NBC has released a Department of Justice (DOJ) memo titled DOJ White Paper: Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force by DOJ (MSNBC). As you read through the document (or just the citations below), if you find yourself being swayed by the DOJ’s seductive logic, it is a useful exercise to turn the parties around: instead of the US claiming the rights detailed in this document, imagine that it were Israel or Russia or... [More]

Tangled (2010) — 5/10

Disney’s take on the story of Rapunzel, done in modern, 3d-animated style. The characters are unsurprising: there’s a beautiful virginal girl who sings, a young handsome rogue who sings and an evil old witch. The story is only tangentially related to the original Grimm’s fairy tale: in the original, the witch was initially the wronged party; in the Disney version, there’s no gray area and the witch is evil from the start. There were no real star voices and only a... [More]

There are some pictures of it in the article World trembles in confusion and/or fear at Iran’s fiberglass airplane by Lee Hutchinson (Ars Technica). There you’ll find over a dozen pictures with commentary. The commentary is, on the whole, not kind, but it’s also neither entirely information-free not unwarranted. They note in the picture below that the “canopy has ludicrously bad optical qualities—note the scratches and distortion.”

Plane with pilot

It’s also, well, it’s a lot smaller than I expected. Or, as Ars Technica put it, “[…]... [More]

In order to program in 2013, it is important not to waste any time honing your skills with outdated tools and work-flows. What are the essential pieces of software for developing software in 2013?

Runtime

A runtime is a given for all but the most esoteric of programming exercises. Without something to execute your code, there is almost no point in writing it.

Debugger

Programming without an integrated debugger can be very time-consuming, error-prone and will quite frankly suck the fun right... [More]

Manufactured Landscapes (2006) — 9/10

This is a documentary about manufacturing—mostly in China—about the world that humanity creates for itself and about the lives that people live in this world. The film starts with a long, slow pan along a factory floor that seems to last for kilometers. It is equal parts horrifying to think of how people can live and work in places like this and awe-inspiring to think what gigantic structures man has created. The documentary also acknowledges its own... [More]

Firstborn (2007)

by Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter

This is the final installment in the Time Odyssey trilogy (although the end of the book is quite a cliffhanger that indicates that Baxter is considering soldiering on on his own). The book incorporates almost every hard-science theme you can imagine, flitting from topic to topic and seeming to hurry through the story. It’s quite inconsistent in the way that they kept shuttling people all over the solar system when that’s obviously such a... [More]

1. Joe vs. the Volcano (1990) — 8/10
2. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States S01E03 (2012) — 10/10
3. Crude (2009) — 8/10
4. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States S01E04 (2012) — 10/10
5. A Very Harold And Kumar 3D Christmas (2011) — 6/10
6. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) — 8/10
7. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States S01E05 (2012) — 10/10
8. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States S01E06 (2012) — 10/10
9. Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo... [More]

Skype for the Mac is kind of a CPU hog, so I’ve been looking for another solution.

I recently used Google Voice/Chat/Hangouts, which is kind of low-fi, but worked pretty well. The browser plugin is quickly installed. Although it didn’t work in Opera, it naturally worked in Chrome. It offered the UI that we’ve all come to expect from Google: bare-bones and adequate.

When everybody involved has an Apple device, FaceTime seems like a logical alternative to Skype and Google Voice. So what kind of... [More]

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009/se) — 8/10
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) — 6/10
3. Paprika (2006) — 9/10
4. Your Highness (2011) — 2/10
5. Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (2010) — 7/10
6. Waiting for Armageddon (2009) — 8/10
7. C.S.A. – The Confederate States of America (2004) — 8/10
8. Casino Jack (2010) — 6/10
9. The Expendables 2 (2012) — 7/10
10. Get Shorty (1995) — 8/10
11. Battleship (2012) — 4/10
12. Ted (2012) — 8/10
13. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)... [More]

Penn and Teller have had a TV show on ShowTime for a while now, but I’ve never seen any. Most of them are available on YouTube (see links below) but I have no idea how long those will last there due to copyright issues. As I watched, it was easy to sympathize with the new-agey folks—Penn is ruthless and relentless. Though he’s too self-satisfied at times, he tempers it with explanations for his anger—that he hates to see people preyed upon. Still, you think to yourself, these people seem to... [More]

1. Johnny English Reborn (2011) — 8/10
2. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) — 9/10
3. Platoon (1986) — 9/10
4. Midnight Express (1978) — 6/10
5. John Carter (2012) — 8/10
6. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011) — 8/10
7. Paul (2011) — 7/10
8. The African Queen (1951) — 6/10
9. Culture in Decline – Episodes 1-3 (2012) — 8/10
10. The Dictator (2012) — 6/10
11. In Time (2011) — 8/10
12. Killer at Large (2008) — 9/10
13. The Campaign (2012) — 7/10

Johnny English Reborn (2011) — 8/10

A surprisingly amusing and... [More]

The following article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and is cross-published here.

Windows 8 was made publicly available a few weeks ago. As usual, Microsoft manages to guarantee compatibility with a lot of software, but there are a few tools that will simply no longer run.

One of these is Microsoft’s own Security Essentials product, which has been completely replaced with Windows Defender, which is built right in to Windows 8. So that one’s easy.

Another is Microsoft Virtual... [More]

The last week’s worth of Daily Shows and Colbert Reports had some very good moments, so I thought I’d summarize and link to the stuff I found interesting. To start off, the show November 28, 2012 – Frank Oz (The Colbert Report) included a really strong “The Word” segment, shown and transcribed by yours truly below.

The Word – Sisters are doing it to themselves (The Colbert Report)

In this clip above, Stephen addresses a column by Fox News staff columnist Suzanne Venker—a so-called journalist to whom I would ordinarily not pay any attention but Stephen did such a sterling job... [More]

A public service announcement, brought you by “The Big Think” through Slavoj Žižek. Transcript follows the video.

We Need Thinking by Slavoj Žižek (YouTube)

“More than ever, we need philosophy today. Even the most speculative—in the sense of reflecting on itself—science … has to rely on a set of automatic presuppositions. Like a scientist simply presupposes in his or her very approach to nature, a set of implications of how the nature functions, what’s the causality in nature, and so on and so on. And philosophy teaches us... [More]”

1. Crank (2006) — 6/10
2. Crank: High Voltage (2009) — 5/10
3. Hudson Hawk (1991) — 6/10
4. Franklyn (2008) — 6/10
5. From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) — 7/10
6. Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) — 5/10
7. Casa de mi Padre (2012) — 5/10
8. Green Lantern (2011) — 5/10
9. I Am Comic (2010) — 6/10
10. Aliens (1986) — 8/10
11. 2081 (2009) — 7/10
12. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States E01 (2012) — 10/10
13. Prometheus (2012) — 7/10
14. Tower Heist (2011) — 7/10
15. Nosferatu, eine... [More]

tl;dr: if you can’t read the BSOD message or need to examine the minidump files generated by Windows when it crashes, use the BlueScreenView utility to view them. Windows 8 kept crashing on shutdown for me because of an errant 56K modem driver. Sad—so sad—but true.

My Windows 8 installation went off with just one hitch: the machine crashed on shutdown. Every. Single. Time. This made it impossible to use the hibernation feature, which was a blocker issue for a laptop.

So, how to solve the... [More]

Your New TV Ruins Movies (Prolost) is a wonderful, eye-opening article about flat-panel TVs. If you care at all how your television looks—and whether it all matches the original intent of the director—it’s well worth your while to read the whole thing (it’s not that long).

However, here are the main points:

Plasma > LCD

If you don’t have a flat-panel television yet, or you’re in the market for a new one, strongly consider buying a plasma screen instead of an LCD. Why? Because “plasma TVs can... [More]”

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) — 5/10

This sequel, worse than the original, is, on top of it all, showing its age. This time, Max cynically helps a settlement try to get petrol while the forces of Humungus (the evil, Bane-like leader of the marauders) try to destroy them and steal all of their supplies. Everything is very post-apocalyptic and the final half of the film is an interminable truck chase across the Australian wastelands. Not really recommended; watch the first one instead.... [More]

There's no cure… by Bronn/Tyrion (YouTube)

The following ruminations were written seven years ago but have held up remarkably well. They have been published with minor updates.

This article deals with the situation illustrated below, specifically the question raised in the comment.

if (! $folder_id)
{
  $this->db->logged_query (“SELECT folder_id FROM” .
                           $this->app->table_names->objects .
                           “WHERE id = $obj->object_id”);
  if ($this->db->next_record ())
    $folder_id = $this->db->f... [More]

The following article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and is cross-published here.

In the latest version of Quino—version 1.8.5—we took a long, hard look at the patterns we were using to create metadata. The metadata for an application includes all of the usual Quino stuff: classes, properties, paths, relations. With each version, though we’re able to use the metadata in more places. That means that the metadata definition code grows and grows. We needed some way to keep a... [More]

I was recently redesigning a web page and wanted to make it easier to use from touch-screen browsers. Links made only of text are relatively easy to click with a mouse, but tend to make poor touch targets. If the layout has enough space around the link, this can be remedied by applying CSS.

The basic box

Suppose we have a box with three links in it, as shown to the right.

Setting the height

The first step is to make this box taller, so the logical thing to do is to set the... [More]

In 2009, Side-by-side in Gaza noted the disparity in the damage caused by Palestinian ordnance versus that caused by Israeli. As revealed in pictures from Israel—Gaza conflict (Big Picture Blog), the stark difference remains in 2012. Is it clear that, while the Gazans are capable of producing some weaponry despite the strict blockades (and allegedly with Iran and Arab countries in its corner), its firepower pales in comparison to that of the Israelis (with the U.S. in its corner). Having the right friends makes... [More]

Without deviation from the norm, Progress is not possible by Frank Zappa (YouTube)

“I think that progress is not possible without deviation.

“And I think that it’s important that people be aware of some of the creative ways in which some of their fellow men are deviating from the norm.

“Because, in some instances, they may find these deviations inspiring and might suggest further deviations which might cause progress.

“You never know.”

The U.S. elections have come and gone. People in other parts of the world—I can attest to Switzerland—were at times exasperated with the amount of coverage in their home countries. That coverage, it seems, pales in comparison to the deluge of information to which Americans themselves were subjected for at least a solid year. And some candidates even started campaigning two years out. The intensity of media saturation was reported to have been prodigious.

Unsurprisingly, many are just glad... [More]

A friend of mine in California asked for my input on the ballot propositions in California in November 2012. Here’s my quick impression of these issues. YMMV.

I used Ballotpedia (Ballotpedia) as my reference. They have good sections showing who’s for/against and why. It’s also a good way to test the wind by seeing which way Democrats or Republicans are voting. Also interesting to see which and how many papers endorsed one way or the other.

Prop 30—Jerry Brown’s Tax Increase (revenues for general fund... [More]

Equal rights or saving the children. You can’t have both.

The following quote floated through the Internets, bubbling along on the social-network streams. It was written in support of voting for the candidate that supports gay rights, for one who supports equal rights for all Americans.

The third debate was eons ago, the election is tomorrow and, if we’re very lucky, we’ll never have to hear about Mitt Romney again. Sure, we’ll still be stuck with Obama but, as the Economist so lovingly put it, better the devil you know.

The best way to listen to the foreign-policy debate was the Expanding the Debate Special on Foreign Policy (Democracy Now!), which featured two of the other candidates—Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party—who offered much smarter and less... [More]