Sequels

Did you enjoy braindead computer game conversion to movie Doom last year?

Then you'll be sure to love the braindead conversion to movie of the computer game Doom 2.

What do you mean, silent h?

To the movies

I ventured out into the cold winter evening to the cinematograph for the viewing of the latest installment of the james bond franchise. A quite jolly outing all told, with a nice freerunning sequence, although surprisingly less impressive than some of the "non-fiction freerunning that can be seen, for example here.

But before all of that I was forced to sit through multiple showings of an execrable trailer for an execrable film with will smith in it (will smith?) callled The pursuit of happyness. At no point is there any explanation for the horrific spelling error in the title. It does contain the unforgettable line "I can't stop; I'm in a competitive internship for Dean-Witter", which surely trumps "Let me through, I'm a doctor".

Belated follow up

About two years ago, I put out a mild plea for help in finding my ideal screensaver (what?). I wanted one that would show my photos on a PC in a nice way, without the kind of hideous transition effects that people who use powerpoint too much seem to think are a good idea. Well, after two years, including starting a job, quitting it and finding another, I finally found what I was looking. The key was the right set of keywords to search with, which, peculiarly, were not anything you might think of like "screensaver" or "photos", which even in combination are far too vague and turn up thousands of tedious low quality pages. Instead, the magic words were "Ken Burns" (I'll leave it up to you to work out why those are the right words). Armed with these, I found the lovely "iSlideshow screensaver", which does pretty much exactly what I want (it has some problems with scaling to my secondary cloned TV/monitor, but so does everyone). Perhaps it didn't help that the software seems to date back only to 2005 when I was looking for something like it in 2004.

Anyway, more later perhaps but must dash now since it's getting on for 9.30pm and the turkey really ought to be done by around now...

I'm crushing your TEX

Question: when you spend about 24 hours working over the weekend, before a 3-day week, are you justified in slacking off for the rest of the week? Somewhat redundant question, I suppose, since it's going to happen whether you want it to or not (I find it rather hard to concentrate the day after working fourteen hours solid up to midnight).

My weekend was spent in an exercise which can principally be summarized as "going against the spirit of LaTeX and trying to crush material down into a suitably small format". Perhaps ironically, by was of a change, today I am preparing a paper for proceedings, which seems to mostly involve trying to fit more material into the available page budget. Ah well...

Comin' straight out of earlsdon...

Another youchoobmoovie. For the warwick missive...

Fun with Brainteasers

YouTube video that won't show up in the RSS feed:



This is what I am like with most brainteasers. Try asking me something new.

I'm not saying that Google is entirely self-obsessed...

...but if you search for "earth" on Google, the first result is google earth...

[I suppose you could say that "if you google earth you get google earth", but the Google thought police wouldn't like me saying that.]

With a soda on the side

Your needless irritant of the day: The Chicken Noodle Soup Song!



Now, compare and contrast:

Chicken Noodle Soup
Chicken Noodle Soup
Chicken Noodle Soup with a Soda on the Side

Peanut Butter Jelly
Peanut Butter Jelly
Peanut Butter Jelly with a baseball bat!



Mmm, bad american food.

Get Out

Today is a very important day, politically. Mid-term elections are happening across the US that can have a major effect on the political climate for years to come. Therefore, I am using this opportunity to deeply, sincerely and urgently insist that you do the right thing, and don't vote.

It is very important that you don't vote for the following reasons:

1. You do not live in America. Although you would not believe it if you read some blogs, these elections are happening in a small corner of the world. Fewer than 5% of people live in America, and most of you don't. So don't vote.

2. You live in America, but are not a US citizen. Many people are like me -- living in the US, but not a US citizen. Therefore, it will be very difficult to vote -- you'd have to lie or cheat your way onto the rolls, and run the risk of a serious prosecution. So keep life simple, and don't vote.

3. You only came to this web page because you were searching for "barbara bush naked" or "dervla kerwin pics" or "kelis milkshake explanation". You are a craven lustful idiot driven by base carnal instincts. You are not to be trusted with a live democracy. Fortunately, you are probably only reading this six months later. But still, today and forever more, please don't vote.

4. You are part of the sinister secret conspiracy of the military-industrial complex that has been trying to monitor my thoughts (despite my fetching tin-foil beanie). Well, honestly, since you control the outcome of all elections electronically from your secret Boulder, Colorado headquarters (well, would you go to Boulder, Colorado? Therefore, perfect hiding place), it doesn't really make a difference. But please don't vote.

Therefore, in conclusion, for all the reasons and many more, it is vital for you-- indeed, more than this, it is your duty-- to not vote today in the US elections. Come on, polls are only open for at most, what, 12 more hours or so? How hard can it be for you to take a few minutes out of your busy schedule and not vote? It's not like your one vote will make a difference anyway. Thankyouverymuch.

Music for the masses

We haven't had a quiz around here in quite some time. So, for want of something better to do, here's a pointless music lyrics quiz.

Now, we all know that there is only one way of listening to music, which is via direct implant into the cerebellum. But in the ancient past of the 20th century, people used all kinds of crazy methods to listen to their music, and then wrote songs about it. Your task is to find (reasonably well known) songs whose lyrics include references to the following devices, and to quote the full line or lines:

1. Transistor Radio

2. 78s

3. 45

4. AM Radio

5. Walkman

6. 8-track

7. CD [player]

8. Reel-to-reel [tape recorder]

9. Gramophone

10. Dansette

For about half of these I have a specific song in mind; for the other half, I'm not entirely sure, but I'm fairly sure you'll be able to find something. If you want to cheat you can probably do all manner of internet searches, but I'd prefer it if you search your brain the old-fashioned way. I mean, it's not like there's going to be a prize or anything... If you prefer you may add your own, such as "LP": 'Sex began in 1963 between the chatterley ban and the beatle's first LP', from Philip Larking.

Bizarre Phishing Antics

Now that the spam filter is up and running, I'm looking more closely at those messages that do evade it. Rather intruigingly, the odd one or two (corresponding to a roughly 98% success rate) that do get through seem to be spam that is not very good at what it intends to do. The latest that fell through the net is from "Kerri" (why doesn't the spam filter also have a trigger for emails sent from a single first name?), although the email address is Chelsea@somewhere, and the message is signed "wbr, Hope" [with best regards?].

The message itself is "I've accidently found your photo at a flickr and i'm very interested in it. Can you tell me what place i can see in the background of it?" That immediately tells me it's rubbish since I don't have an account on flickr (similarly, given the amount of phishing attacks, I am trying to avoid having accounts on ebay, paypal and amazon so as to avoid any doubt). There's a link. In the plain text version, the link is to the implausible address:
file://localhost/home/cmf3/tasks/keeper_au_du/azY8aA/http://www.9ebeauty.com/fli
ckr.html
which isn't going to work for anyone; in the HTML version, there is a link (which doesn't even bother trying to hide where it goes to) to http://www.9ebeauty.com/flickr.html.

So, fairly sure that I can explore with no danger to myself, I take a look.

9ebeauty.com is a rather odd site that apparently sells massage tables and broken english. The /flickr.html page is an HTML version of a flickr page. And, er, that seems to be mostly it. There's no photo, just some static text saying "photo loading". There are links to login to flickr which lead to the genuine log in pages. At first glance, there seems to be nothing more suspicious than a 1x1 pixel iframe containing a counter hosted on a machine identified only by IP address. That IP address resolves to rbnnetwork, the "Russian Business Network", which apparently is associated with spammers in the past. But still, it doesn't seem to actual be anything more than a counter. Except that actually going to the URL gives an apparent 404 (a closer investigation suggests that it is actually succesfully (200) serving up a page that looks like a 404...)

So, an unconvincing spam email leading to a lame flickr rip off, with a counter. What's the point of that, then? I suppose it looks like a trial run. An attempt to see what new phishing scams are the most enticing. But really, why bother? Why not have some pay off? What would be the point of stealing Flickr log-ins? Or is it an attempt to draw people in and then infect them with spyware or zombies? It makes you wonder sometimes.

Fnord

Compare and contrast:

Principia Discordia, the sacred book for worshippers of Eris [...] has been reprinted by Ronin press, which is claiming a copyright to the work.

The Principia Discordia, written by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill, was released into the public domain when it was first published by the authors in 1965.

Versus:

...the simplistic style in which they are written is partly explained by the fact that the editors, having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it with a few footnoted in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly tortuous Galactic Copyright laws.

It is interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backwards in time through a temporal warp, and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws.

Oh, the irony linking to a web version of the most definitely still in-copyright RatEotU.

I'll have a P please Bamber

I recently finished reading "Starter for Ten" by David Nicholls. I first heard about the book after watching a documentary on BBC4 about the history of the campus novel, where the author was one of the talking heads. Since I'd heard of or read most of the others featured in the piece (Amis, Bradbury, Lodge, Brodge, etc.), I was curious to see what he had done, and tracked the book down on Amazon. It had pretty good reviews, and although it hasn't been officially released in the US, I was able to order a copy from a second hand store through z-shops for a few bucks. It arrived soon after and, somewhat to my surprise turned out to be a signed copy (with no dedication though). Either that, or someone else has scrawled "David Nicholls" on the frontispiece for no particular reason.

It's quite a good book. I won't say too much specific about the book itself, you can read it (or the reviews of amazon for that). Although I did enjoy it for the most part, I really didn't like the ending all that much; it wasn't sufficiently unambiguously redemptive for the fact that the protagonist is increasingly idiotic and self-absorbed throughout. Perhaps it's a mark of success that I cared about the characters sufficently to feel short-changed by an ending based around a carefully choreographed piece of weak farce. The clunky coda set the balance a little straight, I suppose.

What I did find most interesting is that it made me very nostalgic, not for my own undergraduate days, but for a time before then: it was very reminiscent of how I imagined University life would be like. The reality was quite different, considerably less melodrama and angst, but also a lot less awkwardness and pratfalls. I'd contrast it with the other campus novel that I read earlier this year, Five Point Someone. The setting could not be more different (an IIT versus an unspecified British university), yet the themes are familiar: coming of age, academic failings and pining for a girl. They even culminate in a similar way: a climactic act of transgression. 5PS is less well written, and has fewer stand out comedy sections in comparison to SF10, but the ending is gentler and more upbeat. I must just be a big softie at heart.

I had to finish reading SF10 since I learn that there is a film version due out any minute now, and I didn't want to be spoiled by clips from the film. I'm quite curious to see how it turns out, to see how a medium length book covering the crucial first six months of university will get clipped down to a crisp 90 minutes. There's also the perennial question of how the fairly well painted characters will translate onto the screen. The casting choices are interesting, mostly because through some weird coincidence or design, the two main female parts are being played by actresses who share the same name as the character they play, and who are daughters of famous theatrical figures (check out the movie page on IMDB for more information). People have been talking about the film somewhat excitedly, as if this could be the next four weddings and a funeral. Someohow, I think it's just as likely that it will be the next Inbetweeners. What, you don't remember Inbetweeners? A fairly insignificant piece of university based fluff that may never have received a theatrical release but sneaked out on to a limited video release; notable solely for the cameo of Johnny Ball as a doddering lecturer; production values notably inferior to G103. Yes, of course I've seen it. I still have a copy on VHS lodged in a secure location in Kent, and might even get around to rewatching it at Christmas time if I have nothing better to do.

The main plot of the book (and presumably film) centres around University Challenge. I sometimes wish that I had a tame American conveniently to hand, so that I could show them the episodes of the show that I covertly acquire. I think the idea of a programme consisting solely of two teams of university students trying to answer relatively obscure questions about the arts and science would befuddle them. "But... where are the scorpions? The sound effects? The prominent sponsorship deals? The attractive ladies in skimpy attire? The million dollar prizes?..." they would gibber in plain disbelief that such a show could survive for more than twelve seconds without being cancelled.

For those unfamiliar with this bizarre British institution, then why not check out this helpful clip of the show on YouTube, taken from the recent retrospective documentary, Time Trumpet. It doesn't really explain anything about the quiz, but does at least partially explain why for the last month I've been wandering around muttering "Venezuela, Venezuela?" to myself in a silly nasal voice.

Samba, spam and more

I had planned to, you know, leave the house or something today, but instead I was overtaken with the pressing need to organize my electronic life some more.

First up was dealing with the vast amounts of spam that I am now receiving (see recent postings on this very issue. The previous solution, a hand crafted procmail script, was no longer getting a tolerable false positive/false negative trade off. I started trying to see whether I could get spamassassin up and running on my email somehow. The first hint that this might be easier than I had anticipated was the fact that spamc appeared to exist on the system my email arrives on. spamc is a client program that sends email to a daemon process to get checked for spam. But, after some playing around, I couldn't seem to get anything to happen. Then I happened (thanks to google desktop archiving my email) that someone else had their email checked by spamassassin, and the headers of their email helpfully indicated the IP address of a local machine doing the checking. Googling (yes, I'll use this as a verb; I've been happily Hoovering my apartment for many years without the world coming to an end) this IP address led to better instructions as to how to set up procmail to call spamc with this machine identified as the daemon. And now all is well: my old procmail script still does the necessary sorting into incoming folders, but it now collects the information from spamassassin, and files all spam directly into my spam folder. All I need now is a few more genuine emails in order to check it's not just dumping everything in there...

Next in line was sorting out ssh across my machines, and ensuring that rsync works properly across the network. ssh was fine; I played around with authorized_keys, and pretty soon I was able to log in and out across machines without needing to enter passwords. Emboldened by my success, I then tried to get rsync running. I started getting hangs in the middle of transfes, which turns out to be a common problem. After a lot of messing around, I concluded that this is just a failing of cygwin+rsync+ssh, and should give this up as a bad lot. Instead, I set things up with windows shares instead. For the long term, and for external connections I'll have to find something else, possibly involving running an rsync daemon. But that can wait for a while.

Fusking Boing Boing

Here's another BoingBoing post that shows quite staggering disregard for mathematics, science, or even correctly copying information from the original story. For some reason this has particularly irritated me this afternoon.

A group of British mathematicians Where in the story does it say that these people are mathematicians? Sure, they may do mathematics, but there is no evidence one way or another that their job is to do maths.

have hit on some kind of secret formula for playing the lotto Where in the story does it say that they have "some kind of secret formula"? It says that they tried a particular heuristic they apparently won the jackpot (assuming that it refers to the most recent drawing on Saturday, whose jackpot of 5.3M GBP = the 13M AUD in the article.

and are raking in millions They won once. That's hardly raking in the millions, any more than someone who puts in 6 randomly chosen numbers and wins the jackpot 'rakes in the millions'.

So, the facts: syndicate of people who work at Bradford Uni plays the lottery every week for eight years, using a particular system for four years wins the lottery once. Not particularly newsworthy, and certainly not worth the screaming hype and spin from BB.

Lastly, from the original article: "Most of us believe winning lotto is down to the luck of the draw. But a syndicate of university professors and tutors in Britain thought it could also be related to the principles of mathematical probability. "

That has to be the most inane tautology I've seen in a long time...

Advance warning

My travel plans for the winter solstice are mostly solidified now. They look as follows:

15 Dec Depart NYNJA (New York/New Jersey Area)
16 Dec 9am -- 11am GMT Array myself enticingly over seating in London's Heathrow Airport
17 Dec 1am Arrive Delhi International Airport. Sleep (or not). Travel onward to Kanpur.
21 Dec Travel from Kanpur to Delhi via Agra (oops, that'll set off the spam filters).
22 Dec 7.30ish, arrive back in LHR, slink off to Maidstone to sleep for a few days.
30 Dec 18.30 depart LHR for EWR.

This leaves me a few days after christmas (27-29) to explore the glorious UK. I'll certainly be passing through London, and may detour out to Cambridge to check that it's still there, but apart from that, I don't plan to travel too far. But if you're in the vicinity of any of those places, let me know via the usual means of communication.

Dialogue for an edgy sit-com

Feel free to use the following in any sitcoms you may be writing as appropriate:

"Good morning Mister, er, Raghead?"
"It's pronounced 'Rajid'"