Saturday, February 20, 2010
Rogue Antispyware
The Internet is full of websites where they tell you what software you should be running but how many places are there that tell you what you what not to run. Well here's one that I encountered on Usenet: Rogue Antispyware, your guide to rogue security software that you should not not have on your computer.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Phone Angst
People have been obsessing over their phones for a while now but I think that Palm may be taking it to a new level with webOS on its Pre and Pixi phones. Since Palm has committed to a regular upgrade schedule for webOS with big updates coming once a month along with minor updates in between the big ones. All told Palm has put out nine updates for webOS since June 2009 and buzz for the tenth update, webOS 1.4, is growing among its users.Part of it is just the newness of the platform. Google's Android has been around for well over a year. Apple's iPhone has been around for three years. Palm's webOS has been around for just eight months and is still very much a work in progress. webOS 1.4 is expected to bring among other things support for video recording, a feature which the iPhone and Android phones have had for some time.
But I think that an essential part of all the phone angst that webOS is generating among its users is that Palm has always generated a strange dichotomy of feelings among its user community. The loyalty of the Apple user community is legendary and with the iPhone it has only grown and reached ever more cult-like proportions. Microsoft has its fanboys too but mostly its users tend to show more of a grudging acceptance than actual love. With Palm, the feel of the user community is a lot more complicated. Loyalty tends to mix with anger over perceived wrongs and missed opportunities which make members the Palm user community like one half of a separated couple—still in love but distrustful and bracing for the worst.
My own phone angst is as much a result of the platform's newness as it is to the its rapid pace of development. I jumped on the Pre early on and I love to tweak the hell out of it using Homebrew patches which I load through Preware. And the Preware people have worked hard to keep up with the pace of webOS development. As result, I sometimes have to deal with days when I have to uninstall and reinstall almost all my patches. Today was one such day as the Preware folks in anticipation of webOS 1.4 updated their patches for compatibility with it. As result I found myself staring at a phone which needed to update over forty patches. Luckily the Preware developers have worked hard to make this process as painless as possible and I clicked the "Update All" button and Preware went to work:
Arrrrgh!
I decide to try the "Emergency Patch Recovery" (EPR) utility. This program has been useful to me in the past by allowing me to wipe out all of my phone's patches in one feel swoop rather than having to uninstall them one by one. But first I have to uninstall my phone's theme and do a Luna Restart (a quick restart that Preware can do when you don't need to do complete reboot). So I fire up Preware again and suddenly it only has to update seventeen patches instead of forty. Hmmm, that's new. So I hold off on running EPR and hit the "Update All" button again. So I close Preware and start it again. Now only nine patches need updating. So I hit the "Update All" button yet again. And this time Preware goes through the process without a hitch.
So all's well that ends well. I find a theme that I like, install it, and do a full reboot of my phone so all the updated patches can take effect. The surprising thing was that I did all this over the course of a couple of hours as I was going about my day. Except for the Java restart and the reboot at the end, my Pre remained in use doing other things while I had Preware churning away in the background (Preware takes a long time to load its list of applications and to do updates). It wasn't perfect but it was a much smoother process than what I've experienced in the past with having to update patches one by one. So my phone angst is a little lower at the end of this day...
...and that's a good thing because I'm going to have to do this all over again later this week or the next week when webOS 1.4 comes out.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Avatar—Dances With Wolves Meets 2001: A Space Oddessey
Warning: This review will contain significant spoilers for the movie Avatar. Do not read it if you don't want to be spoiled.
On a purely mercenary level, James Cameron's new movie, Avatar is the perfect movie for every demographic. A visually stunning film created with 3D digital technology which didn't even exist a few years ago, Avatar is equal parts Sci-fi, fantasy, action, adventure, and cowboys versus indians space western. There's even a romantic subplot thrown in to appeal to the "chick flick" crowd. While the story is simple on the surface, there also appears to be plenty of room for a very complicated back story.
The comparisons with Dances With Wolves and this film are inevitable. A military man makes contact with the natives and works to earn their respect. He goes native at about the same time that his own people arrive—basically our own western civilization—to play the bad guys. While a lot of people might complain that this is a simplistic movie–and it is—the people who like it, including myself, simply don't care that it's core message can be boiled down to "white people bad, blue people good." There are plenty of crappy movies out there with complicated plots and I'm glad to report that from my perspective, Avatar is neither the former nor the latter.
The movie revolves around a crippled marine named "Jake Sully" who must take the place of his dead twin brother in an ambitious program in which scientists explore an alien moon called "Pandora" by interfacing directly with genetically engineered alien bodies called "avatars." They do this in order to communicate with the planets natives, a race of ten-foot tall blue humanoids called "the Navi." The scientists are working against time as the Navi's "Hometree" is right on top of a mineral called "unobtanium" which a greedy company wants to mine. And that company has plenty of stereotypical marines in its employ who are ready to kill the Navi. Sully initially cooperates with his fellow marines, giving them a run down of the strengths and weaknesses of the Navi stronghold even as he works to gain their trust. Ultimately Sully falls in love with the Navi culture—and with a Navi warrior woman.
Naturally, Colonel Quaritch who is in command of the mission decides that the time has come to show the Navi who's boss—in one particularly effective scene the colonel uses Sully's own videolog to justify cracking down on the Navi. Sully tries to warn the Navi but finds himself rejected by his new people instead. Colonel Quaritch orders an attack on the Navi Hometree which is essentially a reverse 9/11. The heart of the alien culture is destroyed in a single unprovoked attack that echoes the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by terrorists on September 11, 2001—only this time we're the terrorists and the aliens are the victims.
This isn't the first time we've seen 9/11 echoed in sci-fi. Battlestar Galactica used the Cylon destruction of the human colonies as a metaphor for the 9/11 attacks as well but Avatar is the first time that I've seen this metaphor employed in reverse, as an indictment of our own culture and echoing the destruction of American Indian culture by our own western culture. It's a fairly potent symbol and it really is the only way we can really justify what happens next. Sully turns against his fellow marines and teams up with a hand full of scientists and a renegade marine pilot (played by Michelle Rodriguez who supplies the fairly compelling scene of a beautiful woman in war paint flying a hovercraft into battle against her fellow marines) to lead the Navi as they fight back against the marines.
The Navi retreat to the "Tree of Souls" which is essentially the nerve center of Pandora, a tree which connects all life on this moon into one giant neural network, Quaritch is convinced that the Navi will be broken if the Tree of Souls is destroyed and makes it the next target in his "Shock and Awe"—yes, they actually say that in the movie, Cameron's bluntness as a story teller is his greatest weakness but his movies are so well crafted and so action filled that it is rarely an issue. It's not an issue for me here as the movie is so spectacular and so immersive that it is almost impossible to get pulled out of it.
Sully convinces the Navi to gather all of their tribes to make a stand at the Tree of Souls which ends in a fairly predictable but nevertheless stunning fashion. The evil humans are defeated and banished from Pandora and the Navi gather at the Tree of Souls to download Sully's consciousness into his avatar body. His human body dies and Sully is fully alien now. It's a piece of wish fulfillment which reminds me of the end of Inglourious Basterds where World War II is won in Europe not by a hard long slog through German held lands which kills millions but by blowing up Hitler and the entire German high command real good. Given that this is a sci-fi fantasy movie, it's hard to argue with the film makers' decision.
But I think that there is something else going on besides a extremely well made science fiction, fantasy, and special effects. I can't for the life of me imagine how an ecosystem like the one we see on Pandora can just naturally evolve. While it is fairly common for sci-fi film makers to ignore the laws of science when they interfere with their paper-thin plots, I don't think that this is what is going on here.
Pandora is basically a giant neural network where every living thing is so tightly integrated with rest of the planet that even the fiercest of the woodland animals know to attack the marines when the Navi are almost overwhelmed by the onslaught of the marines attacking with their superior technology. This neural network is so sophisticated that it is actually possible for the Navi to download Sully's mind directly into his avatar body at the end of the movie. This download is actually attempted twice in the movie—a human scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine who is played by Sigourney Weaver, is shot and the Navi attempt to download her mind into her avatar body. This attempt fails because she's too badly injured but before the final confrontation with the marines, Sully prays to "Eywa," the Navi deity to look into Dr. Augustine thoughts and to help them defeat the humans.
The Navi even bond to their animals by connecting a long braid of hair which unravels to reveal tiny tentacles which connect to tentacles on a similar braid which is attached to these animals. It reminds me of an organic version of the human/machine interfaces you see in movies like The Matrix. There is a scientific idea called "The Gaia Hypothesis" which suggests that all life is connected and cooperates to keep Earth livable which on the surface does resemble what we see in Avatar with all of Pandora's life being linked together. But in this movie Ewya is described in a manner which reminds me more of the way that the Force described the early Star Wars movies (before George Lucas ruined the concept in the prequels with technobabble about "midichlorians").
On the surface, Avatar is expressing a very anti-technology viewpoint—love Mother Earth (or in this case "Mother Pandora"), don't destroy her with your technology. This is a fairly common theme in James Cameron's movies; but there is a deeper, more subtle theme here which is never expressed—probably because it would be boring and James Cameron doesn't do boring. Just like John Connor cannot survive to lead the human resistance against Skynet without a Terminator acting as his bodyguard, so the Navi cannot defeat the humans without the interference of Eywa. Could it be that Eywa is just a non-evil organic version of Skynet? Is Eywa an incredibly powerful supercomputer which can be accessed by the Navi?
I think that this is as good as any theory on the "science" of Avatar. It would certainly explain gravitational "flux" which wreaks havoc with the human electronic equipment and which allows the gravity defying Hallelujah Mountains which float in the air with seemingly nothing save for this mysterious flux to hold them up. If some intelligent species evolved on a world where the gravitational and magnetic fields were so screwy that an entire mountain could just hang in mid-air, it might make it hard for them to develop human-style electronics. Any technology that such a species might develop would likely be organic. It's not a huge leap to imagine that some cataclysm—like say, a self-aware organic computer wiping out the existing civilization—resetting all life on Pandora and allowing it to be remade in the image of an all-powerful artificial intelligence which directs its evolution until all that life is part of the giant self-aware computer which first paved the way for its creation. They might even give it a name and make it their deity. Intelligent design sci-fi style or more aptly in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Oddyssey, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
On a purely mercenary level, James Cameron's new movie, Avatar is the perfect movie for every demographic. A visually stunning film created with 3D digital technology which didn't even exist a few years ago, Avatar is equal parts Sci-fi, fantasy, action, adventure, and cowboys versus indians space western. There's even a romantic subplot thrown in to appeal to the "chick flick" crowd. While the story is simple on the surface, there also appears to be plenty of room for a very complicated back story.
The comparisons with Dances With Wolves and this film are inevitable. A military man makes contact with the natives and works to earn their respect. He goes native at about the same time that his own people arrive—basically our own western civilization—to play the bad guys. While a lot of people might complain that this is a simplistic movie–and it is—the people who like it, including myself, simply don't care that it's core message can be boiled down to "white people bad, blue people good." There are plenty of crappy movies out there with complicated plots and I'm glad to report that from my perspective, Avatar is neither the former nor the latter.
The movie revolves around a crippled marine named "Jake Sully" who must take the place of his dead twin brother in an ambitious program in which scientists explore an alien moon called "Pandora" by interfacing directly with genetically engineered alien bodies called "avatars." They do this in order to communicate with the planets natives, a race of ten-foot tall blue humanoids called "the Navi." The scientists are working against time as the Navi's "Hometree" is right on top of a mineral called "unobtanium" which a greedy company wants to mine. And that company has plenty of stereotypical marines in its employ who are ready to kill the Navi. Sully initially cooperates with his fellow marines, giving them a run down of the strengths and weaknesses of the Navi stronghold even as he works to gain their trust. Ultimately Sully falls in love with the Navi culture—and with a Navi warrior woman.
Naturally, Colonel Quaritch who is in command of the mission decides that the time has come to show the Navi who's boss—in one particularly effective scene the colonel uses Sully's own videolog to justify cracking down on the Navi. Sully tries to warn the Navi but finds himself rejected by his new people instead. Colonel Quaritch orders an attack on the Navi Hometree which is essentially a reverse 9/11. The heart of the alien culture is destroyed in a single unprovoked attack that echoes the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by terrorists on September 11, 2001—only this time we're the terrorists and the aliens are the victims.
This isn't the first time we've seen 9/11 echoed in sci-fi. Battlestar Galactica used the Cylon destruction of the human colonies as a metaphor for the 9/11 attacks as well but Avatar is the first time that I've seen this metaphor employed in reverse, as an indictment of our own culture and echoing the destruction of American Indian culture by our own western culture. It's a fairly potent symbol and it really is the only way we can really justify what happens next. Sully turns against his fellow marines and teams up with a hand full of scientists and a renegade marine pilot (played by Michelle Rodriguez who supplies the fairly compelling scene of a beautiful woman in war paint flying a hovercraft into battle against her fellow marines) to lead the Navi as they fight back against the marines.
The Navi retreat to the "Tree of Souls" which is essentially the nerve center of Pandora, a tree which connects all life on this moon into one giant neural network, Quaritch is convinced that the Navi will be broken if the Tree of Souls is destroyed and makes it the next target in his "Shock and Awe"—yes, they actually say that in the movie, Cameron's bluntness as a story teller is his greatest weakness but his movies are so well crafted and so action filled that it is rarely an issue. It's not an issue for me here as the movie is so spectacular and so immersive that it is almost impossible to get pulled out of it.
Sully convinces the Navi to gather all of their tribes to make a stand at the Tree of Souls which ends in a fairly predictable but nevertheless stunning fashion. The evil humans are defeated and banished from Pandora and the Navi gather at the Tree of Souls to download Sully's consciousness into his avatar body. His human body dies and Sully is fully alien now. It's a piece of wish fulfillment which reminds me of the end of Inglourious Basterds where World War II is won in Europe not by a hard long slog through German held lands which kills millions but by blowing up Hitler and the entire German high command real good. Given that this is a sci-fi fantasy movie, it's hard to argue with the film makers' decision.
But I think that there is something else going on besides a extremely well made science fiction, fantasy, and special effects. I can't for the life of me imagine how an ecosystem like the one we see on Pandora can just naturally evolve. While it is fairly common for sci-fi film makers to ignore the laws of science when they interfere with their paper-thin plots, I don't think that this is what is going on here.
Pandora is basically a giant neural network where every living thing is so tightly integrated with rest of the planet that even the fiercest of the woodland animals know to attack the marines when the Navi are almost overwhelmed by the onslaught of the marines attacking with their superior technology. This neural network is so sophisticated that it is actually possible for the Navi to download Sully's mind directly into his avatar body at the end of the movie. This download is actually attempted twice in the movie—a human scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine who is played by Sigourney Weaver, is shot and the Navi attempt to download her mind into her avatar body. This attempt fails because she's too badly injured but before the final confrontation with the marines, Sully prays to "Eywa," the Navi deity to look into Dr. Augustine thoughts and to help them defeat the humans.
The Navi even bond to their animals by connecting a long braid of hair which unravels to reveal tiny tentacles which connect to tentacles on a similar braid which is attached to these animals. It reminds me of an organic version of the human/machine interfaces you see in movies like The Matrix. There is a scientific idea called "The Gaia Hypothesis" which suggests that all life is connected and cooperates to keep Earth livable which on the surface does resemble what we see in Avatar with all of Pandora's life being linked together. But in this movie Ewya is described in a manner which reminds me more of the way that the Force described the early Star Wars movies (before George Lucas ruined the concept in the prequels with technobabble about "midichlorians").
On the surface, Avatar is expressing a very anti-technology viewpoint—love Mother Earth (or in this case "Mother Pandora"), don't destroy her with your technology. This is a fairly common theme in James Cameron's movies; but there is a deeper, more subtle theme here which is never expressed—probably because it would be boring and James Cameron doesn't do boring. Just like John Connor cannot survive to lead the human resistance against Skynet without a Terminator acting as his bodyguard, so the Navi cannot defeat the humans without the interference of Eywa. Could it be that Eywa is just a non-evil organic version of Skynet? Is Eywa an incredibly powerful supercomputer which can be accessed by the Navi?
I think that this is as good as any theory on the "science" of Avatar. It would certainly explain gravitational "flux" which wreaks havoc with the human electronic equipment and which allows the gravity defying Hallelujah Mountains which float in the air with seemingly nothing save for this mysterious flux to hold them up. If some intelligent species evolved on a world where the gravitational and magnetic fields were so screwy that an entire mountain could just hang in mid-air, it might make it hard for them to develop human-style electronics. Any technology that such a species might develop would likely be organic. It's not a huge leap to imagine that some cataclysm—like say, a self-aware organic computer wiping out the existing civilization—resetting all life on Pandora and allowing it to be remade in the image of an all-powerful artificial intelligence which directs its evolution until all that life is part of the giant self-aware computer which first paved the way for its creation. They might even give it a name and make it their deity. Intelligent design sci-fi style or more aptly in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Oddyssey, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Hurry Up and Wait—Palm's Update Cycle Slows Down
Ever since Palm came out with its Pre phone, they have been updating its webOS operating system approximately once a month. Sometimes the updates have been small and sometimes they can introduce bugs. But even so, it was OK for me since there would usually be another update just around the corner. Now with their latest update which brought webOS to version 1.3.1, the update cycle has apparently slowed down. webOS 1.3.1 came out in mid-November and now we are nearing the new year with precious little word of another update. While normally a delay in updating webOS might not be a problem for me but webOS 1.3.1 has unfortunately introduced a rather serious bug which causes Motionapps' Classic emulator to be very unstable. Worse yet, just running Classic now can leave my Pre so sluggish that I have to reboot it both before and after using this program. And just to add insult to injury, apparently Motionapps has already fixed this bug but can't release the fix until Palm does its next update.
A perfect storm of incompetence. Suddenly the new Palm is starting to look a lot like the old Palm.
A perfect storm of incompetence. Suddenly the new Palm is starting to look a lot like the old Palm.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
For Your Sitting Pleasure
There is a building in downtown Chicago which has been under construction for quite some time. While it still is under construction, several stores have opened making for an interesting contrast between shiny, new stores and unfinished ones. It also has the coolest looking bench:
Christkindlmarket (sp?) in Daley Plaza
A lot of German-American food, tiny shops selling holiday and Germanic themed trinkets, and a lot of people milling about. And also a puppet show!
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Took a Walk in the Park...
It was about 34 degrees Fahrenheit today when I took a walk through the park, just barely above freezing. Usually the water fountains of Piotrowski Park are broken even in the summer. But on the way home, I chanced upon this one:
There's just something so interesting to me about the water in the fountain wears away the ice from previous, colder days.
There's just something so interesting to me about the water in the fountain wears away the ice from previous, colder days.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Textured Clouds
I like the mix of bright, thick, and fluffy clouds layered on top of dark, thin, and wispy clouds. The scene in both pictures was originally much brighter than what my phone's camera could capture but I think I like the pictures just the same even if I'm pretty sure that it's the edge of my finger at the bottom of that second picture....
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Art Near the El
I usually start my day by taking the train and there is some pretty interesting—is mural the right word?—near the station I usually use.
There is some pretty artsy Batman graffiti adorning a local parking lot:
And a more aspirational installation on the side of a church:
There is some pretty artsy Batman graffiti adorning a local parking lot:
And a more aspirational installation on the side of a church:
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Are Pink Clouds Effeminate?
I took this picture last month during the afternoon before Thanksgiving. My phone doesn't do it justice but I really liked the subtle interplay of the wispy pink cloud against the blue sky and bright, nearly full moon.
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