June 2006 Archives

This afternoon, I skipped out of work early and caught a matinee of Superman Returns.

First off, Brandon Routh as the Man Of Steel -- pulls it off without a hitch. He is Christopher Reeve resurrected in looks, mannerisms, you name it. If there is another movie, he will be able to start making Superman "his own" with no problem, and the transition from the old to the new will be not even noticeable.

Without giving away any of the plot elements, the story was well written, and more importantly, it completely ignored Superman III as well as Superman IV: The Quest For More Money Peace. Although a touch long with a running time of 154 minutes, it didn't feel long. There weren't any scenes that you look back on and say "My god, he should have hired an editor" (unlike that recent cinematic albatross, King Kong... not all movies have to be three hours, Peter, honest!)

Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor? Nailed it. He has exactly the right proportion of "calm, intelligent rationalization" and "cold, vicious ruthlessness" that Luthor must convey. Gene Hackman did a fine job, but his Luthor was more campy than creepy. Spacey's Luthor has his campy moments, make no mistake, but he's a villain you can honestly say could theoretically exist, and worse, would be extremely scary to encounter.

There's some interesting plot points that reveal themselves late in the movie, and there's clearly sequel potential being left open, in any number of ways.

Go see this movie. Right now. Seriously.

I had the weirdest dream last night. I dreamed I was so desperate for cash that I had solicited (and received) a job offer from a former employer. It's weird because this simply would never ever happen, for more reasons than I can actually count.

What was funny was that, even though I've visited the campus as recently as a few months ago, in my dream, they'd turned into a decrepit shadow of themselves. It was a collection of three story buildings on a side-street. The elevator was one of those ancient ones with the metal push-buttons for floors, and where the elevator takes about 5 minutes to go up two floors. There was a lending library of comic books on the first floor of what, in my dream world, was the "A" building.

Although, amusingly, the room where they kept the videogames was pristine and full of new stand-up arcade games. I guess even in my distorted dream-world, some priorities stay the same. :-)

Jeremy put in a cameo appearance in my dream, as we chatted about the various merits of my return, whether or not it was a good idea, reminisced about the "old days" working on Y!Finance, what the health of the company was, etc., etc. In the end, he suggested I go chat with Filo before I came back. I woke up before I could discover how my dreamworld had distorted him, though.

Trippy.

While walking to and from lunch today in College Center, I finally saw some people interacting with an art exhibit I'd seen the past couple days. It's a computer hooked up to a "helmet". The helmet is modeled to look like the face of David Koresh, and the computer is running a first-person-shooter style game.

It's unclear to me, since I came in to the presentation in the middle, whether this was an art project, a CompSci gaming-class project, or some bizarre merger of the two. Whatever it is, though, it seemed kind of fun.

You run around as David Koresh, in Waco, on that fateful day. Bibles fall out of the sky and grabbing them will give you, essentially, David Koresh Prophet Superpowers that you can use later in the game. The goal is to start by using the "Awaken" power (which you activate by saying "Awaken!" into the helmet's voice-mic) to convince FBI agents to follow you around for a little while. If you lead them into the compound, and up to the altar of Koresh's makeshift temple, they become converts, pick up guns, and defend the compound.

Do this a couple times, and you've got yourself a little bit of an army.

Then you can start Healing people, or using the (and I didn't catch the name of it) superpower that lets you basically rapidly shoot everyone around you as if you were spinning around with a machine gun really fast.

Later, when the PsyOps truck shows up to blare loud music at you, the helmet will start to vibrate annoyingly, like your head in real life might be, and the game chides you to go destroy the truck.

Scary part: Taking on the role of a whacked out nutjob who thought he was Jesus Christ looked like a lot of fun.

I recently installed the MySQL module for our backup software at work. Noticing that the new version has PIT restore capability I gleefully clicked to enable that, aimed the backup software at the master database, and away it went.

The way this software implements PIT is to do a level 0 backup of the database, send the database a RESET MASTER command so as to remove any existing binlogs, and then (later) just backup all the bin logs since they'll be replayable from the level 0 it created, etc., etc.

Except that sending a RESET MASTER command completely hoses any slaves that are replicating off the master you're backing up.

So I opened a trouble ticket with the vendor, asking them, "How do you think I'm supposed to do this, given how this interacts with my slaves?"

Their response, in a sentence:

"It shouldn't cause any issues with the replicas themselves."

Yeah, no shit, pal. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Backing up the master shouldn't break the replicas. But it does.

Sometimes we get really really smart support engineers with this vendor, and sometimes, you wonder if they've read the ticket.

Yesterday, after a long month of waiting impatiently, my 17" Intel Mac Book Pro finally arrived. I tore open the packaging and started the process of migrating my settings over from my 15" G4 Powerbook. About 20 minutes into the migration, the Mac Book Pro rebooted itself spontaneously. "That's odd...." I thought, but after a second (three hour long) migration attempt, it worked like a champ, so I didn't think too much of it.

That was, until later, when it started rebooting itself every 30-60 minutes. Sometimes even more frequently. Doesn't matter what I'm doing, either (I'd set it down on my desk before I went to bed last night with nothing running... woke up to a login prompt).

Since "random reboots" is often a sign of bad memory in AppleLand, I had one of our Apple gurus swap out my 2GB of factory RAM for 1.5GB of RAM that was "known good". It lasted a whopping 45 minutes. Willing to overlook one transgression, it happened again 20 minutes later.

So now I'm wiping it... it's going back to "virgin" so that none of my data is on it when it goes back to Apple as a "DOA". It took a month for the first unit to arrive, $DEITY only knows how long it'll take for the replacement to get here.