The Hive Archive

• Web Hosting, An Illustration of No Entry Barriers
• Nintendo Revolution Renamed to “Wii”
• The Guy I Almost Was
• Paragliding: It’s the Alone Way to Fly
• Life Without Numbers

I ran across this list on Kotte.org, who apparently cribbed it from Jim Emerson. I’ve marked the ones I’ve seen. Even though I’ve watched a lot of movies lately, I still have a lot of catching up to do.

I am tickled that I’ve actually seen Un Chien Andalou, a somewhat obscure 1929 French film by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali that features an eyeball getting slit open by a razor! If you have ever heard the Pixies song Debaser, it is about this movie. Check it out.

* 2001: A Space Odyssey
The 400 Blows
8 1/2
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
* Alien
All About Eve
Annie Hall
* Apocalypse Now
* Bambi
The Battleship Potemkin
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Big Red One
The Bicycle Thief
The Big Sleep
* Blade Runner
Blowup
Blue Velvet
Bonnie and Clyde
Breathless
Bringing Up Baby
Carrie
Casablanca
* Un Chien Andalou
Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
* Chinatown
Citizen Kane
* A Clockwork Orange
* The Crying Game
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Days of Heaven
Dirty Harry
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Do the Right Thing
La Dolce Vita
Double Indemnity
* Dr. Strangelove
Duck Soup
* E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial
Easy Rider
* The Empire Strikes Back
* The Exorcist
* Fargo
* Fight Club
* Frankenstein
The General
* The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II
Gone With the Wind
* GoodFellas
* The Graduate
Halloween
A Hard Day’s Night
Intolerance
It’s a Gift
* It’s a Wonderful Life
Jaws
The Lady Eve
Lawrence of Arabia
M
Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior
The Maltese Falcon
* The Manchurian Candidate
Metropolis
Modern Times
* Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Nashville
The Night of the Hunter
Night of the Living Dead
North by Northwest
Nosferatu
On the Waterfront
Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Persona
Pink Flamingos
Psycho
* Pulp Fiction
Rashomon
* Rear Window
Rebel Without a Cause
Red River
Repulsion
The Rules of the Game
Scarface
The Scarlet Empress
* Schindler’s List
The Searchers
* The Seven Samurai
Singin’ in the Rain
Some Like It Hot
A Star Is Born
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sunset Boulevard
Taxi Driver
The Third Man
Tokyo Story
Touch of Evil
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Trouble in Paradise
Vertigo
West Side Story
The Wild Bunch
* The Wizard of Oz

Monad, what have you become? I found the following on Arul Kumaravel’s blog:

When I saw this, I actually looked to make sure it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. I’ve been hearing about Monad for some time, it was yet another promised feature that Vista won’t have. It sounded impressive, for once Microsoft was going to create a command line interface, and they were going to clean up the cruft that has accumulated in the past 40 years of computing.

It was/is supposed to be completely object oriented, a cut above the poor UNIX text interfaces. I was just impressed they had finally listened to their customers pleading and begging for a way to script and use the command line to admin Windows boxes.

Then I run across an idiot on Slashdot where someone was using this example to brag about Monad! Most of the time when people type LOL, they aren’t really laughing out loud, but this time, my lungs hurt from laughing so hard. Have these people actually used a command line interface? The reason the commands are so small in UNIX is that they are faster to type!

This syntax in Monad looks like it was dreamt up by someone that saw a UNIX shell a couple times and said, “wow, these commands don’t make much sense, how would a new user know what cd or ls or ps means?”

If this is the state of Monad, I can’t imagine ever using it. The whole point of a command line interface is that I can ssh to a machine over any kind of network and quickly type and do useful work. I was ready to give them a shot, but if they’ve missed this most basic point, I don’t see how it would be useful. Probably not a surprise that Microsoft can’t get a text interface right, but I was hoping.

I leave with a quote:

[ebnf] is monad pronounced like gonad?

Lem Bingley at IT week blogs about the millions of blogs now running adsense that rarely, if ever break the $100 limit that Google requires before they cut you a check. This made sense in the early days of Adsense, since they were still mailing checks to everyone. It certainly isn’t cost effective for Google to mail out $0.10 checks all over the world.

However, with electronic transfers now enabled, they’ve kept the limit the same. Even banks don’t make this much money of the float. If Yahoo or MSN really wanted to cut into the long tail of adsense, they would lower the minimum payout for electronic transfers to something more like $25/month. The other major complaint that I have with Adsense, is that I am not allowed to set a bid price on what ads can appear on my site. Google controls it. If they determine that my page rates $0.01 ads, that’s the ad they place.

Granted, it is in their best interest as well as mine to put the ad most likely to recieve a legit click-through. However, it may not be in my best interest to clutter up my page with $0.01 advertisements. I should be able to set a minimum bid price for an ad to appear on my site. If I bid too high, then ads don’t show up, but since I’m not making much money anyway, I probably won’t care. My visitors will be more likely to come back and read something else I wrote.

I am very much looking forward to good competition in this space. I’ve tried the Yahoo Beta program and it isn’t close yet. I hope it gets better soon.

Bruce Schneier, noted security expert, summarizes some of what is being said about Vista’s new security model. It is amazing how clueless Microsoft can be in ignoring the security models that have proven themselves to be successful and useful in other operating systems. This is one area where I wouldn’t give Microsoft flack for not innovating. Security is tough, learn from the mistakes others have made!

I’m very disappointed with this, especially because NTFS has such a fine grained permissions system. They could have really pulled off something nice. Thankfully, I’ve been using nothing but Linux and Apple OSX for the past month. If more games were available for OSX, there would be no need for Windows in my life ever again.

Some kind of beta webcrawler from Yahoo has been hitting my site in weird ways. It crawled one page 41 times today so far, sometimes less than a minute apart. Uhhh? Yahoo?  The user agent is Slurpy Verifier/1.0 and it is coming from 66.228.164.201/rdev25.yst.corp.yahoo.com.

1. 24/Apr/2006:04:54:17
2. 24/Apr/2006:04:55:20
3. 24/Apr/2006:05:09:19
4. 24/Apr/2006:05:10:12
5. 24/Apr/2006:05:25:35
6. 24/Apr/2006:05:26:51
7. 24/Apr/2006:05:40:03
8. 24/Apr/2006:05:53:00
9. 24/Apr/2006:06:08:24
10. 24/Apr/2006:06:23:49
11. 24/Apr/2006:06:39:04
12. 24/Apr/2006:06:55:50
13. 24/Apr/2006:07:10:21
14. 24/Apr/2006:07:26:04
15. 24/Apr/2006:07:41:15
16. 24/Apr/2006:07:57:16
17. 24/Apr/2006:08:13:54
18. 24/Apr/2006:08:25:44
19. 24/Apr/2006:08:41:38
20. 24/Apr/2006:08:56:35
21. 24/Apr/2006:09:09:55
22. 24/Apr/2006:09:25:36
23. 24/Apr/2006:09:42:03
24. 24/Apr/2006:09:57:09
25. 24/Apr/2006:10:11:12
26. 24/Apr/2006:10:25:53
27. 24/Apr/2006:10:41:22
28. 24/Apr/2006:10:56:33
29. 24/Apr/2006:11:11:46
30. 24/Apr/2006:11:25:46
31. 24/Apr/2006:11:39:40
32. 24/Apr/2006:11:55:19
33. 24/Apr/2006:12:13:24
34. 24/Apr/2006:12:25:08
35. 24/Apr/2006:12:40:09
36. 24/Apr/2006:12:53:50
37. 24/Apr/2006:13:11:00
38. 24/Apr/2006:13:24:19
39. 24/Apr/2006:13:41:08
40. 24/Apr/2006:13:53:56
41. 24/Apr/2006:14:09:42

I’ve tried out Turbogears and Django, ultimately putting together a quick prototype in Django, because the built in admin interface was the only thing left for me to complete.  It was simple enough to port over my object from Turbogears, add in some meta data and push the whole thing to “production”.

Unfortunately, I started coding in Django right before the “magic” removal branch went public.  The documentation didn’t mention anything about a massive API change that seems to require lots of changes to any code you write.  Not that it is too important to me, it will be faster for me to start over and move the methods into the new branch.  Still frustrating.

Of the two, I think Turbogears has the long term advantage.  I love the fact that someone took the time to integrate a bunch of seperate programs into a whole (it’s not quite coherent yet).  The desire to re-invent the wheel is strong with all programmers and I’ve done it myself a couple times.  Turbogears also is not quite ready, they have some nice widgets that will be a joy to use, but when I tried, I couldn’t find any documentation beyond the wiki.  The example in the wiki didn’t work with my build, so I decided I would come back to it after I had tried  Django.  Maybe after they come out with 1.0.

Which leaves me to ponder trying out Ruby on Rails.  Frankly, I’ve been avoiding it because I want to stick with Python.  I’ve been using Python for all my Unix Scripting and I love the way it is put together.  I’ve heard good things about Ruby, but I also want to deepen my Python experience, not dilute the languages I know with yet another one.  But considering Rails is past 1.0 and is gaining momentum, it would be a mistake not to look into it further.

There is no doubt in my mind that I ever want to go back to writing straight PHP if I don’t have to though.  These new frameworks make writing web applications a joy.  The thought of thousands of lines of poorly written PHP make me shudder.

I’ve been focusing on Python lately, mostly for web development. It is strange, but it doesn’t quite feel ready yet. Obviously, there are large production sites deploying on some of the frameworks like Django, but compared to Java and Tomcat, Python web development is still in the infant stages. Even so, the productivity that Python provides over Java is astonishing. PHP just makes me laugh, though PHP 5 does clean up a lot of the warts. The only good thing I can say about PHP right now is that it is ubiquitous and easy to learn.

I don’t know how I missed it but in late 2004, there was an awesome meeting of the minds at Sun which included:

• Larry Wall
• Guido van Rossum
• Jython folks
• Groovy folks
• Parrot people

If Sun would release the JVM under the GPL or BSD or even the Mozilla MPL, and create awesome support for dynamic languages, it would explode all over the web server scene. Heck, I would pay good money for a JVM that had first rate support for Python. It would also help consolidate Ruby, Python, Perl and Java. I guess Parrot could do this, but honestly it will take years for it to be as fast as the JVM on all the platforms Java currently supports. The JVM is an impressive bit of Sun kit, but Sun has tied too closely to the Java language. Sun, open up the JVM even if you keep the Java spec under your control. This is the best of both worlds and would take a major bite out of .NET.

Unfortunately, Sun will probably let the JVM wither away just like they are doing with Solaris. Sigh.

UPDATE: I upgraded my firmware on my wireless router and things started working. One of the most bizzare network issues I’ve seen, since I hadn’t touched anything on that router for about 2 years, and the problem was intermittent. I got rid of the old Sveasoft WRT54 firmware and upgraded it to DD-WRT.

In the past I haven’t had a lot of trouble with Comcast Broadband, but for the past couple days it has been dropping packets all over the place. ARRRRRGH.

--- comcast.net ping statistics ---
624 packets transmitted, 95 packets received, 84% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 68.991/400.410/3449.330/765.964 ms

Ran across this gem on Kuro5hin:

In-class assignment for Wednesday April 5, 2006: Tandem Story. Each person will pair off with the person sitting next to them. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on until both people agree a conclusion has been reached. The story must be coherent, and each paragraph relevant to the prior one.

. . . and here’s what one pair turned in!

Rebecca and Gary
English 144A
Creative Writing
Prof.

At first, Laurie couldn’t decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who had once said in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question.

Meanwhile, Advance Team Captain Carl Harris was leading his patrol squadron into orbit over Skylon 4. Carl had more important things to think about than the neuroses of that air-headed asthmatic woman named Laurie who, after one sweaty night over three months ago, was still desperately clinging to an illusion of a relationship she had fabricated in her unbalanced mind. “Alpha Tango One to Geostation One-Niner-Three”, he said into his subspace communicator. “Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance…” But before he could sign off a bluish plasma beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship’s cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit threw him out of his seat and into the cockpit control panel.

He hit his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. “Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel”, Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth — when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. “Why must one lose one’s innocence to become a woman?” she pondered wistfully.

Little did she know, but she has less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu’udrian battleship launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted, bleeding-heart peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through the U.N. had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empire who was determined to enslave the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu’udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet and nothing to stop them. They swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in a submarine off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 15 million other Americans. He slammed his fist on the conference table. “I KNEW this would happen! I am exercising my executive privledge to annul that treaty effective IMMEADIATELY! Ready the nukes, we’re gonna blow those bastards out of the sky!”

This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.

Yeah? Well, you’re a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium.

Asshole.

Bitch.