says the governments in the nine countries staging the tournament have spent a fortune.
Five new stadiums were built and others were upgraded altogether at a cost of $250m, and more money was spent on improving infrastructure.

...

As Rickey Singh, a Barbadian journalist, says: "It looks like the World Cup was a bad joke - to have imposed exorbitant ticket fees, treat musical instruments as weapons of terror, restrict drinks and food containers at matches."

Helping where it hurts: Firefox's gargantuan appetitie for WIndows memory

2007-04-19T16:19:00.000-04:00

I nearly fell over one time when I saw firefox.exe had managed to allocate 850M for itself...it's not like I had 100 tabs open - not even close. Now a web browser is a very very complex app and for rendering HTML and images and interpreting JavaScript and hosting a Java VM and plugins like Flash and RSS and ...well I don't expect Firefox to not be the most memory-intensive app on Windows...but within reason dude.

The thing that helped me the most is setting the preference config.trim_on_minimize = true as described here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Config.trim_on_minimize By default it's false and apparently this prevents Windows from swapping out FF memory when it's minimised - not generally a good thing when you have complex pages and lots of tabs. According to this earlier generations of FF circa 2001 had serious performance problems when memory got swapped out, but on newer PC's with > 512MB RAM this should no longer be an issue.

The effect of this can be quite dramatic; my FF mem usage went from ~600M to ~200M under heavy usage. There are a lot of pages devoted to optimizing FF mem usage; just Google for it, but if FF seems to be allocating a huge amount of memory and not releasing it even after you close down all the tabs, give this a try first.

S1lent's official crime and 20/20 rant

2007-04-18T23:24:00.000-04:00

One thing I've always admired about this country's current administration is their knack for PR spin. In the disastrous crime surge that has befallen this country, our leaders have decided the best way to cover their inability to actually do anything about it is by pointing the finger of blame in a different direction - right back at us.

First there was Fix Me First media campaign, which managed to burn a considerable amount of public money on prime time advertisements to the effect that the crimes committed by civilians on a day-to-day basis (littering? jaywalking?) were the cause of the order-of-magnitude increases in murders, kidnappings, armed robbery, rapes...Now obviously anybody possessing firearms without permission, or fudging taxes, or not having vehicle insurance is committing a crime.

But what about the massive amount of corruption at the highest levels of government and business, the alleged links between high government officials and business leaders with organized crime leaders and militants, the infiltration of drug trafficking at such a high level that cocaine was being trafficked through our country's U.S diplomatic pouch, the tens of millions of dollars of public funds for public projects waylaid and diverted to the personal bank accounts of the people we trusted and have put in charge of our country? What about fixing them? If these fellas could be lining their pockets left and right, flouting laws and procedures, spending billions on developmentally-disastrous projects no matter what our professionals and specialists and scientists and writers say...dispatching criminal prosecutions like Lara batting against England...I mean whoever in Government came up with the Fix me first slogan clearly is pretty cynical about the public's ability to reason things through and and come to their own conclusions, in lieu of mindlessly digesting the loads of BS fired at us by their crack PR cadre. I swear the three professions I will absolutely forbid my children to enter are politics, law, and communications/public relations. Nobody should have to be an outstanding liar make a living .

So now we have Public Consultations on Crime. I found the flyer above on my doorstep. I'm not participating. They will tell me that You are the only one who can solve crime and i will tell them that they lie. I'm not consulting or marching on a Saturday or turning on my headlights or praying or fasting or do anything citizens of this country who are at their wit's end are willing to do try to stop crime . No amount of death marches or speeches or million-dollar blimps is going to help the crime situation. Patrick Manning and Martin Joseph and Cro Cro and Sprangalang and Bounty Killa and Machel HD and anybody who comes to these consultations can talk till their jaws drop off. It will not help. I would come to hear Sprang if he was speaking though - he would be far and away the most intelligent and knowledgeable speaker on the platform.

I am very cynical about a lot, a lot of things, and I'm trying to move away from empty criticism and stick my neck out with and say what I think can help. So this is what I think about crime in Trinidad and Tobago:

I believe that if people, all people, from all social classes, with any level of education or employment; if all people believe they have an opportunity to make headway in life for themselves and their family, and to live the kind of life we all want, even the fellas robbing and kidnapping, and shooting want; if all of our people are given a fair opportunity to create a decent life for themselves and their families, then crime will decrease. Quality education, access to housing, a public health-care system that works, police protection without victimisation, an efficient, timely and fair legislative system that works the same for people living in Westmoorings as it those for people in Morvant, a reasonable standard of service from public utilities, a working transportation infrastructure that can connect all people in this incredibly small country to employment and self-advancement opportunities, social security for those who really need it until they can stand on their own two feet, social security for the most vulnerable - the disabled, sick, the old, the very young... All these things will reduce crime drastically in this country.

The problem is that no political party has the guts to come up with a 15- or 20- or 30-year plan to implement the long-term programmes needed to do this. Instead, they wants us stupidees to think that they can 'fix crime' in 5 years. The phrase "five-year strategic plan" is an oxymoron. The core developmental issues underlying crime cannot be solved in the time between general elections. Anybody who says to vote for them because they will fix crime is a liar. It will take decades for this country to come to grips with its demons, and we have yet to find people brave enough to forego their own short-term power-hungry ambitions to event start doing what must be done. The only way to reduce crime is a long-term commitment to improve the life and reduce the inequality of all people.

And that is why I grit my teeth whenever I hear anybody mention 20/20. Do people who talk about developed country status know what being a developed country means? Doesn't it mean that when you call 999 because somebody come to rob, rape and kill you, the police can't tell they have no vehicle to send? The could send the blimp to fly all over Trinidad, but fire bun you if you live in Gasparillo and call for police. How about public health care - everybody's nightmare is having to go to Casualty - 'pray you doh end up in dey boy.'

How about infrastructure - driven anywhere recently? We're supposed to be a 'knowledge-based' society, ok so what's the impact on worker productivity of crawling for hours through hot steaming traffic every day? If our 'knowledge workers' spend 2-4 hours commuting everyday what benefit will buying fast computers for them have? Why do I have to wait over an hour to get a bus to go from POS to San Fernando - our nation's two 'cities?' How about public utilities - how many places outside of north-east Trinidad get water 24x7? The only place getting water regular is when rain fall for five minutes and turn our capital city into a Caribbean version of Venice.

What's happening to the young people in our schools - why is having sex before you're fifteen the norm? How many children these days growing up in 2-parent homes, or whose mothers didn't get pregnant when they were still in school. Why are we importing billions of dollars in food - what is the effect of a lack of food security on a country's economy? What happens when food prices rise? Why are our farmers in our rural heartland losing their livelihood every rainy season through flooding, and the government don't give two damns (dams?) about them. Every developed country heavily subsidizes their farming sector...know why?

What about our justice system? If you are charged with an crime how long does it take for you to receive due process? By the time the jury says guilty / not guilty you probably have already been in jail for several years, guilty or not. So what's the incentive for people to allow the system to work for them instead of trying to bribe whoever? What about all the 'big-time-bobol' in NWRHA and CEPEP and...

I'm just going to stop. This is just my opinion. I am not an economist or historian or social scientist or criminal justice major. I simply believe a developed country is not labelled as such because they have skyscrapers, or people walking around with the latest smart-phones, or because the government spends millions on a high-speed network infrastructure (so they can't treat you in Hospital but they could surf the web really fast,) or has high-tech surveillance and listening posts and blimps (this is Trinidad, when last you went somewhere and didn't see somebody you know?) and billion-dollar aluminium smelters, and all the other ways our country is squandering our precious and soon-to-be-gone windfall of energy dollars.

Developed countries are those countries where the basic needs of society have been met. Don't talk to me about industrialization and knowledge-based society. Don't talk to me about public consultations on crime. Don't talk to me about 'developed nation status.' When the fellas on the block finally believe they could get ahead in life without following in the footsteps of their absent fathers right into prison, when we getting water regular down Gasparillo and when they get some more jeeps for the police station, then you could check me.

Web 2.0, maybe

2007-04-14T21:13:00.000-04:00

I still don't know what the heck Web 2.0 is supposed to be but these 2 sites probably qualify for whatever it is:
1. Twitter - This is the really hot one, but what caught my attention is Scobleizer's post that it apparently scooped the USGS and just about every major news site on the Mexico City earthquake.
2. Quizilla - Been around for a while, but it's a really cool idea that lets people share their creativity and interests in yet another way. Ater falling out my chair laughing watching Jason on Home Movies, a quick web scour turned up a link to this quiz.

Friday's 'no comment' picture

2007-04-13T13:43:00.000-04:00

Had this for a while; had to share it. I guess politics is just more fun in Brazil than in other places.

GSoC 2007 - Drupal Automated Staging Toolkit

2007-04-13T08:44:00.000-04:00

I'm participating in SoC 2007 with a project for Drupal - a toolkit for testers for automating the process of creating a Drupal site running a specific configuration. The basic idea is that you specify in an XML file the enabled code modules you want, the CVS versions and patches for each module, the web server, database server and PHP configuration, and the size and shape of the test dataset and users. The tools will then generate the Drupal site code-tree you want, the server configuration files and directives, and database scripts for the test data and users. These are then staged to the server location, and voila, a complete Drupal site ready to go, for unit and regression testing code or benchmarking different server configurations. Time permitting, we'll see if we can automatically stage to a Xen or VMWare virtual image, and then have a self-contained virtual image ready for advanced testing scenarios. I'm really stoked about this project, so thanks to all the Drupal folks who voted for it.

From drupal.org: Google Summer of Code projects - Drupal's 20

2007-04-12T08:25:00.001-04:00

Google will be sponsoring a breathtaking 20 Drupal projects this year, totaling $100,000 in financial contributions. Cool ideas include an SVG drawing tool, Jabber integration, and SMS Framework, and much more. Drupal people say "Thanks Google!" for the amazing support.

read more | digg story

K-Project genesis

2007-04-12T05:05:00.000-04:00

This is the story of an idea and the steps taken towards realizing that idea. Ideas are like living things: they are conceived, they gestate, they are born, they grow, and they mature. But also like living things they can wither and die if not nourished and cared for. This blog is a diary of my attempt to bring to fruition an idea I have about computers and artificial intelligence, and I suppose, life in general.

After months of procrastination, I finally got the inspiration to start my own blog by an amazing game called Rez.
The game itself is fantastic - think of your favourite audio visualization plugin and imagine it turned into a game with you inside. But what was really inspiring was reading how the team behind Rez took a totally original concept, worked hard, shrugged off conflict, disappointment, and setbacks, and eventually produced something very kewl.

I would to follow the example of the Rez team - fix my sights on what I want to accomplish and work hard at it, counting every step, no matter how small, as progress.