Geek On The Mountain

We ordered a pizza the other night during a snow storm. I shoveled when I got home from work, and we had probably about 5 inches. It was 30 degrees out though, so the snow was really wet and heavy. It snowed throughout the night and we probably ended up with about 8 inches total. Had it been colder, I’m sure it would have been quite a bit more. At any rate, the roads weren’t the best, but they were manageable for the most part. Naturally, my road hadn’t been plowed at all and wouldn’t be until morning. Our pizza showed up. In my 20 seconds of chit-chat with the delivery guy, I found that he was stuck and kept getting stuck, which would explain why he parked 50ish feet away from out house. From the way it sounded, it was no big deal. He took off and we went on watching TV and eating our food. About 10 minutes later, I can hear tires spinning outside. I looked, and the poor guy was still stuck, though he’d managed to make it about 50 feet. I threw on my shoes and a coat and went out and to try to help him out. Once I got out there, I saw was he was driving….a 2000 Mustang. Not only is it more or less bottoming out, but it’s rear wheel drive and this guy can’t do shit. Worse yet, a simple push to get him unstuck wasn’t doing him any good. The whole road hadn’t been plowed, so he needed to go like 500 feet or more before he’d hit something he manage. I got him a little ways, but it was more or less futile. He said he was going to call his girlfriend (who apparently has a bronco) to come and tow him out. I headed back inside and continued on with my night. Half an hour later, I looked out the window and I could see he was still just down the road. Maybe his girlfriend just dumped him….

I felt bad for the guy, but the moral of the story is truly that Mustangs and snowstorms just don’t mix.

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I think this article is getting around various places….I just saw it hit slashdot late last night, though I pulled it out of EFFector myself…

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists is an interesting article on pulling information out of Amazon wishlists. Basically, the author downloaded the first page of 260,000 wishlists and then searched through the data to find “dangerous” (That is, if you were a paranoid government.) books and keywords. Included are books like On Liberty, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984. Some of the keywords were Michael Moore, Rush Limgaugh, and Koran. You get the idea. He comes up with a list of what books people seem to be interested in and goes on to demonstrate how he can easily find where many of these people live and even generate a map showing everyone.

And in case you were wondering, it was all fairly simple. It didn’t require any special resources of any kind. Anyone who knows how to program could do the same.

This is all pretty straightforward though. And although it is disturbing as a concept, there are two reasons why it’s even more disturbing as a reality.

First of all, the author links what he’s doing to the whole Patriot Act wiretap thing. This is where the government spies on it’s own citizens even in order to get those terrorists. Bush had said that while there were wiretaps, they were only being used on international calls amongst people who were known to have ties to terrorists. What he didn’t mention was that apparently, data mining such as this was used to determine who should get those wiretaps. So in a way, everyone was being spied on anyways.

Secondly, the Patriot Act can make the whole thing transparent to everyone and the FBI seems to be considering some data mining of their own. From the article:

This is what’s possible with publicly available information, but imagine if one had access to Amazon’s entire database - which still contains every sale dating back to 1999 by the way. Under Section 251 of the Patriot Act, the FBI can require Amazon to turn over its records, without probable cause, for an “authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” Amazon is forbidden to disclose that they have turned over any records, so that you would never know that the government is keeping records of your book purchases. And obviously it is quite simple to crossreference this info with data available in other databases.

On a final note, the FBI is now hiring computer scientists to implement a project that sounds very similar to what I just did:

“Currently, the FBI is strengthening systems engineering in order to tie new systems together architecturally and ensure that standards for custom and packaged applications are enforced, and it needs engineers to accomplish this goal, the agency said.

“The FBI is also focusing on data warehousing as well as federated search technology, which allows a single search query to be deployed across a number of databases, regardless of whether those databases belong to the same protocol or platform.

“‘Warehousing has been very successful, yet enterprise extraction, translation and loading processes must be fine-tuned,” the FBI said. “Data engineers are needed to model legacy databases for federated search and participate in legacy transition planning.’”(Computerworld)

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If I’m remembering correctly, Sci-Fi Friday has new seasons starting tonight (SG1, SG-Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica).
I’m most interested in BG…it’s my favorite show currently on the air (except for the Simpsons, which kind of doesn’t count. Although the show demands great respect for all it’s done over the years, the “newer” episodes are nowhere near as good as the earlier ones. So the current season of it really isn’t as good as the current season of BG.).

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Microsoft decided to release their update the fix the WMF Exploit early. They’d originally planned on releasing it next Tuesday with their regular monthly updates, but I guess they’d thought better of waiting…

The problem itself is somewhat old news at this point. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s basically a bug in windows that will allow code to be excuted when you do something as simple as viewing an image. So doing things like visiting websites that have those pretty pictures on them….yeah, bad idea. You can get a virus or have everything deleted or whatever someone would like.

Anyways, the point here being, go to windows update and install the patch like, now. If you don’t, you’re pretty much a sitting duck. It’s not terribly dangerous yet, but as time goes on there will be more and more things out there that take advantage of the bug..

The good news is that if you’re running an old version of windows it doesn’t effect you. If you’re running windows 386 or 2.0, you should be fine. I think. I haven’t really heard one way or another. I’m pretty sure I never will. On the other hand, if you’re running 3.0 or newer (3.0 came out in 1990, mind you), then you’re vulnerable. Technically, 3.x users can rejoice since, from what I’ve heard, although they have the bug, it needs to be exploited in a different way than it does for other versions. Those few still running 98 or ME (there can’t be anyone still using 95…) are the ones who are really out of luck though. MS no longer supports those versions, so there is no patch. No one really feels any sympathy for these people though. When you think about what the 98 in windows 98 means, and you release that it’s 2006, it seems really, really old. That would be like using 3.x right up until 2001….yeah, right. Anyways, there can’t be a whole lot of sympathy out there for anyone running a nearly 8 year old OS. If you just can’t stomach 2000 or xp, there’s always linux..(or Plan 9… )

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Winter Solstice is a film about a father and his two sons and what they go through after his wife/their mother dies.

This is flat out the worst movie I’ve ever seen. When I rate movies, I can almost always find some redeeming quality in them and give even the worst of them at least a 2 or a 3 (out of 10). This movie, however, is a solid 1.

For starters, there is absolutely no entertainment value in the movie at all. Through the course of the movie, virtually nothing happens. We find out one of the sons wants to move away from home and the other is failing out of school. We also find that, despite it being five years since the death of his wife, the father has not began dating. And how does the movie end? The father has made it around to asking someone out on a date, one son moves away, and the other may have made an effort to pass one class (One of his teachers earlier commented that he sometimes does well, and other times does not, and that when he’ll do which is unpredictable. So his doing well once doesn’t really say much of anything). And it takes ~90 minutes to do all that… I’ve really left out very little.

Of course, a movie doesn’t have to accomplish anything to be good. Perhaps some witty dialog could have saved the film. But alas, there is none. Not only is more or less totally serious throughout, but the dialog is “realistic” as well. One normally assumes that, when watching a movie or TV show, the characters have interactions with each other and generally do things when we’re not watching. All we see on camera are the interesting parts of what happens. Winter Solstice does an excellent job of exposing us to those boring interactions that nearly every other film would skip right past. On top of that, much of the dialog is delivered at a rather slow pace, further drawing out the pain.

But then, this isn’t a movie meant to be entertaining. It has some deeper meaning of expressing the emotions and telling the story of the characters. It’s a kind of art-type-thing. That’s well and good, but this movie appeals to me on an artistic level about the same amount as it does on an entertainment level.

From what I can tell, people who liked this movie tended to connect with it on some level. Some people find it realistic and moving. The slow, awkward dialog acts to enhance the whole thing. While it didn’t hit me on any emotional level, I can at least admit that it is realistic. I think it’s a good depiction of how men deal with things. Unfortunately, I find nothing interesting in it, so the movie is completely empty to me.

If you do see it, it’s entirely possible that you’ll find it interesting on at least some level. On the other hand, don’t be surprised if you’re utterly bored out of your mind.

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