Category Archives: Uncategorized

Unforgiven

A while back, Tim posted a few articles about the theme of salvation in movies. An interesting idea. I responded that there were certain movies, such as Unforgiven, which were not about salvation at all, and that’s what makes them so interesting.

Well, I just watched Unforgiven again, and remembered why I thought, when I saw it the first time, it was such an amazingly good movie. And, yes, of course it’s all about salvation, but not really in normal ways. A pair of old killers, and a young killer, set out to kill some no-good low-down cowboys. Will, played by Clint Eastwood, spends most of the story insisting that he ain’t like that no more. And the kid spends most of the story insisting that he’s just as hard and unfeeling as Will was in the old days. Ned isn’t really sure that he wants to go along, but does, for his friend, and for old times’ sake.

I’ve always been a big fan of Eastwood’s “spaghetti westerns”, and this movie is, in a sense, a commentary on those movies, the values that they espouse, and the possibility of redemption. This is truly a great movie, and highly recommended. Not at all a traditional shoot-em-up western, but enough of that scattered around for those that like that sort of thing. It’s a western that makes you think, if you can believe that.

Wah, wah, I didn’t think of it first

This morning, I was listening to Dan O’Brien’s talk at OSCon about evil.. Highly recommended listening, and *very* funny. One of the things he talked about was the quote by Mohandas Ghandi (or was it Eric Raymond?)

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

So, in that light, we have Bill Gates laughing at MIT’s $100 laptop project

“If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type,” Gates said.

This is great news on many fronts. It demonstrates that Mr. Gates is frightened by the prospect, and, of course, since clever platitudes are always true, it proves that MIT will eventually “win” in some sense, with universally available cheap computer hardware. Yay, MIT.

Gee, I feel so safe

You’ve *got* to be kidding

It seems that the no-fly list is even more useless than I had any reason to think.

It turns out the name Edward Allen popped up on the TSA’s ‘no-fly’ list. Unbeknownst to his parents, the little four-year-old was a wanted man.

So, this seems to imply that the no-fly list contains “Edward Allen.” Just that name. No further identifying notes. This is worse than useless. Given that any terrorist with even a fragment of a brain will travel under an assumed identity, this gives us a system that not only cost billions of dollars, but penalizes only non-criminals, and in no way inconveniences the bad guys, other than undermining the credibility of the entire anti-terrorist effort.

Any database designer would be embarrassed by a schema where the only identifying data was someone’s first and last name. You’d think that the first time this happened, they’d think, hmm, maybe this system isn’t well-designed. But given that this happens again and again and again, they seem impervious to that sort of simple logic. Ya think that maybe a hint that the Edward Allen in question isn’t 4 years old would be in order?

The mind boggles. How can our government *be* so stupid?

Do unto others before they can do unto you

I’m finding the rhetoric about Iran very alarming. Obviously, I haven’t been in the secret security briefings, but calling Iran our most dangerous enemy seems somewhat unprovoked. And the fact that Bush is getting us all prepared for an “I told you so” when we invade and start breaking things is exceedingly unpleasant to me. Killing thousands of foreigners so that our kids can sleep better at night is not security. It’s unprovoked playground bullying.

I’ve also been very uncomfortable with the Bush administration’s position on nuclear energy. In his State Of The Union, he said that we need to actively pursue alternate energy sources, and reduce our reliance on oil. Most sensible thing he’s said in recent memory. And yet, since he made that remark, we’ve heard nothing about how nuclear energy is evil – well, at least, if non-Americans are using it.

Yeah, these two thoughts are related. It seems to me that our evidence of Iran’s evilness is that they are exploring alternate energy sources. Any sensible nation would be exploring alternate energy sources, if the USA wasn’t threatening them with anihilation for doing so.

Our position on nuclear energy has long baffled me. First of all, we assume that only Americans are smart enough to come up with the necessary knowledge to generate nuclear energy, even though every physics text book since 1950 contains the necessary information. And, just in case you’re keeping score, “Enrico Fermi” is an Italian name. Next, we assume that it’s OK for us to generate nuclear energy, and a few of our close buddies, but if anyone else tries, obviously they have only global destruction in mind.

Just maybe, if we didn’t spend all of our time alienating everyone, we could actually cooperate on this nuclear issue, and, together, the great minds of the world (Yes, George, there are great minds outside of Texas.) could actually solve the dilemmas surrounding nuclear energy, and we could have a sustainable energy source for the next few generations.

I mean, sure, suspicion and paranoia have their place, but great advances in science, and diplomacy, tend to happen when people cooperate, not when they yell insults at one another from across the playground. Saying that diplomacy must be pursued before we nuke ’em, while at the same time calling them dangerous thugs, doesn’t seem like a viable negotiaion strategy. Does he think that only Americans watch CNN?

Iran is a sovreign nation. Just like us. We asked them, rather rudely I might add, not to pursue nuclear energy. They said, well, we’d really rather go ahead with this, and it’s our right to do so, thanks. This seems to be our evidence that they are the “biggest challenge for America.” As with the whole WMD fiasco, I’d kinda like to see a shade more evidence than that.

Exporting Excel files

I’ve been trying to drag useful data out of MS Excel files without having to actually install Windows somewhere – and preferably without having to work with Excel. I discovered that Excel will export files as XML. The schema is painful, but, after a bit of working with XML::Simple, I was able to get the data into a more useable format.

This isn’t a finished product by any means, but I thought it might be useful to someone as a starting point, so that you don’t have to plough through the XML schema yourself:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use XML::Simple;

my @cols;
my $x = XMLin('AcademicTables.xml'); # Name of file
my $w = $x->{'Worksheet'};
foreach my $worksheet (@{$x->{'Worksheet'}}) {
    next unless $worksheet->{'ss:Name'} eq 'Academics_Depts'; # Name of worksheet
    @rows = @{$worksheet->{'Table'}->{'Row'}};
# First row - Get the column names
    $firstrow = shift(@rows);
    foreach my $cell (@{$firstrow->{'Cell'}}) {
        push @cols, $cell->{'Data'}->{'content'};
    }
# The the rest of the rows
    foreach my $row (@rows) {
        @values = @{$row->{'Cell'}};
        foreach $col (@cols) {
            $c = shift @values;
            $val = $c->{'Data'}->{'content'};
            $val =~ s/n{2,}/<br />/g; # Remove multiple newlines
            print $col . " -> " . $val . "n";
        }
    }
}

The Third Miracle

Last night I saw The Third Miracle. I don’t remember who recommended it to me. It was deeply thought provoking.

It’s a story of the official process the Church goes through to acknowledge someone as a saint, which includes identifying three miracles. The process is led by a priest who deeply wants it to all be true, but who has had his faith shaken by leading this process before. Meanwhile, he must also struggle with his feelings for the daughter of the proposed saint. As always, the life of a saint is not so much about the amazing things they do, but about the way that they touch the lives of others, often long after their death.

Highly recommended. Stars Ed Wood as priest Frank Shore.

CookieCast.org

Skippy has announced CookieCast:

CookieCast.org presents a daily fortune, taken directly from real fortune cookies and read by me (with the occassional special guest).

I’ve been subscribed since the beginning, and have had a couple guest appearances. It’s not great literature, but it’s always an interesting listen.