Smithology

Some of you might have heard of a sit-com showing on ITV in England called No Heroics. It’s about a city where there are superheros wondering about doing everyday things like shopping and mowing the lawn. The show is based around a pub for superheroes where one of the rules for entry is “No Heroics” (to restrict the use of super-powers inside the pub). There are four main characters and their nemesis who provide the comedy. The trailer is very funny:

A friend of a friend managed to obtain it on channel bt so I gave it a look when I was around at his house. There were lots of funny moments but most of the humour was sex jokes which do make me laugh sometimes but after awhile I always feel like I’m in the presence of a three year old repeating the word “bum” to get laughs. If it comes on telly here I’d set the mythtv to record but I don’t think I’ll be going out of my way to watch it.

[tags]comedy, no heroics, super heroes, trailer, tv[/tags]

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I’m basking in the glory of having read the second half of Little Brother last night despite the knowledge that I would be sorry today. I’m in a sleep deprived, coffee driven euphoria and joyfully letting my mind digest the book.

So what is Little Brother all about then? Little Brother is a young adults spy thriller set in the near future and like Macleod’s Execution Channel, it explores ways in which the war on terror could escalate. Set in San Francisco, a group of school kids end up in conflict with the Department of Homeland Security over their increasing surveillance and suppression of liberty. This conflict divides the community down lines of class, age and race. The book takes a libertarian stance and can almost read as an apologetics course as our protagonist is drawn into ideological debates with his teachers, parents, friends, police and the DHS itself.

Some truly shocking passages describe the psychological trauma of abduction, imprisonment, interrogation and torture used by the American Government already in the War on Terror.

The book is also a bit of a howto guide to beating electronic surveillance, how the internet can be used to connect dissidents and the dangers of online surveillance. As the book progresses, we are exposed to various techniques used to hide identity online in a kind of birds eye view of symetric key cryptography, onion routing and trust networks.

Mainstream media plays a big part in the story as we see how the news spins what really happened to suit the mainstream agenda. We also see the importance of alternative media (ie. blogs) for being able to provide eye-witness accounts and a sort of counter-surveillance (hence the title of the book).

Part of the intensity of the book is that it covers some quite dodgy territory: is it really ok to be encouraging teenagers (the audience for this book) to be skilling up in these areas? The book challenged my beliefs about that, I mean I know all the techniques used in the book, they’re not big secrets but I was left questioning how much privacy is healthy and when does it become an effective cover for those wishing to harm others?

However, I can commend how the book leads the reader to understand how non-violent dissidence can work and that sometimes just embarrassing your opponents by peacefully illustrating what you think are flaws in their ideology are better than dissident actions which can be mistaken for terrorism.

Finally, the book is a bit of a tour of some of the history of human rights struggles in America and San Francisco especially, from the writing of the constitution to gay rights to the legalisation of encryption in the nineties.

As I said, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it very convincing as well as challenging. You can read it online at Cory Doctorow’s Website if you like. Big Brother is watching you, are you watching back? Stay free!

[tags]book, cory doctorow, cryptography, fiction, liberty, little brother, terrorism, war on terror, young adult[/tags]

Uncategorized books, cory doctorow, scifi

FulltimeCasual just reminded me that I went and saw Wall-E on the weekend with Sol and I haven’t written anything about it here.

Sunday afternoon is a pretty good time to see a kids film, there was a big line at the door of the cinema and lots of anticipation. Sol and I nabbed a seat near the centre with me sitting next to a family and Sol having charmed a uni student who was there on her own. I brought a good supply of Fantales for myself and Chupa Chups for Sol (his favourite sugar source at the moment) an we started on those before the curtain even opened. In retrospect, that was a bad idea.

So we get through the ads and previews (Sol yabbers at me through them all) and the feature starts (I try to tell Sol that talking time is over but he whispers loudly at me to shut-up).

I know it’s a cartoon but the opening scene shocked me in an unexpected way. I’m not a big fan of preaching in movies but I wasn’t too worried about it in this film as it didn’t seem to moralise so much as just present a particular unpleasant future. There were some really good moments in this film which spoke to our consumerist society without taking the high moral ground.

For me, the anti consumerist message in this film is not about condemning but about remembering. The film seems to say that we have forgotten who we are and that we need to remember ourselves.

But I’m only thinking about that in hindsight. At the time, I was so engrossed in the story that I didn’t pay much attention to the broader meaning of it. Wall-E is great protagonist even though he doesn’t speak. His character’s movement and body language tells the story in such an emotional way that you forget that there actually isn’t any dialogue! (For the most part)

The basic story of the film is a Hero’s journey kind of thing. Wall-E is a forgotten robot repetitively performing a menial task who is drawn into an adventure and saves the day. It’s also a romance which is strangely touching with a robot called Eve. It doesn’t retread the boring old “are robot’s people” question which has been asked a million times in every other film about robots and computers but just goes past that and has you asking “how do robots express romance?” there is a wonderful scene with Wall-E and Eve just playing together with movement in a kind of dance which is quite uplifting.

There are lots of other fun characters in Wall-E but most of the film is about these two robots and how they help each other and discover each other’s “directives”.

Reading back over this, I realise I’ve described a sentimental movie that tries to preach at you but there is also a lot of fun in this film and I haven’t really described that well. But there are just hundreds of little gags in this film that have you kind of chuckling and smirking contentedly all the way through.

Oh yeah, and visually this film is amazing. Pixar have excelled themselves once again. There are many scenes that just hold you with their visual appeal.

Sol’s impressions of the film were positive overall. He especially liked his springy seat and my Fantales. As the sugar really took hold of him, he started wriggling and making noise and tapping and fiddling and demanding more Fantales and Chupa Chups so that I started to get a bit tense that I was going to have to remove him and there would be a big tantrum as I dragged him kicking and screaming from the theatre. Thankfully, this was only during lulls in the action so once we got into the “end game” part of the film, he settled down. phew.

[tags]children, movies, sol, wall-e[/tags]

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I was in LA again this week for Episode 3 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is Mousetrap. I know I know, I’m the only person in the universe who watches this show so I don’t expect you to read this post or comment. I’ll try and come up with something else worthwhile blogging about – like No Heroics or the new season of Heroes, or Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (which I’m enjoying immensely BTW). This jetlag is killing me.

*** Spoilers Yeeeeehah ***

This episode was bleak. It was bleak and black and terrifying and nasty. From the first second where we see Cromartie driving out of town I knew that it was going to be an awful episode and that Charlie and his wife or both of them were going to die and I didn’t want to watch it.

But I did just in case I was wrong.

Alas I was right or wrong about being wrong, what I mean is death prevailed and it was awful and Sarah knew it was because of her but she couldn’t stop it and she was angry and frustrated but she couldn’t let those feelings go anywhere because as usual she had a job to do. Very angsty. If only they had a bigger budget and they could just blow things up instead of confronting us with drama. But at least it’s convincing drama. I’ve got to say that I find the acting in this show is so convincing that I really do get pretty tense when I watch it.

I can see now how they set up the death of Charlie’s wife Michelle in the previous episode: Ellison pays a visit to Charlie’s house and talks to Michelle and tells her what’s going on so that he can convince Charlie and Michelle to get out of town. Ellison realises that Cromartie is going to try and follow up any links to Sarah and John and he knows where Charlie lives. So the setup is that Michele is majorly pissed that she wasn’t in the loop about this. The reason I think this sets it up is that the writers had decided that in order for Charlie to stay in the show and to give him some reasons for joining the fight in ernest, Michelle would have to go. But they didn’t want Michelle to go down as a symbol of weak womanhood who just ties Charlie down and stops him from being a real man, so they put a bit of fire into her character so that we knew what she was made of in advance.

I think that Sarah is going to disapprove of John’s girlfriend Riley even more strongly after this incident and will plead with John not to get involved with people as it can only lead them into danger.

In other news, Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson) has recruited Agent Ellison to help her find terminators. What’s she up to? She mentioned her late husband, I wonder what happened to that poor soul (and the original Catherine Weaver for that matter).

Gaping plot hole of the week: Cromartie’s plan was brilliant up until the bit where he tricked John into going to the pier. What’s wrong with a dark alley where he’s got no-where to run and Cromartie could just pick him off? Also, why couldn’t Cameron do a better job of surveilling John without him knowing, surely she has super vision?

Following on from Atomic Al last week, this weeks comic relief was a clip from a B grade film called Beast Wizard VII (follow that link now!) that has become a huge phenomenon since Cromartie massacred the FBI agents. The identity that Cromartie took over was of an actor and apparently a bit of a cult fascination has arisen around him. (I told you it was a dark episode)

And here’s a tip for when you’re being chased by a terminator: terminators can’t swim, they tend to sink rather rapidly and it takes them a little while to get to shore as I suppose the water friction and mud on the bottom slows them down a bit.

[tags]mousetrap, terminator, the sarah connor chronicles[/tags]

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

Episode 2 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Season 2 is called Automatic for the People.

I’ve figured out what my problem is. I am using SCC to avoid doing work on the philosophy subject I’m studying. It’s similar to how I became obsessed with gardening during exam week when I was in second year engineering. I’m on the Fox SCC blog and podcast. Hopefully I’ll regain control of my senses soon but in the meantime, I give you:

*** SPOILERS AAAAHHH! ***

So this episode introduces two female characters, the new landlord Kacy who is heavily pregnant, a bit of an air-head but very warm and John’s new girlfriend Riley who is also likeable and warm despite appearing to not have parents and wags school to be with the clearly disturbed new kid (i.e. John). I guess this balances the less typically feminine female characters, two of whom are terminators all of whom are psycho.

The action in this episode was pretty toned down. The most we see is a CG future air to ground battle and Sarah commando rolling a security guard and taking his gun. I guess you could count Cameron’s leopard print singlet-top and pool game in the bar as action but I wish she’d given those sleezy guys a kick in the nuts as well as winning all their cash. Well I guess she throws a terminator into some kind of big capacitor bank but it’s nothing like the money they spent wrecking things in the first episode.

In terms of character development, John continues to emancipate himself from Sarah: His rebellion? To be a normal kid and bring his girlfriend home. Meanwhile Cameron is still flakey and Reece and Sarah continue to have conflict over Reece’s preferred method of dealing with problems which is to just kill everyone.

We also have an incident which sets up the rest of the season: a dying soldier from the future buzzes in and leaves them a list of missions. The first of these missions is to stop a terminator from melting down a nuclear power plant.

The really interesting stuff in this episode is around Sarah’s cancer scare. Last season we learned from Cameron that Sarah was supposed to die of cancer in 2005 or so but because they have time jumped, we no longer know if that will happen. Sarah meets a guy who has cancer in a bar and he talks about what it’s like to her. She is naturally freaked out. We see Sarah learning to confront this fear as she is required to enter a room that contains dangerous radioactive levels. The first time she goes in there, she has a panic attack and believes she has been “crapped up”. Later in the episode, she has to run through the room with no protection on in order to help Cameron (who is flaking) and save the plant. Reece opts not to enter the room (he also advocates running away when the plant starts to melt down but Sarah makes him stay). Sarah’s grappling with her own mortality has in a way made her brave. It could be that she is taking more risks because she almost wants the certainty of death rather than hiding from it. Or it could be that she realises that she can’t escape death so she must prioritise other things above prolonging her own life in the longer term, in other words, she continues to sacrifice everything she has to protect John and save the world.

Oh I almost forgot Atomic Al: the look on their faces as they watch this is priceless: they are in the middle of this intense mission and find themselves sitting in a waiting room watching cartoons)

[tags]automatic for the people, cancer, terminator, the sarah connor chronicles[/tags]

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

We’ve been thinking a bit about school lately, having a toddler who will be going to kindy next year and all that. For some private schools you have to book early to get a place but we have been more thinking about how the choice of kindy can affect which primary school he can go to.

Sol has been accepted into a kindy associated with a Protestant church school. I’m fairly certain that this kindy is going to be starting early on the Jesus stuff: Sol is likely to come home singing “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so”. Not that I have a problem with that so much: I mean up until a certain age, kids live in a world of imagination involving Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Man in the Moon so a little Jesus shouldn’t hurt right? But what of the question of how one school leads to another: he starts in the Jesus kindy, goes to the Jesus primary school and all his friends go to the Jesus high school and the next thing I know he’s coming home telling me that homosexuals should be stoned to death and that he wants to go and preach the four laws in the local shopping centre on Saturday.

But Christian Schools tend to be cheaper than the more secular elite private schools and a more comfortable size than the local state school where I worry he will come home on a stolen bike and tell me he’s a dad to the girl who sits next to him in Sex Ed. Or more prosaically, that his teacher can never remember his name and that his science class ran out of materials so he had to watch while other students did the experiments.

Last night, Compass (on the ABC) aired a program profiling four Christian Schools looking at how their religion affects how they teach. The schools ranged from radically Christian to liberal Christian. After watching this, I felt very comfortable with the approach taken by the Jesuit school. But everyone I know who went to a Catholic School just complains about how they are guilty all the time and that the nuns were cows. Surely things have changed and Catholic schools have changed since most of my peers were in school.

Any advice out there in blog land?

[tags]school, private schools, education, religious schools, indoctrination[/tags]

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I happened to be in the states on Monday night to catch the first episode of the new series of Sarah Connor Chronicles. I usually have a problem with TV shows and movies that glorify violence, especially guns and was a bit uncomfortable with the Matrix movies for this reason but I still find lots of things to like about this show (as I did with the Matrix movies).

The stuff that attracts me to SCC is the philosophical aspects of the characters and the questions and statements it makes about the nature of humanity. The show accomplishes this by contrasting humans with machines in many aspects such as the physical, emotional as well as intellectual possibilities of machines and how we differentiate ourselves as humans from mere “thinking meat”. If we are able to see ourselves as transcending our bodily reality of biological machines then are we able to envisage ever seeing synthetic machines the same way?

The show toys with all these questions whilst delivering an action packed plot with explosions, chases and gun fights. There is also a bit of robot-on-robot combat which is fun (despite my former stated discomfort with violence, it is still entertaining the way it unfolds).

Before I issue a spoiler alert, I’ll let you know that the show can be watched streaming online at the Fox website

*** SPOILERS FOLLOW ***

I was taken by a couple of scenes in the first episode especially the opening music “Samson and Delilah” sung by Shirley Manson. The show sometimes picks themes to run with through an episode and I thought this was a really clever one to start the season with (I wish I could remember some themes from season 1 but it’s a bit of a blur now, there were a lot of chess references but that’s because one of the pre-skynet computer’s they’re trying to destroy is a chess computer).

I was also knocked off my chair by the scene where John had to deactivate Cameron. While Sarah kept Cameron pinned between two trucks, John started to remove her chip, as he did this, Cameron pleaded with him very convincingly that she was afraid of dying, that she had fixed the error in her programming (which had made her revert to the “kill John Connor” program) and the real clincher “I love you and you love me”. I was really sucked into this scene and could forgot that they were acting, the pain as John hesitated and then did the job was heartbreaking. I think this part of the story illustrated the problem of trust really well because we know Cameron is capable of perfectly emulating an emotion if she chooses and knows how to manipulate John, John has to make his decision based purely on logic and not rely on his feelings so in a way he behaves like a terminator himself. Later on, he has to find a way to establish trust with Cameron again which involves putting the gun in her hand. This made me think about the dynamics of trust and how it always involves risk.

I’m also anticipating the change in Cameron now as we know that upon reactivation she was not completely restored but is instead internally resisting her programming to kill John. It makes her character more interesting that she now has this inner conflict. Not that her character has been boring: In the previous season, there was more of a Pinocchio thing (was Pinocchio one of those themes I was talking about) where she would at times seem to be becoming more human only to suddenly jolt everyone when she failed to “get it”. (e.g. at one point she listened sensitively to a teenage girl crying about her problems, gave advice and seemed to genuinely care but agreed with her that perhaps suicide was the way to go: the girl jumped off a building later in the episode). There is a shocking-ness to Cameron’s inability to understand the intricacies of human society despite her best efforts (of course there is a big plot hole here because when it suites the plot, the terminators are able to draw upon encyclopaedic knowledge of human psychology in order to manipulate people).

UPDATE: On looking up pinocchio references in SCC, I came across a post on Critics Rant which also reminded me that one of the themes used in season one was the development of atomic physics leading to the invention of the nuclear bomb (paralleling the idea that development of intelligent software leads to skynet and the terminators).

Some other notable character developments are less dramatic but create interesting dynamics. I like it how John’s uncle from the future Derek advocates a “show no mercy on anyone involved in Skynet” approach where as Sarah is more understanding because of her encounter with the widow of the scientist who was killed at the end of the Terminator II movie. Strangely, there is a relationship now between Cromartie (the main bad terminator) and the FBI agent Ellison who he spared after shooting 17 FBI agents at the end of the last episode of season I. In “Samson and Delilah”, Ellison encounters Cromartie again and Cromartie confirms that he only left Ellison alive because he thinks Ellison will inadvertently help him find John and Sarah.

So anyway, I’m glad I’ve got all that off my chest. This is the kind of show that I might need to blog about a bit just to process it as it is quite intense and I watch it on my own. Oh yeah, and Shirley Manson’s character Catherne Weaver is delightfully creepy, maybe I’ll blog more about her as her part develops.

[tags]philosophical themes, samson and delilah, terminator,the sarah connor chronicles, violence[/tags]

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

Celebrated my third fathers day today with a cooked breakfast (and Merlo’s coffee yum!), a new electric shaver (because I’m too busy being a dad to shave more than once a week it seems) and some science fiction that my 3 month old daughter allegedly purchased for me from Pulp Fiction, Brisbane’s leading sci-fi, fantasy and crime / mystery bookshop.

So I now own a hardcover of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and the paper back of Charles Stross’ Jennifer Morgue (which is a followup to The Atrocity Archives which I reviewed here previously)

Cory Doctorow is interesting. I may have mentioned that all of his books are available for download from his website, I’ve downloaded DRM free mp3 audio books of some of his short stories from there too. He compares his marketing strategy to that of a dandelion which spreads it’s seeds far and wide, caring not where they land yet the sheer volume of those seeds guarantees that some of them will germinate:

I don’t care about making sure that everyone who gets a copy of my books pays me for them — what I care about is ensuring that the everyone who would pay me decent money for a book has the opportunity to do so. I don’t want to hold 13-year-olds by the ankles and shake them until their allowance falls out of their pockets, but I do want to be sure that when their parents are thinking about a gift for them, the first thing that springs to mind is my latest $20-$25 hardcover. (Cory Doctorow Macropayments: Why I don’t have a tip jar)

And that’s exactly what happened this fathers day except it was my 15 week old daughter who knew I was a fan and bought the book for me and I am more thirty than thirteen.

[tags]charles stross, cory doctorow, fathers day, jennifer morgue, little brother[/tags]

Uncategorized books, cory doctorow, fatherhood, scifi

Last week I spent a couple of days debugging some code I’d written that used sysv semaphores in linux. Semaphores come in handy if you want to model a situation where only one process can access a resource at a time. You can also use a lock file for similar ends but semaphores are a bit smarter.

Anyway, I was following the Linux Programmers Guide which is by no means comprehensive but does have a good section on IPC (that’s inter process communication) and found that I could use SEM_UNDO when getting a lock so that if the process holding the lock dies unexpectedly, its lock is released by the linux kernel. However, the gotcha here is that SEM_UNDO is just implemented as a counter so that when you do a lock with SEM_UNDO, the kernel just increments a counter (semadj) of how many adds it needs to do when the process quits. If like me you decide not to use SEM_UNDO when you also release a semaphore, then you’ll find that eventually the semadj counter will overflow, the program will crash and then linux will increment your semaphore by 32767! (This is a bad result since you’re typically using a semaphore that is valued at 1 to represent a free resource and 0 to represent the resource in use, a value of 32767 implies you have 32767 resources available: i.e. there won’t be much locking going on anymore).

The upshot of all this and what the documentation doesn’t make clear is that if you use SEM_UNDO when you do a semop to decrement the semaphore, you must also use SEM_UNDO when you increment it so that semadj doesn’t get out of whack. Fortunately, semctl called with SEM_SET resets the semadj counter (see ‘man semop’).

[tags]linux, programming, semaphores, sysv[/tags]

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