Viraj's Weblog

From Ghost Plane:

If inspiration is the key to how the terrorist network now functions, then an attempt to destroy terrorism by killing or capturing key leaders (and rendering those survivors off to forgotten jails) may head off some particular attacks, but it is doomed to be strategically unsuccessful. New leaders and new cells simply will emerge. While torture may persuade one of these leaders to talk and talk, the likelihood is they have no idea what is being planned, even in their name, around the world. They have no idea where the ticking bombs lie.

The lesson from this analysis is not defeatist. It does not suggest that the war on terror is unwinnable. Rather, it suggests that the key battleground is the realm of ideas; that the effort to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world, and counter militant Muslim thinking, outweighs the illusory short-term advantages of resorting to the tactics of repression. Just as Soviet communism foundered when even its own leaders realized that its basic principles were bankrupt, so the most violent ideas of the Islamic jihad must also be shown to be ineffective and unrewarding. Winning this war of ideas is not, though, just about propaganda. It also means getting the policies right. Western policies and ideas must be the ones that inspire people in the Middle East. These ideas must become far more potent than anything Osama bin Laden could ever tell Al Jazeera from his cave.

I loved the Wallace and Gromit movie. The comedy is both intelligent and hilarious. So when I heard Flushed Away was the first CGI movie by the same writer, I had to see it.

This was a great movie. What's really amazing is every character is so unique and interesting. Jean Reno as 'Le Frog' is one of the funniest in my opinion. He is one of the villains, of course from France, and pokes fun at everything French. Some dialogue before going after their victims:

Le Frog: We leave immediately!
[strides off screen]
Henchfrog #1: What about supper?
Le Frog: [strides back on screen] We leave in five hours!

The comedy is of the Shrek-style, which both appeals to adults and children. There are some subtle things, such as a warning label on a liquid nitrogen tank saying 'WARNING: Rather Cold'. My favorite characters are the slugs, who pop in and out of scenes singing do-wop songs. When they are frightened, they scream and run frantically, but are only able to move a few inches at a time and don't get very far. Or when they are excited, they want to high-five, but sadly realize they have no arms. It's just hilarious.

The way the movie breathes life into such innocuous characters really makes it enjoyable.

I've been a big fan of Aronofsky. He always pushes the limits in his movies. Requiem for a Dream is probably one my favorite movies of all time. Even Pi ranks up there as well. His films' use of the Snorricam and other cinematography techniques are just amazing.

So I was pretty psyched to see The Fountain. The reviews seemed rather bad to me, and opening night was in a pretty small theatre with not many people.

So how was the movie? All I can say is WTF? I did not like this movie at all. Granted, some of the scenes are poetically beautiful, but it's pushed down your throat in such a monotonous and drawn out way that you feel like the director is trying to milk the audience as much as possible. I think there was at least 20 minutes of facial closeup shots of people crying or on the verge of crying. Some scenes were so quiet it just didn't even seem like a movie. I could actually sense the audience getting uncomfortable at times. I'm all for movies being realistic, but let's face it, movies need to have style and be artistic enough to engage our attention. It's the skill of a director to make a boring story into something fantastic.

The biggest thing that I found so interesting in Requiem for a Dream was how low it was willing to pull the audience into its descension into hell. That movie conveyed a true spiraling downwards, getting worse and worse shaking the viewer to his core. There are a few scenes that almost feel like a DJ cutting and scratching, except with film. This was essentially the director's expertise at work, and I loved it. I remember feeling almost exhausted after watching that and thinking to myself, "now that was a movie." Movies push emotional buttons, and that movie took a sledgehammer to the emotional control panel.

But there was nothing genuine or unique in The Fountain. It's just Hugh Jackman meditating, and everyone crying. Rinse and repeat. There are some scenes that are truly Aronofsky, like the way he conveys closeness of people. The 'love' scenes he does, depicting the way human bodies touch each other, are truly amazing. That's probably the only saving grace of this film.

The movie's moral is nothing new to anyone who has studied eastern religions. It is essentially trying to convey one of the tenets of Buddhism: without death there is no life. i.e. Accept death. The best review I've seen so far is describing it as "a feature-length fortune cookie.".

Read a good article in the latest Discover magazine. My favorite line:

You are the descendant of the descendant of the descendant of what was left bleeding but alive on the sidelines after evolution's violent filter swept over deep time.

I attended a talk at Berkeley about 9/11 possibly being an inside job. Now that's pretty crazy, but what I found very interesting is the WTC7 building. This was another building that came down, but it's cause was rather suspicious: fire. It must have been absent from most news coverage too, because it's the first I've heard of it. They showed lots of videos comparing it to a controlled demolition. And you know what? It's actually pretty convincing.

strace is the swiss army knife for sysadmins. Here is a nice article on debugging Apache with strace.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

So begins the movie with lines from the Gospel of Thomas. I wasn't sure what to expect from this movie as there wasn't any advertising for it, almost as if there was an effort made to make it unknown. Even the website has nothing about the movie, instead showcasing shit like Saw III and other Lionsgate films. Great ad campaign huh?

I think it is a rather important documentary. It's about Catholic priests and pedophilia, mostly about an Irish priest named Oliver O'Grady. It was almost unbearable to watch as the children (many of whom are now grown up) and parents were interviewed. The amount of trust the families put into the priest, allowing him to sleep at their place, etc, was great. The thoughts of child abuse never crossed their minds.

There is a harrowing scene where the parents describe finding out of the allegations in the newspaper. They had so much trust in the priest that they comforted him, saying "If you've done nothing wrong, then you should not worry." But in the back of their mind they wondered about their daughter. Now a mature woman, the mother called her and asked if the priest ever touched her during her childhood. "I have to go," she says and hangs up. Then the mother asked the father to call and ask the same question, knowing that she never lies to her father. He did, and the daughter says "Yes." The girl was raped at 5 years old. Their whole life came tumbling down. The father asked his daughter, "Why didn't you tell me?" She never spoke up because her father had once told her he would kill anyone that touched her. She was afraid of her father being put in jail. Can you imagine living such a life?

The father's interviews were really sad, and he openly claimed that there can be no God. He had lost all of his faith.

Another tale is of a boy abused by the same priest. Now probably in his mid-twenties, he was calm at first describing the situation, but lost it at some point. When he walked by the place where it happened, he cried, "That's where he fucking sodomized me." "When I'm close to a girl... I remember what happened." These scars are deep. One of the 'rape' victims was a 9-month old baby. A grown 'man of God' molesting a baby... it is just horrifically mind boggling.

The interviews with O'Grady eerily reminded me of Robert Deniro in Cape Fear. This is a guy that is fooling himself thinking that his sins can be washed away. He even invites all of the children to his home in Ireland (more than 50 children) to speak with him "one on one" so they can all continue to live their lives. "I would kill his mother," one of the abused angrily says. I found O'Grady's actions very selfish. If he wanted to repent, he should spend his time trying to prevent such abuses from continually happening. You see, he spent about 7 years in prison, then was sent to Ireland with all expenses paid by the Catholic church. Now he roams around other children.

This is a real problem. The movie explains that the priests, all their lives being celibate, see children as their 'psychosexual peers' and target them. O'Grady himself was abused during his childhood by a priest and his brother. His brother abused his sister, and that is where O'Grady thinks he 'learned' his behavior. I found it interesting that celibacy was not originally required for priesthood, or so the movie claims. Before, priests had wives and family. But there was a problem. When the priests died, their property would go to the wife or children. The church wanted ownership, and so brought forth celibacy. Could the motivating factor for celibacy in priesthood be money?

I was especially sickened by the corporation-like mentality of the whole Catholic system. One of the abused says, "Religion took a wrong turn." Indeed. Now I'm well aware that such activities are an exception, and there are many 'good' churches out there. Honestly, I think they should allow priests to marry. Why build up the 'psychosexual' tension in the first place?

As one of those interviewed says, "The only time Jesus was angry was in a church."

This week I'm in Seattle attending OSDI. Google presented 2 papers that were fun to watch: Bigtable and Chubby . Check both of those blogs for interesting comments. What was rather humorous was after each Google talk, Yahoo and Microsoft employees stormed the microphone with questions. It's nice to see the little fights being picked .

I'm flying back to Mountain View tomorrow. I made sure to send in my absentee ballot, and am glad with the results. At least one of my nights here was in a drunken stupor. The weather is pretty bad, but I think Seattle is a wonderful place.

Here's an interesting interview with the ipodlinux guys. They are doing some amazing work:

Unfortunately the bootloader which was previously a wealth of information was unavailable and so we had to revert to picking through, literally, millions of lines of assembly to obtain any information on the new hardware. In the end we found enough to build a simple program that could generate two different tones using the inbuild speaker (the clicker, or piezo). Using this code one of our enterprising hackers played a tune of ones and zeros representing the firmware which was then recorded in a custom-built recording studio and then decoded the tune to obtain the original firmware image! From there it was still another few months painstakingly going over assembly dumps to reverse engineer the new CPU.

I'm reading 'Core Python Programming 2nd Edition' and came across what I believe is an error in an example. Here is what I sent the author:

380-381 :: 10.3.10 : open() can throw IOError

I have some general comments on this section. You describe two ways of using try-finally-except. The first method was:

try:
  try:
    ccfile = open('carddata.txt ', 'r')
    txns = ccfile.readlines()
  except IOError:
    log.write('no txns this month\n')
finally:
  ccfile.close()

But if open() fails, an IOError will be thrown, and ccfile will be undefined. The code in finally: will attempt to close that undefined variable, and throw a NameError.

The second method was:

try:
  try:
    ccfile = open('carddata.txt', 'r')
    txns = ccfile.readlines()
  finally:
    ccfile.close()
except:
  log.write('no txns this month\n')

But this suffers from the same problem. If open() fails, you attempt to close an undefined variable.

-- EOM

What's the better way to do this?

try:
  ccfile = open('carddata.txt', 'r')
except IOError:
  log.write('failed to open file\n')
else:
  try:
    try:
      txns = ccfile.readlines()
    except IOError:
      log.write('no txns this month\n')
  finally:
    ccfile.close()

Yuck.. anything better? In Python 2.5, you can clean this a bit:

try:
  ccfile = open('carddata.txt', 'r')
except IOError:
  log.write('failed to open file\n')
else:
  try:
    txns = ccfile.readlines()
  except IOError:
    log.write('no txns this month\n')
  finally:
    ccfile.close()

Still yucky though... The author of the book acknowledged the errata and credited me. He also gives a better solution, setting

ccfile = None

before the block and an

if ccfile:

test before closing.

I got to see Richard Dawkins give a talk at a local bookstore. He has a following that is almost religiously fanatic . I don't think he is saying anything new. He's just very loud about atheism. I thought his critique of Biblical religions rather one-sided. If you are going to bash religion, at least do some homework and study other religions.

I've wondered, aside from religion, where do we learn humility? I think the idea of believing in something much greater than yourself gives you an ideal to live your life by, and a striving to reach that unreachable goal. I would think that most people consider their God to be the ultimate role model, and is a source of inspiration for radical thoughts and ideas (both good and bad).

I think faith is really the important part of religion. The 'leap of faith' is probably something helps people get around hard times and obstacles in their lives.

Religion is part of evolution after all, and it evolved in societies for a reason, likely starting with a confusion about death. It's not hard to imagine the first humans seeing their fellows die and wondering what happens, and even not accepting that death is the end. Death and after-life is something that pervades most religions, and have acceptable explanations for their followers. Honestly, I think the question about religion is really the question about death.

Here's an interesting documentary on 'endtimers', oh rapturous ones.