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Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
roshi
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8:17p
Completely and utterly pooped, got back from Mum's place a little while ago. I got so spoiled. I said I wouldn't mind some garden stuff (secateurs + pruning saw) and a cookbook and ended up with a heap of stuff. Secateurs, pruning saw, garden gloves, little garden trolley thing, a book on Australian natives (which is heaps better than the one I already have - this one is all about listing plants and what conditions they like, my other one is more about propagating, planting, repotting and so on), a huuuuge italian cook book, nice homemade bickies and a pina colada cocktail set.
Mum got a second cat. It is still a tiny kitten and, naturally, adorable. I spent a lot of time this afternoon annoying it and then it spent a lot of time this afternoon snoring and purring on my belly. D wasn't impressed, but he's generally disapproving of having cats in the house so that's to be expected.
I am very tired. I think I will go wash what's left of my makeup off and then flake out on the couch and watch some more Looney Tunes.
Merry Giftmas Moviehouse! Enh who am I kidding I'm next in line for the position of Grinch, but hope everyone has a nice time anyway.
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(comment on this) Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
macosx
[ vorpal ]
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11:41p
Dashboard: what's the point?
Do any of you use it? I've been trying, on and off, for awhile now to try to justify its existence by finding some type of application for it, but I've been largely unsuccessful.
The only possible niche I've found for it is to run informational widgets to conglomerate a lot of ready-to-display information (e.g. weather, CPU usage, etc) on the screen at once and quickly without having to launch full-fledged applications or visit a bunch of web pages. I'm also trying it out now for lightweight versions of one-shot applications, i.e. applications I'd launch to use once quickly and then quit (calculator, dictionary, thesaurus, and stuff like that).
What do you all think?
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(2 comments | comment on this) Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
dewhitton
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3:33p
Alan Moir
Alan Moir is one of my favourite political cartoonists. He is a regular in the Sydney Morning Herald
I like that he doesn't have a particular barrow to push; all politics looks silly to him. His current depiction of the NSW Labor Party is a garbage can full of rotting fish heads. His targets are from all over the world.
On the other hand
I like that his targets are not just local politics. He hits at hypocricy too.
Not just politics.
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(2 comments | comment on this) Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
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jwz
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4:33p
How to use Facebook with a feed reader
I almost never actually visit the Facebook web site: I follow it through a feed reader (in my case, NetNewsWire) along with all of my other feeds. Besides the obvious benefits to this, one great side effect is that you never, ever see the output of applications (e.g., quiz results) or the other useless noise like "so-and-so is now friends with someone else you already know". The only drawback I've found is that you also don't see notifications about photos that your friends have uploaded. (You do see links that they post, however: just not Facebook-hosted photos. It's a bizarre omission.) Anyway, I just had to explain to someone how to accomplish this feat, which made me realize how completely non-obvious Facebook has made this. Finding these feeds is a complete pain in the ass. They've really gone out of their way to hide the URLs you need to use. So. You have to subscribe to three or four different feeds. - Posts: Find the Posts feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php. On the upper right of the page is a gray box, and at the bottom of that box is a link entitled "My Friends' Links" with the RSS logo next to it. Copy that URL. Subscribe to it in your feed reader. This is the RSS URL for any links and (external) images that your friends post.
- Notes: Find the Notes feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things that your friends post via the "Notes" app, which is (I guess) the more blog-like way of posting long things to Facebook.
- Notifications: Find the Notifications feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things like "so-and-so commented on your status". You might not care to subscribe to this one because you can get all of these kind of notifications in email.
- Status Updates: This is the RSS URL for the "What are you doing?" Twitter-like part of Facebook. This is the one you probably care about, and it is trickier, because Facebook no longer links to the feed URL! Nice one guys. You have to construct this URL by editing one of the above URLs. E.g., take the "Notes" URL and change the part of the URL that says "friends_notes" to "friends_status". Keep the parts of the URL before and after that, including the magic numbers at the end.
There. Wasn't that SIMPLE? Previously: How to use Livejournal with a feed reader.
current music: The Coathangers -- Bury Me
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(5 comments | comment on this) Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
domesticmouse
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8:06a
Gaining overview
I scored a promotion at work yesterday. Well, I volunteered for extra responsibility. Same diff, right? One of the downsides of working in an agile environment is that we only have a two week window on the system. What is the problem we are really solving? No idea, here are the features we want this week. It's dis-orienting. So, as part of the retrospective, I volunteered to help the floundering architect, if only to get an overview of the entire system.
An interesting side note here is the constant stream of communication breakdowns between business and the programmers. Business have a holistic need, the programmers are only willing to talk in individual features. This is best illustrated in a phone interview cheatsheet by Stevey Yegge, where in all the points that Stevey interviews on are detail focus.
It entertains me greatly that the question I blew in my first round phone interview with Google is listed on this cheatsheet as an example question. So, by Stevey's estimation, I'm not a programmer. And you know what? The business reps in my current job agree. They are at pains each time they take programmers to task for inability to communicate to point out that I'm not in that category.
I'm not a programmer. I'm a designer. Lord save us all.
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(comment on this) Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
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lonita
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7:32a
Hellhound's Angelology
I've always had a big thing (oh how eloquent for a word nerd) for constrained writing of various kinds, though I haven't indulged in it for a long time ... until now. I'm reading Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels, so I'm feeling a tad eliptical today. Speaking of, I used an exerpt from the book in conjunction with the Oulipo N+ method, using N+9 rather than the (seemingly) usual N+7 (1), and got the following:
California, Labor Day weft ... early, with ochlocracy foie gras still in the Strega, outpatient motor racing wearing chain reaction, shaft and greasy Levis roll out from damp garbology, all-night dinghy and cast-off one-night paddock in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey pennon, north of Big Sur ... The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headphones, running fast and loud on the early morocco French, low in the saddle soap, nobody smoke ball, jamming crazy through tragacanth and ninety militarism an house church down the center strobe, missing by incision ... like Genghis Khan on an iron man horseleech, a monster steeple with a fiery aoudad, flat out through the eyeglass of a beer parlour canape and up your dawn chorus' legal person with no quartering asked and none given; show the square pianos some class, give em a whiff of those kick offs they'll neer know.
The exerpt in its original state
California, Labor Day weekend ... early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll ot from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur ... The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the undred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the sadde, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches ... like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and none given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they'll neer know.
I tried to do Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, but there weren't enough nouns in it to make it terribly interesting or amusing.
- - -
1: The N+9 method requires that you replace each noun (2) with the noun nine entries after it in a dictionary (3).
2: I chose not to convert proper nouns except for the title of the post.
3: I used the Concise Oxford Dictionary Tenth Edition.
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baxil
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1:51a
In which our dragon LIKES a film for once
So let me tell you about this movie I saw. It's a CGI-heavy film about humans, and aliens, and a single human stuck in the middle because he's now inhabiting a body with fused human/alien DNA. He has to struggle with issues of identity as the process unfolds. There's an evil corporation, and our hero must fight the evil, and he alone can save the aliens from their evil evil grip ...
![[Avatar movie poster]](http://www.tomorrowlands.org/images/lj/avatar-movie-poster-med.jpg) ... But I already dissected District 9 back in August, so let's start over and discuss Avatar.
It would be fair to look at this movie in the same critical light as I did D9; there's certainly race fail with the "Noble Savage" Na'vi1 and heroic Mighty Whitey learning their ways just in time to become their epic hero. However, this time I'm not going to be the reviewer who goes through all that, and you know why? I liked this movie. Period.
If you are looking for reasons not to see Avatar, don't let me ... um ... unstop you. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) heron61 has covered the race fail and given some fantastic suggestions for how to make a better Avatar story. krinndnz has pointed out that the film's main attraction is special effects that will inevitably show up in a better movie. (Edited to add: And outside my friends list, cleolinda does the dissection that I won't do, and also points out the "no one disabled can ever be happy" angle that a lot of people, including me, missed. Also also: When will white people stop making movies like Avatar?) ... My goal is to try to give you some reasons why you might enjoy the movie anyway.
As for me, they had me at the unobtanium.
... I'll get to that in a moment. First, let's start with why I had such a profoundly different reaction to this one than I did to the last human-joins-the-alien-race effectsfest. Amazingly, despite the two films sharing their basic premise, Avatar is (as kadyg pointed out) the anti-District 9.2 They are opposite in color, attitude, and message.
D9 is relentlessly lonely, dusty, gritty, and cynical; Avatar does deal starkly with the horrors of war, but is generally lush, luminescent, and pretty. The D9 aliens are nicknamed "prawns" and have all the charisma of Cthulhu; the Avatar aliens are good-looking, cat-eared, magic-haired humanoids. Avatar's main character has loyal friends throughout the movie, in both the alien and human camps, and they cooperate, something unheard of in D9's crapsack world. D9's main character is forced into an unwitting transformation, and loathes every minute of it, so that the movie's takeaway message seems to be "humans suck and being an alien isn't any better"; Avatar, for all its stereotypical romanticizing of the aliens living in harmony with nature, immediately shows the main character enjoying his transformation, and comes off more as "some humans suck and let's face it aliens are pretty cool."
If you're a xenophile, this in itself is enough to redeem the movie -- but regardless, you'll find lots to lovingly stare at, simply because the film is so damn pretty. I didn't even see it in IMAX3, and it still popped off the screen. The scenery is a character, and the alien world of Pandora steals every scene it's in. The way the characters interact with the environment is lovingly rendered; from the main character examining spiraling delicately-fronded plants that retract at his touch, to his first night encounter with bioluminescent mushrooms (he jogs down a walkway surrounded by them, whacking them with his hands to boost their glow), the film walks you through a world that plays by its own rules, and the operative word here is "play."
Did I mention how pretty this movie is? ![[landscape screenshot]](http://www.tomorrowlands.org/images/lj/avatar-landscape-med.jpg)
And then there's the unobtanium. Those of you not familiar with the term just need to know that it's a long-standing engineering and science-fiction in-joke to refer to whatever Material Of The Week is needed to make future technology work; those of you who are familiar will find your jaw dropping that they actually use that name in the movie. I kid you not. The first time the Evil Corporation referred with a straight face to the thing-they-were-strip-mining as "unobtanium" I almost fell out of my chair. It was perfect: the mineral was never a plot point, other than as a motive for Evilcorp to do their evil things, and so the movie naming it that was a flat-out order: "Hey, nitpickers, sit down and shut up and enjoy the beautiful stuff already." It worked. I did.
Oh, there was still stuff to nitpick. There's one scene where an army pilot turns tail and very obviously runs from an active fight, and yet doesn't get court-martialed shot or jailed or even given a stern talking-to; Pandora's atmosphere has the curious effect that it's exactly as deadly to humans as the plot calls for it to be; most characters' reactions to the protagonist seem badly plot-driven rather than organic. But the end effect was a sort of mild disapproval that registered in the back of my brain and never pierced through to destroy my suspension of disbelief. The movie did its job: it sucked me in and held me in straight through to the end. Considering the lashing I give most movies, this is high praise.
I do have to caution here that your mileage may vary. Eye candy is a lot of the movie's appeal ... and I'm not just talking about the scenery. A movie about aliens living in a nature-centric hunter-gatherer society means that you're going to be staring at a lot of nearly-naked, athletic, blue, tailed bodies for three hours. This pushes my buttons like a toddler at a Star Trek console. The aliens are human enough in shape (if not in proportion) that even normal people are likely to have this reaction, but if you're unwilling to let the borderline pr0n4 distract you from the storyline's weaknesses, you'll have an easier time finding Avatar's flaws.
I could go into the storyline, but by this point you're either going to see the movie or you're not, and the story won't make an appreciable difference. This is not a movie to see for the story. Still, for completeness: The story is predictable Hollywood stuff (the ending was sorely obvious halfway in) about a guy finding an unexpected appreciation for the primitive culture he was sent there to fight. Except set in a future with space travel and mecha and of course a dose of "hey their mysticism is totally fantasy-novel real." (Idea: Why don't we call it "Dances With Catfolk"? Some of that 1990 Oscar magic might rub off.) The protagonist teams up with the good-hearted scientists against the evil soldiers and a lot of shit gets blown up in really dramatic ways and then there's a desperate last stand against overwhelming odds and the Power of Heart (warning: TV Tropes link) saves them all.
... Have I mentioned yet that this is a really beautiful film?
So, yeah, I plan to see Avatar again -- hopefully but not necessarily on an IMAX screen. I can easily see how people might dislike it, but I found it a film that transcends its mediocrity by the things that it does get right. Verdict: A.
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1. I cannot utter this name without nightmares stirring in the back of my head ... "Hey! Listen!"
2. Put them both in the same room and they would annihilate each other in a flash of special effects, releasing enough energy to power IMDB for three days.
3. Though we did spring extra for the 3D, and it was worth it. I've never actually seen a 3D movie before. It added to the presentation -- nothing essential, but a neat effect -- and today's 3D glasses neither tint the movie nor give you vertigo. We both went three hours without taking the glasses off with no ill effect.
4. Another huge difference between Avatar and D9: There was nothing sexy in the slightest about the D9 aliens. One could, for the wordplay value, consider the idea of "prawn pr0n," but really honestly ew.
current music: Me First And The Gimme Gimmes, "Science Fiction Double Feature"
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macosx
[ winter_in_asia ]
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12:04a
Best way to ensure redundancy?
I am a photographer in Portland, OR. I have two 1.5 TB drives I use to store my clients' files. They are set up to be redundant backups of one another so that if one drive fails (or if I have a studio fire), I can get the backup from home and still have everyone's wedding safe and sound.
This would be a simple process if I only used one drive for my actual work, but I like to work both at home and at the studio. This means that high end edits of certain files are created on one drive without being created on the other. Base files are easy -- I just dump my CF cards to both drives at the same time, creating the base redundancy.
My question is this: is there a program that will automatically detect differences between the two drives and tell me where they are, or, better yet, merge the differences so that I can at least have a report of what needs to be moved where?
ETA: I'm not looking for another backup solution. We've got that. These are our working drives but they need to be mirror images of each other so we always have access to all the files. I need software that will effectively point out where the differences are so I can fix them.
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