Technology - 12. page

I just finished watching ‘Lost In La Mancha’ which chronicles Terry Gilliam’s attempt to film his version of the story of Don Quixote, ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’. (More reviews here.) The attempt failed, though there was a postscript that indicated that Gilliam was trying again. (An aside: not the best date movie.)

It was interesting to watch the perspective of the team start upbeat and slowly descend into despair. There were many reasons the filming failed, but what was most fascinating is that it was a death march project that just happened to take place in the sphere of film.

Of course there were certain ‘acts of God’ that contributed to the failure, but there always are difficulties beyond control. What’s more interesting to me is the disasters that could have been planned for. Read through some of the aspects of ‘Lost In La Mancha’ and see if you recognize any (plenty of spoilers, so don’t read if you want to watch the movie):

1. Gilliam tried to create a $60 million film on a $32.1 million dollar budget. He actually smiles while saying words to this effect!

2. Not all key players present during planning. In pre-production, none of the actors are able to schedule time to rehearse, partly because they all took pay cuts to make this movie (see point 1), partly because they were all busy.

3. Tight timelines. Due to money and scheduling, every day of filming was very carefully planned out; any problems on early days required changes to the entire schedule.

4. A visionary architect wasn’t willing to compromise. Gilliam is well known for his mind-blowing films (Twelve Monkeys, Brazil) and had been working on this movie in his mind for decades. This led to perfectionism, which, given the tight timelines and lack of money, wasn’t always the right use of resources. Addtitionally, Gilliam had a lackadaisical methodology: he mentions several times that his philosophy is ‘just shoot film and it will work out.’ That sounds freakishly similar to ‘just start coding and everything will be fine.’

5. Project history worked against success. This is one of the most interesting points–there were really two kinds of project history present. Film versions of ‘Don Quixote’ have a checkered past–Orson Welles tried for years to make a version, even continuing to film beyond his Don Quixote dying. And Gilliam has had at least one bomb–The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a box office failure which haunted him for years. In both of these cases, there past actions cast a shadow over the present, affecting morale of the team.

6. When problems arose, the producers didn’t trust the technical staff (the directors). In particular, when weather struck, the directors wanted to allow the team to regroup, whereas the producers, because of points 1 and 3, wanted to film. Strife at the top never helps a project.

7. The equipment and setting was not optimal. Due to, I’m guessing, point 1, the outside scenes are set in a location next to a NATO air base, where jets will be flying overhead (‘only for an hour a day’ according to the first assistant director). The last sound stage in Madrid is reserved–it turns out to be a simple warehouse with awful acoustics.

And then there were some factors that simply were out of the blue. These included some bad weather and the illness of the actor playing Don Quixote. These were what pushed the film over the edge–but it wouldn’t have been on the edge if not for the other factors above. And you can also see that factors snowball on each other–timelines are tight because actors aren’t around; trust between team members is lost because of money and time issues.

It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion, but it was also illuminating to see that the lessons of project management not only are ignored in the software development, but also in film. Misery loves company.

Well, someone’s finally done it. William Tan has put together a set of vi key bindings for Microsoft Word. (Thanks for the pointer, NTK!) I just downloaded and installed it, and thought I’d mention a few things.

1. The author mentions the instability (“alpha” nature) of the code. I haven’t run it long, but I get quite a few “Error 5346” and “Error 4198” messages. I’m no VB expert (nor even a newbie) so I have no idea what those mean. It didn’t seem to affect the document I was editing.

2. Installing the .dot file exposed some weirdness. The default location where you’re supposed to put these files (on WinXP, with Word 2003) is c:\Documents And Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\Startup\. Both the Application Data and Microsoft directories in the above path were hidden from Windows Explorer and the dir command in the shell, but you can cd to them.

The easiest way to install the .dot file is to open up Word, navigate via menus: Tools / Options / File Locations / Startup. Click the modify button, which brings up a file dialog box. Then drag the .dot file to that dialog box.

All in all, I’m glad someone has done this. Now, if only they’d do it for an IDE editor. Errm, I mean a free IDE–I know Visual Slickedit has a killer vi emulation mode. Yes, I know about Vimulator for jEdit, but the author’s language (“This plugin is in the early stages of implementation and does not yet provide a consistent or reliable VI-style interface.”), along with the fact it was last released in 2002, scared me away. Actually, it looks like there is one available for Eclipse: viPlugin.

Regardless, a very cool hack. Thanks, William.

Flash is a fairly pervasive rich client framework for web applications. Some folks have issues with it. I’ve seen plenty of examples of that; the Bonnaroo site is an example of how Flash . Some folks think it’s the future of the internet. I like it, when it’s used for good purpose, and I thought I’d share a few of my favorite flash applications:

1. Ishkur’s guide to electronic music has an annoying intro, but after that, it’s pure gold. Mapping the transitions and transformations of electronic music, complete with commentary and sample tracks, I can’t imagine a better way to get familiar with musical genres and while away some time.

2. They Rule is an application that explores the web of relationships among directors on boards of public companies. Using images, it’s much easier to see the interconnectedness of the boards.

3. A couple of short animated pieces: Teen Girl Squad follows the (amateurly drawn) exploits of, well, a set of four teenage girls, and a cute movie about love (originally from http://students.washington.edu/k1/bin/Ddautta_01_masK.swf).

Of course, these all beg the question: what is a rich client good for (other than cool movies)? When is it appropriate to use Flash (or ActiveX, or XUL) rather than plain old (D)HTML? I wish I knew the answer, but it seems to me that there are a couple of guidelines.

1. How complicated is the data? And how complicated is the representation of that data? The more complicated, the more you should lean towards rich clients. I can’t imagine the electronic guide to music being half as effective if it was done in html.

2. How savvy are your users? This cuts both ways–if the users aren’t savvy, then the browser may be a comfortable, familiar experience. However, sometimes rich clients can ‘act smarter’ and make for a better user experience.

3. How large is your userbase? The larger, the more you should tend towards a thin, pervasive client like the browser, since that will ease deployment issues.

I used to think Flash was unabatedly evil, but I’m now convinced that, in some cases, it really makes a lot of sense.

I’m in favor of promoting the use of RSS in many aspects of information management. However, a recent wired article asks: will RSS clog the web? I’m not worried much. Why?

1. High traffic sites like slashdot are already protecting themselves. I was testing my RSS aggregator, and hit slashdot’s RSS feed several times in a minute. I was surprised to get back a message to the effect of ‘You’ve hit Slashdot too many times in the last day. Please refrain from hitting the site more than once an hour’ (not the exact wording, and I can’t seem to get the error message now). It makes perfect sense for them to throttle down the hits from programs–they aren’t getting the same amount of ad revenue from RSS readers.

2. The Wired article makes reference to “many bloggers” who put most of their entries’ content in their RSS feed, which “allow[s] users to read … entries in whole without visiting” the original site. This is a bit of a straw man. If you’re having bandwidth issues because of automated requests, decrease the size of the file that’s being requested by not putting every entry into your RSS feed.

3. The article also mentions polling frequency–30 minutes or less. I too used to poll at roughly this frequency–every hour, on the 44 minute mark. Then, it struck me–I usually read my feeds once, or maybe twice, a day. And rarely do I read any articles between midnight and 8am. I tweaked my aggregator to check for new entries every three hours between 8am and midnight. There’s no reason to do otherwise with the news stories and blog entries that are most of the current RSS content. Now, if you’re using RSS to get stock prices, then you’ll probably want more frequent updates. Hopefully, your aggregator allows different frequencies for updating; Newsgator 1.1 does.

This comes back to the old push vs. pull debate. I like RSS because I don’t have to give out me email address (or update it, or deal with the unwanted newsletters in my inbox) and because it lets me automatically keep track of what people are saying. I think there’s definitely room for abuse with RSS spiders, just like with any other automated system; after all “a computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history — with the possible exceptions of hand guns and tequila.”. I don’t think RSS will clog the web–it’s just going through some growing pains.

Here are three items that I’ve found useful in the past, but aren’t worth an individual post because of their triviality.

1. Sometimes file archives are only available in .zip format. There are unix programs out there that can unzip such archives, and linux often ships with one. But sometimes it’s not installed. Lately, I’m almost always doing some kind of java development, in which case, you can use the jar command to extract the archive.

2. I generate an html page of all my rss feeds, using a custom perl hack (I wouldn’t go so far as to term it a script). (No newsgator for me! Did I mention I still use pine for email?) This can produce quite a big file, since I’m querying around 80 feeds. In an effort to reduce my bandwidth, which I pay for, I now gzip my rss feeds page, using CPU that I don’t pay for (well, not directly). And, while gzip may not be the most efficient of compressors, files in gzipped format can be transparently read in all the browsers I cared to test: Mozilla, Firefox, IE, and even lynx.

3. Sometimes you just want the data from a mysql query in an easy format that you can pull into a spreadsheet and manipulate further. In the past, I would have written a quick perl script, using DBI, but after investigating the client options, I found another way. mysql -u user -B -ppass -e 'select * from my_data' databasename gives you nice tab delimited output. I’ve used this with the mysql 4 client; since I couldn’t track down the mysql 3 manual, I’m not clear what version of the mysql client supports these features.

We’ve all been frustrated when we hit an outdated link. How many sites actually use a link checker? Meri has a link to an article about the perfect 404 page. I’d like to submit BCN’s 404 page as the most helpful one I’ve ever seen. This is more fun, but perhaps less helpful.

Firefox, the lightweight browser based on Mozilla, has been garnering quite a bit of attention lately. I’ve been a Mozilla user since 0.5, but only use the browser component, so I thought I’d give Firefox a try. It works great, and is very similar to IE (by design, no doubt). But browsing is a habit of mine, and, like anybody else, I don’t like to change my habits. Luckily, it was easy to change Firefox to fit my needs.

1. Have the search bar respond to my shortcuts (i for google images, g for google search, q for qwestdex search). This was no different than setting it up for Mozilla.

2. Firefox by default saves form entries. I don’t like that–it’s the paranoid in me. Easily changed: go to Tools / Options / Privacy / Saved Form Information and deselect the “Save information…” checkbox.

3. Firefox blithely closes a window when there’s more than one tab open. Wow! I don’t like that at all–Mozilla gives me a warning and 99% of the time, I was aiming at the wrong window or had forgotten that I had multiple tabs open. Feedster handed me this post so I knew I wasn’t alone; a bit of searching on MozDev turned up this handy extension: tab warning. Installing this was a snap, and now my browsing experience is back to what I expected.

One problem I haven’t figured out how to fix: in Mozilla, when you open a link in a new tab, the new tab gains focus. In Firefox, the old tab remains in front.

I just ran across one of the most virulent pieces of weblog spam I’ve ever seen. It was an innocuous comment: ‘please help with my website…’ and the URL wasn’t ostentatiously bad:

pseudobreccia60 DOT tripod DOT com DOT ve (please don’t visit this site!)

pseudobreccia, in case you’re wondering, is a kind of rock. ve is the Venezuelan country code. tripod DOT com DOT ve points to ns4.hotwired.com as its authoritative name server. The comment wasn’t blatantly off topic. So, I wasn’t super suspicious of the site.

Being a bit curious, I visited it. What you get is some kind of flash application. It seems innocent enough, just an ad and an under construction sign. Viewing source shows you nothing, but every time you close the window, or change the location in the address bar, it pops up a new window with the same URL in it (I ended up having to shut the browser down entirely via the Process Manager before it would go away). But, the payload is a periodical full size window pop up with advertisements for, what else, p0rn. Shocking, I know. But the persistance of the app was amazing. I almost wish I had a flash decompiler just to take a look at what it was doing.

I was doing all this in Mozilla–I can’t imagine what it tries to do to Internet Explorer (sets up itself as your homepage, adds itself to your favorites) and I don’t want to find out.

Tim Bray points out Radio Vox Populi which is a really cool idea:

weblogs + web crawler + text-to-speech + mp3 streaming = talk radio for everyone.

Of course it could do with some filtering, or categorization, but it’s a cool idea. It actually jives with an idea I’ve had for a long time, which is to use text-to-speech, perhaps Festival, to burn cds of Project Gutenberg to create cheap books on cd (oh, should I listen to Boy Scouts on Motorcycles, by G. Harvey Ralphson or Armenian Literature, by Anonymous today?). That’d be cool, if you can handle listening to a robot voice.

I’ve written before about IM in the workplace. It’s becoming more and more prevalent, and other people have noticed this as well. IM is something that’s easy to use, and gives you the immediate response of the phone without be nearly as intrusive.

Now, in the past, using IRC, it was relatively easy to have a program, or bot, that would listen to conversations, or that you could ask questions of. They were dumb, but they worked. In the world of IM, I wasn’t aware of any easy way to do this. However, browsing freshmeat yesterday I discovered an easy way to write IM applications.

It’s called the SDBA Revolution Instant Messaging Application Server and building IM applications is fantastically easy if you use this perl framework. I was able to download it, and build a simple application in about 30 minutes. And that includes signing up for the usernames from AOL. It uses a perlish syntax and doesn’t support extremely complicated applications, but does offer enough to be useful. If you can code a php website, you can build an IM application. The author even provides six or so sample applications, including a database interface (scary!). The only issues I found with the IM app server were:

1. It doesn’t support Yahoo! That’s because the Yahoo! IM perl module has been unmaintained since the last Yahoo! protocol update.

2. I’m not sure of the legality of using a bot on a public service like AIM, MSN, or Yahoo!. Violations of these license agreements happen all the time, but, if you’re a stickler for those darn license agreements, this application server appears to work with Jabber.

Just goes to show you that 30 minutes a week browsing freshmeat or SourceForge will almost never be wasted. A bit of slack to do this will probably pay off in the long run.