Smithology

Episode 6 of Matt and Sol’s Favourite Things: Trampoline with Montage is available on YouTube. This was recorded on 1st of Jan but I sat on it for a weeks because I have been watching too much BSG trying to catch up to season 4. This episode is dedicated to Barack Obama (Yes I know it’s Australia Day but I’m more excited about Obama to be honest).

One more thing, I finally bought a video camera so the quality is a lot better. Now I just have to learn how to make a decent family documentary short film.

Uncategorized fatherhood, matt and sols favourite things, trampolines, video, youtube

A bookmark has been sticking out of the third last chapter of The Wizard of Oz for a couple of weeks now and tonight while I was patting the 7 month old (who has new top teeth BTW) to sleep I decided to finish it off.

In the introduction Frank L Baum writes about how he was intentionally writing a different kind of children’s story which wasn’t so much about moralising and bringing grotesque punishments on the disobedient as just being a fun place where a child’s mind can journey and play. Then in the first chapter, Dorothy’s house lands on and kills a wicked witch! Incidentally, the shoes are not red: they are silver.

There are a number of details where the 1939 movie differs from the book but the overall plot is the same. Dorothy and Toto befriend the scarecrow, the tin woodman and the lion as they journey to see the great wizard. When they arrive, the wizard tells them they have to kill the wicked witch of the west so they go and do that (by accident in the end) and then return only to find that the great wizard is a “great humbug”. There is a fumble where the wizard tries to get Dorothy home in a hot air balloon and ends up getting blown away. Dorothy then journeys south to see Glinda the good witch who lets her in on the secret that her shoes are actually able to transport her anywhere she wants them to with three magic steps. She walks home using the shoes power but the shoes disappear from her feet during the journey but she is happy to be home.

Apart from having been lent some sequels (thanks Catriona), I get the sense that Dorothy’s story hasn’t ended because at the start of the book we got the impression that while Dorothy was happy on the farm in Kansas, she wasn’t getting all she needed from life: i.e. she was living a relatively isolated existence and Baum describes the farm and everyone there (apart from Dorothy and Toto) as grey. Toto is described as Dorothy’s only friend. I was pretty worried for Dorothy when she got home only to be stuck back on that farm after she had seen and done so much in Oz.

Even though the book is short, it had a kind of epic feel to it more like when I read The Odyssey or books like The Hobbit or even Alice in Wonderland, what I’m trying to say is that the plot is secondary and the focus seems to be on journeying between strange little adventures in imagined places that are relatively self contained. Most fiction you read now focusses more on some problem that is being solved and has a more complex journey.

The books I just mentioned are very simple, the protagonist is on a journey trying to do just one thing. The places they visit are on the way and they visit each place in order to get to the next place. A book like The Merchant’s War has a plot that is driven by a number of characters involved in different events and tends to focus on the relationships between those characters (still with plenty of action and description of the fantastic places through which the characters move)

Anyway, once I’m finished my BSG obsession, I’ll see if I can knock over the other Oz books Catriona lent me and then I’m thinking about tackling Neal Stephenson’s Anathem

Uncategorized books, wizard of oz

Just some housekeeping. I’ve upgraded Smithology to Wordpress 2.7 and moved it from Slicehost to Dreamhost. A few little bells and whistles have stopped working – I will need to upgrade the template and plugins some time or other.

The move from Slicehost is just a finance thing. Awhile back a friend and I had a plan to host some stuff on a slice with the idea of building our empire into a glorious conquest of the internet but I severely underestimated the way having kids would affect my motivation when it comes to after work computer hacking. So I’ve moved (almost) all my little blogs and sites onto Dreamhost which is a lot cheaper than Slicehost for what I’m doing now which is nothing much. My opinion of Slicehost remains very high: you get a virtual linux server that you can do with as you please right from the OS up and for a decent price. Dreamhost is fine for blogs and mucking about with an online shop or whatever where as Slicehost is where you go when you’ve got real traffic and real uptime requirements with a plan for expansion.

As far as moving blogs, the process went as follows:

• export the DB in phpmyadmin
• tar up the web root
• turn off all the plugins
• untar the new wordress and copy it over the top of the old blog
• surf to the admin and do the upgrade
• check that things kind of work. I had to delete some old plugins that made wordpress die
• tar.gz up the webroot again
• export the db again
• copy the tarballs of the upgraded blog to dreamhost
• setup the domain in dreamhost and install wordpress in advanced mode (but don’t click the install link in the email it sends you)
• wait until you get the email that it’s done (takes a minute or two)
• untar and copy the blog onto the domain under your home dir
• do a mysql -u username -p -h mysql.server.whateveryousetup blogdbname < db_bak.sql where db_bak.sql is the dump from your blog db
• manually override the dns in your /etc/hosts file and test the new install.
• While doing that, turn on the plugins and see what happens
• change the dns settings to use ns1.dreamhost.com etc…

simple ;-) It took me a couple of hours of mucking about but I reckon you could get it down to half an hour with practice.

Uncategorized dreamhost, slicehost, upgrade, wordpress

I’ve been noticing more and more how some of my environmentalist friends keep doing things that remind me of the behaviour of some Christians, especially fundamentalist Christians that I’ve known. I think it all comes down to the way ideology and moral codes tend to make us act certain ways.

For example, many environmentalists feel that people who drive four wheel drives are doing something wrong and will tend to form a negative judgement of those people. Christians also tend to think like this about people who are homosexual or transgress some closely held Christian value. The common ground is that both Christian and environmentalist ideology creates a set of behaviours which arise from values and form a moral code which is in tension with the mainstream moral code. So while the majority of people live by a mainstream moral code which accepts (even celebrates) four wheel drives and is becoming more accepting of homosexuals, those who identify with a certain ideology end up subscribing to a moral code which brings them into conflict with the mainstream moral code.

I suppose I’m being obvious but here are a few other things:

• The need to create an “us and them”: You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.
• Withdrawal from mainstream society: Christians boycott films and products produced by “satanists”, environmentalists boycott shopping centres and products which cause environmental damage.
• Narrowing of social circles: only wanting to associate with other Christians / environmentalists
• Development of fashion: Christians dress neatly and conservatively, environmentalists wear organic hemp
• Jargon and indoctrination: Environmentalists reduce, reuse and recycle. Christians lay it at the foot of the cross.
• Preaching
• Paranoia: a tendency to think that someone is pulling strings in the background to oppose you

I suppose what I’m getting at is that environmentalists need to make an effort to avoid some of these behaviours which become barriers. Are you being an environmentalist because you want to take some high moral ground and just feel good about yourself or do you actually want to see things change? I’m not saying environmentalists need to stop doing what they do, it’s about a small tweak of the consciousness and approach that makes all the difference.

I have some friends who often inspire me with their environmental choices and I find that when I hang out with them, I feel a little more motivated to try changing my own lifestyle. It’s not that they judge me and make me feel guilty, it’s not that they preach to me. It’s that I see them living a different life which they enjoy.

The hardest part of environmentalism is that society just seems to go on doing the same things forever, but we can look to a Christian parable to feel more hopeful: Jesus once told his disciples that only a little bit of salt is needed to make the meal salty, the salt spreads through the food, just a grain here and there and changes it without you even being able to see it. The path to environmental change is not in moralising, preaching and putting “eco terrorist” stickers on four wheel drives: those approaches don’t work for Christians and they won’t work for environmentalists. THe real recipe for change is in living an example and being ready to bravely discuss and gently debate your beliefs with others and listen as much as rant about the things you feel passionate about.

[tags]christianity, environmentalism, morality[/tags]

Uncategorized environment, religion

Warning: tech post. I needed to make a movie from a large number of jpegs. I followed these instructions first but the link to mpeg2vidcodec_v12 failed. I googled mpeg2vidcodec_v12 for many hits to the required file.

But I got the bash limitation of the argument list so I wrote this script to do the conversion in batches of 1000 files and then join the mpegs using mpgjoin (also known as mpgtx in apt-get)

#!/bin/bash

SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=`echo -en "nb"`
mkdir tmp
while [ "`ls -1 | wc -l`" -gt 3 ]; do
  for file in `ls -1 | grep jpeg | head -n 1000`; do
    mv "$file" tmp/
  done
  convert tmp/* movietmp.mpg
  if [ "$?" != "0" ]; then
     echo "convert movietmp failed"
     exit
  fi
  rm tmp/*
  if [ -f movie.mpg ]; then
      mpgjoin movie.mpg movietmp.mpg -o movietmp2.mpg
      rm movietmp.mpg movie.mpg
      mv movietmp2.mpg movie.mpg
  else
      mv movietmp.mpg movie.mpg
  fi
done
IFS=$SAVEIFS

NOTE: it deletes the source jpeg files so do a backup first or modify the script to copy the originals somewhere safe.

[tags]bash, convert, jpeg, mpeg, script, timelapse, video[/tags]

Uncategorized tech

The recent announcement by Kevin Rudd that Australia’s greenhouse gas reduction target will only be 5% made me a little bit angry but not very angry. I wasn’t surprised, nor do I think that a higher reduction rate would make a difference. To me, the climate change battle is pretty much lost until it starts to actually affect the economy directly, e.g. perpetual drought or flooding of major business centres and even then, the gradual nature of the change will probably mean that we can keep doing the same old stuff until our planet resembles a burned out cigarette butt and we are all living in plastic bio-domes (but still writing in our blogs). This is called the “frog in the kettle” affect which is the idea that a frog will jump out of hot water if you drop it in there but if you put it in a pot of cold water and then heat up the pot, the frog will stay in the pot until it is cooked.

I think I might be in one of the first generations to be educated from primary school about climate change (or the greenhouse effect as it was called back in the day). In the twenty years since I started caring about environmental issues, very little has changed. Sure there’s been a lot of awareness and talk but we continue to run trucks and cars along big roads all day, power generation is still mostly coal based and I continue to hear day after day about another study coming out to show that human industrial activity correlates with increases in global average temperatures.

As far as I’m concerned the damage is done. Maybe the damage was done a hundred years ago. We are all on a very large ship called the global economy and it doesn’t steer very fast even though it continues to accelerate towards the iceberg.

I used to get really angry and I used to care. I was part of a local environmental group here for a number of years and I know that plenty of people care about the environment but also every one of us is completely dependant on greenhouse gas polluting services. I know people who have decided to “unplug” as much as possible from this system but they are very few and it is naive to think that society in general will suddenly start generating their own electricity, growing their own food and riding a (wooden?) bicycle to work every day.

I like to think that I am a hopeful person and I do remain hopeful that things will change, but I can no longer bring myself to make any effort whatsoever to change the way I do anything in order to help the environment. Until I can see that our leaders take the problem seriously and that our economy and industry is somehow changing, then why should I bother? (But I will still buy those compact fluorescent bulbs and continue to fill my recycle bin for what it’s worth)

[tags]environment, fatalism[/tags]

Uncategorized environment

Tin Man was shown over the Christmas holidays here on channel 7 and I recorded it as I have been having some kind of spooky confluence with all things Wizard of Oz for a few months now where I keep coming across references to the story. I recently borrowed some of the Oz books off Catriona but seeing as I was reading The Merchants’ War and catching up on BSG, I haven’t read them yet.

On watching Tin Man it soon becomes apparent that we are not in Kansas anymore in more ways than one. It is clear from about the five minute mark that this is more than just a modernisation of the story and that it departs in many ways from the story as we know it according to the 1939 movie (which doesn’t exactly follow the books either I’m told). The plot roughly follows the original and the characters are roughly resembling the originals but the details are all different.

While this show had a definite B-grade feel about it, I can’t put my finger on why. Maybe it’s the script, maybe it’s the pace. Perhaps it’s that Dorothy, sorry D.G. is supposed to be eighteen but acts more like she’s twelve. Even though this is supposed to be a fantastic story taking place in a fantasy world, maybe the fantasy aspect of it was just too much: it’s just really hard to mix a fantasy world with a real world character without needing a million scenes where the real world character is just gazing about open mouthed at everything. Or maybe it was kind of how a lot of the focus was just on showing us all this neat special effects.

Actually, now that I think about it, the real problem was that they failed to really develop any of the relationships between the characters. The best parts of the series were when these relationships were being fleshed out such as the scenes where Glitch and Cain end up travelling together. The conversations between Glitch and Cain on this journey were the best parts of the script.

To me the special effects looked really good. The settings all looked pretty awesome whether it was the forest or Azkadellia’s steam-punk castle or the lake. The flying monkeys looked real enough (and the way they erupted from Azkadellia’s bosoms had a lot of entertainment value) as did the other fantastic creatures.

Despite the flaws I just mentioned, the story still had me engrossed enough that I wanted to see what happened and whether the wicked witch would end with a melting scene rivalling Raiders of the Lost Ark’s melting Nazi (but it’s a PG rating so you can guess that the melting scene was not very impressive). The end is very predictable but at least they threw in a little tie back to the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie towards the end which kind of came out of nowhere. (There’s also a hot air balloon which really literally comes out of nowhere and with no explanation which I assume is just from very bad editing to try and fit it into a timeslot).

All in all, if you’ve got six hours to waste and you like Wizard of Oz stuff, then I reckon you’ll enjoy watching Tin Man even if it’s just to play “spot the deconstructed reference to the original” or groan at the jokes in the script.

Links:
Tin Man IMDB
Tin Man Scfi.com
Tin Man Wikipedia

[tags]tin man, tv, wizard of oz[/tags]

Uncategorized tv, wizard of oz

The Merchants’ War is book four in Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series which follows the adventures of Miriam, a tech journalist from Boston who discovers she is the long lost daughter of a family of world walkers who live in an alternative parallel universe which is still stuck in the medieval age.

If you haven’t read any of the books in this series, then I recommend that you skip the rest of this spoilerific review and get hold of the first books in the series and read them. If you like the idea of mixing history up like bringing machine guns into a medieval battle and a bit of sociology and collision of cultures then you’ll like these books.

Also, if you haven’t read this one yet and you care, then come back and read this when you have.

At the end of book three, Miriam zapped herself into the steam age world to escape an exploding building and book four takes Miriam deeper into the world of “New London” and steam-age Boston with all its unfamiliar and dangerous politics. Meanwhile Mike the DEA agent in over his head and his spooky friends zero in on the clan in modern America. The new King Egon wastes no time in executing plans to waste the clan in the Gruinmarkt leaving poor Duke Angbard in a spot of bother. Brill is assigned the job of bringing Miriam back to the clan while some new characters Huw and his gang discover yet another world.

I really really enjoyed this book and found it a little more satisfying than the previous one (The Clan Corporate) because it seemed to end at better place. I remember getting to the end of The Clan Corporate and going “Is that it? Are you just going to leave it all hanging like that!?” This one ends on a cliff hanger too – in the middle of a desperate battle in fact but other characters stories kind of wind up and converge a bit more nicely. I’m looking forward to the next books but hoping if Stross is going to keep the series going for many more books, that the stories can be more self contained. He does this well with the Laundry books ( Atrocity Archives and Jennifer Morgue) but I realise the story of the Clan is on a much bigger scale so it has to be told in parts.

[tags]books, charles stross, fantasy, the merchants’ war, the merchants’ war[/tags]

Uncategorized books, charles stross, fantasy, the merchant princes

I finished First Lensman a while back or should I say I finished with it because I didn’t actually read to the end, I got bored and skimmed.

The thing is that these books were written for teenage boys fifty years ago and they have dated rather fatally in terms of entertainment value. The main thing that got to me was that the bad guys were really really evil and the good guys were incorruptibly morally pure and the books just fail to build up any tension around how the characters will be changed or challenged as people. The books are pure plot and idea, the feeble attempts at portraying human relationships fall into either manly men slapping each other on the back and admiring each other’s abilities and moral fibre, men admiring young women’s pluckiness, women insisting on having adventures and then being grateful to men for being rescued when they inevitably end up tied up in the bad guy’s lair and women winking at each other as they are approached by a man. There is the occasional narrative discussion of a man grappling with being torn between going out and shooting guns with the boys or staying back and commanding the battleship.

Having said that, the scale of the writing reminds me of reading Larry Niven’s Ringworld and even Iain Bank’s Culture novels where you are required to get your head around a couple of alien cultures and their peculiar sociology, psychology and history.

[tags]first lensman, books, scifi, e e doc smith[/tags]

Uncategorized books, e e doc smith, lensman, scifi

Things have been a bit slow at work today and as I turned to my RSS, I came across this somewhat disturbing post on Graphics Engine which discusses a currently popular YouTube clip depicting Earth’s encounter with an asteroid and the fun results set to the music of Pink Floyd. The clip is as mesmerising as it is terrifying and I felt compelled to watch it right to the end despite its horror.

Then turning back to my RSS, I clicked to an old favourite, Astronomy Picture of the Day, with a small amount of trepidation but their post today had no nihilist doom and gloom, in fact it was a homage to the joy and wonder of the art of looking up. Today’s picture was actually a video clip featuring beautiful time lapse photography of sunsets and moon rises. The stuff that fills us with a sense of awe and makes us wonder at our place in the universe. In the context of the previous clip, it came also as a reminder of how lucky we are to be here: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, feeling, experiencing and living life.

[tags]astronomy, life[/tags]

Uncategorized astronomy, life