Singin' in the Rain's crazy dream ballet sequence
Posted by Simon on July 02, 2009 at 12:49 AM
Categories: art, bittorrent, film
I just watched the movie Singin' in the Rain... and by far the best part was this sequence where Gene Kelly dances a ballet with Cyd Charisse. Wow!
The set is a surreal, Dali-esque painting, which uses forced perspective to appear to vanish into infinity. It features stairs that look like stripes on the ground, strange shadows... but the most surreal is Charisse's 50-foot long white silk veil, which wafts up into the sky like it's floating on air. There must have been some incredible fans, and the choreography of the air current with the ballet is incredible.
I don't know how Gene Kelly thought it up, and how he managed to get it made and into the movie. It has almost nothing to do with the plot. It's totally unexpected, but mind blowing. I've never seen anything like it.
Here it is, but really, you should rent it or download it in high quality...
An awesome little flash game
Posted by Simon on June 30, 2009 at 01:40 AM
Categories: links, art, games
You've got to try this.
It's like a tiny little myst adventure in beautiful steam-punk 2D flash game.
Play Little Wheel a tasty little morsel by One Click Dog.
via Das Cartoonist.
Tinselman should like this.
The Entire Cast of Futurama -- someone should make a poster
Posted by Simon on June 21, 2009 at 02:28 AM
Categories: tv, film, future
Here is as close as we've ever got to a poster of the entire cast of Futurama... from their most recent direct-to-DVD movie Into the Wild Green Yonder. It's notable for two things in my mind: first, it doesn't include most of the principles (they would be easy to add) and second, wow, Futurama just doesn't have as many characters as Simpsons. Simpsons has a LOT of characters. What do they say, 50 active on-going basis? That's a lot.
And now my fellow Earthicans ... More Futurama is Coming ...
Comedy Central was happy with the specials and with the 72 produced episodes of "Futurama" it acquired from 20th Century Fox TV in 2006. "Yet there is nothing like new, self-contained episodes week to week," said David Bernath, Comedy Central's senior vp programming. "This is all about reinvigorating the franchise, giving it a new burst of energy."
In other words, futurama pays.
OK, this is stupid but I came up with this joke for Zap Brannigan.
SCENE: ZAP BRANNIGAN IS YET AGAIN TAKING CHARGE OF A
TOP-PRIORITY MILITARY MISSION BY DRAFTING SOMEONE. LET'S SAY
LEELA. IT COULD BE ANYONE, THOUGH.
ZAP: Ahh, do you remember me? I'm Zap Brannigan.
Captain Zap Brannigan. I put myself in your charge.
SOMEONE: How generous of you.
ZAP: By which I mean I put myself in Charge. Of You.
Lame joke? Maybe. But I don't see YOU making up jokes and blogging them for everyone to see.
How many programming languages do you know?
Posted by Simon on June 16, 2009 at 10:31 PM
Categories: tech, meta, code
List of programming languages that I know* that appear on the Official Wikipedia List of Programming Languages**.
- * Or once knew... but I could pick it up again, I swear. It's like riding a bicycle. I don't include languages that I tried to learn but failed... like Scheme and Prolog.
- ** Commonly recognized as the standard in Lists of Things. Let it be known that I only include those languages that are turing complete, so CSS and HTML don't count.
Begin listing:
- AppleScript
- BASIC (Apple ][+)
- Bourne Shell
- C
- C++
- DLX Assembler (not listed, but it's a language...)
- HyperTalk (my first, favourite language!)
- Java
- JavaScript
- Lingo
- MATLAB
- Modula-3 (and don't I wish I didn't?)
- Objective-C
- Pascal
- Perl (and don't I wish I didn't?)
- PHP
- Python (and don't I wish I didn't? :-)
- Ruby (my third, favourite language!)
- μC++ (is it really a separate language? Well, it requires a separate compiler...)
- Visual Basic (sufficiently different from basic BASIC)
- XSLT (yes it's turing complete) (my second, favourite language)
So. Thoughts. FIrst, I can say that I know more than 20 languages. Second, my # of languages isn't going up as slowly these days, but the depth is. Third, my big hole is functional languages. Only XSLT is really functional-ish (people get mad when I say that).
I'd like to learn oCaml.
All of this work courtesy of procrastion and needing to quote a number of languages on my updated Custom Software Development page.
Rails "core team" fucks up big time
Posted by Simon on June 07, 2009 at 11:03 PM
Categories: tech, code, rails
Hey, if you have a rails app that uses the recently introduced authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest Rails 2.3 / http_authentication.rb, you've got a big fucking security hole. Anyone can log in if they provide a wrong username and no password, or a nil username & password.
Kind of terrible, right?
So Nate posts it on his blog after a week of trying to get the attention of the Rails security people, and they blame him in their security alert:
Due to communication difficulties and a mis-understanding between the reporter and the security team. This vulnerability has been publicly disclosed on several websites, users are advised to update their applications immediately. Steps are being taken to ensure that the security email is more reliable in the future. We regret the nature of this disclosure and will endeavor to ensure it doesn’t happen again in the future.
And they give him no credit. Most of the RCT idiosyncracies I can write off but don't fuck with security.
uHear -- test your hearing with an iPhone
Posted by Simon on June 04, 2009 at 11:39 PM
Categories: code, mobile, iphone
Here's a little movie I made of an iPhone app called uHear I developed for Unitron. This is also a bit of an experiment because I've uploaded the movie to Amazon S3 and you're watching it from AWS.
Anyway, the video is short, and shows you four parts of the app:
- The standard hearing sensitivity test, which finds out how quiet you can hear at various pitches in each ear,
- the speech & noise test, which tests if you might have trouble hearing over noise like in a restaurant,
- lots of hearing-related info, and finally,
- a live audiologist lookup based on your current location, powered by google maps API.
Nokia blows it on the N97
Posted by Simon on June 04, 2009 at 03:17 PM
Categories: tech, symbian, mobile, nokia
Nokia's new N97, I was hoping it would be the next great phone. But looking at a review in AAS, it looks like they totally blew it on the keyboard. There are only three rows of keys, which means that the space bar is in completely the wrong place. Gak!
ZDNet UK notes that the touchscreen is resistive instead of capacitative and apparently this results in a substantially less appealing touch compared to the iPhone. Yet another strike against.
Finally, I note that the camera is still the 5MP unit in the N95. I have that camera. It's good, but it's not great.
Despite the fact that the new home screen looks really cool (and much better than iPhone) and that it actually has keys, this means that we're not looking at the next great Nokia device that I was expecting. My search for a great device that combines a huge touchscreen and a decent keyboard/keypad apparently will have to continue.
StartupCamp Waterloo Numero Six
Posted by Simon on June 03, 2009 at 11:29 PM
Categories: business, barcamp, startupcamp
StartupCampWaterloo6 will be... is ... was. Yesterday in fact.
In presentation order:
- Ultrasaur RM kicked things off with a great 30-second pitch "Your sysadmin is hacking your server. How do you stop them?" ... they tried last time and were denied, so the moral is, try, try again. They were first pick this time.
- Thinkpanda with coolest logo and a demo you can't get into right now... an interesting tool for social bookmarking (my words, not theirs) which reminded me a bit of delicious and looked like it would be great as a part of groupware like Base Camp.
- Neverboard Studios... these guys had a pretty cool looking iPhone game and were like, how the hell do we get attention for this thing? They want to charge $$ for it but are worried that they'll never break through the attention barrier. We bounced that one around the room for a while... hopefully had some useful advice... Afterwards at the bar I suggested that they lace the sound effects of their game with profanity in the hopes that Apple will ban it, and ride on the publicity from that. And if they do let it through, people will want it— for the same reason.
- Kaimera Media with a concept for a theme park ride video capture system—like the thing that captures a photo of you on the roller coaster, but video. kiosk that burns a DVD for you on the spot. Definite win for simplest, best developed business plan of the evening.
- Primal Fusion, definitely known around the Waterloo startup community for being pretty well funded and definitely brainy. Demo, which I've tried the private beta on their first product, and while it's interesting, I think there's a lot of what they've done that's not exposed in this version that needs to be in the next before it's clear what they are achieving. By the way, I cheated on including Primal Fusion in the sequence because Mark missed the 30 second pitches. I've been power corrupted. But I suffered accordingly, as my discussion topic was pushed off the end of the agenda. I won't give up though... I'll have another one next time.
- Pager Duty was I think my favorite of the evening, although obviously they didn't do so well on the 30 second elevator pitch or they would have been farther up the presentation order. Very simple, to the point—if you need to have people on call, they will make sure that people are effectively notified with a simple service-style web system.
- Giftah has what looks to me like a solid plan, allowing you to buy/sell excess gift cards and they take on the guarantees. Interesting discussion, including acknowledgement that they do have larger, better funded competitors in the USA like Plastic Jungle ... how to get traffic, etc.
I suspect you'll be seeing some of these companies around in the future doing cool stuff.
Oh yeah—and if you were there remember to take advantage of the Communitech Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program definitely—just call them. Say I sent you :-)
Also, we REALLY need a single unified calendar of events and it looks like watcamp.com might provide.
Possible idea for next time: handing out red cards to anyone who says "Facebook". Also, giving a prize for provoking the best discussion.
Thanks to the Accelerator Centre for providing space, and Tech Capital, Sun Microsystems, and Communitech for food & drinks. This is a totally non-profit venture and all labour is volunteer :-) My posse is Jesse and Mic.
The old server was always crap, but...
Posted by Simon on June 01, 2009 at 12:59 AM
Categories: tech, unix
% uptime
00:59:46 up 607 days, 14:13, 2 users, load average: 0.06, 0.17, 0.36
no wonder I found a lot of wacky old processes running on there...
How to make samba on ubuntu use your unix passwords
Posted by Simon on May 31, 2009 at 01:47 AM
Categories: unix
You need something called "password sync" ... obvious right?
This will help:
Unix and Samba password sync on Debian Etch
...only took me an hour to figure out how to get logging working and decode the obscure error messages....
This is probably what you want to do if you get this:
Authentication for user FAILED with error NT_STATUS_WRONG_PASSWORD