A regular feature, in which we provide superficial 'reviews' of films that everyone else has already seen.
M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" was OK, but far from his his best. Mel Gibson was barely tolerable. The best line was from a deleted scene (roughly, from memory): "Caroline would've figured it out. She always knew the ends of movies."
"When Harry Met Sally" was of course good, but I'd completely forgotten I'd seen it before, and can't remember seeing it, even though most every scene was familiar.
"Love, Actually" was pure, unadulterated sap. Weapons-grade sap. But I still liked it. (Still, with all the portrayals of different flavors and combinatorics of love, where were all the gay couples?)
[True.com CEO Herb] Vest has managed to convince legislators in states including California, Texas, Virginia, and Michigan to sponsor bills that would target rival dating sites like Match.com, Yahoo Personals, Spring Street Networks, craigslist and eHarmony. Those sites would be required to stamp this stark warning atop every e-mail and personal ad, in no less than 12-point type: "WARNING: WE HAVE NOT CONDUCTED A FELONY-CONVICTION SEARCH OR FBI SEARCH ON THIS INDIVIDUAL." Who would want to set up a date after reading that? (The exact text of the government-mandated label would vary by state, and companies that didn't comply would be subject to whopping fines.)
—Declan McCullagh, "True love with a criminal-background check," CNet News.com, 2005-02-28
I'm thinking of blackholing True.com in my Privoxy actions file, but I'd have to introduce a new category of offense for them.
Drinking decaf was not making sense — not with rice milk, no sugar, and whatever the decaffeinating process artifacts — so I gave up on that.
The best wintertime beverage now seems to be rice milk (Rice Dream Vanilla Enriched, or VitaSoy Vanilla Rice Beverage) nuked til it boils, with cocoa powder. The spice shop adjoining Christina's Homemade Ice Cream in Inman Square is one place to get good cocoa. The Bensdorp seems good, and I have to try the more expensive stuff.
I'm still not sure of the "fair trade" implications for cocoa powder. I did find this La Siembra Co-op brand. The FairTrade.net pages on cocoa are incomplete ("under construction") and have statistics only through 2003. Equal Exchange has a Cocoa FAQ, but their only cocoa product is a mix that has lots of sugars I'm trying to avoid.
With few exceptions, Common Lisp hackers are underpaid, undershaven, and (occasionally) undernourished. International humanitarian project Planet Lisp has taken on the challenge of ensuring that no CLer ever goes to bed hungry. You can now Click to Feed a Lisp Hacker. I wonder what it would be like to "adopt" a CLer, to keep them not only fed, but also clothed in the Metallica T-shirt that the brochure says is the custom there. Would I receive monthly wallet-size photos of my adopted CLer's hairy hands on a well-worn Symbolics keyboard? Would they write me sweet letters in all-caps?
HtmlPrag version 0.13 has been released. The most notable changes are
probably the new SHTML & character entity references and the
foreign-filter argument to
shtml-write-shtml-as-html. See 2004-01-31 for the motivation behind the latter.
I'm also no longer distributing packagings for umpteen different Scheme implementations. There are several reasons behind this, including that packagings are too much of a hassle, at least until I get the new Web site software up. Packagings would be easier if everyone supported SRFI-0 properly.
An op-ed piece in today's Globe takes a different tack on the BSL4 lab that Boston University wants to build in Boston.
Bernard Lown and Prasannan Parthasarathi, "The lure of bio-weapons," Boston Globe, 2005-02-23
My own primary concern is that Boston University build their monstrosity outside of town, where it can be secured properly, and where the accidents are less likely to be catastrophic.
The Massachusetts Nurses Association has spoken out:
[We] register our opposition to the placement of any Biosafety Level 4 laboratory (BSL-4 lab) in an urban, densely populated area, where the accidental or deliberate release of a deadly biological agent could have a devastating impact on a large population of residents. Therefore, we believe the BSL-4 lab proposed for a site located very near and directly between Boston Medical Center and the I-93 on-ramp should not be built in inner-city Boston.
—Massachusetts Nurses Association, "Position Statement On the Proposed BU Biosafety Level 4 Lab," 2005-01-25
Jeanne Guillemin, of the MIT Security Studies Program Technical Working Group, has produced a report, "Level 4 Biosafety Laboratories: Public Information and Risk Analysis" It includes a section, "Boston Site," concerning population demographics around the proposed BU lab.
See also: 2005-01-21 Boston University BSL4 Lab, 2004-10-21, 2004-09-30, and 2003-09-30
Now they've done it — they've gone and patented sliced bread.
The Nation site has posted a certain noteworthy article of HST's: Hunter S. Thompson, "The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders," Nation, 1965-05-17, posted 2005-02-22
The CSHomework.com service is borderline unethical, so please only email me if the ethics don't bother you.
—CraigsList.org posting by purported MIT PhD candidate
If this CSHomework.com is for real, and truly operated by an MIT student, someone is about to get smacked down. About the only rule of conduct inside MIT is "Whatever you can get away with, good for you," but embarrassing MIT externally does not constitute getting away with.
And if the poster was trying to disguise his identity, it looks like he did an incompetent job of it...
For reference, here's screenshots of the CSHomework.com CL post and the CSHomework.com site.
For the other person in the world who uses fvwm-wallpaper, version 2.1 has been released.
Having recovered from the Door Gym trauma noted on 2004-12-01, today I marched through the snow to City Sports in Harvard Square, and got a simple telescoping chin-up bar. $17.99 before the 20% coupon they include in that Val-Pak junk mail, so $15.11 after tax. The main drawback to this design for me is that the door frame has only 6'4" clearance, so I had to mount the bar about 9" lower than I'd like. Ideally, one should have to stand tiptoe to get a good grip on the bar. The Door Gym results in the grips being higher than with a bar, since the Door Gym's grips protrude outside the door frame horizontally, and thus you don't have to worry as much about scraping off your face.
Freedocumentaries.org has a Bittorrent of "Control Room". (In packaged MPEG-4 format viewable with open codecs.)
Unfortunately, as I sanity-check before blogging, I'm less confident than before that this electronic distribution of the film is authorized by the copyright owner. I learned of the site via a jobs posting on CraigsList, which included the ambiguous statement:
The movies we post are movies that the directors themselves want to get exposure to for altruistic purposes.
—"Techie Needed to Help Spread Democracy," http://boston.craigslist.org/sof/60449226.html
If this distribution turns out to be unauthorized, it'll be taken down shortly. In any case, the film is definitely worth a rental or DVD purchase. The official site, ControlRoomMovie.com, does not get a link for purchases, since that site is completely unusable without the infernal, anti-Web, effectively closed-format Flash. Instead, I'll link to IMDB's "Control Room" page, which has links in the upper-right corner for purchasing.
Backlog of movies that I've seen in the last three months but not yet blogged.
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" was good.
"Uzumaki" is a noteworthy cheesy horror flick.
"West Side Story" was incredibly gay. I'd been avoiding musicals since childhood, when Curly traumatized me by trying to trick Jud into killing himself, so I had no idea the magnitude of gayness in musicals.
"Matrix Revolutions" was an expensive action flick and shoddy sci-fi.
"Catch Me If You Can" was good, and better than I expected.
"Lost in Translation" had some mood aspects I liked, but I think it's really targeted at the Chamomille Set.
"Avalon" was OK. Visuals were good; story could've been a lot better. The in-game scenes in which the heroine is scoring points are so glaringly dumb that I initially thought the director was mocking the ridiculousness of fps games.
"Shaolin Soccer" was an OK kung-fu comedy. Though, if you know the genre well enough to get some of the jokes, the cg-fu might be boring.
"To Die For" was good, and Nicole Kidman's acting in some scenes was spooky. And of course I appreciated the Tom Peterson cameo.
"The Fisher King" was OK; I don't go for Robin Williams films since "Dead Poets Society." My favorite was the early shock-jock scene — perfect dialogue, delivery, and camera.
The original "Lord of the Flies" should of course be seen once, if only so you can make references more authoritatively.
"Silence of the Lambs" was good too, though not my type of film, but again, references.
The Will Smith vehicle, "I, Robot," was an action soft sci-fi with some glaring brand placements.
"Children of the Century," was way too long, and Binoche didn't make up for it. My favorite part was the printing press footage in the opening credits.
Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" was amusing, although I forgot I'd seen it before.
"The Big Lebowski" was OK, but I didn't like it as much as most people did. Maybe because I didn't admire The Dude. Though the Walter character was great, and reminded me very much of a certain heavily-armed redneck Fed of my acquaintance.
"The Princess Bride" was of course good, and I should've seen it long ago.
Lebowski reminds me to ammend my positive review of "Napoleon Dynamite" of 2004-06-24: I think my objectivity was compromised by the fact I was watching the film with my Spanish girl, who loved it. She's contagious that way.
The comptroller general has issued a blanket warning that reminds federal agencies they may not produce newscasts promoting administration policies without clearly stating that the government itself is the source.
—Anne E. Kornblut, "Administration Is Warned About Its 'News' Videos," New York Times, 2005-02-19
One last point: a disturbing thing about Wednesday's hearing was the deference with which Democratic senators treated Mr. Greenspan. They acted as if he were still playing his proper role, acting as a nonpartisan source of economic advice. After the hearing, rather than challenging Mr. Greenspan's testimony, they tried to spin it in their favor. But Mr. Greenspan is no longer entitled to such deference. By repeatedly shilling for whatever the Bush administration wants, he has betrayed the trust placed in Fed chairmen, and deserves to be treated as just another partisan hack.
—Paul Krugman, "Three-Card Maestro," New York Times, 2005-02-18
Yay, the Canon EOS 350D has a black body.
On the appointment of the infamous John D. Negroponte as director of national intelligence:
John brings a unique set of skills to these challenges.
—George W. Bush, quoted by David Stout and Mark Glassman, "Bush Names Iraq Envoy as Nation's 1st Intelligence Chief," New York Times, 2005-02-17
When you need to keep the lid on an ongoing campaign of human rights atrocities, Negroponte is your man!
Why do journalists Stout and Glassman limit Negroponte's bio to:
Mr. Negroponte, 65, has been serving as the United States ambassador to Iraq since last summer, [...] Before that, Mr. Negroponte had served as United States ambassador to the United Nations.
The word "Honduras" appears nowhere in the article. Someone send them a leather-bound copy of the "John Negroponte" Wikipedia volume, the bulk of which concerns Negroponte's involvement in Honduras.
If your interests are not currently aligned with those of militant right-wing extremists and supremacists, now would be a good time either to keep your head down or to demand that the news media latch onto the President's case and not let go.
(See also 2004-08-13 and 2004-07-01.)
An old friend of mine can paint like this Caustics piece, and much better, in oils, but she's an exceptionally gifted and experienced painter. Computer models and tools increasingly surpass the old-fashioned rendering skills of most artists.
I implemented ISO8601 date parsing (reading from an input port, with wrapper for parsing from strings) in R5RS:
(define p read-iso8601-date/string) (p "---11") ⇒ (calendar #f #f 11) (p "--11") ⇒ (calendar #f 11 #f) (p "--11-11") ⇒ (calendar #f 11 11) (p "--1111") ⇒ (calendar #f 11 11) (p "-111") ⇒ (ordinal #f 111) (p "-W-1") ⇒ (week #f #f 1) (p "-W11") ⇒ (week #f 11 #f) (p "-W11-1") ⇒ (week #f 11 1) (p "-W111") ⇒ (week #f 11 1) (p "-1-W11") ⇒ (week (10 . 1) 11 #f) (p "-1-W11-1") ⇒ (week (10 . 1) 11 1) (p "-1W11") ⇒ (week (10 . 1) 11 #f) (p "-1W111") ⇒ (week (10 . 1) 11 1) (p "-11") ⇒ (calendar (100 . 11) #f #f) (p "-11-11") ⇒ (calendar (100 . 11) 11 #f) (p "-1111") ⇒ (calendar (100 . 11) 11 #f) (p "11") ⇒ (calendar (-100 . 11) #f #f) (p "11-111") ⇒ (ordinal (100 . 11) 111) (p "11-11-11") ⇒ (calendar (100 . 11) 11 11) (p "11-W11") ⇒ (week (100 . 11) 11 #f) (p "11-W11-1") ⇒ (week (100 . 11) 11 1) (p "11111") ⇒ (ordinal (100 . 11) 111) (p "111111") ⇒ (calendar (100 . 11) 11 11) (p "11W11") ⇒ (week (100 . 11) 11 #f) (p "11W111") ⇒ (week (100 . 11) 11 1) (p "1111") ⇒ (calendar 1111 #f #f) (p "1111-111") ⇒ (ordinal 1111 111) (p "1111-11") ⇒ (calendar 1111 11 #f) (p "1111-11-11") ⇒ (calendar 1111 11 11) (p "1111-W11-1") ⇒ (week 1111 11 1) (p "1111111") ⇒ (ordinal 1111 111) (p "11111111") ⇒ (calendar 1111 11 11) (p "1111W111") ⇒ (week 1111 11 1)
I'm still thinking that I should probably use ISO8601 as the foundation of a full-featured date&time library for Scheme, simply because we'll need to interoperate with ISO8601 anyway, but I quite dislike much of ISO8601.
Somewhere in the French countryside, there is centuries-old iron stamp — the last of its kind — and it is used by an old man to label barrels with a one-digit year and a (ISO8601?) week number. That man's lover was on the ISO8601 committee, and the rest is history. Romantic, no?
Just a guess.
I just manually compiled a table for parsing full ISO8601:2000 date
time-points, except + "extended" format (not yet audited):
Code Tokens Input Type E/B Imp. Values Unspec. 02 2 YY calendar B - Y2 M, MD 0222 2-2-2 YY-MM-DD calendar E C Y2, M, MD - 023 2-3 YY-DDD ordinal E C Y2, YD - 02W2 2-W2 YY-Www week E C Y2, W WD 02W2 2W2 YYWww week B C Y2, W WD 02W21 2-W2-1 YY-Www-D week E C Y2, W, WD - 02W3 2W3 YYWwwD week B C Y2, W, WD - 04 4 YYYY calendar B - Y M, MD 042 4-2 YYYY-MM calendar B - Y, M MD 0422 4-2-2 YYYY-MM-DD calendar E - Y, M, MD - 043 4-3 YYYY-DDD ordinal E - Y, YD - 04W21 4-W2-1 YYYY-Www-D week E - Y, W, WD - 04W3 4W3 YYYYWwwD week B - Y, W, WD - 05 5 YYDDD ordinal B C Y2, YD - 06 6 YYMMDD calendar B C Y2, M, MD - 07 7 YYYYDDD ordinal B - Y, YD - 08 8 YYYYMMDD calendar B - Y, M, MD - 11W -1-W2-1 -Y-Www-D week E CD Y1, W, WD - 11W2 -1-W2 -Y-Www week E CD Y1, W WD 11W2 -1W2 -YWww week B CD Y1, W WD 11W3 -1W3 -YWwwD week B CD Y1, W, WD - 12 -2 -YY calendar B - Y2 M, MD 122 -2-2 -YY-MM calendar E C Y2, M MD 13 -3 -DDD ordinal ? Y YD - 14 -4 -YYMM calendar B C Y2, M MD 1W1 -W-1 -W-D week B Y, W WD - 1W2 -W2 -Www week B Y W, WD 1W21 -W2-1 -Www-D week E Y W, WD - 1W3 -W3 -WwwD week B Y W, WD - 22 --2 --MM calendar B Y M MD 222 --2-2 --MM-DD calendar E Y M, MD - 24 --4 --MMDD calendar B Y M, MD - 32 ---2 ---DD calendar B Y, M MD -
Wait! I think you guys missed a few possible symbol sequences!
I'm skeptical that anyone actually prints a date like
"---01" anywhere.
Cambridge people: MicroCenter has a large set of security bits on sale for $5.99. I recently had to purchase a set on eBay, to get past a surprisingly ornery little Compaq Deskpro EN solenoid case lock, and they're now a permanent resident of my toolbox.
I hesistate to plug MicroCenter, as I mainly think of them as Home Of FREE (After Mail-in Rebate Fine-print) Components That Are Worth $10 But Cost You $30 When The Rebate Check Never Arrives. But MicroCenter is great for when you actually need cheap (non-rebate) crap, and mail-order shipping would be too expensive or take too long. Just be careful of the mail-order rebates. Class-action suit waiting to happen, there.
For components like hard drives, I find PCs For Everyone usually has the makes I want (Seagate, currently), and is usually close enough to mail-order price. I also generally like the PCs For Everyone people. (I generally like the MicroCenter employees I've met, too, but their employer really needs to stop pushing the less-reputable mail-in rebates.)
Did I mention the rebates?
I don't use Orkut anymore, in part because it's unacceptably slow and often appears to have crashed in the middle of a session. But, in my absence, the "Urban Photography" community that I created has reached 2187 members.
If only I could sell ads.
(Yes, the photo of the broken iron "URBAN" grate with concrete and a little patch of nature with cigarette butts in it is mine.)
claire:~# update-alternatives --config x-www-browser There is only 1 program which provides x-www-browser (/usr/bin/mozilla-firefox). Nothing to configure.
Just in case this matters to anyone: ever since my first portable Scheme library, HtmlPrag, I've used the following collision-avoidance naming convention for internal-use-only identifiers:
PACKAGENAME -internal: NAME
but that's gotten unwieldy, and I'm moving to:
% PACKAGENAME : NAME
For example, I might call a "foo" in my HtmlPrag library:
%htmlprag:foo
Hopefully, virtually all other Scheme libraries using identifiers
matching the regexp "^%[^:]+:.+$" will be consistent with this
convention. Then we only have to worry about PACKAGENAME
collisions. At least til R6RS gives us a standard module system.
The experimental ASXT is going to be retired sooner than planned. I've almost finished
implementing a much better language, and with extensive use of
syntax-rules...
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