Game: September 2007

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Sunday Night Videos: Halo- The Future of Gaming

For the record, I've played Halo for roughly 15 minutes in my entire life, so no, I am not a rabid fanboy or anything. However, when I encountered this video earlier this week, it was just such a perfect blend of geekishness and satire that I had to post it.

Enjoy.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Slime Time: A Culture Kills Comic

You can always tell when the crew at Strip Generator put a new character into the mix eh?

Come on, it was time for a Goonies joke.

Friday, September 28, 2007

Weekly Google Code Roundup: New Gears libraries, fixing mashups, GWT marries the iPhone, and more

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

It was perfect timing for Doug Crockford, the legendary Ajax curmudgeon, to come to Google to discuss Gears and the mashup problem. The same week that he chatted about the issues that we face, we saw some innovation and fun mashups abound (for example, this Campaign Trails mashup created with the Google Mashup Editor).

Just a few days after we released the ability to do authenticated, cross domain mashups with Google Calendar the JupiterIT folk created Traffik, a mashup that combines your Google Calendar with a Google Map, allowing you to login to view private events and create news ones. It is great to see early experiments with the API such as the Digg Oracle's use of WorkerPool that we went into more detail on.

Vortex is another library that sits on top of Google Gears to add functionality through a nice layer of abstraction. The library will detect if you are online or offline, and have a system to handle one use case for sync issues. Brian Dunnington liked what he saw with the Dojo Offline Toolkit, and took a lot of the ideas from there, giving us a version that isn't coupled to a particular Ajax library. Libraries like this are exactly what we want to see. Gears is aiming to give the community rock solid, low level components, and we expect to see interesting abstractions on top. XMLHttpRequest is to Prototype/Dojo/GWT as Gears it to [insert your cool new offline framework here].

After the GWT 1.4 launch / coming out of beta was announced, Bob Vawter of the GWT team was able to let his hair down and he created a GWT application for the iPhone to see what the experience was like. His take-away was:

The Google Web Toolkit can be used to create applications that, in the same code base, work well on an iPhone and a traditional desktop browser.

You can read more about the development of the GWT Feed Reader.

In other GWT news we interviewed folks from Queplix, an open source CRM company, about their experience building their products which use a lot of GWT, various Google APIs, and even the Google Mini!

Sticking to JavaScript for just a touch more, the Google Maps API team have added a new Local Search Control which makes it simple to search the map that you are on. You can add this control to your Maps mashup with a line of JavaScript.

In other API news, Jeff Scudder announced a new release of the GData Python client library which gives you access to various new releases and a refactored codebase.

What else?

T.V. Raman kindly stopped by for a podcast interview on accessibility which may have some data and thoughts that surprise you.
The Joomla! team updated us on their Summer of Code experience
And, for those of you who write test code, you may recognize the battle cry of: But it works on my machine!. John Thomas talks about the stability of your tests.

As always, check out the latest tech talks, subscribe to the Google Developer Podcast and visit the Google Code YouTube channel.

They Gave Steve-O another show?!?

It is official: professional clown Steve-O of Jackass fame has another show. I have never seen the original show, but I did watch the two Jackass movies, and I've seen his rather raucous interviews, so it is clear that he is a madman and it is amazing what opportunities you find when you are willing to endure horrific pain and humiliation on camera. Of course, it is much more fun dishing it out.

And it is that dishing it out part which seems to make up the majority of the running time of Dr. Steve-O, which is a reality show where, he sets out to dewussify nerds, geeks and dorks in his own, special way. It is sort of like Extreme Makeover or What Not To Wear... if they were hosted by a madman. Of course, I have a feeling that the friends that asked Dr. Steve-O for help are probably going to be getting a swift kick to the groin after the treatment, but that is another story... one that isn't filmed for American consumption.

So, Steve-O travels the country in an ambulance with his nurse, reality star Trishelle, so it is like two reality show heavyweights bringing their considerable talents as performers to the mix, and as a lot of reality shows ask their participants to face their fears on camera, in that respect, they are more than qualified to be hosts.

As a concept, it is just so stupid, and yet like most of the stunts that Steve-O has been involved with, somehow they end up being entertaining. I don't expect anything different this time around, though as a Canadian, I have a feeling that I will be waiting a while to fully experience this show.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Music Videos I wish were full length movies

I was recently thinking about some of the music videos that I really liked the narrative element to, and I thought, why not make a list.

Now these videos aren't on a movie's soundtrack and aren't being used as part of the marketing campaign. I also couldn't include any of the Daft Punk videos from their Discovery album because they were all put together to make a movie.

Now I could embed all these videos, but I think at this point having a blog that loads in less than 3 minutes may be preferable at this time.

Pulp - This is Hardcore. For a song about pornography, the video has completely different overtones rooted in 1930's-60's Hollywood glamor. It is very L.A. Confidential. The video is so good that I would like to watch both the movie being made and the behind the scenes-type film.

The Decemberists - Sixteen Military Wives: A song about a certain military debacle turned into a Wes Anderson movie. Even divorced from the song that supports it, the video stands strong as a narrative, and that's why it is on this list.

Belle and Sebastian - I'm a Cuckoo: A narrative about a training long distance runner caught in the midst of a romantic comedy in Glasgow.

Madvillain - All Caps: I like the samples I admit it, but it was the old school comic look of this short video that makes me want to see more. Of course, having the story end on a Stan Lee/Batman note is always a positive.

Yo La Tengo - Sugar Cube: In all honesty, I thought School of Rock was going to be based on the concept of this video. The principals of Mr. Show makes this video what it is.

So, are their any videos you wish were full length movies?

Queplix discusses their GWT open source application

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

I was recently in New York City and had the chance to meet Steven Yaskin and Paul Tenberg of Queplix, a company that is trying to change the face of CRM using an open source business model. Steven and Paul are both old timers in the CRM industry, and it was very interesting to discuss their vision.

The interview focuses on QueWeb, the open source customer care application that they released. The application is built using GWT and uses a slew of Google APIs and products (such as the Google Mini). We discuss how open source affects their business, how their architected this CRM framework and details on some of the magic that allows you to slurp up legacy applications and hand you back an open source version built with GWT widgets. This enables you to tweak the functionality without being in the proprietary black box. As part of this effort, they created a slew of GWT widgets for reuse. All of this is hosting in their Google Code project.

Watch the full interview below, which ends with a short demo of QueWeb.

Thanks again to Steven and Paul for taking the time to meet.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

I Almost got into Beauty and the Geek

I was very tempted to watch the whole premiere of the fourth season of Beauty and the Geek last night after I found out that like nearly all reality shows heading into their 4th season or later, there was a special twist.

This time around the twist was that one of the geeks was a cute gal with a male "beauty" partner. That was intriguing to me, because the television world needs more geek girls. I have to say that Beauty and the Geek was always one of those shows that I was aware of, but it had never ever been on my plate as a viewing option, and that was almost enough get me to fully engage with the show... almost.

Now, don't get me wrong: I love femigeekiness in all its forms, and I did flip on the show quite a few times to check out the action and the female on female-geek hatred, but in the end, even the allure of a geek chic woman wasn't enough to draw me into the show I am sad to say. So once again, I am going to going to be on the sidelines as people talk about this show throughout the blogosphere, though if I read that Nicole is doing well, perhaps I will have a little smile.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Hey! Nielsen is in Public Beta

Last week, I was invited to participate in the final stages of the closed beta of Hey! Nielsen, a new social media site from the fine folks who made their name in determining television ratings and now the site is open to the public and I feel am now free to talk about the site.

I am sure most of you have been to sites that on the surface resemble Hey! Nielsen, as it is a network site that is predicated on users writing their opinions on television shows, movies, music, websites and personalities(I myself enjoy this last category as it catches a lot of comedians as well).

You can also agree or disagree with someone else's opinion. For example, let's say you read a negative opinion of Heroes, and while the opinion did make some good points, you still disagree with the general premise of their opinion. You can then assign a rating to their opinion for -5 for strongly disagree through +5 for strongly agree... or any rating in between, including a neutral 0 rating as well.

Personally, I'm sort of laughing about some of the reactions I've been getting about my opinion of Sarah Silverman. I stated that while I like her work, her comedy isn't for everyone, and a few people are disagreeing vehemently with that opinion. It is very strange. Of course, my write-up of Jon Stewart was very well received. At the moment it seems to be a Supernatural and Jericho lovefest, but I have a feeling as more people join the site, everything will start balancing out.

The service also seems to be allaying some of my angst regarding writing reviews of new series I am currently enjoying, since it is Nielsen and perhaps my opinion, along with countless others might help keep a few more of them on until they find a larger audience. Hey it could happen, couldn't it? So I may feel a little freer in expressing my opinions about new series at Culture Kills once again.

I've also put one of the site's widgets on the blog running a list of my opinions/reactions if anyone is interested in taking a gander, though my titles are pretty self-explanatory. And if you happen to join, drop me a line... my username is writinguy.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Stuff floating around my mind

How is Britney Spears getting a summons from an accident in August news? Really... getting tired of hearing about her now. Well, I've been sick of hearing about her for quite a few months now. So I am shutting up about her again and trying to get back on the horse when it comes to my blogging resolutions this year.

I was flipping through an old issue of Rolling Stone listing the 500 top singles of all time and in the back, there was a list of people who were contributed to the list. Most of the people were musicians, but those who weren't usually had a second line listing who they were and thus explaining why their opinion mattered. Of course, a few of the musicians involved like a few members of The Donnas also had such a subtitle. Now, I thought it was funny that the editors of the magazine thought that both Jakob Dylan and James Hetfield needed such captions as well. I guess that is their subtle way of saying that those two artists were past their culturally relevant prime.

Demi Moore finally took Ashton Kutcher's last name. Well, on everything but movie bylines, because she feels the last name she picked up from her first marriage is a lot more valuable than the name she has on her passport, driver's license and credit cards.

If I didn't listen to the podcast at the BBPS today, I would have never heard the term Unicorn Rape. I think I could have gone the rest of my life not thinking of that. That Second Life is a weird, David Lynchian place.

Google Developer Podcast Episode Nine: The status of accessibility on the Web

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Using iTunes?

T.V. Raman is a Research Scientist at Google who knows a thing or two about accessibility. We took the opportunity to interview him, and Hubbell, his seeing-eye dog (who was nice and quiet).

We started out by asking the honest question that developers ask about accessibility: "What is in it for me?". T.V. discusses the practical issues, and what you should be doing with respect to accessibility, and how it is one piece of the usability picture.

We then delve into the problems of developing accessible websites, and solutions to some of the problems.

If you listen to the interview you will learn:

How not to develop in a user-agent specific manner
Fun issues with screen readers
How audio CAPTCHA brings equality to the pain of CAPTCHA, and how people who can see use the audio ones
How painful is the Web to view for a blind person
Using the Google Web Transcoder (the other GWT!) to clean up pages
How CSS hasn't been as leveraged as much as we would like
How the increase in mobile and widget platforms has a side effect of accessible views
How RIA applications deal with accessibility
How T.V. has written custom clients for Google APIs
What standards groups are doing in the accessibility space
Dealing with Python, a language that cares about whitespace, as a blind man.

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

Also, check out an accessible web search for the visually impaired.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

A PSA from the Asian Community: A Culture Kills Comic

Will I get utterly slaughtered for this one... only time will tell.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Week 19: Pageant of the Transmundane

I had a winner all picked out for this week, and half the write-up for the award... and then a late entry came in and stole the prize. Literally, a blog entry put up less than 4 hours ago has pulled off an upset.

This week's winner hails from the friendly shores of Ill Doctrine, after Jay Smooth asked the question: What if Bill O'Reilly was a rapper? It attacks someone I despise and it isn't a bad song, so it is a nice twofer.

And to reflect the fact that a loud mouth talk show host was the subject of this week's winner's work, I thought it would be more than appropriate to find a file photo of when Homer Simpson had a short lived current affairs show on television. What more fitting way to celebrate the Homer Simpson Transmundanity Award this week.

Congratulations Jay Smooth. We may not be NPR, but acclaim is acclaim, isn't it?

The rules of this little contest: Every week I will be selecting one blog post that I have seen from the vast reaches of the blogosphere to bestow with the Homer Simpson Transmundanity Award for being one of the freakiest(in a funny way) things I've seen or read during a 7 day period. It doesn't necessarily have to have been written during the week, I just had to have encountered it. That means that if you find something interesting and repost it like a movie or whatever, if I saw it at your blog first, you get the prize. Of course, creating your own content is also a very good way to win.

Now, if you see a post that you think is worthy of this illustrious prize, just drop me a line at campybeaver@gmail.com and we'll see if we can't get your suggestion up and award-ready while giving you some credit and a link to your own blog.

Weekly Google Code Roundup: JavaScript and GData can now write home, Gadget Ads, presentations, and more.

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

We had a really fun week with launches and news across a myriad of products. From a technical perspective, it was really exciting to see the launch of a new GData JavaScript library that enables full CRUD access from the browser. No need for proxies. Jun Yang, engineer on the GData team, sat down to explain the API and how it works. People will remember when the mainstream thought it was impossible to do full read/write authenticated cross domain access in a secure way.

Jason Cooper, of the Google Mashup Editor team, took the new API that works with Google Calendar, and provided a mashup that is able to create new events in your calendar.

Speaking of JavaScript APIs, The Digg Oracle is a new Google Gears application that showcases the pattern of sucking down data, and allowing you to do local manipulations and data filtering in the client. It makes heavy use of the WorkerPool and the local database. See it in action.

The Google Maps API has also gotten some new features and news. First, a new IP based limit is coming soon, and new enhanced map tiles are available. You can also use custom map types via the Google Maps API Open Source Utility Library.

In the land of open source, Leslie showcased the summer of coders of 2007, and released a podcast on all things GCC. We also discussed our thoughts on the ISO decision on OOXML, and the Google Code for Educators program released a series of lectures on MapReduce.

The Google Gadget and AdSense universes combined for the introduction of Google Gadget Ads, which are customized "mini-sites" that run as ads on AdSense publisher websites. These ads are interactive, engaging, and will appeal to your users, simultaneously providing value to advertisers while getting visitors to stick around your site. The end result is that advertisers get more engaged users, users have a richer ad experience, and publishers opted in to image ads may see increased competition for their ad space.

When you check out your ads, you can watch what is going on via Google Analytics, and the team has created a series of videos to teach you about many advanced features.

These videos could have included a presentation, and now you can create presentations from within Google Docs itself. Now we the great collaboration experience that we have for docs and spreadsheets can be had for your presentations. Please use this power for good, and no slides with 20 bullet points!

To finish up, I can get quick access to results from two of my favourite sports. A quick cricket search gives me all of the Twenty20 scores, and iGoogle gives me the rugby world cup results.

All in all a great week! As always, check out the latest tech talks, subscribe to the Google Developer Podcast and visit the Google Code YouTube channel.

Anna Faris: Dramatic Actress?

There are times when you hear about a certain performer taking a role based on the life of a real person, you can't imagine them being able to pull it off. I mean, I certainly scoffed at the idea that Willa Ford was going to play Anna Nicole Smith, because both halves of that sentence are just ridiculous.

And let's face it, a lot of actors take on such roles when they don't have the talent or experience to carry them. I'm looking at you Jennifer Love Hewitt for trying to play Audrey Hepburn (who thought that would be a good idea).

But today I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Anna Faris has signed up to star in a biopic about the life of Linda Lovelace/Boreman, a role which is drastically different than the comedic fare she has made a career out of, but I think she is fully capable of pulling it off.

She plays a lot of "dumb blonde" type characters in her comedic work, and her part in Lost in Translation was in essence a caricature of a lot of her peers, but when you read her more serious interviews, she is a woman who is surprisingly full of substance, wit and intelligence, and I would like to see her really stretch her legs playing a heavy, dramatic role. I think it is time for her to truly spread her wings as an actress and show the world that yes, she is capable of anchoring a movie that has a little more meat to it (no pun intended).

I think this is the right move for her. Scary Movie shouldn't be the pinnacle of her career. After all, there was a time when Tom Hanks pretty much only did screwball comedies, and then he did Philadelphia and the rest if Oscar history.

Simpsons + Star Wars = Awesomeness

Via CollegeHumor

Need I say more?

Thursday, September 20, 2007

The James Bond movie I wanted in 1999

I was going through some of my old emails, and I found something that I had almost totally forgotten about.

You see, after The World is Not Enough came out, I had some ideas about where I wanted the next movie in the James Bond franchise to go. I came up with a synopsis of the kind of movie I wanted to see before I had heard any of the casting or plot of Die Another Day.

Brosnan's James Bond would face off against a villain played by Kevin Spacey. In my mind, Spacey would have played an ambitious though slightly nerdish founder and CEO of a computer software company that was nearly ubiquitous because of some shady dealings and a near monopoly on a specific kind of software.

Spacey's character was super rich, one of the wealthiest men in the world, but he wanted more. So he planned on using weaponized satellites created covertly by the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia and China that he could seize control of because his software ran on each of those systems, to try to quickly melt the polar ice caps and destroy a quite a few of the major financial centers of the Western World to make a fortune from the disaster as he would have invested his vast fortunes in the market and sold short the shares of countless companies and then using those profits, buying those same companies and as a result, he would become so powerful that no government could stop him.

He would in essence rule the world.

Of course, Bond would stop him with the help of a CIA-trained female hacker, resulting in Spacey's hideout/lair being destroyed after the satellite coordinates are altered from the ice caps to the command centre where those orders originated from. Bond, being the trickster he is, would naturally escape with the girl and get caught by Q at some inopportune time, giving the movie a laugh at the end.

Looking back on it now, I sort of predicted the following:

The use of space-based lasers to melt ice in Die Another Day
The idea that a group would use disasters that they planned to make money on the stock market in Casino Royale
Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor and the film-within-a-film version of Dr. Evil.

And while I think Daniel Craig is stellar as Bond, I still think my Bond film idea would have been kickass. At least it couldn't have been worse than Die Another Day.

New GData JavaScript library enables full read and write access for your mashups

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

I am really excited to see the release of the GData JavaScript Client Library for Calendar that allows you to do a lot more with Calendar GData mashups.

Developers have been able to work with our GData feeds from JavaScript for over a year, but only in a read-only capacity. There are plenty of mashups that can be done that way, but what if you want an application that ties into personal content? What if you would like to write an Ajax client that can create, update, or delete entries as well as read it?

Now you can. This release allows you full read-write access to Google Calendar from JavaScript. Instead of requiring server-side proxies to do this for you, AuthSub is fully supported from within the pure JavaScript client.

You can login by doing something similar to:

function logMeIn() {
 scope = "http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds";
 var token = google.accounts.user.login(scope);
}

function setupMyService() {
 var myService =
   new google.gdata.calendar.CalendarService('exampleCo-exampleApp-1');
 logMeIn();
 return myService;
}

I got to sit down with Jun Yang, who worked on this code, and got his take on the new library:

Armed with this new functionality, I can only imagine how the mashups will become richer. I can't wait to see them!

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

The rest of 2007 is a No-Tour zone for the White Stripes

Last week, The White Stripes canceled their North American tour schedule, and today it was announced that their UK/European tour dates starting in October have also been canceled.

The reason that has been given is that Meg White is suffering from acute anxiety and cannot travel at this time. There are some accounts which say that she has acute anxiety about air travel at the moment.

Now, of all the reasons that celebrities have given for breaking commitments, this is one I can fully sympathize with. Anxiety disorders have a funny way of sneaking up on people and manifesting themselves in a variety of odd ways.

I've had some anxiety issues myself over the past decade and I know how crippling they can be, and it seems like Ms. White may be approaching the issue in a healthy way by not forcing herself into a potentially bad situation. I am sure that over the coming months she will slowly be able to find a way to deal with her disorder.

I wish Meg White a speedy recovery.

Updates from the Django Sprint

by Adrian Holovaty, Django core developer

More than 200 people around the world devoted their time and brainpower to improving the Django Web framework this weekend, during a scheduled Django coding sprint. On Friday, September 14th, the first day of the sprint, some Django developers gathered at Google's offices in Chicago and Mountain View for the benefits of in-person communication, camaraderie and, yes, free food.

17 people showed up at Google Chicago, which was a sort of ground zero for the sprint, with the project's BDFLs Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss in attendance. Another 7 people participated from Google's Mountain View office, which was linked with Chicago via videoconference.

Python creator (and Google employee) Guido van Rossum even stopped by via videoconference to give a pep talk about Django version 1.0 and share some of his experience running a large open-source project.

The sprint was intensely productive, with more than 400 tickets closed in the Django issue-tracking system, 300 new patches/ticket attachments and more than 200 commits to the Django code base. All told, there were more than 2,440 changes, including wiki changes, ticket changes, patch uploads and code check-ins.

Overall, the consensus was: "We should do this more often!"

The Chicago sprinters, hard at work (photo by Jacob Kaplan-Moss)

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Now that's a lot of traffic!

I had to replace my modem today and when I finally got back online, I discovered something wonderful!

My recent article on Jodie Foster badmouthing Sin City had made its way to the front page of the IMDB.

Now, I've had some good days in terms of traffic, but I've never had a day like this before. I haven't even had a month like this before. It looks I have a shot of reaching at least ten thousand hits today. When I first saw the stats, I nearly fell out of my chair.

I am shocked and awed by it all and I'd like to thank everyone who has read my little blog today. I appreciate it.

Oh, and I'd also like to say Happy Birthday to Karl of Secondhand Tryptophan. Hope your return to radio goes well, but with Hilly by your virtual side, I think it is going to go very well.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Prison Break Season 3 is looking good

Prison Break has always the television equivalent of a popcorn movie. You know there is plot holes and things that sometimes don't make sense, but the story is told at such a rapid pace and so much is going on that you just find yourself going along for the ride. Masterpiece Theatre is most certainly isn't, but even with its flaws, I still find it royally entertaining and unlike The O.C., it has managed to keep my interest coming into its third season.

If you have Tivo'd the season premiere or you are waiting to watch the second season on DVD, I think this is a good post to skip as I will be discussing some of the plot points that got us all to moment in time.

At the close of last season Michael Scofield, the mastermind behind a daring escape from Fox River penitentiary, found himself captured in Panama and thrown inside a rather sinister institution called Sona. Along with Scofield, we also discover that Agent Mahone, the corrupt and drug-addicted FBI agent who had pursued the convicts throughout the season, and former Fox River guard turned bounty hunter Brad Bellick have also found themselves incarcerated at that very same prison. Meanwhile, Michael's brother, Lincoln Burrows, found himself a free man after his convictions for crimes he didn't commit were overturned when new evidence came to light, so in a stunning reverse of the beginning of the series, Michael is now in jail and it is up to Lincoln to get him out.

As the season opens, we get a far better taste of how bad Sona is, as the above character watch from within a crowd a fight to the death in the open courtyard of the prison in the middle of a rain-soaked night. The following day, the body of the loser still sits in the center of the courtyard, a signal that this place is light years away from the rigid discipline of the American justice system. It is later revealed that those in Sona are the worst of the worst, and that the year before Scofield had arrived, the prisoners had rioted so badly that the guards pulled out to the perimeter of the facility, allowing the prisoners to fill the power vacuum from within and establish its own disciplinary system under a single leader.

Of course, Scofield's notoriety makes him a potential rival for said leadership, so it becomes clear that Sona will likely not be kind to him. Through some twists, it becomes clear that once again he is going to have to use his talents to escape from the facility, which will be a much tougher task seeing as he hasn't had an opportunity to prepare for this particular challenge, so it will be interesting to see how he improvises.

There are still so many unanswered questions, and knowing Prison Break, I have a feeling that those answers are going to be unexpected. I am looking forward to seeing where this season is going to end up.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Sunday Night Video: Big Train

This is a very surreal clip from the 1999 British sketch comedy series Big Train. I am not going to tell you what it is about because to do so would wreck some of the humor.

I will however mention that Simon Pegg, star of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Spaced appears in the clip.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Death to LOLCats: A Culture Kills Comic

Perhaps someday I'll be talented enough with Illustrator to put together my own comic... until then, I will continue using StripGenerator.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Week 18: Pageant of the Transmundane

Hello from the dewy fields at the 100th Meridian. Somewhere Ry Cooder is singing my eulogy, but that is another story.

This week's winner is from The Best & Greatest Commercials Ever Made, a blog site whose title is pretty self-explanatory.

A few days ago, a certain ad for Wilkinson Sword razors was posted, and it is one of the best spots I've seen this year, though it goes far beyond the standard 30-60 second boundaries and becomes a mini-narrative in and of itself. The ad is called Fight for Kisses, and I have a feeling that it will soon be popular on those funniest ad shows that pop-up annually.

And because this week's award has to do with an ad for razors, it seemed fitting to award this week's Homer Simpson Transmundanity Award with one of the rarest sights of all: a clean shaven Homer.

Congratulations and to the winner goes the spoils and a nice little image badge for your site.

Linux Kernel-Userland Interface Design, Testing, and Documentation: An Update from LinuxConf EU, and the 2007 Linux Kernel Summit

By Michael Kerrisk, Software Engineering Team

As you may know,Google allows its engineers to spend 20% of their time on projects independent of their regular day to day job. For my 20% time, I chose to continue and expand my work on maintaining the Linux man-pages.

Since April, we've managed to ship 21 new releases, with a dozen or so new pages, and around 400 major and minor improvements to existing pages.

My work on the Linux Man-pages project man-pages led me to talk about kernel-userland interface design, testing, and documentation at the recent LinuxConf Europe, where my Zurich colleague Roman Marxer also spoke about Google's recently open-sourced Ganeti virtual server management software.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the immediately following USENIX Linux Kernel Developers Summit, where I joined Google colleagues Andrew Morton, Paul Menage, and Martin Bligh to participate in the discussion of current topics related to kernel development, including the topic of kernel-userland API design, testing, and documentation.

You can read my talk, and in-depth coverage of the Kernel Developer Summit at LWN.net. It's available to LWN.net subscribers only until the 20th of September, but you can already see the obligatory group photo.

Googlers Andrew Morton and Paul Menage relaxing at the end of the Linux Kernel Summit, Cambridge, England

(photo credit: Michael Kerrisk)

Ed. note: Post updated to fix typo.

I was an Online Female Impersonator

This is a blogging post I did a while ago in another venue, and I thought since it was a rainy Friday afternoon where I live, I thought I would revisit it.

--

When I first started using the internet back in my freshman year of college, I used to chat at this telnet site called Hotel. That was back in 1995 through 1997, so that was before most of the major instant messenger programs/services got off the ground. For the first 5 or 6 months of chatting, I was largely myself (because online we are all a little different than we are in real life) but part of the allure of the internet has always been the anonymity, and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see things from a different perspective. There were many routes I could have taken, but in the end I decided I was going to see what it was like to be a woman online.

Part of it was arrogance, I admit. I wanted to know if I was a good enough writer to pull it off, and another part was simple curiosity. So it was that I assumed another identity and I became Marissa.

Now Marissa was an ordinary girl with sort of mundane roots. She was my age at the time, had an older brother and a younger sister, and worked at her parent's gas bar out in a hamlet outside of the town I lived in. I tried to avoid all the mistakes a lot of men trying to play women online make, and because in general, I was a good listener the previous six months, I had picked up a few things about how conversations flowed in that environment. Nothing was too over the top or extreme. She also had a boyfriend, a "fact" I thought I would be able to use if I got into too much trouble in the role and avoid some of the potential complications of someone becoming too enamored with my character. The thought I had in my head as I began was to try to maintain the "Person first, woman second" ethic, so I thought I was ready, but in retrospect, I was likely mistaken.

Within 5 minutes as Marissa at Hotel, someone had asked me about my bust size, which got the equivalent of a slap in the face from me, and I thought it must be a fluke, because I never acted like that in chat, and as a guy, well, no one would really ask me a question like that--but then it happened again, and from someone I knew as my real personality. It was like I was seeing their true colors for the first time. But I kept going with the experiment, because Marissa was becoming a more refined character, which made her a bit more interesting to play. Yes, there was still some harassment(if a received even a fraction of the inappropriate questions that a lot of real women received online, I am shocked women actually participated in chat at all). Now, I am not talking about a little flirting here, I am talking about full-on sexual advances, and I don't think I was putting out those vibes at all! I didn't bring up sex at all... I mean, I was talking about music with a group of people there, and some guy just whispered asking if I wanted to have a little bit of "private fun" with him. I politely declined... but still, I was left very uncomfortable.

I remember one time I was just chatting with some guy and everything was pleasant...

...and then he took off my shirt.

He hadn't even asked me if I wanted to cyber or anything. Absolutely no warning. And this was after I had played the BF card! It just happened. It was at that point I knew my little experiment should end. I went back to being myself full-time there, but after that my vision was colored by my experiences as Marissa, I knew there was all this other stuff going on under the surface and when I met the people who had out-and-out propositioned my feminine alter-ego, well, I had a hard time letting go. It wasn't a fun place to be anymore.

Looking back, do I regret being Marissa? Not really, because it gave me some much needed perspective... though I guess your mileage may vary with experience like that. Would I do it again? Probably not. I ended up feeling a little dirty after it was all said and done, mainly because of the outright dishonesty of playing that role.

Google welcomes ISO decision on OOXML

By Zaheda Bhorat, Open Source Team

Google welcomes the ISO decision to not approve the fast track of Office Open XML (OOXML) proposed standard DIS 29500 (ECMA 376).

Our engineers conducted an independent analysis of the OOXML specification and found several areas of concern, which we communicated both to the ISO and to the public. These include and are not limited to the following:

for a specification of this size it was not given enough time for review;
the undocumented features of OOXML prevents its implementation by other vendors;
dependencies on other Microsoft proprietary formats and their technical defects makes it difficult to fully implement; and
the overall cost for vendors of implementing multiple standards (hence the lack of OOXML implementations in the marketplace).

It is also incompatible with the existing ISO standard ISO 26300:2006, the Open Document Format (ODF), which already offers a high degree of interoperability, wide support, and offers the level playing field the world needs. Google is a supporter of ODF and has successfully integrated this open format into Google Docs and Spreadsheets. ODF also enjoys implementation in over twelve other products.

The ISO approval required at least 2/3 (i.e., 66.66%) of the votes cast by participating (P) members to be positive, and no more than 1/4 (i.e., 25%) of the total number of national body votes cast negative. Neither of these criteria were met by the proposed standard.

The concerns from many technical experts around the world were submitted as comments by the voting bodies to ISO on September 2, 2007. These must now be resolved at a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) on February 25-29, 2008. In contrast, ODF was approved unanimously (23-0 among P members, 31-0 overall) as an international standard by ISO in May 2006.

As we represented our position in many countries, we were encouraged by the process observed in some places that truly evaluated the proposed standard on its technical merits as well as the feasibility of implementing the standard for the people of the country. These countries successfully declined or abstained due to insufficient information about the standard or the lack of time to evaluate the specification. In addition, many irregularities have been reported in the voting process (see here, here and here).

Technical standards should be arrived at transparently, openly, and based on technical merit. Google is committed to helping the standards community remain true to this ideal and maintain their independence from any commercial pressure.

Google supports one open document format and calls on industry participants to collaboratively work on ODF. With multiple implementations of one open standard for documents, users, businesses and governments around the world can have both choice and freedom to access their own documents, share with others and pass onto future generations.

Online Sites for Kids

I have written before about the wonders of some on-line sites including Starfall and Club Penguin. In Slate, a couple of articles on a related theme. Emily Brazelon finds that 11 year olds are not so thrilled with Club Penguin but enjoy other sites. Interestingly, price is the big factor. If it's not all free, it's not all fun.

Michael Agger spends too much time in Club Penguin. It is a very comprehensive treatment for interested parents.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Which is funnier?

I don't know which is funnier:

The original Chris Crocker crying because of all the Britney Spears haters... or Seth Green making fun of that same video for The Soup.

It's a close one... it really is.

UW and Google: Teaching in Parallel

By Sierra Michels-Slettvet, Engineering Intern

Earlier this year, the University of Washington partnered with Google to develop and implement a course to teach large-scale distributed computing based on MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS). The goal of developing the course was to expose students to the methods needed to address the problems associated with hundreds (or thousands) of computers processing huge datasets ranging into terabytes. I was excited to take the first version of the class, and stoked to serve as a TA in the second round.

But you can't program air, so Google provided a cluster computing environment to get us started. And since computers can't program themselves (yet?), UW provided the most essential component: students with sweet ideas for a huge cluster. After learning the ropes with these new tools, students finished the course by producing an impressive array of final projects, including an n-body simulator, a bot to perform Bayesian analysis on Wikipedia edits to search for spam, and an RSS aggregator that clustered news articles by geographic location and displayed them using the Google Maps API. Check out Geozette.

We are looking at ways to encourage other universities to get similar classes going, so we've also published the course material that was used at the University of Washington on Google Code for Educators. You're more than welcome to check out the Google Summer Intern video lectures on MapReduce, GFS, and parallelizing algorithms for large scale data processing. This summer I've been working on exposing these educational resources and other tools so that anyone can work on and think about cool distributed computing problems without the overhead of installing his or her own cluster. In that vein, we've released a virtual machine containing a pre-configured single node instance of Hadoop that has the same interface as a full cluster without any of the overhead. Feel free to give it a whirl.

We're happy to be able to expose students and researchers to the tools Googlers use everyday to tackle enormous computing challenges, and we hope that this work will encourage others to take advantage of the incredible potential of modern, highly parallel computing. Virtually all of this material is Creative Commons licensed, and we encourage educators to remix it, build upon it, and discuss it in the Google Code for Educators Forum.

Lastly, a quick shout out to the other interns who helped out on our team this summer: Aaron Kimball, Christophe Taton, Kuang Chen, and Kat Townsend. I'll miss you guys!

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Calling Jodie Foster Out Over Sin City Slam

For the past few days, there have been little snippet stories appearing all over the entertainment news wires about Jodie Foster criticizing Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's joint work on Sin City, and I decided to look into this issue a little deeper because I sensed that something wasn't exactly right with how it was being presented.

I sought out the original USA Today article so that I wouldn't misquote her or take what she said out of context. And the context is so very important in this case.

Here is the quote in question: "[Sin City] was so painfully cartoonish I was offended. I don't know how you enjoy or laugh about a child abduction and molestation. What part of that sentence is funny? I can't get beyond that. I don't know if everyone understands the impact of a movie's message."

OK, I have to say it. We all know that Sin City was based on a graphic novel and the book was basically storyboards for the movie... which means that yes, it would be as Ms. Foster so eloquently put it "cartoonish". Utterly shocking, isn't it?

But here is my objection to that statement. She didn't finish watching the movie, and that segment in particular, and because of that it seems like we watched two different movies.

At no point did I laugh about child abduction. I mean, really, does Jodie Foster think the "That Yellow Bastard" chapter of the movie was supposed to be a comedy? I don't know how she got that idea. In fact, within a few minutes of being introduced to the characters involved in that storyline, the hero castrates a child rapist/murderer with his bare hands! Does that sound like the kind of story that is in anyway supporting or condoning the action of child molesters or abductors? To me, it certainly doesn't. That segment of the movie/story was about the bravery of an honest cop in a corrupt system who devoted his life and gave up everything to protect a single child from harm. Is that not noble? Is that not a good message, a positive message?

I certainly think so. To me, that segment is the complete antithesis of what Foster says it is.

Now the interesting point of all this is the context for that above statement. It was an interview about Jodie Foster's exploration of the dark side of humanity through her work and her fascination with crime; in the sidebar of which, there was a list of the selected movies from her filmography related to the subject. The list included her playing a child prostitute (Taxi Driver), a rape victim (The Accused), and an FBI agent hunting down a brutal serial killer with the help of another serial killer (Silence of the Lambs)... while also discussing her new movie, The Brave One, in which she plays a vigilante killer. And about that movie she states that "It's a sophisticated film, and I know that not everyone who is going to see it is going to be sophisticated."

So let me get this straight. When you make a movie like that, Jodie, it is OK because it is an artistic decision on your part, but somehow when another artist does that, it is not OK. Right.

I'm not saying that she has to like Sin City... but come on, at least be consistent. If I said that I didn't like or finish Taxi Driver, and I don't see how anyone else could enjoy it because it glorifies child prostitution, we'll, I wouldn't be too sophisticated, now would I? And would I not be missing "the message" of the movie if I took that premise at face value, because that seems to be exactly what she has done with Sin City.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Hollywood Pairings I would Love to See

With work continuing on Righteous Kill, the second movie that paired Robert De Niro and Al Pacino together on screen(and the third movie they've appeared in together), I started thinking of a few other pairs of actors I would like to see play off each other in a movie. Here are the three best I came up with.

Samuel L. Jackson and Eddie Murphy: Yes, they appeared together in Coming to America, but that was 1988 and Samuel L. Jackson wasn't the man back then. And with Murphy's recent work in Dreamgirls, I think a cinematic matchup between these two actors could work very well, especially if Murphy played things more on the dramatic side. And given the fact that Murphy is working on two action comedies (Beverly Hills Cop IV and something with Brett Ratner directing and costarring Chris Rock), I think these two actors could work well together as equals in a movie. Maybe with Murphy as the villain, a role we haven't really seen him play. This combination seems like a cinematic possibility sometime in the next decade.

Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet: One is the queen of Oscar Town, the other the apparent heir to that throne. Isn't it time that they met onscreen? I mean, they both do such varied work, and well, I think they would both bring a lot to a movie they were both in. And that movie would likely be Oscar-bait, wouldn't it? Executives wouldn't stick Streep and Winslet in She Devil 2 or Police Academy 9: The Massacre in Moldavia, but then again, you never know what is going to fly in Hollywood. Hey, it could happen.

Sigourney Weaver and Denzel Washington: I have no idea why this pairing popped into my head, but somehow, it just seems so right. And the kind of movie I was thinking about with them both in it was one of those movies that take place in a room/house and it is all talky tension. You know the kind of thing I am referring to: 12 Angry Men/Death and the Maiden but with these two actors involved, well, it could turn to action at any given moment. It would be explosive in every way. And seeing a poster that had the names Weaver Washington in bold would look pretty cool too. But will it happen? Not likely.

So, who are two actors who haven't really worked together that you think could work well together onscreen?

Monday, September 10, 2007

From the Subway to the Studio: Susan Cagle

I just happened to catch one of the last reviews from What Greg Likes before he decided to turn in his gun and badge... err, rather blogging pen, where he talked up a live performance CD by Susan Cagle, a New York City subway performer called the Subway Recordings.

Susan Cagle is a singer-songwriter who was formerly a childhood member of the Children of God a religious group *cough* that encouraged its young members to busk, and she learned to play guitar at age 7.

When she finally parted with the group in her late teens, she headed to New York City during the turbulent year of 2001, and discovered that she could make as much money busking in the subways as she could in a normal job, so that's exactly what she did. She recently signed a record deal after being discovered by producer Jay Levine plying her trade at Herald Street Station, and to capitalize on the sound she had cultivated over the years, the decision was made to record the album while she performed live in two subway stations.

A lot of the songs recorded for the CD were also recorded as music videos, and the one that really resonated with me was a song called Shakespeare. It really catches a certain pop sensibility that was missing from a lot of popular music in the past few years during the domination of Britney and Christina.

Now, I've heard rumors that she was also recently on The Oprah Winfrey Show because of her song "Dear Oprah" but I haven't been able to confirm it.

If the above is true, she may be destined for bigger and better things.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Sesame Street DVD Deleted Scene: A Culture Kills Comic

Yeah... I was a demented little kid.

Made with StripGenerator.

Week 17: Pageant of the Transmundane

I always love a great burn, especially when the person being burned really deserves it.

I had discovered The Feck on Stumbleupon last week, and after checking back in this week, I discovered to my great pleasure that they've found something good... something very very good indeed.

It seems that Tori Amos has something rather caustic to get off her chest during her recent tour and employing her gift as a singer-songwriter, well, she expressed them through song.

She wrote a little ditty called I'm not stupid which puzzles over the poor choices that 21-year old Hollywood celebutantes make, and some that older celebrities make as well. On a scale of 1 to 10 of burns, it is a solid 7 or 8 really. That is some fine redhead on redhead rippage.

And since the artist involved in this week's winning entry makes her living at the piano, the most fitting image I could think of was of course, Homer Simpson in front of the piano. Once again, we have a winner of the Homer Simpson Transmundanity Award.

Congratulations Jeremy Hertz and the rest of the fine crew at The Feck for winning this honor, which is especially impressive since your blog started about two weeks ago.

Friday, September 7, 2007

A Love Letter to Football

I know a lot of you out there in Bloggerland are not huge sports fans, especially when it comes to football, and that's OK. I can deal with that.

But personally when it comes to football, I am a huge fan. That is an understatement really. I have a box full of playbooks. Seriously. I've never coached or played the game in real life, and yet I still have thousands of plays in a box. Don't remember why, but I treasure having them.

The strange thing about my love of the game is that I am not even bound by allegiances to a particular team, division, conference or league. I love football with a terminal and non-specific intensity. And while my distaste for baseball and basketball is almost legendary now, my affection for football of both the NFL and NCAA variety is indeed legendary. Everything that George Carlin said about football vs. baseball is the perfect examination of why I love the game.

I love the rivalries, the personalities, the offensive and defensive formations, and I get a kick out of seeing the improbable, the unbelievable way things go down on the field. I watch heart of Walter Payton and LaDanian Tomlinson with awe, the spring-loaded hips of Barry Sanders with amazement and the motormouth of Chad Johnson with amusement.

The Immaculate Reception. The Holy Roller. The Miracle in the Meadowlands. The Hail Mary. The Drive. All of these moments in sporting history are part of my memory.

And I will watch any game I find. An ESPN classics repeat of the 1982 Stanford-Cal game? I'm there. A preseason match between the Houston Texans vs. Oakland Raiders? Where do I sign up? If I found a NCAA Division III game somewhere deep on the cable dial, I would watch it (Go Poets). I've even watched World League/NFL Europe games when it was still a viable entity.

But my favorite thing to find on the tube is something that NFL Films has put together. The combination of symphonic music and slow motion action shots just can't be beat really.

If I am going to be fair, I have to admit that I am largely disappointed by the games that a lot of the major college teams schedule at the beginning of the season. Of course, every once in a while something extraordinary happens like 1AA champion Appalachian State taking out #5 Michigan this weekend just reinvigorated my love of the game as a whole(and I give App. St. all the credit in that win... saying that Michigan overlooked them or isn't the team the media made them out to be is denigrating their opponent's effort and skill), but because the impossible can happen on any given Saturday or Sunday, it makes every game a thing of magical beauty.

But I will not watch the CFL... that is going a little too far. I'm Canadian, and I have to draw the line at that. 110 yards... why, why?

So, I'm I ready for some football. Damn Right!