Viraj's Weblog

Took a bike ride to the AMC Mercado today to check out Doubt. It's generally about a priest accused of improper behavior with a student. It is based on a play, and through some of the dialogue you can tell. In fact it's mostly dialogue. It's an intelligent drama that works well on the big screen. Meryl Streep's performance is just amazing. I mean, she plays a really mean person, but does it flawlessly. There are really interesting subtleties she does that add so much to her character, like the way her eyes shift and the tilting of her neck. She is filled with distrust, for everyone.

I was surprised at just how comical the movie was, taking some rather taboo subject matter and still being able to find funny moments. Though I've never been in a Catholic school, it seemed to capture it pretty well and had a standard mean nun against little boys theme. The 'battle' scenes are between the nun (Streep) and the priest, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, also a great actor.

There is a certain subtext in the film that almost makes fun of religion and its formalities. The scenes in the rectory are especially interesting. As the priest and nun argue, they take turns sitting in the seat behind the desk. It becomes almost like a circus, with each side swapping deference depending on their position in the room. The writer is definitely poking fun at religion and the fact that those considered holy fall to the same evils as everyone else. The one hope is the happy-go-lucky nun who initially loves everyone and is mean to no one. She undergoes a change by the end of the movie, and it seems almost brought about by the bureaucracy of religion.

I would even go so far to say the movie is anti-religion. Judging by the high reviews, it makes sense. These days you can't make a movie glorifying religion and get good reviews. Atheists will shoot your movie down. It reminded me of the religious attacks in There Will Be Blood. In that movie, religious corruption is attacked physically, again with a subtle attack on organized religion itself.

Doubt takes a different approach, as if it is saying there are some good things in religion. It says only pay attention to aspects like compassion and love. It says disregard the institutionalized formalities and illogical faith. It's really saying what most agnostics think: religious text is literature, nothing more. There are some great stories in the Bible, and some really bad ones too. The characters in the movie seem like a dying breed, forever walled inside their concrete garden shielded from the city's non-religion. Various infiltrations come in the form of technology like ball-point pens and radios. The nun refuses to accept them, and even accuses the wind of changing like never before. But these things creep in anyways as a constant threat, and it's inevitable that the religious figures will be overwhelmed. It's subtle, but I think this movie shows more of a death of religion than anything else. Caveat emptor.

It's been almost a year since I released a version of Movie Vote. In that time I had been rewriting the UI in Java with Google Web Toolkit off and on. That started out as an experiment because I hated Javascript so much. I liked GWT so much I went full-on with it. Now the server side of my app is mostly JSON interfaces, and the UI is AJAXy without any Javascript written by me. I was glad to 'svn rm' the horrible Javascript I had in my previous versions. With GWT and Java, type checking is done before I deploy and I no longer have to worry about variable misspellings and other stupidness when writing JS.

Anyway, just in time for the holidays, I give you Movie Vote v1.5.

In general, web programming is really not my thing. No matter what language I'm writing a UI in, I'm just not a UI developer. I can guess as to what I think is a cool interface but this is better left to UI designers. I now have a screenshot on the project page. That minimal-looking interface involved a lot of code!

Upon reading some reviews of this movie, it sounded like a feel-good racial harmony picture. I've liked Eastwood's directing and acting. He is a masterful storyteller, so I decided to check this out. What's interesting about this film was how gritty and real it felt. Eastwood has a knack for getting at the primitive feelings in characters. The lead character proudly says racist remarks, and at times he really means bad by them. It's those gut feelings that all humans have when they see someone that looks different from them. But it's not only other races he dislikes. It's generally anyone that's not like him, including his priest. Clint Eastwood can show hatred in his facial expressions like no one else.

The film is basically old war man meets gangland violence. Even though he's been through war, he's no match for the stupidity of kids with guns. He walks a tightrope pushing everyone's buttons, and eventually he knows what's coming. It's a good movie that shows the sign of our times. I especially like the comical parts. Some of them are racist and vulgar, but it's not done in a mean-spirited way at all. The characters understand they are different and are ok with brutally making fun of each other.

The plot has some unlikely dramatic events. But then again it wouldn't be a movie if it didn't.

I'm a fan of Primer, so this new movie about time travel intrigued me. It's another low budget flick. Turns out it was only playing in San Jose, so I decided to take the 30-mile bike ride (15 miles each way) to check it out.

First a word about my bike ride. I took this route and going there in the daytime was an enjoyable ride. Biking back on a Saturday night was not fun at all. I think I almost got killed twice. Both times were oncoming cars making left turns and not seeing me coming. I've noticed that drivers around here are getting worse, and today I need to buy a brighter light. As a biker, I'm also used to the standard yelling out of windows. One passenger tried to scare me by yelling "Boom!" like a gunshot as they passed me. Heh, maybe I should start carrying a gun with me?

Anyway, about the movie. It was pretty fun and dealt with the common doppelganger theme. These movies are funny because they try to portray recursion dramatically. I'm always interested in how they do it and whether it actually makes sense visually. Luckily this only recursed a few levels deep and was intriguing to follow. It's dubbed as a horror/sci-fi, and there are some scenes of blood, but not much. It's a case where a man finds a time machine. But he could not have found the time machine if he had not been led to it by a double that found it and went back in time. Repeat.

For a low budget film, it was nicely done. It's one of those films where things happen that don't make much sense. However, after some iterations, it does.

I'm reading a rather amazing book called Before the Dawn. It's pretty much the written version of a great documentary called The Journey of Man. Both of these tell the story of human migration and evolution out of Africa following the same Y chromosome all males share and the mitochondrial DNA all females share. These essentially came from our evolutionary Adam and Eve.

One of the interesting concepts is just how much warfare was likely in primitive societies. Think of the time when there were different human-like species. Do you think we got along well? Not so. One species survived, and for a reason. Daily there were extermination campaigns. Every day you were hunted or hunting. Follow chimp warfare and you get a glimpse of how the pre-humans must have been like. Hunting in groups, finding a lone 'outsider', and then jumping him to destroy him and his legacy. It must have been a vicious time to live in.

A small group of people started the population we now call humans. They left Africa and formed bubbles of societies as they traveled to new lands. Out of each of those bubbles left a few more humans, eventually finding a new land and again settling. Some stayed, some left. The cycle repeats, and eventually you have the different nations and races we have today.

We have come a long way. Animals gathering in groups larger than 50 require a lot of brain power to read others and work together.

One principle that biologists think may help explain larger societies, both human and otherwise, is that of reciprocal altruism, the practice of helping even a nonrelated member of society because they may return the favor in [the] future. A tit-for-tat behavioral strategy, where you cooperate with a new acquaintance, and thereafter follow his strategy toward you (retaliate if he retaliates, cooperate if he cooperates), turns out to be superior to all others in many circumstances. Such a behavior could therefore evolve, providing that a mechanism to detect and punish freeloaders evolves in parallel; otherwise freeloaders will be more successful and drive the conditional altruists to extinction.

Conditional tit-for-tat altruism cannot evolve in just any species. It requires members to recognize each other and have long memories, so as to be able to keep tally.

The book then goes and gives an example of the vampire bat, whose societies do just this.

Many common emotions can be understood as being built around the expectation of reciprocity and the negative reaction when it is made to fail. If we like a person, we are willing to exchange favors with them. We are angry at those who fail to return favors. We seek punishment for those who take advantage of us. We feel guilty if we fail to return a favor, and shame if publicly exposed. If we believe someone is genuinely sorry about a failure to reciprocate, we trust them. But if we detect they are simulating contrition, we mistrust them.

Think of how much information processing this requires and you can imagine how our brains might have evolved.

Reciprocity, and an ability to calculate the costs and benefits of cooperation, underpin our social life, writes the economist Paul Seabright, "making it reasonable for us to treat strangers as though they were honorary relatives or friends." It is remarkable that this behavior evolved at a time when primitive warfare was at its most intense and people had every reason to regard strangers with deep suspicion. Strangers can still be dangerous, yet in the right circumstances we habitually trust them....

making it possible "to step nonchalantly out of the front door of a suburban house and disappear into a city of ten million strangers." Without this innate willingness to trust strangers, human societies would still consist of family units a few score strong, and cities and great economies would have had no foundation for existence.

...

Trust is an essential part of the social glue that binds people together in cooperative associations. But it increases the vulnerability to which all social groups are exposed, that of being taken advantage of by freeloaders. Freeloaders seize the benefits of social living without contributing to the costs. They are immensely threatening to a social group because they diminish the benefits of sociality for others and, if their behavior goes unpunished, they may bring about the society's dissolution.

I can't help but be reminded of the scheming financial practices that many fell victim to. Sure you can pay that $1 million mortgage, don't worry. Trust me. Sure you can have a credit card with your awful credit. Trust me.

Human societies long ago devised an antidote to the freeloader problem. This freeloader defense system, a major organizing principle of every society, has assumed so many other duties that its original role has been lost sight of. It is religion.

Can it be that the lack of this freeloader eviction system, be it religion or whatever, what has led us to the economic meltdown we are seeing? I think that religion is dying, and it is evident in almost every aspect of daily life. But what will replace the handling of freeloaders? I have to wonder if hundreds of years from now there will still be the concept of guilt and shame. Will our trust for others diminish?

Here is a great episode of PBS' NOW explaining the role of credit rating agencies in the financial meltdown.

Upon first glancing at the IMDB page for this movie I thought it was a Bollywood one, and I'm not much of a fan of those. Then I saw the director 'Danny Boyle'. This guy did some awesome movies like Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later. One thing about all of those movies is the great use of music, almost as if the music is driving the movie. Slumdog is like that too, and the best way I can describe it is an Indian version of City of God.

I think most people didn't expect to see so much violence in the movie, but it really brings to light the fallacy of what many people think India is like: some exotic place where everyone is nice. The movie gets pretty brutal as it follows a boy rising out of the slums. Granted, there are other movies like Salaam Bombay! that also do a good job of showing the seedy side of India. However, the vivid cinematography in Slumdog is unmatched.

Boyle does a great job of filming the trains with the same technical fascination as a boy with a Lego set. Everything about the movie is just really nicely done.

Charlie Kaufman is a great writer who normally takes melancholy trips into the psyche. His earlier movies like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation have a fairly humorous tone about them. Synechdoche is labeled a 'Comedy' in IMDB, but I don't think I or the audience laughed once during the movie. There were some amusing moments, and they were funny in a way because they are true to human thought, but also uncomfortable to admit. Synechdoche is pronounced like Schenectady. Yes, I had to look it up because I wanted to know how to pronounce the movie I'm buying a ticket for.

I honestly wanted to walk out of this movie about 30 minutes from the end. It just became a bit non-sensical with characters becoming other characters. Then I realized Kaufman employs a similar technique in his other films: recursion. Adaptation had an author writing a book about an author writing a book ... In this movie he blurs the line between the characters people portray and the real characters (also actors). He's generally conveying the philosophical idea of humans constantly changing their portrayals of who they are based on interactions with others.

From Ebert's review:

Here is how it happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace -- whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.

The movie is dream-like, with time whizzing by without any indication. It's really about hopes and failures, and how we are all actors in our own plays. There was a bit too much self-pity. Just when I was almost fed up, the ending was something that really brought it all together. Philosophically it is not a new groundbreaking idea, but it's a good portrayal. It's a really sad and hopeless ending, but it made sense. The director becomes the directed. At every point there is a voice in his ear telling him how to respond to the world, until he is directed to let go and die.

Good interview.

Here is a pretty good article on parental gene battles. A quote:

One of the most striking contrasts between autism and schizophrenia is how they affect the ability to understand others. Autistic people have a difficult time figuring out what other people are feeling. Schizophrenic people, on the other hand, sometimes do too good a job. They may come to believe that a refrigerator is talking to them, for example, or that people are conspiring against them.

Here is a great speech by Bill Moyers at a media reform conference. His words are very inspiring.

Amy Goodman, one of the few journalists out there doing real news coverage, was arrested at the RNC. This is on the heels of the police's pre-emptive raids of peaceful protesters in their homes. It's really a sad day when Americans are arrested for discussing non-violent civil disobedience. Are we living in communist China? It's absolutely idiotic to try to curtail dissidents in a supposedly free society. Without such people disagreeing, nothing ever changes, and it is the freedom to protest that makes this a great country. I'm reminded more and more of 1984, where one day you won't even be able to think subversive thoughts without getting your door knocked down.

Why do we accept these attacks on civil liberties? It's almost as if people don't really care about this until it happens to them. I sometimes feel us Americans are like the frog in the water which is slowly rising temperature. Take everything away at once, and we notice. But slowly erode away our freedoms, or slowly raise our cost of living until we can't live, and we go to our grave without ever noticing.

I'm reading "The Elements of Style." Some choice quotes:

Flammable. An oddity, chiefly useful in saving lives. The common word meaning "combustible" is inflammable. But some people are thrown off by the in- and think inflammable means "not combustible." For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable.

...

Hopefully. This once-useful adverb meaning "with hope" has been distorted and is now widely used to mean "I hope" or "it is to be hoped." Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly. To say, "Hopefully I'll leave on the noon plane" is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you'll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you'll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven't said it clearly. Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense.

...

Nature should be avoided in such vague expressions as "a lover of nature," "poems about nature." Unless more specific statements follow, the reader cannot tell whether the poems have to do with the natural scenery, rural life, the sunset, the untracked wilderness, or the habits of squirrels.

I remember a few years ago a high school took their students to see Spielberg's "Schindler's List". There is a scene where a lady is shot point blank in the head causing her head to flop back. Some of the students in the theater burst out into laughter. I believe at least one of those students was suspended or similarly punished, and there was a whole controversy about it in the news. I knew it was only the beginning. Comedy is so subjective, and what is one day very serious, only takes time to become very funny.

I feel like Tropic Thunder is that student's payback. This is a movie where that kind of laughter is the main goal. It is really over the top. The violence and vulgarity is just insane, and the movie manages to be incredibly funny. Yeah, it's ok to laugh at the extremely graphic disembowelment of a soldier, because behind it all is an intelligent satire.

Robert Downey Jr. is pretty amazing in it. For those that don't know, he plays an Australian who plays a black guy. His scenes were probably the funniest. Some really like Tom Cruise's cameo, but I thought it was a bit overkill.

The movie basically pokes fun at the movie business, and the fake trailers at the beginning are actually hard to distinguish from the real trailers just a few minutes before. It reminded me of "War, Inc." but less political and more acceptable to a wider audience. It's great fun if you have the stomach for it. A choice comment from IMDB:

If you are offended by this movie, then don't see it. Go see Space Chimps (good movie), unless you are going to be offended by degradation of Life on other Planets, etc.

Yeah, etc indeed.

An interesting article about banning spectators from the Olympics cycling event.

Relatives of Australian racing champion, Matthew Lloyd, managed to work their way through the heavily guarded finishing line by bribing a security official. But his mother Barbara Lloyd was told to leave the area, because she was cheering too much, The Herald reported.

After a relative was denied watching the race, they allowed her to watch TV:

She didn't have a ticket, normally you don't need a ticket to watch the road race,'' he said. "She flew over here from Australia to watch it and watched it on TV."

Come on, isn't a major part of a race having fans cheer you on?

The six hour race, in some of the most picturesque countryside, finished at the Great Wall but with not a spectator in sight.

I have to agree with Ebert on this one and say this movie is just absolutely wonderful. I didn't think such a story could be told without coming across as drab, but the way this movie is put together is a great achievement in filmmaking, not to say anything about the actual storyline. And there is a storyline, and it's portrayed better than most fictional heist movies.

But the main attraction is the characters themselves, and Philippe Petit is of course the star. Even at his late age, he comes across more lively than most children, and it is very infectious (however some may find it annoying). You have to really have a mind like a child to find him interesting, and that is a compliment. These type of people are very infectious, and they embody the human spirit in their achievement.

The movie is about a man attempting to walk a tightrope across the World Trace Center towers and essentially the buildup to that event. When it happens the audience is thrilled, and silent. The movie surreptitiously compares the tightrope to life itself, and how me must all walk on our own tightropes. I always found the act of living similar to walking on a tightrope. At any moment we can be knocked off. One small puncture through a few millimeters of our skin, one wrong turn on the highway, one small step, and we are tumbling down. As we age, it becomes more difficult to stay on the tightrope, and eventually no matter how much we try we can't stay on and finally drop off. The movie conveys this fact, and you appreciate life more coming out of the theater.

There is an amazing scene in the movie depicting the careful moments late in the evening as they prepare to string a wire across the World Trade Center towers. The cinematography here is just amazing. They are racing against time, and time is depicted as the rotating stars in the heavens and the lighthouse-like light at the top of the tower pulsating like a heartbeat. Meanwhile, in the front of the scene you see the silhouette of the characters hard at work trying to beat the morning light. It is really breathtaking and I don't even know how to explain it, but it captured everything the scene needed to convey.

I also found fascinatingly nostalgic the scenes of the actual building of the WTC towers. With the thought of them gone now, it really puts it into perspective just how much work was done building them and the human efforts made to create such tall structures. I found those scenes very somber and sad, to see all that hard work come crumbling down. But it also reminded me of the impermanence of everything, and just because we put so much effort into creating something, it will definitely not last forever.

The moral is you are on the rope whether you like it or not. Why not enjoy yourself and realize the magnificence of it all?

Before you consider taking that tryst in Dubai, heed this warning:

... sales manager Michelle Palmer, 30, was stopped by a policeman for allegedly having sex on Jumeirah beach two weeks ago with Vince Acors, 34 – a man she met only that night.

...

Sex before marriage in illegal in the UAE, as is being drunk in public, but for years authorities in Dubai have let westerners off with verbal warnings rather than prosecute.

...

The maximum punishment that Ms. Palmer could face is six years in jail. She is said to have been advised to marry Mr. Acors, who was on holiday in Dubai at the time, in order to reduce her sentence to two years.

...

“People have to understand that the act of kissing in Public considered normal by today's European standards is considered as a criminal offence according to UAE laws and customs. Of course the authorities in Dubai tend to be more tolerant than the other emirates in the interpretation and application of the laws but these laws are still in place and they can act upon them whenever the lines are crossed.”

I guess what happens in Dubai, stays in Dubai... for about 6 years .

This weekend I finally installed Leopard on my macs. I have an old Powerbook G4 15" and a Mac Mini. Both of them run it great (I have at least 1G RAM on each). At home I also have an Ubuntu server running on a laptop which I use for various Linux things. I've been sharing drives via Samba on it and hacked up my own backup scripts.

But with Leopard, there is this cool Time Machine thing I can use right? Well I wanted to use a network share via Samba with Time Machine. Turns out it is not so straightforward. OS X by default won't let you use the network drive. This post describes how to get around that. There is also a wealth of information here. Great, now I can select the network drive in Time Machine.

But now I was getting an error about creating the disk image. I watched a bit what it was actually trying to do on the Samba share and noticed that it was using the machine name in the filename being created, which is a 'sparsebundle' file. My machine name was something like 'Powerbook G4 15"' and I had a feeling the '"' or some other character in the filename was not playing well with Samba. So I changed my computer name (via Preferences -> Sharing) to some very simple name. Still no go .

After some searching I came across this post which seems to describe my problem. It generally suggests to create the disk image file manually and then copy it to the network share. But I wondered, why not try creating this directly on the network share? I should have the same problem Time Machine gave but perhaps I can get more information and debug further. So I tried it, but unfortunately the command given in the post was wrong. A few comments below describes the correct one (wtf don't they fix this?). Here is the command I ran:

hdiutil create -size 50g -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname "Backup of powerbook" powerbook_000d93b43026.sparsebundle

And I got the unsexy error:

hdiutil: create failed - Operation not supported

Fooey. Ok, I didn't get much debug info there. It sounds like some operation is being tried on the Samba share, but what? Next I followed the rules and created this image on a local drive. That worked fine. Now the post states to copy this image over, but I instead tried to 'mv' it. This should try to replicate everything at the destination and perhaps give me more info. It did:

mv /tmp/powerbook_000d93b43026.sparsebundle .
mv: chown: ./powerbook_000d93b43026.sparsebundle/bands/62: Operation not supported
... lots more
mv: chown: ./powerbook_000d93b43026.sparsebundle: Operation not supported
mv: /bin/cp: terminated with 1 (non-zero) status: Cross-device link

Interesting! So it looks like the real culprit here is 'chown'. OS X is trying to chown these directories on the Samba drive, which of course is not supported. Looking at the files created by hdiutil, it looks like it is trying to chown the group 'wheel':

powerbook_000d93b43026.sparsebundle valankar$ ls -lRa|more
total 16
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 valankar wheel 204 May 24 10:27 .
drwxrwxrwt 10 root wheel 340 May 24 10:27 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 valankar wheel 498 May 24 10:27 Info.bckup
-rw-r--r-- 1 valankar wheel 498 May 24 10:27 Info.plist
...

Whatever, knowing this is not helping me much. In fact, I just found another post where someone digged further. After copying it over (actually the 'mv' copied it just fine but bombed on the chowning), I enabled Time Machine and it generally worked. But it worked SLOW.

As an aside, I've generally had some slowness using Samba when it involves lots of intense disk access. Say I'm watching a video as well as recording something with EyeTV on the Samba share. It generally will clip the video pretty badly. No amount of Samba tuning on my part could improve this and I eventually gave up. But Time Machine was ridiculously slow, and it drove me to wonder, "WTF am I using Samba for anyway?" I mean seriously, I have no Windows boxes here. Why aren't I using Apple File Sharing? Surely Linux supports it right?

Thus began my journey into setting up netatalk (AFP) on Ubuntu. It was a short one and generally without hiccups. This page has some pretty good docs, however with Ubuntu there is one stickler. SSL support is not compiled into netatalk, and this is required for Leopard. The workaround is described here. Sheesh, why even include the package if it's essentially unusable? Well it works with Panther, albeit with a warning. But with Leopard you just get an error trying to connect.

Now how do I connect to my share? Well I have yet to figure out how to show my shares in Finder. Instead I have to go directly to Go -> Connect to server. In there I type the full path of the share, e.g.:

afp://system76/timemachine_powerbook

At this point I came across a problem. In my /etc/hosts file on the server I had something like:

127.0.1.1 system76 ...

And when I attempted to connect, it hung at trying to connect to 127.0.1.1. Evidently this IP is passed along over AFP. I fixed my /etc/hosts so my hostname was not pointing to a loopback (no idea why it was in the first place).

Voila, I have a network share now. Sadly, neither hdiutil nor Time Machine were able to create the disk image on the network drive, so I still needed to create the image locally and copy it over. But once I did it worked like a charm, and much faster than Samba. It's still pretty slow for the initial backup of about 20G (in fact I think it took like 12 hours), but after that it worked pretty well. I'm a bit worried how it will deal with large backups though, as it could be lots of traffic over the network.

Another thing I have to worry about is resizing the disk image. This post describes it somewhat, and it's likely I'll have to do that at some point.

I setup the same thing on my Mac Mini, so now I have 2 Time Machines going to the same share. Plus I have AFP setup and no more need for Samba. Good riddance!

One caveat. My syslogs are filling with:

May 26 09:02:33 system76 afpd[3651]: bad function 4F
May 26 09:03:05 system76 last message repeated 89 times
May 26 09:03:25 system76 last message repeated 163 times

Turns out this is some undocumented AFP call.

Update: And now I think I've lost faith in Time Machine network backups altogether. There is a great post describing the pitfalls of such a solution. Maybe it's time to move back to rsync snapshot backups.

I had an urge to record some of my borrowed acoustic guitar and here is what I ended up with. Unfortunately the acoustic is drowned out by everything else. Again, it was all created with open source software . I wanted to get progressively harder towards the end but it ended up just getting really noisy. Anyway it was a fun track to spend my weekend on.

For this recording I was kind've inspired by a track called Hovercraft by Space Mtn. Some of the bass line is similar. I'm getting a bit better with mixing sounds though I can only go so far with the electronic drums. Still I'm impressed with how clean of a sound Hydrogen and Ardour produce.

Today I picked up a bass guitar, the Yamaha RBX170. It's a pretty low end guitar , and I generally wanted to try to create some songs with a bass loop in them.

Well here is my first try. I played a whopping 2 notes on the bass . It will definitely take me a lot of practice to play it as it's a different beast from the regular electric guitar.

I haven't been practicing guitar as much as I'd like, but every now and then I spend a few hours attempting to play. Generally what I enjoy is trying to just guitar solo over some song played from my ipod.

This weekend I played with 2 open source tools: Hydrogen, a drum machine, and Ardour, a recording tool similar to Pro Tools. I'm using them on Mac and unfortunately some of the support is lacking. However I was able to record a tune. I created everything from scratch and I have to say I really love these free tools. I had the displeasure of using Pro Tools and just thought the whole thing was a racket intended to get people spending gobs of money on the software and training.

There's a really interesting article in the April 2008 issue of Discover magazine about the time before the Big Bang. All of the common theories seek to explain what happens right after the Big Bang, but what about before it? There are a couple of new theories floating about. One of them has to do with entropy. A condensed universe has very little entropy, but its explosion, and all that comes of that, including life, is the increase of that entropy. From the article:

In any such large groups of objects, the system tends toward equilibrium. Physicists use the term entropy to describe how far a system is from equilibrium. The closer it is, the higher its entropy; full equilibrium is, by definition, the maximum value. So the path from low entropy (all the molecules in one corner of the room, unstable) to maximum entropy (the molecules evenly distributed in the room, stable) defines the arrow of time. The route to equilibrium separates before from after. Once you hit equilibrium the arrow of time no longer matters, because change is no longer possible.

"Our universe has been evolving for 13 billion years," Carroll says, "so it clearly did not start in equilibrium." Rather, all the matter, energy, space, and even time in the universe must have started in a state of extraordinarily low entropy. That is the only way we could begin with a Big Bang and end up with the wonderfully diverse cosmos of today. Understand how that happened, Carroll argues, and you will understand the bigger process that brought our universe into being.

...

These high-entropy universes would be boring and inert; evolution and change would not be possible. Such a universe could not produce galaxies and stars, and it certainly could not support life.

This furthers the idea that life as we know it is simply the dissolution from a high-energy, low-entropic state to the dispersal of that energy. It's as if life is actually decay, or rather the steps along the way as energy decays towards the equilibrium state. Life is like the burning of a flame, and the process is really just these molecules and atoms heading towards the high-entropic state. In other words, it seems life is really the process of death! Death of energy.

Another intriguing idea in the article is that there is no time at all. Our idea of time is simply the result of different arrangements of matter. That is, at one point there is one configuration of matter in a universe, then what we define as a second, or minute, or hour later is another configuration of matter. If that configuration were not changing, there would be no time. This actually makes sense to me, because if you think of life a progression of energy, if that energy is static, you would not age, no cells would change in your body, and time would stand still.

In Platonia all possible configurations of the universe, every possible location of every atom, exist simultaneously. There is no past moment that flows into a future moment; the question of what came before the Big Bang never arises because Barbour's cosmology has no time. The Big Bang is not an event in the distant past; it is just one special place in Platonia.

Our illusion of the past comes because each Now in Platonia containts objects that appear as "records," in Barbour's language. "The only evidence you have of last week is your memory - but memory comes from a stable structure of neurons in your brain now. The only evidence we have of the earth's past are rocks and fossils - but these are just stable structures in the form of an arrangement of minerals we examine in the present. All we have are these records, and we only have them in this Now," Barbour says. In his theory, some Nows are linked to others in Platonia's landscape even though they all exist simultaneously. Those links create the appearance of a sequence from past to future, but there is no actual flow of time from one Now to another.

Very interesting stuff!

I've been reading a rather excellent book called The Living Cosmos. A major part of the book talks about how life possibly arose on Earth, and understanding its processes will help understand just how obvious such similar processes must be happening elsewhere.

One of the interesting theories is that since evolution requires variation through mutations, one way to increase the number of mutations is through radiation. This gives rise to all sorts of strange scenarios, where the sun, or even a nearby supernova or hypernova, could release some radiation that causes major shifts in the evolutionary fitness on Earth. The possibilities are endless.

But what really got me thinking is the concept of life itself. It turns out this is a very hard thing to define. Most scientists equate metabolism with life. Let's think about this for a minute, and look beyond the complex cells we have today, back to when the first complex molecules started to form. Why would they form?

The book has an excellent picture showing solar radiation being converted to heat, which is an increase in entropy towards a more probable state. So we go from a condensed improbable energy state to a dispersed probable energy state. Think of a gas spreading in a room. The steady state is when there is more entropy. Now, between this beginning and end stages are other stages that harness the energy. These are molecular bonds such as ATP. So energy is flowing from the sun, being captured by molecules with the creation of bonds, and finally being released by those molecules by the breakage of those bonds. It's a stairway effect, where energy trickles down. It's being harnessed, or stored, but eventually released in some way. Another similar process is radioactive decay, where you have elements themselves changing at an atomic level by electron states. An electron is raised to some level by the inflow of energy, and then moves to another level by the release of that energy. In complex molecules the release could be through mechanical energy, waste production, etc. It's all just a transfer and harnessing of energy.

Is this not the process of life itself? Let's now think about how such complex molecules like cells and their replication processes might have evolved. Let's say solar energy starts forming some complex molecules which we would consider lifeless. Again, these are forming through the harnessing, or rather the catching, of solar energy. Sort of like fusing material together if you will. The atoms are simply the road the solar energy travels, and the forming of molecules essentially the 'damage' the energy does on the road. Now these molecules want to revert back to their more probable state of more entropy. That is, they want to break those bonds and go back to the state they were in before the sun ran them over. So they do, but the sun comes back again to do damage. This creates a cycle, but the complex formations are completely reliant on the sun.

Now, let's say you are that molecule relaxing or breaking your bonds to go back to what you were. In that process you release some energy (again, the stairway). That energy could affect another molecule next to you. Remember all of this is happening on a much grander scale, so many varied molecules could be forming. Let's now suppose a neighbor molecule takes as input you in your probable state and spits you back out in your improbable high-energy state. Something like a stencil, where the input may be some collection of elements (along with solar energy) and the output being an advanced molecule similar to what the sun did on its own.

Now what happens? A cycle is created! While one molecule is breaking apart, another is there taking the very energy released by the breaking apart to create a brand new original molecule. But it can't go on forever because at some point there is energy wastage through heat, so the sun must come in again and add energy the process. This eerily sounds like night and day. How can it go on at night? With the storage of the energy that happened during the day of course.

Let's call the 2nd molecule the replicator, because it is actually recreating the 1st molecule. Here you can see we are not fabricating molecules out of nothingness, but rather always reusing what is in the environment. What you have is a chain reaction. Could such a reaction be the birth of life as we know it? Extrapolate this to much more complex molecules, and we can begin to envision how DNA and replicating proteins might have evolved. It's just all on a much more higher level. Take the original replicator pair of molecules and let's say they are considered a whole molecule by another much larger replicator. In other words, you could have recursion going on, where a replicator replicates a replicator .

It becomes apparent that to continue life you need to recycle what once was into something new. As long as you have the energy input you can do this. Once energy is used out of molecules they breakdown, but you need to create more for future work. This is the very essence of replication. That is, survival depends on replication with stored energy.

Many spark of life experiments involve putting ingredients in a bottle and submitting it to some high energy like electricity. But I wonder, is this the wrong approach? Instead, shouldn't we be trying to model molecules that would exhibit a chain reaction with even the minimal amounts of energy? This chain reaction would be further tweaked as it's progressing because there would be changes in radiation (the sun's energy wouldn't be uniform, and you'd have radiation sources other than the sun). I find it hard to believe that life started abruptly with some spark. If you consider life as progression down the energy stairwell perspective it all seems to make sense that complex energy-harnessing organisms would arise. We can consider a lifeform simply as a very large molecule with high-energy bonds, ready to break to perform any of the physical powers that such lifeforms will have. They can pick up objects, they can reproduce, they can eat, etc. Taken on a much grander level we as humans could just be another step in the stairwell towards entropy.

Why did I name this blog 'Life as waste elimination'? Well partly because I am sick, and partly because I look at waste elimination similar to the energy released through breakage of molecular bonds. The scheme can be applied at the cellular, molecular, and even atomic levels with electrons.

These days the buzzword seems to be "hypervisor". It's a general term for what VMware is. One thing I've always found to be a good use case for virtualization is testing new and possibly broken configurations. These past few days I've been food poisoned and working from home recovering, but it did give me a chance to play around with the latest Linux virtualization: KVM.

KVM in this sense is not that hardware device to connect one monitor to multiple machines, so the choice of naming is unfortunate. It is based on QEMU, however there are kernel hooks to make things go faster by utilizing virtualization features on certain processors. What's great is recent distributions have it simply as a kernel module that doesn't require any kernel patching.

First some background. Why am I interested in this? Well in my case I run a website on Apache (who doesn't). I've been hearing some good things about lighttpd and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. However, I didn't want to muddy my current Apache server with lighttpd. I simply wanted another system to play around with, preferably one that didn't require hardware. So this seemed like a perfect case to try out the completely free KVM.

Now my host OS (the OS that will run KVM) is a Ubuntu 7.10 server. It actually runs on a closed laptop, so essentially I have no display on it and only connect to it remotely. Most virtualization software these days are GUI apps unless you buy the horribly expensive 'server' products. I was somewhat pleasantly surprised as to how KVM worked in my scenario. Ideally I wanted to run a guest OS the same as my host OS, Ubuntu 7.10, so that's what I started with.

First I installed the kvm package:

sudo aptitude install kvm

Easy enough, next I modprobe the right modules:

sudo modprobe kvm
sudo modprobe kvm_intel

I should point out you need to have a processor that supports KVM. See their web page for more info. Now it get's a bit confusing. In some documentation there is mention of running "qemu-system-x86_64", however on my box this is the unaccelerated version that makes no use of KVM's kernel modules. I'm not sure what's going on here, but I believe at some point QEMU and KVM will merge code, and maybe this is the reason for the documentation discrepancy. Anyhow, for my case, I had to use "kvm" to start up my virtual machine. So I downloaded the Ubuntu 7.10 server ISO and begun my journey. First I needed to create a disk image. Interestingly, these disk images only take up space as you add to them, similar to VMware:

qemu-img create -f qcow vdisk.img 10G 

This creates a 10G-maximum disk image. Now we're ready to begin the installation:

sudo kvm -hda vdisk.img \
  -cdrom ubuntu-7.10-server-i386.iso \
  -boot d -m 384 -vnc 192.168.1.137:0.0 \
  -no-acpi

This simply boots the VM with the Ubuntu server CD and 384M of RAM. It's recommended to use -no-acpi, so I did. Now BAM I get an "exception 6" and a crash immediately (as described here). My foray is not starting off well . After more searching I came across this bug which hinted that this was maybe fixed in a newer version of Ubuntu. Huh? So something in Ubuntu is causing this crash? Searching further I found this thread which gives more info:

Confirmed here with kvm-intel and KVM 39. Invalid opcode (#UD) is probably caused by the boot spash code which may be using big real mode code.

So indeed, something in Ubuntu was doing it. So I decided to try grabbing the bleeding edge Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" server. After some thumb twiddling it now boots!

Now remember how I have no display on this box? Well the convenient -vnc argument creates a VNC server that I can connect to remotely! This is all great, but kvm also supports X, and actually I do most of my work from an OS X X terminal. Why not just use the X interface? Well on OS X, the keyboard becomes completely unusable in KVM for some reason. It could be something retarded in the X server. Anyhow, for VNC, there is Chicken of the VNC, by far the stupidest package name ever. It generally works well though, however when I tried to connect to my VM I was getting some invalid rectangle error. It seems everything was against my trying to get this working . After much experimentation, I found that I had to simply disable Hextile encoding in the VNC connection profile and voila, I can connect.

Now I thought to myself, I'm going to be running a webserver on this, don't I need some kind of network setup? Well once I confirmed things are booting ok, I did some research on KVM networking. Essentially what I wanted is my VM to appear just like a separate machine on the network with full network access. KVM has all sorts of networking possibilities, but here is my setup. First I updated /etc/network/interfaces to look like:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
  bridge_ports eth0
  bridge_maxwait 2
  up /sbin/ifconfig eth0 inet 0.0.0.0 promisc

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
  address 172.16.5.0
  netmask 255.255.255.0

This generally came from this Ubuntu KVM doc. The IP above is actually a bogus one that won't be used. Rebooting (alas, I did have to reboot) gave me a br0 and eth0 device listed via 'ifconfig'.

My host machine still worked so that's good.

Now how to start the VM with networking? Simple:

sudo kvm -hda vdisk.img -m 384 \
  -vnc 192.168.1.137:0.0 \
  -no-acpi -net nic -net tap

I went through the install with no problems at all and it got an IP via DHCP on my router. Sweet.

Now one thing that was bothering me about all of this is that spiny sudo prefix. I would've liked to not use sudo. This forum thread mentions a possible solution but I had no luck with tunctl and I didn't feel like spending too much time on it.

So I got my cool VM working, now what? For what reason am I on this Earth? On my main web server I have a Django site running under Apache. What I wanted to try is running this with FastCGI under lighttpd. Now I have to admit, lighttpd configuration is a much nicer experience than Apache configuration.

Take a look at my lighttpd.conf. My virtualhost is defined at the bottom, and is taken mostly from the Django fastcgi docs. lighttpd has a very simple and elegant configuration. Note that I had to modify some of the modules loaded, and the Django docs seem to indicate the ordering is important. Once I started up my Django site in fcgi mode my site was instantly accessible, and FAST. At least, very fast for a virtual machine!

So what have I learned from all of this? Well KVM is cool, and one of these days it is going to beat out its commercial counterparts. Also, lighttpd is cool. Cooler than Apache I must say. It will definitely be coming to more web servers near you.

So here is an MP3 of a creation I made in Garage Band, attempting to do the Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven guitar solo. It's pretty bad, but hopefully has at least some resemblance to the song heh.

I totally expected this to be a chick flick, and in many ways it was. However, the high ratings made me want to see it. I am wholly impressed. This was a great movie, not to mention the cool music. Honestly, it was the first movie that I've seen that looks at childbirth as a completely ordinary thing, and not a wondrous climax. The characters give off the impression that this sort of thing has been going on for a hundred thousand years, and they all take on the heir of nonchalance and understanding. The parents especially react to their 16-year-old daughter's pregnancy in a way that is very unconventional and refreshing for a movie.

The star is Ellen Page, whom I remembered as a vengeful girl in Hard Candy. Her acting here is rather flawless, and I think she is one of the best of her generation. It's rather amazing to see someone so young with such skill. She will definitely be winning some awards, and keep an eye out for her in other movies.

There were many scenes that made me laugh because the characters seemed so genuinely unique. The music throughout is some great indie music that contributes to all the scenes wonderfully. The movie is generally about adolescence, maturity, and pregnancy. It sounds serious, but is actually rather charming. I guarantee you'll find at least one character in the movie you can identify with. I definitely recommend it.

This movie was hyped as being produced by Guillermo Del Toro, who directed the pretty awesome Pan's Labyrinth. It's strange how a director's fame is used to sell another movie that's not even directed by him. Anyway, it got me interested as well as the good reviews, so I went and saw it.

The theater had a lot of kids in it likely expecting some shock/horror. In fact I saw a few leave after the movie didn't turn out to be what they expected. One thing about artsy theaters is the moviegoers have more respect for the film and stay quiet. At the big AMC's, the benefit of stadium seating is devalued by being packed with noisy kids. I sometimes feel like donating some money to the small theaters so they can improve their seating.

Anyway, 'The Orphanage' is a rather slow moving ghost story. It's a bit similar to 'The Others', but I thought that film was better. This film definitely has a lot of atmosphere and has that going for it, but the slow storyline almost seems abrupt as it's punctuated with some shock moments. Even the non-shock moments, where things get lively and adventurous, almost seem pushed onto the audience and don't transition well. However, it does give a dream-like quality to it, where things are disjoint and emotions change frequently. That was likely the purpose, but I just knew very early it was too dream-like and could expect that things are not as they appear.

It's generally about ghosts and children. There are actually very few shock moments, some of them formulaic, but others actually pretty tense. I was rather bored until the end where the mother finds clues to the disappearance of her child and slowly reaches the explanation. The audience is played beautifully and the tension is palpable. It was more suspense than shock, and definitely had a Hitchcockean feel to it.

I'm not sure if I can recommend the movie. If you like ghost stories and psychological suspense, you will like it. But if you are not a big fan of 'things are not as they seem', you will hate it. The movie did have nice cinematography that really contributed to the feel of the movie.

It's been awhile since I've posted a movie review. It's not that I haven't been watching movies. In fact I would say I've been watching too many movies to review .

Today I saw There Will Be Blood. I've been anticipating this film for some time, as Paul Thomas Anderson is such an awesome director. I loved some of his previous films such as Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Hard Eight. His direction is so nicely woven together that his movies seem like musical pieces.

'There Will Be Blood' is no exception. Granted, this was a pretty long movie, almost 3 hours. It was also playing on one small theater in my area, which was of course packed, and of course doesn't have stadium seating, and of course a big-headed dude sat in front of me. But this didn't distract too much from the movie. It's really a masterpiece, and the best way I can describe it is a modern Citizen Kane. If you didn't like that movie, you definitely won't like this one. It's rather slow, but punctuated with spurts of violence and intense drama. There is even some comedy in there. The final scene starts out comedic, with the audience even laughing, but it almost immediately turns horrific. These type of scenes are amazing because the audience is almost in guilt that they were laughing a second ago. For a director to pull it off seriously is a testament to his or her skill.

The movie is about oil. In fact an alternate title for the movie is 'Oil!'. That was a book by Upton Sinclair (whom I have not read). The film conveys the sheer danger involved with oil mining in those days, where there was the possibility of limitless wealth and virgin land to be divested of the treasures underneath. At many points in the movie something deadly happens while digging for oil. It's almost as if tapping into that massive ancient reserve of liquefied animal remains releases some kind of evilness before its blessing on its founders. This deadliness is shown throughout different times, as technology changes from humans wielding hammers to machines.

The scenes are very simple, and the camera-work is just beautiful. There are shrills of violins and classical music throughout which somehow complement the barren landscape. Oil is almost portrayed as a monster, similar to how drugs are portrayed in Requiem for a Dream, but in a much more subtle way. Daniel Day Lewis is absolutely amazing and embodied his character completely. He bounces from loving father to pure evil flawlessly. The scenes where there is anticipation of finding treasure underneath the land are just great. You feel that power and limitless wealth being tapped into by the oil drill.

There is a constant battle between religion and atheism throughout the movie, and at one point you can almost see the birth of evangelical Christianity. One thing about movies these days is there always seems to be a snub towards religion, almost as if atheism is the new intellectualism. Audiences seem to love this, as if they are craving to be taught there is no God. The movie does poke fun at religion, but it equally portrays the irreligious as not something to admire. I have a feeling that people will take the ending the wrong way. In fact I heard some conversations after the movie more in admiration of the violence than anything else.

There is actually not much blood in the movie (except for the end). I think blood is more a metaphor for oil, and there is definitely lots of that. Do yourself a favor and go see this masterpiece. Everything from the music, to the direction, to the acting is just flawless.

Really good documentary on ExxonMobil's role in global warming.