Aliens are out of vogue in Space Operas

Submitted by ian on Sun, 04/08/2012 - 22:11

When I first saw the Firefly TV series, it took me a while to really put my finger on what I loved about it so much. The obvious part was the mixture of Space Opera with traditional Western tropes. But, there was something else, something more elusive. It was the total lack of aliens. The world of Firefly is reminiscent of the distant future as portrayed in Japanese Mecha tales. Humans have colonized other planets, and found no other sentient life.

Playing around with Posterous

Submitted by ian on Sat, 03/31/2012 - 21:43

I've been looking for a good way to post one thing into multiple channels (Drupal blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), and one of my clients is using Posterous for exactly that.   I'm hoping this will work for my personal needs to.  Sweet.

SSH new user unable to log in

Submitted by ian on Tue, 03/13/2012 - 05:00

This may be old hat for the *nix pros out there, but I recently created a new account for a friend on my Unix box, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why I could log in as him on the machine, but not remotely. SSH was working properly. The firewalls seemed right. His password was fine. I was wracking my brain. Finally, I noticed that in the SSH config file at /etc/ssh/sshd_config, that users had to be specifically allowed with the AllowUsers directive. If my user were foo and my friend bar, I noticed that the directive was listed as

AllowUsers foo

Moneyball

Submitted by ian on Mon, 02/13/2012 - 04:43

I often enjoy movies based on real stories. "Moneyball" is an interesting problem in story telling. It's basically a story about math -- how applying statistical analyses could help the manager of a baseball team. Also, it doesn't have a happy ending -- the team that the story follows doesn't win the big game at the end. But, I think that these kinds of rigors can help the writers focus on the real human development in the story. And I think that, in this case, the writers rose to the challenge. Moneyball is a bit meditative, but I like it.

Rating: 
4

Supertroopers

Submitted by ian on Fri, 02/03/2012 - 06:04

I wasn't at all sure what to expect with this movie, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find an oddball comedy very much in the the vein of the classic "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle"

Rating: 
3

Detective Dee

Submitted by ian on Tue, 01/31/2012 - 01:58

This movie delivers well on its promise: it's a fun mix of Sherlock Holmes with a typical period Kung Fu movie. Although I didn't crack it, the mystery is certainly solvable, which is nice for those among you who likes to work out these types of whodunnits ahead of time. The main character is lovable. There's plenty of romance and intrigue. And, the action sequences are pretty sweet. Nothing in this movie transcends to the level of an amazing cinematic opus. But, everything about it is solid.

Rating: 
4

The Nines

Submitted by ian on Sun, 01/22/2012 - 17:25

This movie had two strikes against it at the get go, as far as my wife and I were concerned. As much as I really like Ryan Reynolds, I don't like many of the movies he's in -- good actor, bad agent, as far as I'm concerned. And while some of my favorite movies are extremely artistic ("Pi", for example), it's more often the case that I really don't like the artsy films. It makes sense, when you push the boundaries and do something experimental, it's a gamble that will either pay off big or fail miserably.

Rating: 
5

Cowboys versus Aliens

Submitted by ian on Thu, 01/12/2012 - 04:13

The first thirty minutes or so of this movie are fairly amazing. Whomever wrote the screenplay is something of a genius, in my opinion. There's a lot of modern critical analysis out there these days which says that the modern story should set up conflict immediately and push to onward from there. This screenplay kind of mocks that notion, and the Western genre as whole, all the while living up to it's simple and beautiful title. It goes to painstaking lengths to set up the very definition of cliché Western.

Rating: 
2

Murphy's Law trivia

Submitted by ian on Tue, 01/10/2012 - 20:06

"Murphy's Law" is maybe the best example of a specific, technical concept which has been broadened and taken out of context. There's some debate on the origin of the idiom, but the story I like is that it was invented by a aeronautics engineer working on the space program. He was working with a group, building a high-G centrifuge-like device. When they ran the device, there was no reading on the sensors designed to measure the G-force. And when they investigated that oddity, it turned out that the sensors had been placed inside the device backwards.

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