'Til All Are One

2011-​​02-​​02 update: Updated link. Thanks to Jack Moore.

Yes­ter­day I watched the new Kino ver­sion of Met­ro­polis. No, I’m not talk­ing about the animé (which I must see some­time since I’m a huge animé fan), but the 1927 Fritz Lang cine­matic mas­ter­piece. The movie is silent and in black and white, and for the time it was very cutting-​​edge in terms of tech­no­logy, plot, budget and over­all size. Unfor­tu­nately, the ori­ginal 1927 ver­sion no longer exists, but this Kino ver­sion is the most com­plete to date, includ­ing the excel­lent Gottfried Hup­pertz orches­tral score (re-​​recorded to make it sound bet­ter). The score was clearly writ­ten for the movie; orches­tral sounds sub­sti­tute very well for the lack of speech and sound effects.

The last time I had seen Met­ro­polis was when I was a child. Although I didn’t under­stand much, I was freaked out by the plot and the silent nature of the movie. I recall hav­ing a few night­mares about robots and I could not even look at the video cover (which fea­tured a pic­ture of the Machine-​​Man robot) after that.

The plot itself was very inter­est­ing. It’s amaz­ing what can be done without any speech (there was some ‘speech’, but it was just text on the screen). Hav­ing been released dur­ing the height of the capitalist/​communist struggle for polit­ical suprem­acy in Europe, this movie was uni­ver­sally panned by both sides for sup­posedly sup­port­ing one side or the other.

The main theme of the movie is a single phrase: “The medi­ator between head and hands is the heart.” You’ll need to see the movie in its entirety to under­stand what that means. It is a very power­ful theme, as is the imagery employed: mech­an­ical machinery; a small army of uni­formed, undif­fer­en­ti­ated work­ers; clocks and watches; and many others.

All-​​in-​​all, I loved this movie. It’s a shame that the ori­ginal no longer exists, but Kino expertly craf­ted the most ‘com­plete’ ver­sion they could. Miss­ing scenes were sum­mar­ised on the screen in text.

I wrote this in response to a Slash­dot art­icle about the Win­dows spy­ware pro­gramme Gator:

PRESS RELEASE: MICROSOFT INNOVATES IN NEW VERSION OF INTERNET EXPLORER

Store all your pass­words, fin­an­cial data and other per­sonal inform­a­tion on a cent­ral server! Never again will you have to remem­ber a pass­word or PIN, since you can con­veni­ently access all your data from a Microsoft server*! Microsoft have made it so easy for you by upload­ing all your data auto­mat­ic­ally, no ques­tions asked! In addi­tion, we use our pat­en­ted Mal­ware™ advanced arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to ana­lyse your move­ments online and offer ser­vices tailored just for you! To make this as pleas­ant an exper­i­ence as pos­sible, we even share your data with third parties so that you are only offered ser­vices that suit your interests.

“Microsoft has always strived to deliver the best value for money in the industry,” repor­ted Tom Rort of The Gart­ner Group. “Microsoft products pay off big time for me! I’d give this release a rat­ing of five dollar-​​signs,” said Mary Swindle of The Aber­deen Group.

Once again, Microsoft has shown its com­mit­ment to look­ing out for the best interests of its customers.

* cost of retrieval is $US9.99 per trans­ac­tion, and since Microsoft already have your fin­an­cial data, we con­veni­ently deduct the money from your bank account auto­mat­ic­ally.

I saw X-​​Men 2 a few weeks ago. I’ve always been a fan of the com­ics, so I am rather sens­it­ive to any ‘changes’ that are made just for the movie. How­ever, I do real­ise that it is near-​​impossible to squeeze the entire X-​​Men uni­verse into a 2-​​hour movie. I must con­clude that they did an excel­lent job here. As in the first movie, the ‘changes’ were done very well.

There were a few little easter eggs hid­den in there as well. In the first movie, you get a quick glimpse of Jubilee (the comic book char­ac­ter whom Rogue replaced in the movie), and just like in Spider Man (another fant­astic movie) there is a short cameo by Stan Lee (This man is a GOD! If you don’t know who he is, stop read­ing right now for you have offen­ded me.). In the second movie you hear Jubilee being called by name (by Storm), and on a tele­vi­sion set you see a man with the cap­tion “Dr Henry McCoy” beneath his face. The man appears as a nor­mal (non-​​mutant) human being, but this man later becomes Beast. I think there were a few other easter eggs, but I don’t remem­ber them.

Speak­ing of The X-​​Men, I found a great fan-​​comic, The Uncanny X-​​Sprites. Quite funny. I also stumbled across Wolverine’s real name. It’s not Logan, it’s James How­lett. It’s all explained in Marvel’s Ori­gin series, which was released last year. There was also a Para­dise X series which con­tra­dicts some of the fun­da­mental aspects of Ori­gin, but I wouldn’t take it ser­i­ously. Both of these (among oth­ers) are explained in vivid detail (beau­ti­fully illus­trated, too!) at the Lost Soul Wol­ver­ine site. I spent hours read­ing all the stuff there; I was so riveted.

Last Sunday I saw The Mat­rix Reloaded. I am not going to com­pare it to X-​​Men 2, but I will say that this is another excel­lent film. The CGI was amaz­ing. There were a few little flaws, but with all the action going on they were easy to over­look. I love Hong Kong mar­tial arts movies (Jackie Chan and Jet Li are DEITIES!), and this movie sat­isifed my desire for some well-​​choreographed fight scenes. On the neg­at­ive side, there is less con­tinu­ity between the plot and the fights when com­pared to the ori­ginal movie. Also, some parts were slow and unne­ces­sary. I don’t want to see a bunch of Zion­ists (I assume that’s what the inhab­it­ants of Zion call them­selves?) dan­cing, and I don’t want to see Neo mak­ing love to Trin­ity. There’s enough pr0n on the Inter­net, thank-​​you-​​very-​​much.

Like the first movie (and the third, which arrives in Novem­ber), The Mat­rix Reloaded was mostly filmed in my home town of Sydney. It’s weird to watch scenes from a movie and think, “hey, I was at that place only yes­ter­day!” It also makes me won­der if I really am in the Mat­rix. Kooky.

The abso­lute coolest thing, how­ever, was Trinity’s crack­ing of the elec­tri­city grid. She uses Nmap to scan for open ports and finds that port 22 is open. Port 22 is typ­ic­ally used by SSH, and sure enough Trin­ity uses a known SSH v. 1 exploit to gain access to the server! As her root pass­word, she uses Z1ON1010. Not only does this make her 1337, it is also another easter egg — 1010 is the num­ber 5 in bin­ary (or so I’m told), and if you’ve seen the movie (spoiler alert) you know that Zion in the movie is in its fifth incarn­a­tion. More on this at The Register and Slash­dot, and there’s a nice screen­shot at Insec​ure​.org, the home of Nmap.

Of course, what’s a movie these days without mer­chand­ising? Sam­sung has a ‘lim­ited edi­tion’ ver­sion of one of the phones used in the movie. To me it looks like a for­got­ten prop from Star Trek: The Ori­ginal Series. It looks hideous, the ergo­nom­ics are all wrong, and the screen is too small to do any­thing use­ful. That won’t stop Sam­sung from char­ging a premium for it, or people from buy­ing it. I feel sorry for those people. They obvi­ously have some sort of psy­cho­lo­gical prob­lem that has them con­vinced that they will only have friends if they have the latest mobile tele­phone. If it’s movie-​​themed and a ‘lim­ited edi­tion’, even bet­ter. They may even pur­chase a black trench­coat to go with it. That will alle­vi­ate the symp­tioms of their inferi­or­ity com­plex for a little while, after which they will feel com­pelled to jump onto the next fad. Over-​​consumerism should be treated as a men­tal illness.

Another Jack­ass copycat injured

” AN 18-​​year-​​old was in crit­ical con­di­tion after jump­ing from a five-​​storey build­ing in an appar­ent imit­a­tion of a stunt from the tele­vi­sion show Jack­ass.

” The youth was attempt­ing to jump into a pool from the roof of a con­domin­ium when he missed, shat­ter­ing both legs, police said. ”

Man Advert­ises ‘Son for Sale’ on Inter­net

There are some things you just don’t joke about. Like selling your son over the Inter­net. A father in Scot­land did just that: “Hyper­act­ive kid for sale, good at vacu­um­ing, not great at wash­ing dishes because he’s too short. Guar­an­teed to annoy,” the ad read. The father only wanted eight bucks for the 5-​​year-​​old. A Web surfer in Canada noticed the ad and con­tac­ted Scot­tish author­it­ies. The father/​seller said that he pos­ted the ad about two years ago as a joke then for­got about it until police came knock­ing. He’s been told to remove the ad. Besides, his son, now 7, is tall enough to wash the dishes.

For sale: One annoy­ing tw*t of a girl­friend

In a sim­ilar vein to the pre­vi­ous link…

US hos­pital searches for Klin­gon inter­preter

” A REPORT ON CNN claimed that a US hos­pital is frantic­ally search­ing for someone flu­ent in Klin­gon.

” The hos­pital, in Mult­nomah County, needs an inter­preter for men­tally ill patients who appar­ently won’t speak any other lan­guage. ”

It looks like this since has been called off, and it turns out that the ori­ginal story was blown out of pro­por­tion.

Black People Love Us!

Warn­ing: not for the satirically-​​impaired

Rugby team fined for lack of black play­ers

” South Africa’s Golden Lions Rugby Union (GLRU) have been fined R30,000 (2,400 pounds) after they were found guilty of not field­ing enough black play­ers in their team. ”

Unfor­tu­nately, this one isn’t satir­ical at all.

I am a heavy user of the Galeon Web browser. IMHO, it is far and away the best browser avail­able for any plat­form. Tabs and ses­sion sup­port with crash recov­ery are bril­liant fea­tures. Not only has Galeon had them for longer than most other browsers, it imple­ments them in a super­ior way. Not only that, it is quite fast and stable as well. I keep Galeon open all the time with mul­tiple win­dows open (presently I have 7 open win­dows, which allow me to ‘cat­egor­ise’ my tabs), and each win­dow has many tabs (For example, I’ve got over 30 tabs in my ‘main’ win­dow, and over 50 in another). I like my tabs to run down the left side of my win­dow (AFAIK some­thing only Galeon can do), so that more can fit on the screen and I don’t have to scroll through them. It may sound nuts, but I like it that way. And yes, I also use book­marks: my book­mark col­lec­tion is extens­ive. If Galeon crashes (a rare occur­rance), or if I want to close it for some reason (another rare occur­rance), I can get all my win­dows and tabs back when I restart it.

As you can see, I am very attached to Galeon’s unique fea­ture set, which makes switch­ing to a new browser dif­fi­cult to say the least. Before I moved whole­sale to Galeon, I would sim­ul­tan­eously run Kon­queror and Opera, and some­times Nets­cape 4 as well. This was so I could lever­age the strengths of each indi­vidual browser.

I have been eye­ing Galeon2 for a while now, and I finally decided to try it out. If it’s good enough to be included in Man­drake Linux 9.1, then maybe it’s good enough for me. Galeon2 is still under­go­ing heavy devel­op­ment, so I wasn’t expect­ing too much. Since the Galeon team is pretty-​​much rewrit­ing the whole thing from scratch to take advant­age of the GNOME2 plat­form, it would be under­stand­able for it to take a while to reach matur­ity. My ver­dict? It is very close to meet­ing my needs. There are many extra set­tings hid­den in Gconf, and after tweak­ing these I was able to cre­ate a sim­ilar setup to what I had in Galeon1. How­ever, some things don’t work yet and a couple are missing.

I had a chat with some Galeon developers a few weeks ago, and they said that they are try­ing to reach a sim­ilar fea­ture set to Galeon1, the dif­fer­ence being that this time they are cod­ing for GNOME2 and its Human Inter­face Guidelines. Unlike the Galeon splinter pro­ject Epi­phany, they are not try­ing to cut out fea­tures on a sig­ni­fic­ant scale. A while ago there was much con­flict in the Galeon mail­ing lists (to which I am a sub­scriber) over whether Galeon should sim­plify its fea­ture set or con­tinue on its cur­rent course. The Galeon founder and main­tainer, Marco Pesenti Gritti, left the pro­ject, forked the code and used it to cre­ate Epi­phany. I per­son­ally like this dual-​​pronged approach from the GNOME folks. Most people don’t like unne­ces­sary com­plex­ity, and so Epi­phany gives a simple, Safari–like inter­face and exper­i­ence. For power-​​users such as myself, Galeon fits the bill brilliantly.

There are some pros to Galeon2 over Galeon1. For one thing, the UI is faster and more respons­ive. My favour­ite, though, is the default book­marks. There aren’t very many, but the ones that are there are great. In the GNU /​ Linux -> News sec­tion, for instance, there are only four entries:

• Desktop Linux
• OSNews
• Pclinuxon­line
• Slash­dot

Notice any­thing spe­cial in there? Of the four GNU/​Linux news sites chosen by the Galeon team, PCLinuxOn­line is one of them!

I for­got to men­tion one of my other favour­ite fea­tures in Galeon (1 and 2): smart book­marks. I like them so much that in early April I volun­teered to take charge of main­tain­ing the offi­cial smart book­mark dir­ect­ory. The Trans­late to Eng­lish smart bookmark/​bookmarklet in the default Galeon2 book­marks was made by myself. There are many other book­marks in the dir­ect­ory which I wrote myself, includ­ing some to search PCLinuxOn­line (in the News cat­egory). I know it’s not much but it’s nice to hear that oth­ers appre­ci­ate and use your work

… well, sort of, any­way. Allow me to explain.

Today, we had a news sub­mis­sion about the BSA’s new scheme to teach chil­dren about the ‘evils’ of soft­ware pir­acy. To make this ‘learn­ing’ (or should I say ‘indoc­trin­a­tion’) more fun for the kid­dies, they got a mas­cot. Take a good look at it, what do you think it is?

It’s a fer­ret… supposedly.

When I first read that the BSA was using a fer­ret, I thought that we should call it a rat instead, since BSA is filled with dirty low-​​life rats. Then I hopped over to the site and had a look at it for myself. I swear, it looks like a weasel! A drugged-​​up homie weasel!

On a whim, I fired off an e-​​mail to Mike Magee at my favour­ite IT news site The Inquirer. If you’re not famil­iar with The Inq, think of it as The Register without the hubris. Indeed, Mike was the founder of The Reg, and he told me that he still owns 23% of it. Here’s part of the e-​​mail I sent to Mike:

The Busi­ness Soft­ware Alli­ance has received US Justice Depart­ment fund­ing of $200,000 to ‘edu­cate’ chil­dren about soft­ware pir­acy. More info at

http://​www​.wash​ing​ton​post​.com/​w​p​-​d​y​n​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​s​/​A​1​9​6​7​7​-​2​0​0​3​M​a​y​6​.​h​tml

What I’m won­der­ing is why this organ­isa­tion, which boasts some of the richest com­pan­ies in the world as its mem­bers, is receiv­ing US gov­ern­ment funding?

Another point of interest is the mas­cot of this new Play​itcy​ber​safe​.com ini­ti­at­ive. It is _​supposed_​ to be a fer­ret. To me it looks like a weasel. A ser­i­ously drugged-​​out, homie weasel. A weasel may be the per­fect choice for the BSA, but is a drugged-​​out homie char­ac­ter really the best choice to encour­age chil­dren not to steal? I would say it does the exact oppos­ite. You can see this weasel at

http://​www​.play​itcy​ber​safe​.com/​i​m​a​g​e​s​/​k​i​d​s​h​o​m​e​_​f​e​r​r​e​t​.​gif

And here’s part of Mike’s response:

Many thanks for the nice let­ter. And for the tip. The BSA is up to all sorts of tricks and we’ll cer­tainly cover this one.

A few hours later… BANG! Weasel Watch is born! Some excerpts:

HEAVILY SUBSIDED TRADE organ­isa­tion the Busi­ness Soft­ware Alli­ance (BSA) has received $200,000 fund­ing from the US gov­ern­ment to pro­mote a soft­ware pir­acy scheme aimed at children.

But that has raised ques­tions about why the Justice Depart­ment has chipped into the scheme, see­ing as the BSA is already sub­sid­ised, in fact paid for, to the tune of mil­lions, by some of the richest IT com­pan­ies in the world.

and

In fact the BSA Weasel, pic­tured above, looks like it’s either drugged up or it’s about to bite someone’s ankle, don’t you think?

SCORE!!!

Okay, this is just bizarre. The art­icle is based on the annual “Pat­terns of Global Ter­ror­ism” report. Isn’t it ironic that a gov­ern­ment that claims to be the bas­tion of free­dom across the globe is cri­ti­cising another gov­ern­ment for not clamp­ing down on civil liber­ties? Per­haps they should invade Canada, just as they have done with their neigh­bours to the south on so many occa­sions?

The art­icle was recently covered in Slash­dot, and there were some inter­est­ing responses. Two of my favourites:

I’ve heard it explained many times, that the reason why Amer­ica is tar­geted by ter­ror­ists is that “cer­tain ele­ments” are simply jeal­ous of our out­stand­ing qual­ity of life. They want to des­troy what they can’t build for themselves.

If you’re right about Canada — what, with all the pot smoking, low crime rates, free health­care, and civil liber­ties — I would expect Canada to rise to the top of the ter­ror­ists’ hit list. So, maybe instead of try­ing to get the damned Cana­dians to coöper­ate with us, we should simply launch an advert­ising cam­paign in the Islamic world explain­ing that Canada is the more logical tar­get for their anti-​​western fringe element.

and

Bush claimed shortly after ⁹⁄₁₁ that we were attacked because they hate us because of our freedoms.

So what a great way to pre­vent a future ter­ror­ist attack. Remove those freedoms so they (the­or­et­ic­ally) have no reason to hate us anymore.

What makes these inter­est­ing is that while being funny, they are at least partly groun­ded in truth. The argu­ment that ter­ror­ists attack the US because they are “jeal­ous of the Amer­ican way of life” is incred­ibly narrow-​​minded and arrog­ant. These people have a dif­fer­ent belief sys­tem entirely; there is far more to this world than raw cap­it­al­ism and mater­i­al­ism. What’s more, on most hol­istic meas­ures of qual­ity of life (which includes import­ant non-​​monetary factors like health, edu­ca­tion, pol­lu­tion and polit­ical free­dom), the US ranks quite low com­pared to many other nations. If I wanted to attack a coun­try because I was jeal­ous of their way of life, I’d be send­ing anthrax to Sweden or Denmark.

Per­sonal free­dom has dimin­ished markedly in the US, and unfor­tu­nately this has cre­ated some­what of a dom­ino effect into other states. The Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment, while not being nearly as undemo­cratic as that in the US, is a case in point. It was revealed last year that Aus­trali­ans are 20 times as likely to have their phone calls tapped by author­it­ies than US cit­izens. How­ever, I’m optim­istic that we won’t see any­thing along the lines of the Office of Home­land Secur­ity over here. I am more con­cerned about Ech­elon (more info), which seems to fit in well with the elev­ated occur­rance of wire tap­ping in both the USA and Australia.