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Horror Off-Season: The Devil Inside

2012-02-01T23:03:00.000-05:00

The Devil Inside was released on Jan. 6th, 2012 in the US. It's a possession horror movie written by Matt Peterman and William Brent Bell, and directed by William Brent Bell. The duo's only prior collaboration was 2006's "Stay Alive", which is a bit of a guilty pleasure movie. It, like many other horror movies, failed because it didn't quite figure out how to integrate technology into a horror story. Horror as a genre hasn't quite figured this out, so I don't really blame this on them. I just bring it up to lend some context to saying I think Stay Alive had interesting visuals and concept but was pants-on-head retarded. It's very into the bro-horror idea that horror is sometimes funny because it's bad. With that, I find it very impressive that The Devil Inside is very much the opposite sort of movie.

The Devil Inside generally plays itself as a straight faux-documentary, using a seasoned professional cameraman as an excuse for multiple cameras. You can see them discussing setting up the cameras, and also they do interviews with various people they're following around. The director also records himself, which seemed a bit odd in the context and I could've done without those bits.

The basic premise here is that 20 years after her mother went insane and killed several members of her church congregation during a botched exorcism, Isabella Rossi travels to Rome with a documentary film maker to reconnect with her mother and attempt to understand her condition. We go with Isabella to an exorcism theory class at the Vatican, to a mental hospital run by the church, and to the apartment of 2 young priests Isabella befriends after the exorcism class. The class and the interviews with the 2 priests, Ben and David, are used to explain the rules of the movie's possession mythology.

Ben and David have actually gone rogue and are performing exorcisms on victims the church officially won't authorize an exorcism for, arguing that the rules make it impossible to prove possession without attempting an exorcism but preclude an exorcism without proof. We go with them to see an actual exorcism in progress on Rosalita, where they explain how they use medical science to track the symptoms of possession and progress of the exorcism. I thought that bit was very interesting, and I don't think I've seen a single other exorcism movie where the religious figures attempt to integrate and benefit from science. This is also probably one of the best scenes in the whole movie. They made a real smart decision to cast either a gymnast or contortionist in the role, and the positions her body contorts into are just unnatural. This is aided primarily by some pretty good practical effects, and one very short shot of CGI. There is another scene later where they attempt an exorcism on Isabella's mother that is also very good and tense but not as visually uncomfortable as Rosalita's exorcism.

After the unauthorized exorcism attempt on the mother the characters go into panic mode for a bit and begin to show signs of stress and uncharacteristic behavior. Even though the pace was good I didn't like this bit because it seemed like the movie had gone off the rails. Towards the end of the sequence the story's protagonist shifted from Isabella to Ben, but the documentary framing device remained on Isabella. I like that in principle, since they didn't compromise the character motivations for simplicity's sake. However, they never explained why they decided to do that.

I've previously expressed my annoyance at movies that try to be mysterious or edgy by not neatly tying up their plot threads at the end but actually just end up deliberately introducing something in the middle of the movie and never explaining why it's important. This movie is guilty of that to a minor degree, but it may be a casualty of the abrupt way they chose to end the movie which they may have done in hopes it would drive traffic to a website they advertise before the credits which probably extends the story. I haven't checked the site so I'm not sure if it was successful at all.

All in all the movie isn't nearly as bad as people seem to be saying it is. It does a lot of things right and delivers a pretty interesting story. It doesn't get so caught up in trying to be realistic and character based to be visually creepy. The ending was a bit of a disappointment, but I thought it was really entertaining. Nowhere near as good as Exorcism of Emily Rose, but way better than The Last Exorcism.

The Beerening: Scotch Ale + Brown Ale brewday

2011-12-28T03:39:00.000-05:00

Scotch Ale Tasting:

Initial tastings of the ale are downright offensive. It tastes like cat urine. The first bottle is acrid, and burns all my senses. It's pretty awful. After a few weeks it's managed to upgrade itself to "bland", which still isn't too great to drink but at least isn't as awful as it used to be. Moving on from that, it went through a stage where it smelled really yeasty but didn't give up a lot of hints regarding the beer itself.
I was originally shooting for a very low level of carbonation to approximate English pub ales. After the first few tastings I decided to try to re-carbonate to a higher level of carbonation to attempt to make the flavor a bit less bland. I tried to add additional carbonation using pre-measured conditioning tablets. I opened every bottle, added 2 tablets, and quickly recapped using sanitized caps. I had a few gushers, which is probably similar to the mentos+coke effect and could have been avoided by putting all the bottles into the fridge for a few hours first. CO2 dissolves better in cold liquid.
After a week it was more carbonated, which helped the blandness but still tasted the same. Another week or so after that something odd happened...the flavors "rounded out", for lack of a better term.
What used to be really thin and sharp flavors, not metallic but with a bit of that character, became much warmer and everything seemed a lot more cohesive. It almost feels like I can actually judge it as a beer and not just relegate it to the bin of things that taste awful. I can't quite identify everything in it, which is still troublesome but I can definitely pick out a light maltiness with a toffee like body. Something in there is very similar to Werther's candies, but not quite as buttery. I definitely didn't manage to get the fruity yeast esthers I was trying for, which might have helped this beer a lot.
It's still a very light beer, which disappoints me because I really wanted something with more character and complexity, but it's actually shaping up to be something quaffable. I've learned a few things from this, even if the beer is less than stellar:

#1 I tried too many new things. All-grain, decoction, Belgian Aromatic Malt, brown sugar. I tried a lot of new stuff and I don't know what's making up the flavors I really don't like.

#2 My ability to hold a mash temp is freaking terrible. If I were to shoot higher to begin with or take more intermediate steps to maintain a temperature, I might do better.

Brown Ale brewday:

Moving on from that, I decided to step back and make a really simple beer to try to refine my technique. I also bought the Beersmith software, since I figure it could help me with some mash calculations.

I decided to shoot for a Brown Ale using only 3 malts, 2 hops, and a basic yeast I've used before.

12 lbs. US 2-row
2 lbs. Briess Special Roast
.5 lb US Chocolate Malt

1 oz cascade @ 60 minutes
1 oz cascade @ 30 minutes
1 oz glacier @ 10 minutes

Yeast: Wyeast 1272 - American Ale II

Since one of my major problems has been holding a mash temperature I decided to use the same basic technique as last time and improve upon it instead of trying something totally new. In the Scotch Ale writeup I mentioned using an "improvised mashtun" but didn't really go into detail about that. My improvised mashtun was a ginormous nylon grain bag in my bottling bucket with a spoon wedged inside between the bag and the inside opening of the spigot. Even with the top on, the plastic is just too good at giving off heat to hold the temperature for the length of the mash.

This time, to try to mitigate that I wrapped the bucket tightly in a blanket. I also told Beersmith I was using plastic, so it could take the thermal properties of my mashtun into account while calculating my strike water temperature. Since the Scotch Ale was so bland and light bodied I decided to mash a bit higher as well.

Unfortunately, I'm still trying to figure out Beersmith's interface so I screwed up and misread the temperature and used a strike temp that was way too low. I wound up in the high 140's instead of the mid 150's, and realized I'd screwed the pooch. I pulled off a bit of my mash immediately and also added some additional water from the tap, totaling about 1-2 gallons of water, and boiled it. As soon as it was boiling I poured it back into the mash and stirred up, which got me to a lot more respectable temperature.

Even with the wrapping I still lost a decent amount of heat so I might need to upgrade to actual insulation, or just sack up and do an actual Coleman Cooler MLT conversion.

I just let the mash rest, and then lautered to another bucket. I managed to get about 1.062 gravity from my first "gyle". I added my sparge water and let it sit, then lautered again. According to my refractometer readings of the runnings, at 1.020, I could have kept going but I had way more wort than I'm actually capable of boiling so I decided to leave it be. Generally you can lauter all the way down to about 1.008 before you start extracting tannins. In all I collected 5.5 gallons of wort with a combined pre-boil gravity of 1.052.

In the past I've topped up my boil kettle during the boil to maintain volume, so I have to top off less once the wort is in the fermenter. This time I knew I had too much wort and wasn't going to boil off enough over the hour, so I got the 2nd largest kettle in my apartment and filled that with wort hoping the extra boil off would let me use all my wort. I followed my hopping schedule as advertised, with the only real exception being I tossed a few pellets into the secondary boil, which I started a little earlier than the primary boil.

Prior to this brew I'd built my own immersion wort chiller, basically following what this guy did:

It's really easy and really cheap, there is pretty much no reason not to do it.
I chilled with that, and it took about 15 minutes to get to a pitchable temperature.
Post-boil I had 4 gallons of wort and topped back up to 5.5 gallons and pitched yeast. My Original Gravity was 1.048

I actually brewed this on Dec 5th, it's taken me this long to get around to writing this. The beer is about ready for bottling, so hopefully this goes better than the last. The krausen has fallen, and I hope to get around to bottling this weekend.

--PXA

October Horror 2011 - Post-season - Greatest hits 2009

2011-10-29T22:04:00.000-04:00

I didn't originally write anything about the first October Horror Viewing season in 2009, but we watched some really good movies that year. So the first entry in the post season is this writeup of the entirety of the 2009 season.

That year we had simple categories since we were just starting: Zombies, Slashers, Hauntings & Exorcisms, and Scifi Horror.

Zombies week: Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Quarantine, Dead Snow, Braindead.

All these movies were pretty solid. Shaun and Zombieland are zombie/comedy classics and are very funny. Dead Snow was really fun to watch because of the novelty of the concept of Nazi Zombies and the balls to film zombies in bright daylight in the snow. Definitely a highlight and something I enjoy watching again from time to time. Although we originally watched the sub'd version I have a dub now which is much more fulfilling. 28 Days Later is a modern classic for being one of the first movies of the current zombie cultural resurgence, and also for the unapologetic fast zombies. Quarantine deserves special distinction since it was so unsettling it took me 3 tries to watch to the end. Braindead is an early Peter Jackson movie and is just weird. I don't know what to say about it, it's beyond messed up. I think my favorite of the week, horror wise, was Quarantine. In general I liked Shaun of the Dead the best since it is REALLY funny.

Slashers: Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Cut, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2004), Saw, Prom Night (2004)

Prom Night was also on this year's list, partially because we either never watched it in 2009 or just didn't remember watching it in 2009. Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street are all huge classics. I probably liked Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street the best. Friday the 13th has pretty excellent kills and the twist killer reveal absolutely floored me the first time I saw it. Nightmare of course put Robert Englund's Freddy on the map, and I really like him as a character because of how bizarre and manic he is while still being half a second away from killing you dead. I think Cut deserves special mention for being quite fun to watch with a pretty novel concept. It's a little silly, but hey...Molly Ringwald in a horror movie.

Hauntings & Exorcisms: The Unborn, Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, 1408, A Haunting in Connecticut, The Amityville Horror, 13 Ghosts.

Exorcism movies are some of my favorites. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is probably #1 on my list of scariest movies ever. I watched it at 2 in the afternoon, with all the lights on, in a dorm room, with the door open, on a green tinted 15" CRT monitor and it still scared the crap out of it. Personally the least solid movie in this week was Rosemary's Baby. I just didn't think it aged well and it was kindof weird and boring. The Amityville (remake) was decent, although a little visual at the expense of personality. The Omen (remake) was also fun, but a bit silly. It was just a bit too easy to mock. 13 Ghosts is one of my favorite movies, but not particularly scary. It's a very original concept and the execution is wonderfully stylish. The Unborn is also very stylish, with some excellent jump scares and a few genuinely creepy moments. 1408 is also very creepy, but feels a little rushed and frantic. They probably didn't want to run out of things to do since the movie was set in a single room. A Haunting in Connecticut is probably my favorite horror movie out of the week. Pretty much everything it does is perfect.

Scifi Horror: Pulse, The Mist, Dreamcatcher, The Thing, Doom, Event Horizon, Aliens.

Aliens was a poor choice, as it much more action focused than Alien. Doom as well, I honestly don't know why we put it there. I guess it had some horror moments in the middle. Dreamcatcher is another great movie that has a lot of fun moments, it's just a bit more disturbing than creepy. Still well worth watching. The Mist was a great tense movie, but the ending is very polarizing. You either really love it or you hate the death out of it. It gets a major thing right that a lot of monster movies just forget: The monsters are scarier the less you see of them. Pulse is a guilty pleasure for me. It never seems to get a lot of respect and the sequel was horrible. It's got a lot of plot holes but I just love the concept and the execution is competent enough to make it interesting. Event Horizon is a modern horror classic, as far as I'm concerned. It's scary, it's gross, it's bizarre. The concept is innovative and the execution is horrifyingly tense. It's also one of my favorite scary movies and does pretty much nothing wrong.

--PXA

October Horror 2011: Day 28 - The Last Winter

2011-10-28T20:24:00.000-04:00

The Last Winter, released in 2006 was directed by Larry Fessenden. It stars Ron Perlman and Connie Britton.

As the final movie of the official horror viewing season this year I was really expecting something fun, especially with Ron Perlman in the lead role. Unfortunately the movie ruined itself in the last act deciding to be preachy instead of just presenting a cool story with the message they wanted. I'm aware it's a bit of a hot-button issue, but they could've taken the high road and just presented things without the soap box.

The basics here are that an American oil company is trying to build an ice road to a remote spot in the arctic circle so they can open a well. The oil reserve they're trying to tap is apparently large enough to secure U.S. energy independence for quite some time. The project leader, played by Ron Perlman immediately begins butting heads with the environmentalist who's been assigned to the base to report to the government with environmental impact assessments. Effectively, the government sold the land to the company under the condition that they operate an environmentally sound operation on it. The environmentalist won't let Ron Perlman build the ice road because it's not cold enough for the road to be safely built, but Perlman's character just doesn't care and is going to find a way to get this oil.

The movie itself is actually really good for the most part. The characters are pretty genuine, if a bit difficult to distinguish. Ron Perlman's character is a bit one note and inappropriately angry, which plays into the obvious preachiness because he represents the company and we're supposed to hate him. Everyone else seems like real people just trying to do their jobs in a stressful environment. What they really do well here is that the tension is mostly accomplished through the behavior of the characters: They act strange, they don't quite behave normally or as they used to. It's very unnerving. This is amplified by how isolated the cast is to begin with, and then by how much time each of them spends alone. You hear things happening off camera, the characters see things that the camera doesn't show and since no one else is around to verify you just don't know if it really happened or if it was in their head. The tension is supremely built for the first 80% or so of the movie.

Then in the middle of the 3rd act they start showing us far too much. Instead of leaving it nebulous, they make it obviously clear what's happening, and what's happening is just stupid. If you can forgive Larry for hopping on the soapbox right at the end there it's actually a pretty good supernatural suspense movie. If you can't, it's still a good movie that got ruined at the end by obnoxious moralizing.

With this, Horror Viewing Season 2011 is over. We only planned 28 movies instead of 31 since it's easier to divide into 4 categories and also for a bit of buffer. I may fill the remaining 3 days by adding some additional movies I liked or really good movies from 2009's crop.

--PXA

October Horror 2011: Day 27 - Cry_Wolf

2011-10-27T21:51:00.000-04:00

Cry_Wolf is a 2005 American movie directed by Katie Couric's nephew and stars Not-Thora Birch, Jared Padalecki, and Jon Bon Jovi.

It's a pretty interesting premise: Owen is the new guy at a preparatory high school in Australia and falls in with a group of students who break out of their dorms at night and gather in the school's chapel to play a game they call Cry Wolf. The game is a sociology game where one member of the group is designated a Wolf, and nobody in the game knows who. Each "night" the Wolf "murders" someone. This is followed by a round of accusations and the townsfolk eventually "lynch" whoever they think is the Wolf.

After a girl is murdered in the nearby woods the students invent a serial killer called The Wolf and write an email to the student body describing the kills he makes as he works through a school. They design the kills after members of their own group. As mass hysteria grows they revel in how they're causing it all, until Bon Jovi discovers the fraud and threatens to expel Owen. I don't remember exactly why they let him stay.

Owen begins receiving threatening IMs and messages from the Wolf, as if he was suddenly a real person. Paranoia among the group builds and Owen is attacked by someone dressed exactly as the Wolf they made up. There's a double and triple twist, which aren't actually horrible.

It's a pretty decent mystery/thriller sort of movie, with a fairly inventive story. It fails to hold attention at points and it's sometimes difficult to follow who the female characters are. I don't think I would watch it again, but it was actually pretty fun the first time around. It felt a bit like a late 90's teen slasher movie, just a bit more intelligent.

Horror Season 2011 concludes tomorrow with: The Last Winter, set in the Arctic.

October Horror 2011: Day 26 - Shutter

2011-10-26T21:20:00.000-04:00

Released in 2008 Shutter is an American remake of a Thai film of the same name from 2004. The remake stars Joshua Jackson in the lead role.

The story is that an American photographer who previous lived in Japan has moved back to the states for a period of time. He eventually gets married and accepts a job offer to move back to Japan. From the honeymoon onward it seems some spirit is stalking the newlyweds mostly manifesting as distortions in photographs. As the haunting intensifies the spirit manifest as hallucinations and then is able to manifest in the physical world just enough to kill some people until they die. The nature of the haunting is revealed, then re-revealed. The film closes with Josh Jackson in a mental hospital in a catatonic state with burns on his neck and face.

The movie is well developed, although not very creepy. It is fairly suspenseful. What drags it down a bit is the characters. Namely, I want to punch most of them. Josh himself isn't bad, but a bit dismissive and and makes some dumb moves. In the end it turns out he's a big huge asshole, but it just doesn't make sense. His wife has an unfortunate tendency to go wife-rage jealousy on every single woman who wanders within 4 feet of her husband. The other characters are mostly superfluous.

The end is actually pretty damned creepy, with the final photo taking being just really messed up. The film is a bit lackluster as a whole, but everything in it is pretty good. It's worth watching because it is suspenseful and creepy at points, but probably not worth rewatching.

With the larger continents done, we move to Australia for: Cry_Wolf.

October Horror 2011: Day 25 - Dominion

2011-10-25T23:33:00.000-04:00

Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist was released in 2005 on the coattails of Exorcist: The Beginning. It could almost be classified as a remake.

Basically in 2004 Paul Schrader was hired to film a prequel to 1973's The Exorcist with a story written by Caleb Carr and William Wisher, jr. Schrader had essentially finished his movie when the studio decided it wasn't to its liking and hired Renny Harlin to refilm the movie. The resulting movie, Exorcist: The Beginning, was released in 2004 to poor reception on the part of audience and critics alike. Since the version the studio liked was doing poorly they decided to give the version they didn't like a chance and threw Schrader a few thousand dollars to finish his movie, which they released in 2005 with the name Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist.

It's really interesting to compare both of those movies since they have the same story and effectively the same plot, with different direction, and slightly different screenplays and cast. The movies are so vastly different that the author of the original Exorcist story describes The Beginning as his most humiliating professional experience while saying that Dominion is "Handsome, classy, and elegant".

Both movies tell of Father Lankester Merrin's first encounter with the demon Pazuzu prior to the events of The Exorcist. The events depicted vary quite wildly from the flashback sequences of those events from Exorcist II: The Heretic. The basic premise is that after suffering a crisis of faith during World War II, Father Merrin takes a leave of absence and joins an archeological expedition to East Africa which uncovers an early Christian Church that was built on the ruins of an older pagan temple dedicated to Pazuzu. The demon possesses a local pariah and does spiritual battle with Merrin. The encounter reaffirms his faith and Merrin dedicates himself to the exorcism of demons and eternal battle with Pazuzu.

Dominion is a profoundly subtle and uncomfortable film, favoring atmosphere building and story to creep out the audience over grotesque visuals. It's a movie that's difficult to look away from. When it's not showing something designed for obvious shock, it's building an atmosphere saturated with cultural tension between African natives and British military forces. The story evolves slowly, as Merrin is forced to confront the demon with the aid of God. Even though the final transition involves Merrin regaining his faith and using it to save the woman who he can no longer be with because of that faith, the movie doesn't harp on a religious message. It's a personal struggle of Lankester Merrin to believe in God despite the overwhelming presence of evil and wider mentions of religion are only really used to establish a context or contribute to the tension.

The demon and the evil events in Dominion are much creepier, while The Beginning winds up being far more typical of supernatural horror, and as such far less creepy.

Both movies are worth checking out to compare with each other, but if you were to only watch one of them Dominion would be it. It's a much creepier movie across the board with better developed characters and thick layers of tension. It's subtle without being tied to the idea that subtle means that nothing happens, and has great lulls between tense moments. Comparatively, The Beginning bashes the audience over the head with important points because it doesn't trust them not to miss those points, and panders to an "EVIL MUST BE SICK" mentality to the point where it does the story a disservice. Dominion, as Ebert put it, takes evil seriously.

Next up, Asia with the Shutter remake.

October Horror 2011: Day 24 - The Shrine

2011-10-24T22:00:00.000-04:00

The Shrine is a 2010 Canadian horror movie directed by Jon Knautz and starring Aaron Ashmore.

The film opens with an unknown man dressed in a gown strapped to a cross-shaped table as a cloaked cult chants odd prayers in Polish, then hammer a grotesque mask into his face. Cue credits.

Flash forward and we meet Carmen, a reporter who's in a failing relationship with Marcus, a photographer. Carmen is in the professional doghouse for writing a controversial article. In a misguided attempt to salvage both her career and relationship she suggests Marcus accompany her on a "vacation" to the Polish village of Alvania, and while he's their he can help her do a story on the original man's death. The original man was a reporter for the same paper, incidentally. They take along an intern named Sara.

When arriving they do a few uncomfortable "ha ha look at how weird and backwards these rural Polish hicks are" scenes before finally seeing an unnatural grey cloud above the forest, which was mentioned in the original reporter's notes. They go to investigate and after being initially warned away from the forest, they sneak past the villagers and discover the cloud reaches the ground and forms a dense and visible wall. Sara and Carmen enter the fog and are lost for a time. When they come out, they find a little girl who speaks passable English to lead them to a barn containing several corpses, all wearing masks like the reporter in the beginning of the movie.

The group is captured by the cult, and separated. I'm going to stop here since I don't want to give away anything interesting. If you want the full synopsis, head to wikipedia, or go ahead and watch the movie.

The opening bit where the leads first enter the village are pretty uncomfortable, but not in a good way. They're poorly handled and a little silly, even though it's obvious they're trying to be tense. The scenes inside the fog itself are a pretty good warm up, and although a bit unsurprising are well executed. After the discovery of the corpse barn the movie takes a very sharp turn into more grotesque and interesting territory. There are very bizarre monster effects that function both as jump scares but also to blur the lines between what's happening and what might be happening. Are they hallucinations, or some sort of "true" vision revealing real monsters? This sort of thing only escalates until the movie more or less answers the question in a pretty novel way. I wasn't surprised by it because they made it make sense that it was happening, but not so much that I saw it coming halfway through the movie. I also really like the twist that the angry, scowling, knife-wielding Pollack isn't actually a bad guy.

One thing I didn't like was that a significant portion of the movie was in Polish, and had no subtitles. It was still relatively easy to follow the action and the depth of what happened at the end really didn't need spoken words to appreciate, however I think it could've benefited from subtitling or just using English for at least a bit more of the dialog during the cult's scenes. It could have added a lot of depth to the mythology and also made the movie more accessible to a wider audience.

The makeup effects are also very good, but you can tell they're really low budget which is a bit distracting, they could have benefited greatly from just a tiny bit more money in the makeup department.

All in all, it's very good and well worth checking out. It is tense, creepy, and interesting. Sometimes even downright jumpy scary, but it's not relying on that to freak you out, which is where it wins.

Onward! To Africa! Tomorrow is Dominion: The Prequel to The Exorcist.

October Horror 2011: Day 23 - And Soon the darkness

2011-10-23T23:25:00.000-04:00

And Soon the Darkness, released in 2010 is a remake of a 1970 British film also called And Soon the Darkness. It is set in Argentina and features Karl Urban, Odette Yustman, and Amber Heard.

Amber Heard is one of the current crop of scream queens making some fair decent movies. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is actually one of my favorite under-appreciated slasher movies.

Odette Yustman is also pretty strong in both horror and mainstream. She's even got a recurring role in the current season of House. It doesn't hurt that she looks like Meghan Fox if Meghan Fox had acting talent.

And Soon the Darkness is the story of two American girls who are on vacation together in Argentina. They separate from a bike tour and tool around the country. We join them on their last night in the country where they stay in a hotel but go out and get shithoused at a bar. Odette's character, Ellie, spends a lot of it making out with a guy while Amber's Stephanie obviously doesn't approve. The guy ends up following them back to their hotel and being creepy, they're saved by Karl Urban. They're so drunk they don't get up early enough and miss their bus back to the airport. Instead of trying to make other travel arrangements they decide to tour the country some more and visit some waterfalls. They have a fight and get separated, Ellie gets kidnapped. Steph and Karl Urban try to rescue her, there's death, some twists, more death, angsty, etc. Eventually Stephanie gets free and is rescued by Argentinian military.

I glossed over a lot of details in the name of avoiding spoiling anything, and also because I just don't want to go into it.

The movie is unfortunately dull, despite its best attempts at action sequences and throwing around twists so as not be accused of being formula. The earlier action sequences suffer from none of the characters acting intelligently, and the twists are predictable...which kindof defeats the point of twists.

The characters don't really help since our protagonist, Steph, is really a one note that waffles around most of the first act before being defined completely by her attachment to Ellie. Ellie is a stereotype of the annoying party-girl with a deep friendship with a more innocent girl, and that just really made me dislike her. The entire character just grated on me and I spent a lot of the movie lamenting her time on screen. Steph isn't much more interesting, but she is at least not annoying. She suffers from being too afraid to act appropriately. Even when she starts to go final-girl, she only survives by pure luck and not any sort of transformative badassery.

Karl Urban is actually the best to watch because even though he's also a one-note, the performance manages to tone down that aspect enough to give the impression he might be a fully realized person.

The movie does one kindof interesting, artsy thing. While starting off in full color, as the movie goes along they desaturate the colors and increase the contrast. It's a cool little thing to read some subtext into, but the rest of the movie is just dull. The plot was very similar to other kidnap/revenge stories like Hostel or Taken, with only very few variations from formula.

Not really worth the effort.

With The Americas complete, we venture to Europe with: The Shrine

October Horror 2011: Day 22 - The Brood

2011-10-22T20:37:00.000-04:00

Released in 1979, The Brood was directed by David Cronenberg, probably best known for movies like The Fly, Videodrome, and Scanners. This is the first entry in "Around the World" week and takes place in North America.

The Brood tells the story of a experimental psychotherapy technique developed by a psychologist named Dr. Raglin, who is an expert on repressed rage. The technique, called psychoplasmics, works by forcing the subject to face traumatic experiences or emotions to a depth that causes physical manifestations on the body, which are cleared by "going through" the experience and leaving it behind.

The main character's wife is in therapy undergoing this treatment, while engaged in a bitter custody battle over their daughter, Candice. Convinced the wife is beating the daughter during visits to the hospital, he tries to uncover what really goes on during the visits and the therapy sessions. While he investigates Dr. Raglin, anyone who's offended or injured the wife begins dying. They're being murdered by creepy, mutant children in snowsuits. The body count extends to include the wife's parents and a school teacher who Candice bonds to as a surrogate mother.

This movie isn't nearly as bizarre and mind-bending as most of Cronenberg's other films, and not quite as downright disturbing and disgusting. Instead, he favors more of a mystery story that slowly unravels the origin of the "Brood" of murder-children. The ending bit is pretty disgusting, but is more of a one time shock than the constant unrelenting bombardment of most Cronenberg.

I enjoyed it well enough for what it was, and the mystery was fun to follow. Probably worth checking out if you're into the whole "Body-horror" thing, or need to give someone an intro because this is sort of "Body-horror Lite".

Tomorrow we travel to South American and watch: And soon the Darkness.

October Horror 2011: Day 21 - Paranormal Activity 3

2011-10-21T22:09:00.000-04:00

I've learned 2 things today: Paranormal Activity 3 is a really scary movie and I'm one of the 5 people under age 35 that are capable of not talking for an hour and a half.

One of the unfortunate perils of seeing movies in theaters is the possibility that the audience is filled with disrespectful, juvenile, bros in flat-brimmed baseball caps and simpering, self-entitled college girls who really believe the entire audience should be made aware of their every thought and fear during the runtime of the film. I am not kidding when I say one asshole brought one of those plastic bulb horns that you can buy at pet stores to scare cats to the theater, and squeaked it during the movie. (P.S. if you are one of those people, you need to end yourself immediately. A movie ticket costs at least $9, that is way too expensive to be forced to listen to you trying to pretend we're all here for your stand up hour. Nobody needs your commentary, keep it to your damned self.)

That said, I think it's even more impressive that Paranormal Activity 3 is one of the most skin-crawling, gut-wrenchingly scary movies I have seen all year. Despite the best efforts of the Mask of the Brotasm I was able to get involved enough in this movie to be concerned that I had just eaten and neglected to bring a change of pants.

Paranormal Activity 3 is a distant prequel to the events of Paranormal Activities 1 and 2, taking place in 1988. It chronicles the initial haunting of Katie and her sister Kristi by the demon that would later torment them in adulthood. PA3 has one of the more believable reasons for a found footage movie to have cameras everywhere: Katie and Kristi live with their mother, Julie, and her boyfriend, Dennis. Dennis is a professional cameraman. He makes his living by video taping other people's important events. This is why he has a garage full of cameras, VHS tapes, and editing equipment. It's far more plausible than PA2's nanny/security cameras.

PA3 also has the good sense to drop the number of cameras used from the absurd total PA2 had. For a large portion of the movie PA3 only uses 2 cameras. They eventually add a 3rd camera, which has been attached to an oscillating fan, in order to catch more action. This camera in particular had amazing potential for scary shots because it was in a regular motion. They could easily add or remove elements from the scene when the camera wasn't showing them and also set off jump scares just barely out of frame. The fact that you never really know what was going to show up as the camera was oscillating really contributed to the amount of tension those scenes had.

They also introduce a "witchcraft" aspect to the movie as a means of explanation of the presence of the demon, but they barely spend any time on it. It results in providing some context to things, without explaining them too much.

They expertly build and release tension and exploit that to make great scares, and not just jump scares. The scares here are far more shocking than the original movie, but rely more on tension than what the second movie did.

I think I might like it better than the original, but I might need to sit on that statement for a few weeks, maybe rewatch them both when they do a DVD release. It's a very good movie and well worth ponying up the cash to the theater to see.

Tomorrow we begin the trip around the world, starting with David Cronenburg's The Brood, in North America.

October Horror 2011: Day 20 - Evil Things

2011-10-20T22:58:00.000-04:00

Evil Things is a 2009 indie horror movie by Dominic Perez.

Following the disappearance of 5 pretty white folks a VHS tape is delivered anonymously to the FBI. The tape is labeled with a handwritten note that just says "Evil Things". On the tape is a pre-edited copy of THIS MOVIE. OMGZ!

Most of the film is shot by one of the 5 lead characters, who is a film school student with aspirations of being a documentary film maker. He's chronicling his friend's 21st birthday party, which takes place at an absolutely sweet house in the middle of the woods owned by the friend's Aunt. The movie starts off in NYC at the beginning of the drive to the house and follows them as they're harassed by an unknown stalker in a van. After a snow storm they end up at the house and spend the night drinking and partying, then the next day they spend several hours lost in the woods. That night, they're picked off one by one, off camera. The film ends with an over the shoulder shot of the killer editing the video and making a really creepy animal noise, which was heard earlier in the woods. Then the film re-ends showing the killer video taping the cast hours before their road trip started. Then shows more of the events of the movie from the killer's perspective during the credits.

The movie as a whole is pretty lackluster. The scares are competently executed but not well supported by the surrounding scenes. Also after a slower start the action takes off so quickly it glosses over what happens to a lot of the characters, which makes their ends lose some of their impact. The complete lack of explanation of anything is also a little annoying. Even after watching the credits you're left with no real idea of why the killer is doing anything. For all we know, he really likes video cameras and kills anyone with one so he can liberate it. The clicking animal noise, while supremely creepy, is given no context...the killer just makes that noise. It's weird. I'm not sure if the director was trying to be artsy or avant-garde by starting so many threads and ideas and never really tying any of them up, but it just rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes this can be really good, like in Inception where the movie ending is designed to be ambiguous with regards to the single question of "Is Cobb still dreaming?". However, this works because Nolan expertly crafted the narrative around the question and chose that single question to leave open. Perez's ending lacks any of this focus.

Unfortunately this is probably a little too confused to be really worth watching, unless you wanted to try to decipher whatever mythos might exist.

Found footage week closes with: Paranormal Activity 3.

October Horror 2011: Day 19 - Troll Hunter

2011-10-19T22:00:00.000-04:00

Troll Hunter is a 2010 Norwegian movie released stateside in June 2011.

The found footage in this case comes from hard drives containing digital video shot by a group of film students who start the movie pursuing an alleged bear poacher. They overstep just far enough to get involved with the poacher, who turns out to be Hans: Norway's only registered Troll Hunter. Hans' job is to exterminate trolls who go outside of their territorial boundaries, or venture to a place where humans might discover them. They begin following Hans as he tries to discover why so many trolls have fled their designated areas.

Ultra violet light causes trolls to violently explode or calcify depending on their age, and they have an insatiable craving for the blood of a Christian man.

There's nothing exceptional about the found footage camera work or premise. In fact the camera gets annoying sometimes taping things that it doesn't seem like a rational person would tape.

However, the special effects were pretty nice. They played off the uncanny valley-ness of modern CGI by designing trolls that looked a bit silly on purpose. But the way they moved and the proportion and placement in the scene made them seem real, but still wrong somehow. The effect of which is that you feel they really don't belong in the scene but it could just be because you're looking at a TROLL and it just doesn't make sense to your brain.

The story was compelling, if a bit simple, and the troll scenes were very tense. The final boss was epic in the truest sense of the word. The relative difference in size between the troll and the battle tankified jeep was mind boggling. The ending of the found footage was a bit weak, but the post-epilogue bit of the state official was actually pretty fun.

Definitely worth watching for action, thrills, it's a little scary but more in the dark fantasy way than the horror way. Good stuff, those Norwegian movies.

Next up: Evil Things

October Horror 2011: Day 18 - Apollo 18

2011-10-18T22:30:00.000-04:00

Apollo 18's premise is that it's pieced together from recently recovered footage taken by the crew of the Apollo 18 mission. The last official manned moon landing was the Apollo 17 mission, and 18 was cancelled.

The story begins with the mission being uncancelled and the 3-man crew informed they'll be allowed to go to the moon. Once they arrive they experience technical difficulties, odd sensations, and eventually discover the remains of a secret, failed Russian mission and a dead cosmonaut. They float an implication that the creepy problems and paranoia might be a result of a haunting by the dead cosmonaut and not the obvious creepy, stealthy alien. But it never really pans out.

I think this uses the most plausible explanation for the constant presence of camera of any found footage horror movie I have ever seen. Even the standard "Film crew" framing device inevitably leads to at least one moment where you think to yourself "Why the hell are they filming THAT?". Either it's wildly inappropriate, or absurdly dull. Another common trope in found footage is the camera operator will inexplicably manage to hold the camera amazingly steady while fleeing for their lives. I really appreciated that in Apollo 18 a lot of the cameras were stationary or mounted to something. Either a helmet, a vehicle. Basically anything other than an astronaut having to hold a camera. It makes an amazing amount of logical sense and allows the director to shoot from several angles and have the camera flail wildly when handheld in a stressful situation without losing the audience.

The movie is really good at being generally tense, and the final few scenes are very hectic and had you really sucked in and focused. However, it's not scary, it's just tense. When the movie and ends and tension releases you find yourself really disappointed, since nothing really happens. There are really only 2 creepy things that happen, and the rest of the movie is tension between the characters. There's nothing wrong with that sort of tension but the problem here is that it never leads anywhere. You never discover anything about the presence/haunting on the moon, the crew all dies and...that's that. The end.

Even with that, I enjoyed watching it because it is good, and even creepy. It's just a bit of a let down because none of it leads anywhere.

Tomorrow night is the Norwegian import: Troll Hunter.

The Beerening: Wee heavy brew day

2011-10-18T21:10:00.001-04:00

I haven't written anything about my homebrewing hobby yet, but this past brew day I did several very interesting things that probably deserve to be discussed a little bit.

With late fall and winter rapidly approaching I really wanted to brew something rich and malty, with a lot of complexity to enjoy, but low ABV so I could drink it after only about a week in the bottle and drink a couple of them without getting owned. I settled on a Scotch Ale 80/-, which should be between 4-5% ABV. Scotch ales are copper to amber colored, malty, toasty, caramely, with very little hoppiness and a nice touch of fruity esthers from yeast.

My basic recipe was:

63% American Six-row Pale (7.5 pounds)
17% American Vienna (2 pounds)
13% Brown Sugar (1.5 pounds)
4% American Crystal 40L (0.5 pounds)
4% Belgian Aromatic (0.5 pounds)

1 oz Fuggles @ 60 minutes
1.5 oz Kent Goldings @ 20 minutes

The color of this recipe is about 9 SRM, which is within the style but I really would like it a little darker.

To darken it up I decided to try two new techniques. The first being the decoction mash, and the second being deliberate kettle caramelization. Both of these techniques add certain flavors and will darken the color of my beer.

A bit of background:
Decoction mashing is a result of early brewers' inability to accurately measure temperatures while mashing. The premise is that after mashing in and stirring your grain bed well, you pull an amount of the thick part of the mash (basically the soaked grain material) out of the mashtun and boil it for several minutes before adding it back to the main mash. The technique is a well known hallmark of German brewing, and adds bready and biscuity flavors as well as darkening the mash.

Kettle Caramelization is simple a side affect of a concentrated wort. An extended boil is a good way to condense the wort to make higher ABV beers, and would cause caramelization. Most modern Scotch ale recipes just include a decent amount of Crystal malt, but in Brewing Classic Styles Jamil discusses a smaller unhopped boil whose entire purpose is to deliberately caramelize some of your wort. This traditional technique adds caramal notes, toffee flavors, and residual sweetness to the brew since the process renders some of the sugars unfermentable. It's not as reliable as using Crystal malt, but it's an interesting technique to try.

On to my actual brew:
I hit my first mash rest of 145F and let it rest for 20 minutes, then started pulling thick mash for my first decoction. Michael Dawson of BrewingTV advocates 1qt thick mash per pound of grist, but I wasn't sure how much this would raise my temperature so I pulled off a bit less.

This is about 6 quarts of thick mash, it looked a little watery so I added 2 more quarts that were more diligently strained, resulting in this:

I boiled these 8 quarts of thick mash for about 15 minutes.

There was a minor technical issue with my stove and it took me longer to get the grains to a boil than I wanted. My improvised mashtun lost a lot of heat, so when I added the decoction back in I barely managed to break even. So I stirred the mash up and pulled another 4 quarts of thick mash and brought that to a boil. I let it boil about 10 minutes and added it back to my main mash, raising the temperature to 149F. I felt that was a decent rest temp so I let the mash rest there for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes I lautered. My grist absorbed a LOT of water and I only ended up with 1.5 gallons of first runnings. However, those running had a gravity of 1.075, which is pretty decent. In Brewing Classic Styles Jamil recommends pulling 1 gallon of first runnings and boiling that off. The common discussion on the internet involves boiling this down to 1 or 2 quarts. I set the runnings to boil and wandered off to watch some Star Trek. About an hour and some odd later I had lost most of the volume and was down to about half a gallon. The color was gorgeous and it smelled absolutely incredible.

I decided to sparge with about 3.5 gallons at 155F. I heated the water and then poured it into the mashtun. The soaked grain absorbed NONE of it so I had a really thin sparge. I let it sit for about 20 minutes, stirring regularly, and lautered again. I ended up collecting all 3.5 gallons at a gravity of 1.020, which is a very weak 2nd running. The color was substantially lighter due to not being boiled to death.

From there I mixed the caramelized wort and the 2nd runnings until there was about 3.5 gallons in my boil kettle. After the hot break, I added the remaining 2nd runnings as the kettle boiled off until I had all of the 2nd runnings in the kettle. Then I added my hops and did a regular 60 minute boil.

After the boil I cooled the wort to about 90F and mixed in 2.5 gallons of cold water, bringing it to about 70F. I had a final volume of 5.5 gallons of 1.049 wort, into which I pitched 500mL of Scottish Ale starter.

It's been fermenting at roughly 65F ambient temperature. It'll probably another 2-3 weeks until I bottle it, and then a week in the bottle should have it ready for drinking at right around Thanksgiving.

Cooling, the cold break is particularly hypnotic.

Drink on!

--PXA

October Horror 2011: Day 17 - Cannibal Holocaust

2011-10-17T23:21:00.000-04:00

Cannibal Holocaust is a 1980 Italian movie directed by Ruggero Deodato. It is considered the grand-daddy of the found footage genre and one of the most disgusting and controversial movies of all time. After the movie's original release, the film was seized until the director could prove to a court of law that he didn't kill his cast.

The first half of this movie focuses on anthropologist Harold Monroe leading an expedition into the South American jungle to rescue a lost group of an American documentary film crew. They really drive home the point in the intro that the film crew is American. The second half is Monroe watching the footage of the original crew that he recovered and discovering why the original crew was brutally murdered and displayed like a grotesque christmas ornament.

The movie is famous for its anti-exploitation message and contains a form of the iconic "Who is the real monster?" line.

This movie is sick. It is gross. It is disgusting. It would be difficult to watch if I hadn't had my soul removed from years of internet shock memes. The effects are quite good when they're used correctly, but often look like bad paper maché. What helps the gore effects out is the use of actual gore. One of the controversies of this movie is that the animals that were killed by the cast during the found footage portion are really being killed on film. It's so undeniably real that it lends credence to the effects used to simulate the human murder and dismemberment. Unfortunately, these scenes are actual slaughter. It's disgusting and it makes me hate the characters.

...Crap, I'm supposed to hate the characters. The original film crew are raging assholes, we're supposed to hate them and be satisfied by their eventual death and dismemberment. It works. Between the senseless animal murder, the sadistic treatment of the natives, and the rape I honestly felt the characters deserved to die.

Cannibal Holocaust isn't what I'd call a good movie. It's disgusting and morally reprehensible, and the characters deserve their gruesome deaths. Really the only thing that makes this worth watching is the horror cred you get from having watched Cannibal Holocaust

Move along.

Tomorrow night, found footage continues with Apollo 18.

October Horror 2011: Day 16 - The Blair Witch Project

2011-10-16T20:52:00.000-04:00

The second entry in Found Footage week is 1999's smash hit The Blair Witch project. Found footage movies had been in the periphery of the genre for years, perhaps one of the earliest examples was 1980's Cannibal Holocaust. However, Blair Witch managed to bring it into the mainstream of the horror genre through an innovative internet marketing campaign which attempted to provide validity to the assertion that the recovered film was legitimate. Even though the Blair Witch franchise attempt failed utterly with the sublimely terrible Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, the success of The Blair Witch Project enabled later films like Cloverfield, Quarantine, Paranormal Activity, and Grave Encounters.

Blair Witch has quite a reputation surrounding it, unfortunately I just don't think it's deserved. For something that's supposed to be real footage some of the actions of the characters seem utterly contrived and I just can't imagine a real person doing something like that.

The majority of the film's running time is spent trekking through the woods and arguing with each other, which grated on my nerves so much that by the time actually scary things started happening I just didn't care. Further, the build up to the climax is scarier than the actual close. The tent shaking scene in particular is pretty tense.

They open a lot of things that they never really answer, but I suppose that was create an air of mystery...but that sort of thing is silly in the movie itself. You've already convinced people to watch it, just resolve things for them. The unknown fate of one of the characters may have been alluding to a continuation of the story in the sequel, but then they made a sequel that didn't pick up that plot thread at all.

If the movie had a stronger ending I might accept its flaws, but the end is just such a let down it seems more silly than scary. Maybe if I didn't have such a strong disbelief from so many years on the internet, or if I'd had the immersion of a theater, I would think better of the ending.

Anyway, next up is the original found footage: Cannibal Holocaust.

October Horror 2011: Day 15 - [REC] (2007)

2011-10-15T23:08:00.000-04:00

I'm not entirely sure that this should be here, as this is the original movie that was later remade. However, we'd watched the remake, Quarantine, a few years back when Blockbuster was still in business and this seemed like a good opportunity to watch the original movie.

[REC] is a 2007 Spanish film which was remade barely 1 year later as the English language Quarantine. It was written and directed by John Erik Dowdle, who was responsible for the cult found footage movie The Poughkeepsie Tapes. GIFs from that have been making their way around the internet as some of the most damned creepy scenes ever.

The premise of both movies is that a news channel reporter is shadowing the local fire department as a human interest story for a late-night news show when they receive a call to rescue an elderly woman trapped inside her apartment. When they arrive, the woman is covered in blood and very aggressive. She ends up biting one of the responders. When they attempt to evacuate the responder to the hospital they discover the police and the army have surrounded the building in a quarantine as part of Biological, Chemical, or Nuclear response. The rest of the movie follows the group of tenants as their group slowly fractures and becomes infected with something very similar to a Zombie virus (à la 28 Days Later) until the only survivors are the newscaster and her cameraman who take refuge in the attic apartment where they discover the source of the disease before being murdered by patient 0.

People criticize the remake quite a bit for being mostly a shot-for-shot remake of the original with very little original spin. After watching both movies, that complaint seems to come mostly from hipsters who believe foreign movies are better by virtue of being foreign movies, who believe English language remakes of foreign movies are always bad because we Americans have no sense of what makes a scary movie and bulldoze over the subtlety and superior sense of horror that foreign movies innately posses.

[REC] by itself is a great movie, it's claustrophobic, shocking, and creepy. It's bloody, and violent without becoming an action movie. The film is a testament to the found footage genre. It's terrifying without doing much over most of its running time and despite a minor stumble during the last 10 minutes has what might be one of the most terrifying final 5 minutes of any movie. EVER. I am not kidding, the end of this movie was beyond scary. I will admit that it was harder to get into because it relies extensively on very fast paced storytelling, which is difficult when reading subtitles. I have no particular hatred of subtitles, but they do make things a little harder to follow. Especially in something that moves this quickly. Even with that against it, it's a truly great movie in its own right.

The remake acknowledges this by being 90% the same. However, the remake is shot with a better sense of composition and pacing. They've created a few new scenes that didn't exist in the original movie that serve very well to heighten or maintain the tension established in previous shots. One of these new scenes is the reason it took me 3 tries to finish the movie for the first time. It's truly something I didn't want to watch. Some of the more subtle effects were used to extend the capabilities of the zombies so that their movements threw them into a very uncomfortable part of the uncanny valley. Also, an issue I had with [REC] was that it looked like the majority of it took place during the day and was very well lit from outside the building. This didn't make sense for something set during the overnight shift of a fire department. Quarantine had much better lighting.

The running time of the remake is ~89 minutes and the running time or the original is ~78 minutes.

I was more affected and more frightened by the first 82 minutes of the remake, but the final 7 or so minutes are far more scary than the remake's finale. The original takes a minor tangent into religious explanation for the events before abandoning it right before the end. After this weird religion thing it becomes far creepier than the remake.

Either way, this original is great and the remake is really a remake done right where the original is adapted and expanded on to make it better for the target audience.

Tomorrow night we check out the movie that kicked off modern found footage revival: The Blair Witch Project.

October Horror 2011: Day 14 - The Thing (2011)

2011-10-14T21:47:00.000-04:00

This movie isn't a remake by strict definition but is, in fact, a prequel. However the story and premise is so similar to that of the original that it could easily be a remake with creative editing.

The first The Thing was released in 1982, written by Bill Lancaster (of Bad News Bears fame) and directed by John Carpenter. The movie was itself a remake of the 1951 movie The Thing from Another World, which was based on the 1938 novella Who Goes There?, though Carpenter's movie is more faithful to the source material than the original movie. Carpenter had effectively invented the modern slasher 4 years prior with 1978's Halloween and the original movie really saw him upping his game. The film is considered a horror classic for its bleeding edge special effects and effectiveness in creating sensations of claustrophobia and paranoia. The movie was rife with brooding tension that exploded effectively at the finale. It was brilliant combination of bizarre and disgusting with tense and psychological, and is consistently ranked one of the scariest movies of all time.

The prequel was written by Ronald Moore, a writer for Star Treks TNG, DS9, and VOY and Battlestar: Galactica, and Eric Heisserer who wrote the screenplay for the Nightmare remake and the script for Final Destination 5. It was directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., in his feature film directorial debut.

The basics of the story is that a research team at a remote Antarctic station encounter an alien monster that has the capability to perfectly mimic any organism at the cellular level. The alien feeds on each member of the team while they slowly fall apart and turn on each other due to their suspicion that one of the others is The Thing. In the end the research station is destroyed in an attempt to kill the creature and the final few survivors are left in the unforgiving cold to die, unable to trust each other.

The only major variation from this is that in the prequel they dig up the alien before it breaks out, and the end of the prequel dovetails directly into the opening shot of the original movie.

The prequel has a bit more of a meandering opening while it assembles its cast and establishes the setting. I will say that the sweeping shots of the snowy wasteland are pretty gorgeous. It also picks a much more higher pitch once the action does start, burning through cast members much more quickly than the original did. It made it a bit chaotic at times, and hard to follow. To an extent this served to highlight the chaos and panic in the film, but it was too easy to lose track of characters which is a bit disappointing to me when I'm trying to follow a story. It also did a pretty decent job of recreating the claustrophobic environments of the first movie, but not so much the paranoia. The movie moved too quickly to really identify with any of the characters, although I think that was more because it was trying to make you feel like you were part of the events by dragging you through the plot at a break-neck speed.

Early on there was some awkward hand-held camera shots, which is usually a way of placing the audience inside a scene and making the action seem tense and unstable. Thankfully it either stopped being as noticeable or they stopped using it before the middle point.

The worst point of the entire movie is probably the CGI, and that is to say it was jaw-droppingly terrible. The original did everything with incredible models, animatronics, puppets, and massive creativity in picking their shots. Everything looked real and disgusting, albeit a bit hokey sometimes. This remake uses real, practical effects sparingly, and even then it uses them when the monster is mostly out of shot. I'm sure this saved them money, but it meant that when the monster was being shown in all its glory it was entirely CG. So what should have been the most horrifying and disgusting shots were reduced to CGI that would have looked dated 5 years ago. There were definitely spots when it looked good, but it was also very hard to be afraid of because of the spots where it looked like a stupid.

In fact, the majority of the forms the monster took that were new to this movie (e.g. the woman's head hanging off the back of the monster) looked silly. The best ones were when they borrowed forms from the original movie. It had to be in the two-faced, backwards form by the end for the original timeline to work, and when it got there it looked the best.

The theater I saw it in had the sound up absurdly loud, and the creature sounds were really high pitched. The sound system assaulted me and left me a bruised and battered man. It was traumatic.

All negatives aside, I actually thought this was a pretty decent movie. It wasn't quite as good as the original because of the really bad CGI. The decision to focus more on chaos and panic was well served by the faster pacing, although I really liked the paranoia and tension of the first one. This doesn't quite hold up to the original as a horror film, because the creature effects and sense of claustrophobia in the original are much scarier than the immersion in the chaos of the prequel.

This was a fun scifi/action/thriller. Watch this, then watch the original to continue the story and get creeped the hell out.

Re-rererererere week is over! Tomorrow night, Found Footage week starts with [REC]

October Horror 2011: Day 13 - Fright Night (2011)

2011-10-13T23:40:00.000-04:00

Last year's October Horror month started with the original Fright Night, from 1985.

I really like how they've updated the original for this remake. Instead of copping out and just updating the setting and some superficial trimmings they really revamped (lawl) the entire story and all the characters to make sense in a modern context.

The basic idea here is that a vampire moves into a cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood, and the nerdy guy living next door discovers he's actually a vampire. No one believes him, and he eventually loses his best friend and girl-interest to the vampire. His only hope is to enlist Peter Vincent, an entertainer who appears to be "faking the funk", to help him kill the vampire and protect his mom. The vampire is a funny character because while being ostensibly a modern predatory alpha male in both movies he's still bound by old-school vampire rules. There's a pretty funny scene where Colin Ferrel's vampire is fishing for an invitation from Anton Yelchin's Charley.

The character that was updated the most was probably Peter Vincent. In the original Peter Vincent was a meek old man played by Roddy McDowall. He was the host of a late night horror movie show called "Fright Night", which showed the 1930's-1950's Hammer Studios-style gothic horror films Vincent once starred in. In the remake Peter Vincent is a multimillionaire magician performing a highly theatrical stage show in Las Vegas called "Fright Night" in which he battles vampires and a host of other demons with the power of magic. He's also a collector of rare and magical artifacts and books, mostly concerning vampires, which he keeps in his gigantic hotel penthouse along with his gorgeous wife. His wife hates his guts, he's completely superficial, and quite often hammered on Midori liqueur. The character is played with a sloppy, but confident, swagger by David Tennant. He's very fun to watch in the role, although there are a few time when he falls into the giddy and excitable Dr. Who mannerisms which don't seem to fit very well.

It's a nice casual vampire movie, very well executed. It's not a dark story, or dark humor, but not quite as comedic as something like Shaun of the Dead. A good balance of somewhat unsettling visual effects and light story.

And I definitely don't see Christopher Mintz-Plasse getting into gay porn for a decade like the original "Evil" Ed.

Anyway. Tomorrow is a return to the Theatre for The Thing.

October Horror 2011: Day 12 - Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

2011-10-12T20:01:00.000-04:00

The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise began in 1984. The first movie, and most of the series was written and directed by horror magnate Wes Craven. The series spawned 9 sequels, including a cross over with Jason Vorhees. However, the series lost steam and the final Freddy-only movie was 1994's New Nightmare. Freddy was dormant again until 2003 when Freddy Vs. Jason was released.

Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes company produced this 2010 remake, which was written by the writer of the Doom movie and the directorial debut of Samuel Bayer (who had previously only done music videos). Robert Englund didn't reprise his role as the iconic Freddy and was replaced by Jackie Earle Haley, fresh off roles as Rorschach in Watchmen and George Noyce in Shutter Island.

Background aside, I really hate this movie. I think it's one of the worst major productions and an absolute affront to one of the most iconic horror franchises ever.

The movie relies far too much on jump scares, which really devalues the more atmospheric scenes in between jump scare scenes. Each individual scene is actually pretty well put together, but the movie as a whole never comes together. There's just not a lot of tension, and even though the nightmares look very good they don't serve to be scary or unnerving in any way. This is probably because of a dependency on CGI, which I don't normally find too much of a detractor but here it just doesn't look very good.

They also changed the backstory of the Freddy character to make him more blatantly evil, instead of the ambiguous nature of the original Freddy. His characterization is also more of a nasty, sexual, and aggressive monster and less of a mischievous and silly but also warped and dangerous. Some of the glove mannerisms contributed by Haley are a nice addition but the lackadaisical delivery of the lines makes it seem like Freddy's taken a horse tranquilizer and is trying to get some ass before he passes out. The changes to the character really remove the dynamic nature that separated him from the lumbering beasts that ordinarily inhabit the slasher genre, and without that everything seems a bit mediocre.

The original movie's effects aren't even that bad. The fashions are a bit dated, but the movie certainly doesn't feel as old as some of the others from the 70s and 80s I've watched. It's well worth watching over this. This is just...not interesting, not scary. It may have worked better if they'd invented their own supernatural slasher, but new-Freddy can't hold a candle to old-Freddy and it brings the remake down to "generic".

Next up, a trip to the Theatre for Fright Night.

October Horror 2011: Day 11 - Friday the 13th (2009)

2011-10-11T23:00:00.000-04:00

The first Friday the 13th was released in 1980 to cash in on the popularity of Halloween. That film was a success on its own and spawned 9 sequels and a crossover with Freddy of Nightmare on Elm Street before being rebooted by Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production company.

The original's plot centered around a group of teens who have been hired as camp counselors to get an abandoned campground at Crystal Lake running again. Years ago the camp was shut down following the drowning death of a mentally disabled camper. The camper was unsupervised because the counselors who were meant to watch him were screwing. Standard slasher moralizing. There's a fairly excellent twist ending, before twist endings were cliche.

The remake destroys the twist from the original within a minute or two of its running time and is nowhere near as focused in plot. It meanders a bit, I think for the sake of upping its body count.

The new version begins with a flashback to Jason's childhood, then fastforwards to a group of delinquent teens hiking in the woods. They're trekking to find a large crop of wild marijuana hidden in the wood with plans to harvest the plants and then sell them and get massively rich. They make camp for the night and proceed to drink, smoke, and screw until Jason appears to punish them all for their promiscuity. Jason dispatches them all within a few minutes and cue credits.

6 weeks later we meet a slightly larger and even douchier group of teens heading to Ritchie Rich's father's cabin in the woods. There's a tangential relation to the first group of teens in Sam from Supernatural, who is the brother of one of the girls in the first group. They make it up to the cabin where they drink, smoke, and screw. The characters play their stereotypes pretty well, even if it is a bit obnoxious. It does serve to distinguish everyone and provide some semblance of a personality to identify with, which is nice.

The murder is very fun, pretty well paced, varied, and creative. There's also a lot of real practical effects instead of CG which really helps them look meaty.

It's a little dark and high contrast, but such is the way with most modern horror movies.

However, the characters in the first are much better, the kills are more fun since they're much better lit. The original story is better than the remake, and the twist at the end I think is part of what made it such a classic. It is very 70's-tastic since it was only 1980, but if you can stomach that it's a much worthier movie to watch.

Next up: Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

October Horror 2011: Day 10 - Prom Night (2008)

2011-10-10T21:37:00.000-04:00

Prom Night was a Canadian slash movie released in 1980. It starred Jamie Lee Curtis, who was also in the original Halloween. I haven't seen the original film so I can only evaluate this one as it stands alone.

The premise is that a young girl's teacher develops an obsession with her, and is fired from the school. He then breaks into her house and kills her entire family in front of her as she hides in the closet. 3 years of intense therapy and adoption by her aunt and uncle later, she's all grown up and about to graduate high school.

However, the killer escaped jail and tracked her down on the night of the senior prom. In his obsessive jealousy he then stalks the hotel where the dance is held, killing off hotel employees and all the girl's friends. The majority of these kills are quick and obfuscated stabs to the abdomen with a large pocket knife.

All the killings are identical, so they all blur together. This effect isn't helped by how generic all the characters are. At best case the character has shown enough personality to be disliked as a shallow caricature of a high school stereotype. There's no one to identify with, so there is no horror to what is happening. Even the lead character, who we spend a lot of time with, fails to connect. The actress was decent, the writing just didn't give her anything except a series of scenes to wander through.

The movie's glossy and well constructed but flat and utterly uninteresting. It's not even particularly bloody or suspenseful. I can't say I disliked watching it, I was just a little bored because I didn't get anything gory to watch or anything interesting to think about.

Next up: Friday the 13th (2009)

October Horror 2011: Day 9 - Halloween (2007)

2011-10-09T21:48:00.000-04:00

The original Halloween was released in 1978 under the direction of John Carpenter. The film was one of the progenitors of the original slasher genre and gave birth to one of its most recognizable icons. It's basically the guidebook for how to make a slasher movie.

Old school Halloween focused more on suspense than is standard for the genre it spawned, and was fueled by what might be the best soundtrack in all of horror movie history. In fact, when Halloween was first screened all audiences found it boring and tame but once the famous odd-time theme was introduced the exact same footage was exciting and tense. I could easily music-theory-nerd on the theme for an hour, but I digress.

Halloween: H20 attempted to rebuild the ailing franchise in 1998, at the tail end of the 90's slasher resurgence led by Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legend. But despite an impressive performance at the box office, this was the last film of the original Michael Myers timeline.

This 2007 reboot is directed by Rob Zombie, who had previously directed House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects which were very slick but mostly bizarre and gory. Zombie's version differs quite a lot from the original in tone and characterization. While Carpenter's film was mostly Laurie Strode's story, Zombie's version is very much Michael's story and includes a lengthy origin story where we see Michael's childhood, and psychotic break. We also see his first few months being treated by Dr. Loomis, and then his escape from the psychiatric hospital. Here, Zombie is playing the long game, similar to many super hero movies that spend most of their first installment on the origin story. It's paid off since now that Michael is a real character who we've actually seen go from child to monster and that makes him infinitely more compelling. It also means the sequel can pick right up and continue developing the mythology in a sane way instead of the ridiculous progression the original timeline took.

One odd thing I thought was a bit tacked in was an actual Michael Myers mask. In the '78 version the iconic mask was actually a Captain Kirk mask that was spray painted white. Michael stole the mask from a local costume shop when he first arrived in town. In the '07 version it's an actual Michael Myers Halloween mask that Judith Myers' boyfriend puts on while they're getting ready to bone. He then tries to convince her to let him wear it while the screw. The scene is just weird and contributes nothing except to introduce the mask so that Michael can save it and wear it later.

I really want to see Zombie's sequel to this now, because this movie was just really good. It had good characterization, creative direction and camera work, great tension, fun kills and excellent make up and effects. I really enjoyed the original movie, and this version is a perfect homage to it while still standing up on its own as the beginning of a new Michael Myers timeline.

On deck: Prom Night (2008)

October Horror 2011: Day 8 - Dawn of the Dead (2004)

2011-10-08T21:15:00.000-04:00

The first Dawn of the Dead was a George Romera zombie movie from 1978, part of the original Trilogy of the Dead which consisted of 1968's Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and 1985's Day of the Dead.

This 2004 remake was directed by Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen, Suckerpunch). The film is visually striking and is awash with Snyder's signatures, including specific use of slow motion and a noticeable soundtrack using contemporary songs. The story of both movies are fairly similar: In the middle of the Zombie Apocalypse a small group of survivors lock themselves inside of a shopping mall and deal with personal conflicts while trying to survive the growing number of zombies amassing outside and in the lower floors of the mall. Beyond that there isn't much similarity.

The original film was rife with social commentary about consumerist culture and materialism, which doesn't present itself at all in the remake. The remake plays more with personal drama between characters but is far less high minded. Also, zombies in the remake have human or better capabilities while the original featured Romero's famed slow zombies.

The remake on its own is very entertaining. The writing is good and the characters are fun. It's got a nice, brisk pace that manages to avoid dragging too much towards the end of the 2nd act. The effects are really good and realistically bloody. The zombies were scary, the actions scenes were pretty tense. The non-action scenes served pretty well to setup the next bit of story while maintaining a slightly desperate or creepy tone. I really liked the soundtrack with short montages set to Johnny Cash and Richard Cheese.

In fact, I think the only thing I didn't actually like about this movie was the subplot with Mekhi Phifer and his Russian Mail-order Bride. I honestly don't believe anyone that "From the Hood", or that street smart, would be that damned stupid. Plus, that scene killed off one of my favorite characters.

The original movie had a pretty uncertain ending, where you could decide for yourself if you wanted the characters to live or die. The remake's ending was a lot more clear-cut, or at least I thought. When I had watched this I was convinced the cast all died in the final zombie attack where the camera is dropped, but wikipedia describes this ending as "leaving their fate unknown".

Either way, it's a great zombie movie that's very well balanced between human drama, gore, and action. It's well worth watching both, since the original is a classic, but this one capably stands on its own. It's also pretty obvious watching it that the Dead Rising video game took some major cues from the movie: Exploding gas station, set in a mall, unorthodox weapons, a dog. The biker gang in the original movie is pretty similar to the convicts in the game. Dead Rising in some ways led to the Left 4 Dead series and by proxy Dead Island. So yeah. Good movie.

Re-week continues tomorrow with Rob Zombie's Halloween.

October Horror 2011: Day 7 - The Ninth Gate

2011-10-07T21:00:00.000-04:00

The Ninth Gate is the most modern feeling movie of the season, although The Order was released 4 years after it. The Ninth Gate was released in 1999, along with a slew of other Satanic stories, and stars a pre-Burton Johnny Depp.

The premise here is that there is a book, written in the mid 17th century by Aristide Torchia called The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows. There are 3 surviving copies of the book in 1999 and one is in the possession of a Boris Balkan, who hires Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) to authenticate the book against the other 2 copies for him.

Corso is a rare-book buyer and dealer who operates on the shadier side of things, often conning people out of collections in order to sell them at a profit. He smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish, to the point where it's a bit ridiculous.

Corso's investigation into the books leads him into a massive conspiracy involving a secret society of very rich and powerful people who are attempting to use the book to summon ultimate power or commune with the devil or something.

The writing in this movie is probably the best we've had all week. It's very focused, but very natural and quite witty when it needed to be. It was mostly a mystery with a few supernatural elements sprinkled in for effect, but would've been just as entertaining without them. The excellent character writing and acting actually helps you relate to these characters as people, that sort of thing is important when you're watching a movie where the majority of the characters are eccentric and absurdly rich book collectors.

The only real points playing against the movie are the ending, which was just a bit confusing, and the soundtrack. They'd managed to explain everything up to that point without a painfully obvious exposition dump but just kindof dropped the ball in the last 5 minutes. I had no idea who the girl was supposed to be or how she related to the rest of the plot, except to haul Depp along when he lost the trail. The soundtrack had some great moments where the orchestral score really complimented the epicness of what was going on, but other times it dropped into this funky bassoon and trumpet based theme which was very reminiscent of bits of Ghostbusters or those black & white "industry!" Disney cartoons. It really did the atmosphere the movie was trying to build a disservice.

Children of the Corn was probably the best "horror" movie so far, but this I think is the best movie in general. It was just really fun to watch even if the supernatural elements were superfluous and without them this would have no right belonging in October Horror Season.

I guess that's a back handed endorsement: It's not horror, but it is creepy at a few points and a good movie, watch it anyway.

With this movie, Cults week is over. Kicking off Re-rererererererereerere-whatever will be 2004's Dawn of the Dead, a remake of the 1978 Dawn of the Dead.

October Horror 2011: Day 6 - Children of the Corn

2011-10-06T21:42:00.000-04:00

He wants you too, Malachai!
Children of the Corn was first shot in 1984 and is based on a short story by Stephen King. It stars Linda Hamilton and Peter Horton.

Children of the Corn is another classic horror movie and is based on a cult of children in a rural Nebraska town that murders the adults. They take over the town and spend 3 years murdering any outsiders who happen upon it while practicing a bizarre "Coming of Age" ritual when the children turn 19. All in the name of "He who walks behind the rows". Effectively a "Corn God".

I like that Children hints at the powerful nature gods of ancient pagan religions, something that was also poked at in an episode of Supernatural starring Paris Hilton. Children of the Corn is a pretty good movie that is very well constructed and beautifully cast. It suffers a bit when screened to modern audiences because some of the cinematography that was probably pretty atmospheric and creepy comes off as kindof cheesy and schlocky. Likely, this is due to the success of the Horror genre in the 80s leading to a lot of poor imitations over the last 20-30 years.

The actor that was cast to play Isaac, the original leader of the Children, suffers from a Growth Hormone Deficiency. The effect of this is that at age 25 he had the body of a 12 year old boy, while having a very unique voice and facial features that were subtly "old" looking for the age of the character. It also meant he wasn't a child actor and could pull off the part more convincingly than a child could. The character was "off" in so many slight ways he almost fell into the uncanny valley and was very unsettling to watch.

The movie isn't exactly "scary" in the sense of modern movies, but it's very good and well constructed. There's a large amount of creepiness that I can really appreciate and I like that it doesn't depend on gore or shock like a modern play on the concept probably would. Although I will admit that a more modern take on the story would appeal more to modern audiences and be scarier to those audiences who expect more visual thrills rather than depending on shear psychological "THESE ARE FREAKING KIDS" WTF-ery.

I think there is actual a modern remake, but I haven't seen it.
Either way the story on this original is very good and well worth watching if you're a fan of the genre, but don't expect to be scared by it, just pretty unnerved.

Closing out Cults week is "The Ninth Gate"

October Horror 2011: Day 5 - The Collective

2011-10-05T21:30:00.000-04:00

The Collective, a 2008 independent "paranoid thriller".

The Collective has a list of credits that usually worries me. The cast is very small, 12 names in total, and most of those only have 1-2 speaking lines if they have any. The worrisome part is that most of the cast also have several other credited positions in the production. The 2 lead actors also wrote the movie, directed it, edited it, and helped score the soundtrack. Now, I'm not trying to imply that all indy movies like that are bad, it's just that it's often a red flag because of how just terrible Tommy Wiseau's The Room is. It can turn into the one person who's the protagonist, writer, director, producer, wall-paper artist just fellating themselves for the entire movie's runtime.

Thankfully, The Collective isn't one of those movies. It's actually very competent and everyone involved is a pretty decent actor. The soundtrack isn't particularly interesting, but it's serviceable. The writing isn't quite as taut as you'd want this sort of movie and there are a few scenes that don't add much and probably should've been left on the cutting room floor.

In the movie, Tyler gets a terse voicemail from her sister, Jessica, using someone else's phone asking for help. Tyler hops a red-eye flight to New York City immediately to try to find her sister. Everyone Tyler speaks to is secretive, evasive, and paranoid. Tyler eventually discovers her sister has become involved with a group of elite Manhattanites that have formed a secret society in an old cathedral, where they attempt to explore faith and the power of the spirit by mishmashing different cultures' religious ceremonies. Things go horribly wrong during one of these and a member dies. Naturally, this leads to a cover-up and the whodunnit is the central mystery of the plot.

Unfortunately the movie really failed hook me into caring about the mystery, and really doesn't offer clues or any explanation. By the end I didn't know if they had actually solved it correctly, and I really didn't care. The way the characters were reacting seems to imply they didn't care either. It just didn't seem like there was much at stake, and even the rescue of the sister seemed to just go perfectly even though there were problems along the way.

It's kindof like marketing a movie as a Police Drama, and then it's just a movie about a traffic cop writing tickets all day without any issues except one driver got a little angry but then backed down when the cop threatened to arrest him.

Next up is Steven King's Children of the Corn. This one is actually movie length, we checked.

October Horror 2011: Day 4 - Suspiria

2011-10-04T22:00:00.000-04:00

I finally got my Xbox to play the English dub of Suspiria directed by Dario Argento.

Released originally in Italian in 1977, Suspiria is not only considered a classic horror film but one of the best movies ever.

The premise of this movie is that an American ballet dancer decides to take her career to the next level by going to study at an ultra-prestigious German ballet school. Unfortunately the school is a front for a coven of witches who derive power from torturing and murdering the students.

I really liked this one, it's probably the best movie of the season so far. Even with the elements that I really had a hard time enjoying this was supremely creepy and very focused, which are qualities everything else this year has lacked. It's heavily atmospheric, very bloody (for the 70's, anyway), and very imagery heavy. The soundtrack has what might be one of the best horror motifs I've ever heard next to the Halloween soundtrack.

Unfortunately the soundtrack is also the first thing that I found somewhat distracting. It has a tendency to get absurdly loud during the tense scenes, especially during the murders. And it's not a typical modern soundtrack that's built around being melodic or rhythmic in a traditional sense, it's a 70's style synth, sample, and noise soundtrack. It also has the peculiar tendency to cut off abruptly during a scene change from scary night time to a daytime scene. It makes the dialog very hard to understand since it's so quiet in comparison.

I'm also pretty sure they got a lighting director who was used to working in the theater to design their lighting. It's definitely a unique look but compared to more modern movies that have done that it looks a bit too strong. The movie is overwhelmingly red. Everything is bright red. So bright red my eyes hurt a few times. The lighting is red, the walls are red, the wine is red, the blood is red...all the same red. There was one scene where a character dumped some wine down the sink then had to scrub it off the bowl because it was pretty clearly red paint. They also have a heavy green light at certain times, and sometimes they even pull out blue lighting towards the end. At times it serves the atmosphere very well, others it's "MIEN EYES THAT IS SO RED". Thankfully it seems to serve the atmosphere most of the time, just when it doesn't work it pretty glaring.

The ending sprint is absolutely glorious, and the sound design was just great. The noises and the voice the witch queen was using were truly creepy in the most visceral sense. It made my skin crawl.

Definitely a must-see.

I'm heading out of town for a few days for a friend's wedding so the next few movies might have to get back dated, or I'll just post multiple reviews per day if I have to catch up since I might miss a few.

On deck: The Collective

October Horror 2011: Day 3 - The Believers

2011-10-03T22:32:00.002-04:00

The Believers is a 1987 horror mystery starring Martin Sheen and Helen Shaver.

The film opens with a family of 3 getting ready for the morning when the coffee machine boils over and Martin Sheen spills the milk. Then the mother dies in a freak coffee/electrical/spilled milk accident as Sheen and his son can do nothing but watch in horror. After a brief scene of an African tribal ceremony involving goat sacrifice we return to Martin, who's moving into his new apartment/office in New York City. We figure out much later in the movie that this cutscene actually takes place decades ago, but there's no indication of it.

That's one of the problems with the movie. There's really no sense of the flow of time around the events that are depicted, which leaves the story feeling like an aimless meander. The peripheral characters come in and out and are hard to keep track of, even when they come bearing important information. The soundtrack cues aggressively, it's even funny at times. They seriously played an "Evil Music" cue for barely more than a second because a character picked up a black magic Santeria artifact, then shrugged and put it back down. They also heavily featured windchimes.

There were some good creepy moments towards the end, with snakes and spiders. It was a pretty lackluster delivery of a sparse story, there was a fair twist ending though. But it wasn't enough pay off for how uninteresting the rest of it was.

Tomorrow continues with Suspiria, in English this time.

October Horror 2011: Day 2 - The Omega Man

2011-10-03T00:33:00.004-04:00

Day 2 is The Omega Man, released in 1971. It stars Charlton Heston and Anthony Zerbe and is based on the 1954 novel I am Legend by Richard Matheson.

The Omega Man is the 2nd film adaptation of the story, the 1st being 1964's The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price. The 3rd being I am Legend in 2007. I know it comes as a surprise since it's black & white, but I've actually seen the 1964 film.

The basic story is that some disaster has taken place, which kills most of the world's population, leaves some as some sort of monstrous creature that is highly sensitive to light, and very very few unaffected. Dr. Robert Neville (Robert Morgan, in the case of Price) is an army doctor who is for some reason immune to the disaster and now lives completely alone in a ruined city, surrounded by the monstrous "others" trying to find a cure for the affliction and save humanity. However, the others are just as intelligent and have formed their own society in the ruins of our society. I am Legend is one of the classic examples of the "The real monster is us" idea that often shows up in some of the more adventurous horror that attempts to have societal commentary

There are various differences between the 3 representations of the character being doctor or eradicator in various proportions. It's also very interesting how each treats the others, but I'd like to keep this short.

The movie is solid, but plays as action/survival and less horror. Unfortunately, this focus on action makes Omega Man the least interesting in the group. Any and all moral ambiguity is gone, it just comes down to Heston as "Good" vs. the "Evil" leader of the others, Matthias. Heston represents the modern world, technology, electricity, artificial light, guns and Matthias represents a movement deliberately away from these modern ideals. Add in a sprinkling of 70's era racial dynamic ("honky paradise" is one of the funniest lines in this movie) and you've got the movie. There's nothing to think about, it's just Heston vs. Matthias and Heston's eventual downfall as brought about by the fact the he helps the rag-tag jive-talkin' survivors and some of them betray him.

It's definitely entertaining, but for my money I think I am Legend with Will Smith tells the story best. It's just as fun to watch as Omega Man, but focuses more on drama and horror. It's got some very excellent creepy moments when Neville questions his sanity, some very good emotional moments with Neville and his dog, and some very good action moments. It's just more well rounded than the others.

Omega Man isn't a bad movie, and definitely worth watching on its own. It's just a bit flat compared to the other two. It offers a much stronger cult than The Order did.

Next up is The Believers (1987).

October Horror 2011: Day 1 - The Order

2011-10-02T20:33:00.000-04:00

The first movie of this year was supposed to be the horror classic Suspiria directed by Dario Argento. Unfortunately my Xbox couldn't play the English dub included in my copy of the movie, and I don't know Italian. So as a backup we watched The Order, released in 2003 and starring Heath Ledger, Mark Addy, and Peter Weller.

The basic plot of the movie follows Ledger and Addy, the final remaining members of an obscure order of Catholicism, as they attempt to unravel the mystery surrounding the death of their mentor, an excommunicated priest. They meet creepy demon children, The Black Pope (Chirac), and the Sin Eater.

The beginning is pretty strong, story wise, and actually quite creepy several times. However the narrative kindof loses focus shortly after the meeting with Chirac, and meanders a bit before finally latching back onto Ledger's character and the Sin Eater. The end is also fairly strong, though not nearly as interesting. The unfocused middle bit kindof ruins the possibilities and the film ends without having explored all the various threads of the mythology that were introduced in the first act, leaving me feeling a bit short changed.

Definitely entertaining, and with some very interesting moments and concepts, but just a bit lost in itself and finally unable to deliver. Not a bad movie by any means.

Next up: The Omega Man

October Horror Month 2011

2011-09-30T20:01:00.000-04:00

Another year has elapsed and we once again find ourselves drifting further from the sun. The days are getting shorter, the weather gets colder, and for whatever reason everyone loves to tell ghost stories and tour graveyards. Our personal tradition as always consists of dividing the 4 weeks of the month into themes and attempting to watch a horror/thriller film every night.

This year's themes are: Cults, Re-rerererererere (Remakes, Reimaginings, Sequels, etc.), Found Footage, and Around the World (Each film from this week takes place on a different continent).

I'm going to once again try to post a short review of each movie every night, including a relevant trailer. It was a good exercise in writing discipline, although there are movies I saw that I didn't get the chance to finish reviewing. I might revisit those later when this month is over. Anyway, back soon. Same Bat time, same Bat channel.

Bourgeois Beer: Brewdog's Tactical Nuclear Penguin

2011-06-07T19:00:00.003-04:00

The second installment of Bourgeois Beer comes to us both as a surprise. I had ventured to my nearby liquor store in search of a good Scotch. It's been a while since I had Scotch and I felt this situation needed to be remedied. When I got to the store, however, I was surprised by a sign in the beer aisle that stated "Tactical Nuclear Penguin and Sink the Bismark, we have them. See the management." Ok, the name is pretty intriguing, I now want to now what this is all about.

TNP and STB are both freeze distilled "Superbeers" from BrewDog. For those unfamiliar with the freeze distilling concept, the long and short of it is that an alcoholic beverage is subjected to a very cold temperature and since water freezes at a much higher temperature than alcohol a portion of the water becomes ice. This ice is removed and the remaining liquid now has a higher concentration of alcohol. Compared to regular distilling, where alcohol is boiled out of the liquid and the rest is left behind, freeze distilling produces a drink that's a lot more like what you started with. See the wikipedia article here.

TNP is made by taking Brewdog's Paradox Imperial Stout, aging it for 14 months in the same types of used sherry casks used to mature Scotch whiskey. It's then freeze distilled up to 64 proof. Yeah, this stuff makes Utopias look like baby's first bottle.

The bottle was cool when I got it home so I decided to try it cool->warm first. I used my Utopias glass since I figured $90 beer deserves a glass made for a $200 beer.

The beer pours a dark amber with almost no carbonation, and is very clear. I take that back, there is no carbonation, the first bubbles were just the result of being poured. This beer isn't nearly as dark as some others I've seen, but it is just about as thick.

I'm still not entirely sure what I sniffed in that glass can be considered beer. It immediately tells even potent Rauchbiers that their weaksauce smokey flavor will not be tolerated in the Penguin's house. The beer smells like black pepper, smoke from a backyard grill, and burnt wood with a solid background of alcohol and chocolate. I am now prepared.

I wouldn't recommend drinking this too warm as that quickly destroyed whatever semblance of subtlety the flavor was holding on to and really plays up the alcohol flavor, making it obvious you're drinking a 32% ABV beer. When it was still relatively cool the other flavors were strong enough to mask the alcohol at least a little. First off, it's smokey as all hell. It takes a good few seconds for anything besides that overwhelming smoke flavor to present itself. I guess in this way it has something in common with the Scotch I was looking for but I never like my scotches this smokey. When it's finally done with that it switches to a flavor I can only describe as smoked kielbasa. It's thick, still smokey, spicey, and meaty. I maybe picked up a little over-roasted coffee, but it vanished pretty quickly. I couldn't get any of the more stout like flavors of nuts or chocolate that the sniff hinted at. This beer takes you for one helluva ride. It's almost like Baijiu in that respect. Also the tendency to remind of meat, although Baijiu gave me more a deli meat...salami or ham character.

In contrast to the wild flavor explosion that is tasting the beer it actually feels pretty flat in your mouth, probably due to the complete lack of carbonation. If you've ever used cold cream to remove makeup, it's kindof like that. (I was a zombie for Halloween, don't give me that.) I guess I'd say maybe a very thick version of "silky". It didn't really feel like my mouth was being coated with it, like most dark beers that are this viscous feel like. Although the aftertaste did hang around for quite a while, and was very very smokey.

While TNP goes around the superbeer complaint I voiced in my previous Bourgeois Beer on Sam Adams' Utopias, it just ends up being unlike beer or wine and becomes...sausage. Seriously, folks, it's strange.

(I would note that after I wrote this up I did manage to convince a visiting friend to buy a bottle of Sink the Bismark and let me try some. I didn't get enough or remember it well enough to write a full Bourgeois Beer on it, but I will say that it deserves its higher BeerAdvocate rating and actually tastes like beer. In this case it's very close to a Belgian Strong Ale like Duvel, without as much yeasty character. Actually very good and completely belies its 41% ABV. It's supposed to be an IPA, but I just didn't get that.)

Drink on!
--PXA

October Horror Season 2: Day 18

2010-10-25T16:20:00.000-04:00

This night's movie was "Se7en" starring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, and Kevin Spacey.

I first saw this movie several years ago at the recommendation of a friend of mine in High School. At that point I hadn't really conceived of a good movie that ran at a rather slow pace and used horrible, depraved crimes as something other than "AHA!" shocking gross-outs. Se7en presents these murders so matter-of-factly, even while its characters wretch on screen. To a degree I think the evenness of the treatment between routine police work and investigating mutilated corpses with deadly sins written in blood does the film a disservice, dramatically. On the other hand I can see it might be trying to make the point about the tediousness of work and the horrifying banality the killer sees in every day life. This was also one of the first movies I'd seen with Brad Pitt in it, and back when I originally saw it I was surprised to learn he was a very good actor.

While it's more a really tense drama with a few shockingly gross scenes than a thriller of any sort, it's still a really well done movie.

Tomorrow will have been "High Tension"

October Horror Season 2: Day 17

2010-10-17T22:38:00.001-04:00

Day 3 of Serial Killer week's feature presentation is "From Hell". This 2001 film was directed by the Hughes Brothers (previously known for Menace II Society and Dead Presidents) and based on the Alan Moore graphic novel.

Now, I confess I've seen this movie before, and it is one of my favorite movies. I don't know if it's Top 10, but I've always really enjoyed it. It seemed to be something that was artistic and stylish but still accessible a violent, so I felt I could enjoy it without feeling like a brute who just loves bloody movies. I think the assessment still holds up, but after repeated views and thinking about this after some slight "Film Schooling" by my better half, it's probably not as high art as I originally thought.

In fact, part of the reason I probably noticed the filming style was how heavy handed the use of angle and colored lighting was in the first act of the film. Later on, they seemed to film more using natural white light and enhancing certain elements with color. From what I understand from the DVD commentary the film was shot mostly chronologically, so it could've just been the brothers getting used to directing a movie like this, or perhaps some additional budget being allocated to allow them to film on locations instead of sound stages. Either way, after the funeral scene the quality of the lighting improves significantly. Also, while I really enjoyed the graphic novel style angles and contrasts in the early movie, I will admit that the later style feels a lot more natural while still maintaining some signatures (like the shot of Jack walking up the ladder shot from underneath the carriage).

Aside from the shaky start cinematography-wise, there really isn't much playing against this film because it's still very well directed and very well written. The cast includes Johnny Depp, Robbie Coltrane, and Ian Holm, so the acting is all very good. Even the lesser known actors and actresses playing the Masons and the Whitechapel hookers are very good. In fact, the worst casting choice was probably Heather Graham.

This almost hedges out Feast as my favorite movie of the month so far, but I still love the prodigious amount of unapologetic gore Feast pumps out. If I was trying to seem higher class than that, though, I'd put From Hell up front. Definitely see it if you haven't.

Tomorrow night was supposed to be High Tension, but due to already having the DVD and needing to catch up, we watched Se7en.

October Horror Season 2: Day 16

2010-10-16T22:32:00.002-04:00

For serial killers day 2 we watched "Horsemen" from 2009, starring Dennis Quaid.

For a movie written by the man behind "Doom" and "The Expendables" and directed by someone who primarily does concert videos, this is surprisingly competent. Unfortunately as a good thriller it falls flat. The direction and the editing is jumpy and often confusing. The writing isn't horrible but it's not too impressive either. They seemed like they wanted to take the Pseudo-biblical overtones of "Se7en" and mix in a touching father/son reconciliation story, what they ended up with was a mess. Don't get me wrong, the movie was sick and disturbed, which helped as a payoff but it couldn't save it. There was no investment in the characters, especially not the victims since they barely even mentioned most of their names.

And the ending twist of Crying Emo kid Apocalypse was just sad.

Thorough disappointment, since "Se7en" already exists and does the same sort of thing so much better. As much as I enjoy visiting Dennis Quaidia and President Dennis Quaid, I can't recommend this either.

Stay tuned for "From Hell".

October Horror Season 2: Day 15

2010-10-15T22:02:00.032-04:00

(Please note: This and the next several days will be back-dated to appear on their correct day while I play catch up. I was not able to watch for several days due to unforeseable circumstances.)

Day 15 kicks off Serious Serial Killer week with 2007's "Zodiac" which stars Robert Downey Jr and Jake Gyllenhaal among other big names. Really an A-list cast.

Directed by David Fincher the film is just about guaranteed to be incredibly well constructed. While I'm sure there's limitless possibility for film-nerding on this one, for a layman it just really didn't seem out of the ordinary. It was good, no doubt, but I couldn't really interest myself in the shots unless something was actually happening in them. With a film that clocks in at ~2.6 hours, holding attention is really important.

A good job is done here and I didn't really find myself wandering away from the movie for too long. The only thing I could really hold against it is that in certain places they did a lot of time skipping, so you'd see "2 weeks later", and then maybe 35 seconds of film, and then a fade and "3 weeks later". I'm told they did this to stay accurate to the actual time line of the case as laid out in the book, but it's really distracting when it happens so quickly. If you've ever seen the Sphere adaptation, they stuck the actual chapter names from the book as transitions between sequences and it really cut up and ruined the action.

Aside from that, Downey Jr is always a pleasure to watch, even Jake isn't bad playing the doe-eyed cartoonist. He fails a little as the serious journalist later, though.

Definitely not bad, but I wouldn't really do a recommend on this. I guess maybe since I'm too young to remember the Zodiac news coverage, if it had been my time I might be a little more interested in it.

Tomorrow serial killers week continues with "Horsemen"

October Horror Season 2: Day 14

2010-10-14T19:44:00.000-04:00

Monsters week is over after tonight's viewing of 2005's "Feast" starring Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, and Jason Mewes.

I wasn't too sure what to expect here since it was a pretty random looking Netflix recommendation, but I knew things were going to turn out well about 2 minutes into the film when each character was introduced with a still frame write up that included snarky "Fun Facts" and "Life Expectancy".

The whole movie is set in a dive bar in the boonies of some undefined country where a bunch of sad losers gather more out of habit than interest. Suddenly "Hero" bursts in and warns of a monster attack, and promptly dies. He is replaced by his girlfriend, "Heroine", who's life expectancy is given as something along the lines of "Better than the last hero's, we hope." The movie is well aware all its characters are really caricatures, but instead of becoming self-parody it just refuses to care. The "So what?" swagger really carries the audience through what always turns out to be the most boring part of any "survival" monster movie: The group's internal strife as characters fight for dominance or personal escape. There's all the requisite back stabbing and accidental death you should expect, but it just slides past so smoothly. All too often it feels like movies in this genre hit a point and have to slam on the breaks so they can have some good "human" drama before resuming the pointless killing, in Feast it makes sense.

Also like Slither last night it plays itself just amusing enough by its own ridiculousness to avoid having to make jokes at its expense. However the blood and disgusting gore is turned up several points, which makes it slightly difficult to watch in parts...but how often does a movie actually make you need to turn away from the screen because it's too gross? At this point even Saw movies are so hilarious you just kindof watch them and go "Oh, well lookie here. This character needs to remove that other character's sphincter with this rusty scalpel and carry at least 12 pounds of fecal matter and intestines to this rusty bucket without spilling anything on the electrified wire before the timer runs out and the pear of anguish surgically inserted into their chest cavity expands. Yawn." (Also, Saw producers: You are not allowed to steal my idea, if this shows up in a Saw or Hostel sequence I'm coming after you.)

In short, it was so good I'm actually planning on getting the 2nd and 3rd movies to see what kind of dive the series took. Knocks Slither out as best movie of the month thus far.

Tomorrow Dramatic Serial Killer movies starts with "Zodiac".

October Horror Season 2: Day 13

2010-10-13T19:29:00.015-04:00

On Tuesday the 13th we watched Slither starring Nathan Fillion.

Slither is part of a new batch of monster movies with the old-school "small town horror" aesthetic but modern production values, and it was a hell of a lot of fun.

It managed to maintain a certain air of light-hearted fun without actually being funny, the situation and the way everything was put together was just so weirdly amusing on its own the movie didn't feel the need to force some more jokes. Plus it was absolutely disgusting, especially at the end during the final transformation of the Grant/Alien/Monster/Zombie thing. Again, not so over-the-top like Dead Alive was. The monster was also worthy of note since they never really went so far as to define what it was, where it was from (except SPACE), what it wanted to do, or even really how it worked. So whatever they decided they needed the monster to be capable of, it suddenly was. But they didn't abuse the mechanic too much so you were never sitting there going "Oh. Yeah, of course it does THAT now too! The hell, movie?"

This is probably the best movie of the month so far since it was really fun to watch and well paced but also bloody and gross without becoming ridiculous.

Monster week ends tomorrow with Feast.

October Horror Season 2: Day 12

2010-10-12T22:01:00.001-04:00

Day 12's movie was the Wolfman (2010) starring Anthony Hopkins and Benecio Del Toro.

I didn't read many reviews of the movie, but I did see it reviewed by Escapist's resident film geek Movie Bob and he gave it a fairly lukewarm reaction. His complaints stemmed mostly from the meandering nature of the movie which had been rewritten and redirected so many times it suffered from a sort of schizophrenia.

On my watch through I couldn't really see the jumpy nature, but I did notice a few things felt a little tacked together. The first half of the movie was pretty dull, to be totally honest, I know it was trying to build some kind of tension but I couldn't stop making jokes about Hugo Weaving wandering around calling everyone in town Mr. Anderson. All of a sudden, immediately following the attack on Benecio's Lawrence Talbot, it took a sharp turn for the AWESOME. Out of nowhere there were creepy shots of some deranged kid, talking statues, jarring flashbacks, and VERY well done gore. It got bloody real fast and then sprinted across the finish line. I got a little confused about exactly what happened towards the very end when they started killing off named characters, but it didn't matter because it was still fun.

Definitely a recommend, even if the first half was a little on the snoozery side it pays off by the end.

Tomorrow: Slither.

October Horror Season 2: Day 11

2010-10-11T22:54:00.015-04:00

For monster week day 3 we watched 1997's Mimic starring Mira Sorvino and Josh Brolin.

I wasn't sure what I was getting into here. I remember seeing the preview when I was younger but didn't really think much of it, it looked like a fairly boring standard movie. I didn't realize at the time what Guillermo del Toro was capable of it.

The movie was well paced, well written with good characters, and well shot for being - by virtue of its time - dark all the time. Although, the exposition seemed a little forced at times. The creature design was nicely creepy, and well split between CGI and models. I was really, genuinely impressed with a seriously entertaining movie with good portions of creepy, action, and gross coming out of the premise "6 foot tall killer cockroaches". I might even go so far as to check out the sequels, but everything about their creatives teams are different so they might not play nearly as well.

Tomorrow it looks like we'll finally get our netflix DVD so the movie of the night will be Wolfman.

October Horror Season 2: Day 10

2010-10-10T22:53:00.000-04:00

The Host is this year's first non-English movie, also I believe the first foreign film.

Normally I tend to shy away from foreign films, most of this is because I really like my movies to be in a language I understand...this restricts me to English language movies and French children's film for ages 0-5 years. Every so often I make an exception, last year's Dead Snow (Norwegian) was phenomenal. Although I still found having to read subtitles distracting, I couldn't help but admire the sheer size of director Tommy Wirkola's sack: Filming bloody zombie Nazis in broad daylight against a snow-covered mountain.

This year we watched The Host. It was dubbed, which removed the subtitle annoyance, although it would've been nice for the Korean text on television to have been translated. I really enjoyed the movie, mostly because the monster was beyond amazing. Released in 2006, it has better integrated CG than any American film I've seen since then. Michael Bay could take a lesson. Also, despite the monster itself not looking too scary at all it was pretty frightening when it appeared because of the way it moved. I thought this aspect was enhanced by the film's general lack of shaky cam. Again, Michael Bay could take a lesson; so could J.J. Abrams. When the thing was on the screen you were forced to pay attention to it. What hampered the movie, in my opinion were the random attempts at slap-stick comedy. It would have been better served playing completely straight faced.

All in all this is one of the better creature features I've seen, even if it did have some WTF moments and clocked a little on the long side. The death of the monster was excellently well played, although they had mentioned something towards the beginning of the movie I wish they would have delivered on. Definitely worth watching.

Tomorrow, if we get it, will be Wolfman. Otherwise, tomorrow will be Mimic.

October Horror Season 2: Day 9

2010-10-09T23:59:00.000-04:00

For day 2 of Monster week we've been forced to substitute "Wolfman" with 1972's "ZaAT", as presented by Mystery Science Theater 3000.

There's not much to be said about this. While last night's bad costumes and action were reminiscent of classic Kirk-era Star Trek, this had more in common with bad 50's/60's monsters: The lumbering, emotionless, man in a bad rubberized suit. Half the time I thought the actor was literally drunk and stumbling through the set. The narration was pure corn and the plot made almost no sense. I really am thankful that scifi and horror have grown past this as genres. Also, the MST3K crew's jokes and associated skits were pretty funny as usual and definitely kept my interest over the hour and a half of ZaAT's run time.

Since there is no mail delivered on Sunday, tomorrow will be "The Host", an import from Korea.

October Horror Season 2: Day 8

2010-10-08T21:39:00.027-04:00

Monster week begins with 1982's "Swamp Thing" directed by Wes Craven.

Now, I had watched the 1990's TV series as a child and was told this was a horror movie so I expected a campy genre piece trying to play it serious. What I got was actually a pretty good precursor to the show. What I didn't get was a horror movie.

The story was surprisingly engaging for early 80's "Science Gone Wrong" cheese, and the cheese factor was actually quit low. They didn't play too much beyond what they were able to do, and thankfully didn't even TRY to explain the science...that shit just worked. The swamp thing suit was actually pretty good, era considered; and there were very few points where the though that this was a dude in a green painted wet suit really got in the way. Arcane's post-formula form was pretty retarded looking, though. No real save there, it looked like a retarded man-bear-pig fighting swamp thing with a broadsword.

Aside from the bright 80's camp of the whole thing, there's really nothing to set it up as a bad movie, actually it's a decent old style action flick. For my money the best swamp thing is still the 1990's live action TV show. Both movies, and the series are available streaming on hulu.

Day 9's movie will be: Wolfman, unless the DVD doesn't come in time...in which case we'll watch "Zaat" with Mystery Science Theater 3000.

October Horror Season 2: Day 7

2010-10-07T23:02:00.002-04:00

Vampire week concludes with 1987's "The Lost Boys" starring Kiefer Sutherland and the Coreys.

I was looking forward to this one because when I was but a wee lad I took a "College For Kids" course about horror movies and monsters taught by a Professor R. Cane. It was pretty neutered by necessity, since you can't really show the full gamut of gore to a class of pre-pubescent boys; however, The Lost Boys was tame enough and apparently "classic" enough for a few scenes to make the cut. So based on my limited preview of it and the implication that it somehow inspired vampire movie lore, I was pretty excited to finally see it.

After having watched it, I do not find myself disappointed. It's not the groundbreaking film I may have thought it was when I was younger, if I had seen it then I probably would've been disappointed. I've since developed a more even perspective and had brought down my expectations, and at that level it was actually pretty good. I enjoyed watching it and thought the vampires were pretty imaginative. They actually looked like they may have played a large part in influencing the Buffy The Vampire Slayer vampires, more so the series than the movie. Also, considering that last night I watched Dracula 3000 which have vampires in coffins in space 1000 years in the future, I really enjoyed that the Lost Boys vampires didn't sleep in coffins. Actually, they had funky mutated bat feet that let them hang from the ceiling of their cave, which would've looked supremely creepy at first if it had not been for Bill S. Preston, Esquire's weird-ass mullet. The vampire action aspects were all very well done, although the kill scene at the end where blood shoots from all the plumbing in the house was beginning to remind me of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive.

The movie suffered, actually, because of its vampire hunters. The entire comic shop hunter plot was made of pure cheese but played so straight by Corey Feldman it almost hurt. The odd "Oh yeah, we probably ought to include a romance" aspects of it also brought things down. I did enjoy the fake-out twist at the end, despite living in a post-Shyamalan world. I would enjoy a version of the film with this stuff taken out and focusing purely on a divorced mother with 2 teenage sons moving to an unfamiliar town that just happens to be teeming with vampires to live with her father.

Tomorrow we begin Monster week with "Swamp Thing"

October Horror Season 2: Day 6

2010-10-07T00:26:00.003-04:00

For vampire week day 6, we watched Dracula 3000 starring Casper Van Dien and ...wait for it... Coolio.

You know you're in for a great movie when Coolio's on the cast. I mean, let's look at this guy's filmography for just a second: Pterodactyl, Gang Warz, China Strike Force, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth, The Convent (which is funny as all hell, by the way), ... OH DEAR GOD HE WAS IN BATMAN & ROBIN! Batman & Robin!!! BAT NIPPLES! BAT CREDIT CARD!!!!
Anyway, so you know if it's got Coolio, it'll be a hilariously amusing train wreck.

Moving on. The plot of Dracula 3000 is that Count Orlock somehow either escaped Earth and camped out in a planetary system that just so happened to be named the Carpathian System. That or all vampires are aliens. Anyway, planet Carpathia dies out so he hops a galactic transport ship that just so happened to be named the Demeter at Transylvania Station and books passage to Earth. Not too long into the voyage he gets hungry and starts taking out the crew, turning them all into vampires. The captain tries to blow the ship up but gets stopped by Orlock. Fast forward 50 years, the lesser vampires have turned to sand and Casper Van Dien's Abraham Van Helsing arrives on the scene to salvage the ship. I explained this so I could make the point that this is not a subtle film. Also, there is a crew member named Mina. About as subtle as a kick in the teeth.

Anyway, the movie has next to no budget and it shows. But the cinematography is decent enough that the cheap sets pull off a convincing backdrop. For what it is it's pretty well-written and well-produced, even the acting is decent enough. There's no real drama, so basic emoting is more than enough to carry the jokes. All in all, I can't think of a reason not to watch this. It's not scary, so if you're expecting a movie that's funny because it's bad this isn't it. But it is a well done spoof, not Mel Brooks caliber or anything, but obvious and funny. And compared to last night's unholy haul, a nice short breeze.

October Horror Season 2: Day 5

2010-10-05T23:51:00.001-04:00

Vampire week Day 5: 1979's 'Salem's Lot, apparently short for "Jerusalem's Lot"...which makes it lose a lot of its title appeal.

Even the trailer is really long...

Anyway, the main thing this movie has playing against it is that it's 3 freaking hours long. So is the 2004 remake. This has mostly to do with the fact that these weren't movies, but actually TV Mini series. Either way, way too long to watch in a single sitting.

Salem's Lot had a several very creepy scenes playing in its favor, it just was forced to space those out to a point where they became something wonderful and amazing when they showed up because it meant a break from the monotony of the late 70's drama. I know it has a reputation as a vampire classic but I don't see it. Usually a horror classic has something really good, but this couldn't save itself from its own pacing.

If someone were to make an "I've got shit to do with my day" fan-edit of the movie, distilling it to relevant plots and creepy vampire scenes, it would be a great 70's vampire flick. As it stands, Salem's Lot is an example of a slow burn done wrong. For reference, "Let The Right One In" is a slow burn done right.

Unfortunately I can't recommend this movie in its original form. It's worth watching if you have no problems fast-forwarding the slow bits, but to sit and view in its 3 hour entirety just doesn't pay off enough.

The next movie will be: Dracula 3000. This should be funny.

October Horror Season 2: Day 4

2010-10-04T23:28:00.002-04:00

Tonight's film was Dracula: Dead and Loving it starring Leslie Nielsen, Mel Brooks, and Amy Yasbeck.

I think Mel Brooks is a funny man, this movie made me lawl. Also, heaving Victorian bosoms.

In all seriousness though, the best thing about Mel Brooks movies is the style and humor still hold up even after over a decade. The man knows his craft.

Tomorrow we will be watching: Salem's Lot

October Horror Season 2: Day 3

2010-10-03T23:20:00.002-04:00

Week 1, day 3's movie was Interview with the Vampire starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

Also appearing were Kirsten Dunst, Antonio Banderas, and Christian Slater. Needless to say this is a movie about Beautiful People, and pre-Twilight beautiful vampires can mean only one thing: Anne Rice.

The premise of the story is that Tom Cruise is Lestat and fucking LOVES being a vampire, so he makes Brad Pitt a vampire. Brad is less than thrilled with the idea of killing people to live and spends the rest of the movie whining. The whole story is actually told in flashbacks as Pitt is giving an interview to Christian Slater. Kirsten is turned by Tom after Brad feeds on her in an angsty stroll through an outbreak of the plague. She freaking loves being a vampire too, for about 30 years and then the fact she will never grow boobs gets to her and she tries to kill Tom. Angst, confusion, angst, plot twist, fire, angst, more fire, some fire, and then angst. And another plot twist.

The movie was far more entertaining the first time I saw it, since this time around I knew the major milestones and the detail they added just made it feel slow. The movie doesn't really do anything creative with vampire lore, and there isn't so much a story as a series of events. It's not really a horror movie, but look at who wrote it. It's a decently well presented drama that just happens to have vampires in it. Not really my kind of movie, but I enjoyed it well enough. The way the story is told is intriguing enough to pull you through the boring moments.

Tomorrow's movie will be: Dracula, Dead and Loving it.
This might not merit a review, since all I would be able to say is "I think Mel Brooks is a funny man, this movie made me lawl. Also, heaving Victorian bosoms."

October Horror Season 2: Day 2

2010-10-03T02:04:00.003-04:00

Month Day 2 and Vampire week Day 2's movie is Let Me In, directed by Matt Reeves of Cloverfield fame.

Let Me In is actually a remake of the 2008 Swedish film "Let the right one in", which was itself based on the 2004 book of the same name.

The premise of Let Me In is that Abby, a vampire in the form of a 12 year old girl moves in next door to Owen, an awkward boy who is bullied constantly. They become friends, and after leaving a trail of death and blood, run off together.

It's hard to discuss Let Me In without comparing it to Let the Right One In, but I'd like to avoid that. Let Me In I think suffers from the tenants of modern American film it adopts. Namely, teal/orange digital color shifting and lens flare. I noticed the lens flare early on but not as much towards the end. The fact that everyone was freaking orange bothered me the whole time. The movie didn't shy away from gore or blood, putting it front and center without apology whenever it could sensibly get away with, which was really only 3-4 times. I really liked it. Owen and Abby were pretty creepy, but not too much that you couldn't feel sorry for them.

Overall Let Me In is far more accessible than its Swedish original. Both movies are great in their own right, and seeing Let the Right One In before Let Me In is well worth it, since where Let Me In does vary from its source material it gives a nice tip of the hat. Watching both adds a bit of depth to what is the shallower of the two. Although even alone Let Me In is very well done and picks up the action just often enough and just long enough to keep you interested in what is effectively a slow horror-drama.

Tomorrow will be "Interview with the Vampire".

October Horror Season 2: Day 1

2010-10-01T00:33:00.030-04:00

Once again October is upon us and it is my favorite holiday season. Just as last year myself and my other will be watching one movie each day of the month, broken into 4 week long categories. These are: Vampires, Monsters, Serious serial killers, and Ghosts. As an exercise in blogging discipline I will try to include a small review for each one.

Week 1 is Vampires and movie 1 is Fright Night, the 1985 classic vampire camp flick starring Roddy MacDowel as Peter Vincent.

At first glance the camp seemed almost overwhelming, but behind it was a movie that was just smart enough to rise above itself. The special effects, while ridiculous, were quite good for the age; especially Evil's wolf->human transformation sequence. MacDowel was pretty fun to watch, as well as his obviously powdered hair. If I thought about the movie too much, I'd find finer character points to be disappointed with. However, it's really one of those rare movies that knows exactly what it is and doesn't try to portray itself above that. Really fun, definitely recommend watching it to anyone. Also, if you keep in mind that the actor who plays "Evil", eventually went on to do a lot of gay porn throughout the 1990's, a lot of the jokes are a lot funnier.

Experiments in HTML5: Recreating Boomshine

2010-08-31T13:40:00.000-04:00

My first exposure to the HTML5 drawing canvas was during work on my final project for a class at RIT called Web Client Side programming. Back then, Firefox 3 was the most recent version, and only supported a subset of the specified canvas features. Also, the spec was in a far less evolved state than it is now. Anyway, at the time I was less than impressed with canvas and HTML5. When Apple fired up everyone against Flash a few months ago HTML5's canvas took front page and everyone start playing with it. I decided to give it another shot and started playing around myself.

Now, the thing to understand going to canvas from an environment like Flash or even 2D drawing with Java is that there is nothing done for you. If you want buffers, or mouse events, or object hit detection...you have to do it all yourself. I thought this sort of thing was going to be very difficult, that my solution would be of so poor quality it would never work well, or that it would just get too annoying.

After doing a little toying around with drawing little animations like Sine curves, and a fun wiggling tentacle mass (which I might publish here later, since it was actually quite fun getting in touch with my high school trigonometry brain), I decided to take on a larger project. This would involve all sorts of mouse events and hit detection, basically everything I'd need in the future to do anything beyond an HTML5 toy. One thing I know I have a tendency to do when working on my projects is spend a long time questioning a lot of mundane details, so I decided to preempt myself and work on something that's already had all the finer points worked out. Since I was going to be doing a game I decided to think about what was fun enough to motivate me, simple enough that I could do it in a few hours, but still looked good. The first game I thought of that met all those criteria was Boomshine, by Danny Miller (www.K2xL.com).

So I started sometime on Thursday and setup the basic template I'd need to fill in: The canvas, floating dots, screens with a play button, a way to store levels, etc. And started working. After setting up the main animation loop and drawing a bunch of dots, I went to go get in touch with the part of my brain that still remembered Trigonometry.

If you're not a developer, or not interested in the technical aspects of the development of the port please skip the next section. Non technical content resumes at the bold heading.

***BEGIN SKIPPING***

With no source, I basically had to look at the game and engineer a technical description how it worked. Essentially providing myself with an informal specifications document.

The major aspects I picked up from looking critical at the game, and the basic technique to implement them are below

Pseudo-randomly colored dots of constant size displayed on the play area. There are too few instances of dark or ugly colors in the game for their selection to be truly random.

I will need a palette of colors to choose randomly from. A simple 2 dimensional array of hex codes should suffice.

These dots will bounce within the play area traveling in random directions at variable speeds. There is a small amount of variance of the speed of dots traveling in the same direction, so speed is variable around an average.

Using a base number add a random percentage of a possible increase to it during object construction. Also use Math.random() to find an angle between 0 and 360 and convert it to radians. Using that angle and the speed, I can use Sine and Cosine to determine the x and y speeds to send the dot along the right line. This works because the x and y speeds are the opposite and adjacent sides of the right triangle formed with the speed as the hypotenuse. TRIG!

The bounce off the wall is done from the center of the dots, and does not slow down the dot.

This is simple edge detection, check if the x or y position has over stepped the bounds of the box and then reverse the appropriate axis.

There are 12 levels in the game, each level increases the total number of dots, and the amount of dots a player must explode to reach their goal.

An array of javascript objects will do this fine, I can then set total and goal properties.

The game keeps a running score of the number of dots exploded.

Global variable.

The player is allowed to click once per level on the play area to add a single exploding dot at the position on the board.

If I start the per level dots exploded counter at -1, I can allow the click event to create the initial exploding dot if that value is -1 and count that dot as explosion 0.

The dots explode to a certain radius on a non-linear time scale, expanding faster initially than immediately before their maximum size. They will then shrink faster than they expanded.

(max radius-current radius)/max radius gives me an inverse percentage of the maximum, if I multiply that by a constant and force it to the ceiling, then multiply it again by an expansion constant I can get large numbers at low current radii and smaller ones when I'm closer to the maximum. It's not a true logarithmic or exponential scale, but it doesn't really need to be to be convincing. I then hold for a given number of frames and multiply the expansion constant by -2, now it will shrink along the same curve but faster.

Any regular dot hit by an exploding dot will immediately stop moving and become an exploding dot. This is the "chain reaction" mechanism that defines the gameplay.

Each time I move a dot I can iterate a global list of dots and look for any that are exploding. For each exploding dot I can compare the distance between the centers of the two to the sum of the radii. If the sum is smaller than the distance, this dot has hit an exploding dot and needs to start exploding itself.

When all exploding dots have vanished, the level is over and the player has either met the goal or not.

During the main animation loop that steps each dot, since I'm already iterating the dots, I can see if any of them are exploding. If the per level exploded count is not -1 and nothing is currently exploding, the level is done.

During a level, if the number of exploded dots meets the goal, the player is informed by the background color of the play area becoming lighter.

The background's color is broken down into RGB integer values and compared to the target color's RGB values. The duration is divided by the framerate to compute the number of intervals to step. The difference between the two RGB values is divided by the number of intervals to determine how far to step each interval. A function can recursively call setTimeout to call itself only the number of times it needs to in order to change to the target color.

When the level ends the play area background fades back to normal if applicable and the level screen is displayed for either the current level or the next level.

Same as above. The recursive function can be setup to accept a callback function to call when it's done using setTimeout to recurse.

The game displays up to 3 rectangular buttons on a non-play screen, these buttons will need to respond to mouse over and click events.

This was very difficult. I ended up doing something similar to the dots where I created Button objects and a global controller to manage them. The global controller attached a single click and mousemove event to the canvas. During each event handler it would compute the x and y of the mouse within the canvas, then iterate the Button objects it was managing with those coordinates and see if those coordinates are over the Button. I setup this Button object with a fake "addEventListener" function so I could attach my own events to the custom buttons, the controller calls these events if the hit detection matches. For a rectangular shape the hit detection uses the isPointInPath() function after tracing a path around the edges using x, y, width, and height. Later I expanded this to handle the speaker icon used for muting the background music. The hit detection for that works differently since it's not a geometric shape. I use an in-memory canvas to draw the image then the ImageData API to examine the pixel at the mouse's x and y. If the pixel's RGB values match what I had drawn, the mouse is over the shape.

***STOP SKIPPING***

When I had enough of these requirements met, I emailed the original author of Boomshine, Danny Miller. Danny has blogged about the frustration caused by unauthorized clones of his game, and how these clones hurt his reputation whether they are attributed or not. I wanted partially to share my work with another developer, but also to show him I had a working port and wanted his approval to publish the game as an academic exercise. Danny was an excellent fellow and responded to me within a very short time. He was supportive of the port, and offered to not only cross post my writeup of the development onto his website but also to host the port alongside the original Boomshine.

I'll throw an update here whenever that happens. For now, the port is only available at http://174.143.146.203/html5/boomshine/

Ok, finally: An end to my misadventures with AT&T.

2010-06-04T11:07:00.000-04:00

I had previously written about an unfortunate turn of events which resulted from my canceling my AT&T service, namely AT&T refusing to address my lack of cell service and then charging me a termination fee when I left them.

When I had written that article in December of 2009 I thought I was over and done with AT&T. I hadn't been contacted in quite some time, and I no longer had an account on the site. It turns out that I was mistaken, AT&T was still pursuing my bank account with a burning rage...they just weren't bothering to let me know I had not been forgiven.

I had also made several timeline errors in that post, which I'll try to rectify here.

December, 2008: Left Verizon and got an AT&T account and an iPhone.
- Several months of bad reception and misadventure later -

June, 2009: I move from Rochester to just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. I now have no reception unless I walk outside. The Palm Pre is released on June 6th, and I buy it. I cancel AT&T because they've told me I'm not getting reception anytime soon.

July, 2009: I speak to a rep regarding the cancellation fee on the 21st. I am told that I should pay them, they're totally justified and deserve my money. This person and this person's immediate supervisor are incredibly rude. I am told that my complaint will be forwarded to arbitration or somesuch to investigate whether or not I should be allowed to leave without an early termination fee.

- Several months of no contact. -

December, 2009: I read the article regarding AT&T's poor quality being mocked on SNL and go to check my account, only to find it's not there. I think I'm free and write a triumphant blog post.

- Several more months of no contact. -

May, 2010: I get a letter from a collection agency dated April 30th. It took a few days to get to me since I moved and forwarded my mail. Since I no longer had an AT&T account I couldn't update my address in their system when I moved.
This letter is a bill for close to $400 on behalf of AT&T. I call them to complain, and get this bill reduced to $150. I file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau since AT&T was nothing but rude, unjustified on the termination fee, and sent me to collections without telling me.
The next day I'm called by the collection agency who tells me I need to pay the $150 immediately or else they will charge me $30 more, so I can't even get off the phone and call AT&T again. I pay them now or pay them more later. While I'm on the phone with this company they let slip they're the 2nd agency to have received my account. This is important. In the 11 months since I last had any contact with AT&T they have hired not 1 but 2 collection agencies, the first of which didn't even try to contact me. I didn't get a call, letter, email, carrier pigeon...nothing. All they did was report my outstanding debt to the credit agencies. Thanks for the black mark, guys. I now have to watch my credit report like a hawk just to make sure that the debt eventually gets marked as paid and removed. This absolutely sucks.

As a final little note, since AT&T is again in the news apologizing for almost sending the lawyers after a guy who emailed the CEO. I called AT&T one last time after I settled with the collection agency and attempted to get someone to apologize for the gross mishandling, rudeness, and lack of communication over the past year. They refused. I could not get any formal apology beyond the scripted "I'm so sorry, sir." from the reps. Eventually I got silly. I tried to get ANYTHING with an AT&T logo on it that said "We're sorry". Didn't even ask for context, I wanted a stick note, or paper with some letterhead. I even tried asking for a drawing of a sad face, not even words. This wouldn't mean anything, it wouldn't be a public statement of anything, but it would make me feel a hell of a lot better. They still refused. I'm just a 24 year old kid, AT&T won't say they're sorry to me. But this guy somehow got the public eye involved and now they're all apologetic. I hate PR.

How-to (Part 2): Full read/write access to ReiserFS in Windows 7

2010-03-25T15:48:00.000-04:00

A few years ago I did a good bit of hacking and wrote this article: How-to: Full read/write access to ReiserFS in Windows Server 2008 x64

This St. Patrick's day I was at a bar with a friend of mine from my old Community College days and we were discussion virtualization software. Yes. I am that nerdy. I was bemoaning my usual complaint that VMWare Server 1.x, which I used in the original article since it supported raw disk access, takes an absurdly long time to start a VM on Windows Server 2008, and also Windows 7 (presumably Windows Vista as well). This startup time is on the order of 6-8 minutes during which the entire system is hung and unusable. He was curious why I didn't use something like VirtualBox. I had been under the impression that VirtualBox didn't do this since it wasn't in the GUI or listed as a feature. However, I was wrong.

My enlightened friend shared with me this manual page. So I finally had some options, it seemed. It took a few hours of poking but I finally got everything working with VirtualBox and it is absolutely wonderful.

So here is how I did it on Windows 7:

Install VirtualBox as normal.
I copied the .vmdk files I'd used to set this up with VMWare. If you don't have these files to copy then create a new VM in VirtualBox of the appropriate flavor of linux and do the installation as per the original article.

You will need to support ReiserFS and Samba, make sure your setup includes these.
Create the new .vmdk as per the linked page from the VirtualBox. You can find the drive # by populating volume properties from the device manager.

In order for the raw disk access to work under Windows 7 you will need to set the compatibility options on C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox\VirtualBox.exe to run it as administrator.
Link the new vmdk first to VirtualBox with the Virtual Media Manager, open the VMM and click "Add" to add the vmdk(s)
Create a new virtual machine of the appropriate flavor of linux. If you copied files from a VMWare installation you will need to add a SATA bus to the VM's storage configuration and add the vmdk's to that controller. If you installed from scratch in VirtualBox don't do this now, it will only complicate your life.

At this point you should have everything installed and be able to boot your VM, and share your files back to Windows. The only problem with this is that VirtualBox is geared more to run as a consumer level virtualizer. If you close the window the machine starts in, the machine will be forced to shut down. This means that you would need to keep a window open, wasting space in your taskbar, just to access your files. Fortunately, there's a way around that as well.

Set the options on C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox\VBoxHeadless.exe to run as administrator.
Create a new text file on your desktop, name it "Start VM.vbs"

In the file, paste:

Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run chr(34) & "C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox\VBoxHeadless.exe" & chr(34) & " --startvm VBoxReiser", 0
Set WshShell = Nothing

Replace VBoxReiser with the name of the VM you created above
Save this file

This is why you need to set VBoxHeadless to run as administrator. You will be prompted to allow the program to run as admin, but then you will see no further windows. Your VM will be running in the background without. Since you've started this headlessly you will not be able to use the standard GUI to shut down the VM later, so you will need to create another VBS or BAT file, executing:

VBoxManage controlvm VMNAME acpipowerbutton

This will shut the VM down, assuming it is responding to ACPI signals.

Any network configurations you had in VMWare should be relatively simple to set back up in VirtualBox.

I've been running this for a few days now and it is so much better. I no longer need to dread rebooting because of the horrifying start times from VMWare. It was fun to do a nice bit of tech stuff out of work.

--PXA

Perverting Common Wisdom (A stock market tale)

2010-03-10T23:33:00.000-05:00

"Perverting common wisdom, Nephew, is the mark of all great conspiracies" - Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Dune, Frank Herbet)

It's an accepted premise that to make money you need to spend money. And to spend money you need to have money. So by syllogism, to make money you need to have money. This applies to the stock market quite sensibly, and most people agree that you should start an investment account with $2,000 or else you simply won't be able to make the aggregate gains required to counter commission fees. Aggregate gains is very important, because it is really how you are to play the game correctly. Most stocks will not jump several hundred dollars, or for that matter several dozen dollars, in anything resembling a sensible period of time to hold a stock. Not without some major news coming out of that company. So you're looking to make a few cents to a few bucks on hundreds of shares.

But what if you don't have this $2,000 to invest, is it still possible to make money? With, say, $700? If you are careful, subtle, and lucky can you make not-enough into enough?
To this end I'm starting a new blogspot site: A Stock Market Tale
Hello, Readers. I'd like to play a game.

First, my rules:

I can only use my initial investment of $700, and any money earned from this initial investment
As I only have $700 and want to make the absolute most of it, I cannot pay for any service beyond my broker. Everything I use for my research will have to be free. No trials either, that's just lamesauce.
Every purchase will be my own decision, I will not overtly take tips. I will be required to justify each decision based on clear and rational criteria. This isn't to say I might not ask my friends for opinions on things, but I will never ask "What should I buy?" or accept "Hey, you should buy ____, I think it'll go big."
Sometimes I will have to stay in cash, but if I haven't made a move in 2 weeks I will declare game over. Temporarily, at least.
If I lose too much I will declare defeat.

Now your rules: (otherwise known as a disclaimer)

I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. I am in no way implying that I have developed some super secret methods or intuition. You will not, under any circumstances, consider what I say as any form of advice. If I write that I am doing something it is in the interest of disclosure. If you make any decisions based on what I say, that is your own fault and I cannot be held responsible because this is not advice.
What I am doing I am doing as my own personal interest. It is obviously not my job and outside of any profits I make I am not being paid for any of it. If AdSense on the side of the official blog make any money, it's a plus but it is not the point.
I am not doing this as an endorsement of any official broker or any companies I might invest in. I do not intend to reflect onto my employer or any related entity.
Please understand that I'm just a dude writing about stocks with no formal training or inside information.

The plan of attack:

Since I have a limited amount of money to invest I'm going to be looking exclusively at stocks priced at less than $10 a share. This is the only way I can make a net profit, any higher and I won't make enough aggregated over the number of shares to amount to counter commissions.

Since I have no news information other than what is freely available, and most of the companies I'll be looking at just don't make news, I will be relying purely on technical analysis to pick my stocks. I will also be mitigating my risks using stop loss orders to sell my positions if they drop too far past a level based solely upon an analysis of the chart.

As I buy and sell positions I will sporadically update the new site (A Stock Market Tale) with details of how I'm doing, and also why I'm moving the way I've decided to. Hopefully it'll be interesting.

--PXA

Mac's iPad and other related musings, Part 2

2010-02-25T15:54:00.005-05:00

And we're back...
This was a somewhat less depressing thought I had yesterday morning when I was walking to my morning train.

I am a huge fan of Palm's WebOS on their 2 new smartphones, the Pre and the Pixi. I've had a Pre since June and despite the fact mine is physically wrecked I still think the OS is great. I hope Palm makes more money so they can use better hardware and QA. But I was thinking about WebOS applications, being written primarily in Javascript and also the new gaming capable APIs which I believe are in Java for direct hardware access. Java is a desktop language...and Yahoo! widgets are written in Javascript. Unfortunately, Yahoo! widgets suck. I haven't really seen anyone using them out in the wild, and of course they're only available on the PC.

But what if it were possible to use certain WebOS applications AS widgets? The Palm Application Catalog could be extended to the desktop, and you could run the same games and utilities on both. I'd written an application to scrape the mbta_alerts twitter feed and show me if my train was delayed, wouldn't it be cool to have that on my computer and take advantage of the better network connection? This also creates a 2nd distribution channel for developers.

The way I read it, Apple's trying to put the iPad somewhere between a laptop and a device like the iPod touch. Unfortunately that space is currently occupied by netbooks. For all their shortcomings, they have one major leg up on the iPad: They are a real computer. So if Palm were to create a system which would allow their WebOS apps to run on real computers, they can not only grab desktop space but can also invade that contested area for lightweight applications running on lightweight computers.

As far as I know, no one's created anything that can run the same applications on a mobile device, on a low-power computer, and on a full desktop. Also, Palm has been pushing the idea of reliance on the "cloud", in WebOS devices information like installed applications, device settings, and contact lists are automatically synchronized to the internet. This capability is already there, wouldn't it be EVEN COOLER if you could log in to this desktop WebOS system and get all your installed applications?

Garsh, I hope someone at Palm is paying attention 'cause I totally want this now.

Mac's iPad and other related musings

2010-02-24T10:49:00.006-05:00

MaxiPad. Moving on.
When I'd heard about Apple's tablet announcement, I thought it was a joke. Everyone wanted a Mac tablet. For YEARS I'd hear about people wanting Mac to finally make a tablet or a netbook computer. What they finally put out was an oversized iPod Touch with an extra chromosome and gimpier than Lt. Dan, and while the usual sections of the computing industry immediately engaged in fellating the device a lot of people were left scratching their heads. It has 3G but is locked to AT&T, it won't multi-task, you can't install your own software on it (App store only), you need an adapter just to get a USB port, it has no camera, no flash support, won't play widescreen video, I'd imagine it has no microphone as well, no video out either. So...what do I use this thing for?

Anyway, it did get me to thinking, which I guess is good.

Over the past few years I've been watching as most of the last generation of evil empires try to rescue their public image by adopting transparent processes, on the surface at least. As contrast Apple operates in complete opacity, under a shroud of darkness. Hidden away from the world in his dungeon fortress, Barad-dûr, Sauron -- I mean Steve Jobs -- steers Apple in his single-minded quest for domination. Or something. Honestly, do you know what goes on there, 'cause I don't.

This leads into my next thought. Over at Defective By Design (The anti-DRM folks who I love dearly), they made up some great posters for the iPad launch.

This tagline: Your computer is our computer, is a theme I've seen slowly spreading through the industry over the past few years. The players are beginning to realize the surest way to ensure continued profits is to execute control. On the other hand you can also ensure a measure of quality, as Apple demonstrated by the stranglehold they've kept on what hardware their OS will run on. Microsoft plays the side of the coin where they give the customers a measure of freedom, they want to control the industry more than the customers. I'm sure they have aspirations to get there eventually but they're gonna start at the top and work their way down. They've started with the driver signing requirements in Vista and Windows 7. For now you can turn off the verification, but you have to do it on each boot. This is already causing problems for a set of end users and spells certain doom for alternative Windows drivers. It also paves the way for increased hardware costs as manufacturers are forced to submit drivers for approval just so their hardware is compatible with Windows Future-Version. Virtualization software, which often uses system drivers to provide more direct access to system resources and better performance, will be effectively required to ask Microsoft for permission to compete with Microsoft as they product their own virtualization software. This seems like a tremendous conflict of interest. A few years ago Microsoft filed a patent for a method of building DRM control into an OS kernel, I think this is the first step towards that end.

Apple's interests, it seems, lay in squeezing their consumer base for cash. They've already begun teaching people to expect less capability for the same price. The iPad does less than an iPhone or iPod Touch and costs much more. The MacBook Air was a bad machine, and didn't even have an optical drive but cost more than any other laptop of similar capability. And they've been hiding configuration options on their OS since its inception. And as an amusing aside, one of the reasons cited for rejecting the Google Voice app from the the App Store was that having another phone application on the device might confuse their users. This is probably why all their hardware has rounded corners -- so their users won't hurt themselves by chewing the edges, because they clearly think people are that stupid.
Their recent patent is for displaying advertisements through the OS. The filing includes a flow chart for how the OS could determine when to play an ad, and it includes checking to see if the user has pre-bought time. That's exactly how it sounds...Apple thinks there is a strong possibility that sometime in the future people will be willing to rent ad-free time on their own computers. The patent also specifies that the OS could disable key features such as the mouse or keyboard except when prompting for interaction to make it impossible to not watch the advertisements. The only way this will work is if people accept the idea that what they have paid for is not theirs. That a computer is similar to the digital tuner box that TV companies will rent you and that your use of the OS is just a service you pay for.

Wow, I hope neither of these folks get what they want. I like being able to choose things about my computer, and I like the idea that I own it and can beat it into doing what I want provided I'm clever enough.

More upbeat musing coming soon.

VLC includes Santa Hat icon, offends Buddhist?

2009-12-26T13:21:00.004-05:00

A few days ago I noticed my VLC icon, the much beloved cone, had donned a red "Santa" hat. I thought it was a cute little "easter egg", and thought nothing more of it. This morning I was wondering if there was a plugin or if it would be easy to make a feature for VLC that involved the icon randomly swapping hats. Deerstalkers, fedoras, pressman's hats, baseball caps...just hats. For fun. I came across a recent thread on the VLC dev forums where someone was requesting the hat be removed or a patch be made to allow users to toggle the hat on or off during the Christmas season. This person was apparently incredibly offended the some developer thought it would be cute to give the cone a recognizable hat for a few weeks out of the year. I'm really curious if this person also gets offended at restaurants that put up orange and black streamers or cardboard witches in late October, or people who wear "What would Jesus do?" bracelets. I found a little survey generator and I'm going to try to embed it here and see if I get enough readership to actually collect some useful data here. Just for my own edification.

The link to the thread is here: http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/2009-December/070015.html

[The survey period is over, it has been removed.]

Halleluja! AT&T: 1 year later

2009-12-21T14:23:00.004-05:00

In the wake of the SNL skit poking fun at AT&T's signal problems, I noticed it has been almost a year to the day since I bought an iPhone. Now while I managed to escape their service in July it took quite a bit longer for me to escape their contract. And I only now assume to have escaped the contract as I can no longer log into their website and I haven't recieved letters from any collection agencies. AT&T has failed to directly contact me on this issue: EVER...so I'm just guessing.

So the adventure started because Verizon refused to allow me to try the Samsung Omnia without locking me into a 2 year contract. I had allowed my agreement to lapse and then purchased a BlackBerry Storm. But, when I tried to exchange the Storm for the Omnia I was told that I would be bound to a new 2 year agreement. Apparently the 30 day trial is shared between the phone and the service and any change to either within that time negates the trial.

The Omnia was Verizon's final chance to retain me as a customer at that point and since they wouldn't let me see if I liked the phone enough to keep their service, I canceled my contract and left the store...heading over to the AT&T with my head hung in shame I asked for an iPhone. The rep hooked me up with my account, activated the phone, applied my RIT employee discount, sold me some screen protectors, and sent me on my way. Aside from a few odd hiccups at Wal-mart involving the phone refusing to work since it thought the SIM card was out, nothing seemed odd for the trip home. I brought the phone home and immediately set about jailbreaking it. The phone was working out pretty well for a while, apart from some of that GSM noise and sketchy signal. Over the next few months living in Rochester the signal problems grew worse and the noise became more annoying. I'm not sure if it was actually making it more, or if I'd just slowly grown to hate it.

AT&T support seemed only grudgingly willing to help me concerning my poor reception. While I understand the description of the issue leaves a lot to be desired as a technical support request, these people are being paid to at least try, which they did not. And from a customer perspective separate from the technical problem, they didn't help me at all. These people refused to admit there were any issues, kept repeating that I was in a good signal area like saying it again would make it true, and they wouldn't even consider compensating me for the poor service by giving me even one-time discounts.

I was dropping calls sometimes 3 times within a minute. It was horrifying. And I wasn't even in a major metropolitan area, I just had poor signal. And it wasn't my phone because as soon as I left my room, or stepped outside if I was in a particularly sturdy RIT building, I was able to use the phone perfectly well. As a former Verizon customer for several years I had never experienced the frustration of a dropped call. In fact, I can't remember it happening to me before this, EVER. This constant dropping of calls and failing to ring even once caused my overreacting mother to call the county Sheriff's office to investigate my apartment and make sure I was ok. I have NEVER been so angry at a phone company.

Eventually, after almost 4-5 months of this I got them to consider this might be their problem. They offered to replace the SIM card on the phone, which I knew wasn't going to help, but I decided to play along since they were finally paying attention to me as a customer and not the enemy. Unfortunately, just a little after this I had to graduate and move, so we postponed the replacement until I had settled in my new apartment. When I called again after moving, the rep at the other end, while being slightly kinder than anyone else I'd spoken to up until this point wasn't any more helpful. I was told I was 3 miles away from the nearest tower, with the maximum range of GSM being...survey says...3 miles. The guy basically told me I was out of luck, there's nothing they can do regarding compensation, my options were either step outside every time I need to make a call and hope they build a tower nearby in a few months or switch carriers. So took the sensible option: I switched to Sprint when the Palm Pre came out in July. After ~8 months, I was finally free. Or ... crap.

While Sprint was being really good to me, discounting me for poor service and eventually giving me a device which gives me flawless reception in my apartment for free, AT&T was trying to charge me a cancellation fee. They sent me 2 bills, each 2 months apart for the fee. They didn't call, they just sent me sporadic bills. I finally called them and I was again confronted as the enemy. I got through the first level which told me nothing could be done, and the next level who told me they couldn't do anything, and that level's manager who told me I was completely unjustified in asking for the fee to be dropped. (The fee they charged me to cancel the service I wasn't getting...yeah.) But he'd put it into arbitration just to get me off the phone. A representative from the cancellation department would contact me within a week.
A week went by, then 2, then a month, then 2...and no call. Eventually it was December again, and I decided to pop into my att.com account to see if the fee was still there. And much to my surprise I no longer had an account with att.com. I can only assume that AT&T finally decided to drop the cancellation fee they had no basis for charging me. Greed is not a basis. But they must have been so embarrassed at their own unreasonable handling of my case and took so long to make a decision, that they decided not to call me.

So, 1 year later... AT&T has completely spoiled any chance of my considering them a responsible entity. They are a bad company, with a crappy network, a slew of crappy phones, and some of the worst customer service I've ever had the displeasure to receive. They are a joke, and it is funny...in a very sad way.

--PXA

Bourgeois Beer: Sam Adams Utopias

2009-12-06T23:33:00.002-05:00

With a price tag of ~$200 per bottle, Sam Adams Utopias is a beer for those who feel a little heavy in the wallet. As it is also released only every 2-3 years, and it very hard to get ahold of, it has a reputation of being a fine beer for those who seek new and extreme flavors out of beer.

Some tag Utopias as a "Super-Beer", and with an ABV of 27% it's certainly something beyond mortal beers.

I managed to get ahold of a bottle through a friend of mine who still lives in Rochester near Beers of the World. I wasn't able to find it in the liquor stores near my apartment, which is ironic given my proximity to Boston. I picked up the bottle when I visited my parents for Thanksgiving.

The bottle comes with a serial number which doubles as a discount code at the Sam Adams store for a free Utopias signature glass made by Reidel. Now that I've finally got ahold of that glass and sampled the Utopias out of it, both chilled and at room temperature, I feel it's time to write about it.

At first, the swirl and look. The beer is almost completely un-carbonated, it sits heavy in the glass. Swirling it causes a noticeable coating to form on the side of the glass. It's not Stone Russian Imperial Stout or Old Engine Oil, but it's pretty thick. The beer is clear and dark, mostly an amber color like most beer. A little more towards the dark brown of a stout than the golden color you'd get in most lagers.

At the sniff you start getting into it. There are hints of dried fruits, brown sugar. There's also a similarity to the Dogfish Head 120 IPA, or Imperial IPA, owing to the incredibly high alcohol content. It almost seems like it's trying to be a low power liquor or high power wine, like a warm tawny port or a sherry. Some sort of fortified wine or burnt red wine. A lot of reviews place it similar to a brandy but I think the fortified wine label fits better, it just doesn't have that angry burn of a full-on liquor. When chilled more red fruits come out of the sniff, wild berries, blackberries.

On to the main course, drinking the beer. The mouthfeel is very satisfying. It's lighter than it looks but still thick enough to coat the tongue. Also not so thick it feels like I've chewed off a chunk of something. The beer itself is not like anything I've ever tasted, not with regards to beer, anyway. Just like the smell, it's more like a burnt wine than anything. There are hints of lots of farm fruit, but it's all subdued. Strawberry, black berry, raisins, red grapes, cooked apples, etc. They all taste more like a jam than the fruit itself. That subdued, soaking in sugar idea. When it's chilled it tastes more like a cleaner, more refreshing beer. Some of the sweeter flavors are toned down making it fruitier, more like a lambic beer. Even cold it's still incredibly complex. Warm, the beer takes on darker and sweeter tinge. The alcohol is also more pronounced. The dark brown sugar that was almost completely vanquished by cooling it takes center stage when it's room temperature. The burnt wine flavors are also a lot more prominent when it's warm.

My recommendation for this beer is to chill it first, then allow it to warm as you drink it, so as to get the full representation of the flavors. Some of the more subtle fruit-based flavors get lost in the alcoholic might of the brew when it's drunk at room temperature.

Also, my recommendation for this beer is not to buy it unless you're in it for the experience. The flavor just isn't too incredible, mostly because it doesn't taste like beer. You can get the same ideas by mixing a dry port wine with a really grape-y red wine...and maybe some of thick stout. This beer is in the same vein as the Thomas Hardy's Ale, that I also didn't like. Both that beer and this one are way too similar to a wine.

While I have a tremendous amount of respect for the brewmasters that crafted these, I just want a clear distinction between beer and wine...these ground breaking beers blur the lines a little too much for me.

Drink on, folks!
--PXA

How customer service SHOULD work.

2009-11-29T23:52:00.002-05:00

I have my own opinions on how customer service should be done. When I previously worked in the service industry I applied my ideals to great success. However, it the rest of the industry seems to have the opposite ideas. So when I do find customer service that treats me with respect as a customer and not a walking checkbook, I'm always pleasantly surprised.

This is how NOT to do it:
Pretty much since the first day I took my iPhone home I had problems with reception. I was far-ish from a tower and the signal didn't penetrate into the finished basement that served as my room. When I moved to my new apartment in Norwood, MA, I had even WORSE reception. I was told by AT&T customer service this was because I was barely at the maximum range of the nearest tower. I was also told there was nothing I could do but continue to pay them for a service I wasn't receiving and hope that eventually they built a tower closer to me. But he couldn't tell me when or where the next group of towers was going to be. When I left AT&T because I wasn't getting any service, cellular or customer, I was charged a very large early-cancellation fee. While I fully admit that I canceled early, I contend that the lack of reception was a valid reason. When I confronted them regarding the fee they claimed there was nothing that could be done, and refused to consider the validity of my reason for dropping them. When I finally got them to agree to think about dropping the charge they told me they'd pass the request to the appeals department which would contact me within a week. It's been maybe 2.5 months and I haven't heard back from them. This tale is so filled fail, it actually makes me sad. Not like Bambi's Mom dying, but still pretty depressing.

On the other hand, I had the same problem with my Sprint phone since I got it. Very poor reception. Pretty much had to leave the apartment to use the phone. However, when I called their customer service I was offered an option to remedy the situation almost immediately. I was offered a device that's effectively a CDMA mini-tower. Since I was using it to upgrade from NO reception, not just poor reception, I would be charged half price for this device and I wouldn't have to pay the monthly fee for using the device. 2 months later when I examined my bill, I had been charged full price for the device and had usage fees for it. I immediately used online chat to confront them about the charges. The Sprint rep took maybe 5 minutes to review my file and then told me "Yup, you're right! Our bad!" And instantly removed the charges. There was no escalation, no hassel, no confrontation. When I got done with them, I was grateful for the assistance and actually happy about my choice of wireless carrier. I was so ecstatic about the fact they didn't try to bend me over and take all my money, I didn't even attempt to have my late payment charges removed. I'm left with the impression that THIS is how customer service is done.

So, congrats Sprint for getting something so simple right, when everyone else is hell bent on getting it wrong in the hope of making a quick buck by wringing your customers for money you don't deserve.

Mojo Rising: AutoFocusing on Dialogs

2009-11-06T00:47:00.002-05:00

While I have every confidence the documented controller.setInitialFocusedElement() method will work during scene pushes, the story is somewhat different if you only showDialog(). I'm currently adding the final touches to my first complete Palm Pre application, in preparation for a postmortem blog post on developing with Mojo.
One of those final touches was automatically focusing on the text input widget when the dialog was shown. This simple thing took me over 2 hours to figure out and required reading through the actual framework code provided by Palm.
For whatever reason some methods of the scene controller aren't fired on showDialog() like they are on pushScene(). Might track down more on this later.
For now, to get Mojo to automatically focus on an element when a dialog is shown, do this:

1. When creating your view, add a tabindex="0" to the div which will become the widget. Or use the Mojo.View.makeFocusable() method, which currently does the same thing.
2. In the Assistant object you passed to the showDialog() method as the "assistant" property, add the following line of code to the activate() method:

Mojo.View.advanceFocus(this.controller.sceneElement);

Alternatively you could just call:

this.controller.advanceFocus();

However, the advanceFocus() method of the scene controller object is annotated as private so using it is likely not the best practice. There also might be a better way to get the sceneElement, but at the time of this posting I am far too tired to look it up.

More Mojo Rising coming soon, folks.

--PXA

I hate sports.

2009-10-07T18:04:00.004-04:00

How very unamerican of me, but I've never been interested in sports. Not really interested in playing and DEFINITELY not interested in watching. I fail to see how watching other people play a game can be enthralling, and why is chess boring to watch but football is popular? Are viewers just getting off on the movement? Is it a living vicariously thing? Whatever, I don't get it...but that's not my point.
I know I'm not alone in my lack of enjoyment of sports, there are plenty of people who are just plain don't care and want absolutely nothing to do with it. That's not really my point either, though.
What's bothering me is how it's assumed that sports is such a part of mainstream life that EVERYONE wants to participate in it.
I recently got an HDTV and subscribed to Verizon's FiOS TV service. As part of this service I've been gifted with what looks like a dozen sports channels, NFL, Nascar, NHL, NBA, etc. And that's just the HD side of the dial. But I don't get Shotime, so I can't watch Dexter. I want to watch Dexter, I don't want to watch sports...and more to the point I will NEVER want to watch sports. There is no way for me UNorder the sports package, but to get Shotime I have to sign up for a movies extras package that costs $14.99 more a month. I get the movie channels being their own package, they're specialized and generally of a higher caliber than the other channels. But sports programming is specialized, regardless of whether its proponents would care to admit it. Why can't I opt out? I'd gladly pay for the movie channels if I didn't have to pay for this sports crap I'm not watching.
Anyway, I was almost over my nerd rage at that annoyance when I went to update my phone's OS. Out of the box, and again with this update, the phone has some stock applications. Many of these are useful generic things like youtube, google maps, sprint navigator, etc. But the update also re-installed 2 sports specific applications: NFL and Nascar. Now I'm not really complaining about the inclusion of these applications in the phone or the update...I'm sure NFL and Nascar paid Sprint or Palm some good advertising money to get a presence on the phone. The problem I have is that I can't get rid of these things. Well, that's not true: I can. But I'm not the vast majority of the population. The only way to get rid of these applications is to 'root' the Palm Pre, that is use the hidden developer mode to gain shell access to the phone, then use that command shell to delete the application directly from the phone. The UI that you would normally use to remove any other application simple doesn't give you the option to remove these.
While that situation doesn't have the trade off the TV one does, there's nothing I could be getting instead of these applications, it's still frustrating I can't get rid of these things that are absolutely useless. I don't like sports, I want to get rid of these applications, I want to get rid of these channels.

Liking sports is a choice you made, not liking sports is a choice I made. Why do you feel your choice has the right to screw with mine?

--PXA

Javascript Shenanigans: Advance Javascript Resource

2009-09-09T18:03:00.002-04:00

I was wandering around the internet at work today and stumbled upon this excellent application at John Resig's site ejohn.org.
I'm a little annoyed I hadn't found anything like this when I was looking for JS resources when I was trying to figure out some of the more advanced things like closures and prototype hackery. This starts slow but gets good fast:
Learning Advanced Javascript

Be enlightened.

--PXA

Javascript Shenanigans: How jQuery works. Kinda.

2009-08-28T19:35:00.004-04:00

Every time I re-read the source code to jQuery I understand something new about how it works. It's actually rather enlightening, figuring out how it works.

I'd like to explain the way the "jQuery" code from the previous post works, since it uses a decent amount of more advances javascript and led me to a greater understanding of the language.

So, this:


(function () {
$ = function(elem) {
return new $.prototype.init(elem);
};
$.prototype = {
init: function(elem) {
  this[0] = elem;
  return this;
},
each: function(f) {
  for (var i in this[0])
    f.call(this[0][i]);
  return this;
}
};
$.prototype.init.prototype = $.prototype;
})();

Broken down:
First, to make sure that everything is setup as soon as the file is loaded (before any of the document is even parsed by the browser), the setup is wrapped inside an anonymous block. I'm not sure what the proper javascript term for this is, but it's very similar to the "static { }" block from Java, where any code contained within it is immediately executed as soon as the class is loaded by the JVM. As an example:
(function (val) { alert(val); })("HI MOM");
Would immediately alert the string "HI MOM" before any content loads.

After this, we define the $ function. The function does the simple job of returning a new instance of "init". While creating instances of functions may look odd, Javascript allows this. Functions are often used to declare what's commonly thought of as an object. While "function $(elem)" is legal, I find the "var $ = function(elem)" notation makes a little more sense.

Javascript does not formally define its classes, so multiple instances of "object" can each have completely different properties and methods. Properties and methods are assigned at runtime. The .prototype method, mentioned in the previous post gives us a way to make sure all instances of an object have specific members. So, $.prototype is an object containing additional members of the $ object, which will be applied to every $ around.

In it, we define an init method which stores us a reference to the element we gave it, and then returns an instance of "init". After that we define an each method, which simple iterates whatever "this[0]" is and returns. While it's not strictly necessary to return from this function it let's us do something really cool: chaining. Look it up at jQuery's site, it rocks. This each method accepts a single parameter, a callback function, which is executed on each iteration of the loop. Rather than simply calling the function like "f()", we can use the more flexible .call() method. This basically allows us to "redefine the execution context for the given function", or in simple terms it lets us change the value of the "this" variable.

This final line adds $'s prototype to init as a prototype. This is why jQuery plugins are written
jQuery.fn.nameofmyplugin = ...
In real jQuery, jQuery.fn = jQuery.prototype, so your plugin adds another object to $'s prototype, which also adds it to $.init's prototype.

g'night. tired. bye.

Javascript Shenanigans: Why I hate Prototype

2009-08-27T15:19:00.006-04:00

Surprise, I'm not dead yet!

So anyway, I've been doing a decent amount of Javascript lately. This includes pure JS, and a few frameworks...jQuery, Prototype, and Dojo. I'm going to ignore Dojo for now since it really is a whole other beast than either jQuery or Prototype.

jQuery and Prototype behave in similar ways, providing a helper function like $() and allowing you a relatively standard API to do things that certain browsers do differently (like CSS). But jQuery is nice in that it stays out of your way, Prototype intrudes. It's the asshole that starts staring over your shoulder and saying everything you're doing is wrong as soon as it walks into the room.
Technically, Prototype grabs your keyboard and starts keymashing.
Odds are pretty good that a pure javascript application will stop working as soon as prototype is included in the page.
Take a look at the following example:


window.onload = function () {
  var arr = [0,2,5,7,3];
  alert(arr.length);
  for (var i in arr)
    alert(i);
};

The variable arr is an array with 5 elements. The first alert returns the expected "5", so you would expect that the "For .. in" loop (or a foreach loop) would alert you 5 values. In pure JS it does as expected, but when prototype gets in the game the for loop runs 43 time. Holy hot damn, what just happened to my code? Well, now you can't use foreach anymore because prototype all up in da hizzy.
The root of this problem is in the way that prototype works: by extending the DOM and javascript itself, through the "prototype" method.
In my copious free time I decided to see if I couldn't figure out how each of these frameworks implemented their "each" iterator function.

So, this emulates prototype's behavior:


Array.prototype.each = function (f,context) {
  for (var i = 0; i<this.length; i++)
    f.call(context,this[i]);
}

Yes, prototype is somewhat more elegant than this, but the basic premise is the same.
While jQuery's behavior is a bit more complicated than this (And I'm pretty certain that this is because John Resig is an immortal space traveler, come from the stars to give us amazing client side scripting languages), I feel it offers a better way of achieving the same effect.


(function () {
  $ = function(elem) {
    return new $.prototype.init(elem);
  };
  $.prototype = {
    init: function(elem) {
      this[0] = elem;
      return this;
    },
    each: function(f) {
      for (var i in this[0])
        f.call(this[0][i]);
      return this;
    }
  };
  $.prototype.init.prototype = $.prototype;
})();

This allows you to iterate over the array in much the same way, except it doesn't modify the array so our original example would still loop 5 times and not 43.
But why does it work? Next time, on Build Environment.

--PXA

Level 3, BEGIN

2009-06-06T18:54:00.002-04:00

So it's been a long time since I've written anything, and that's because since I last wrote here I got a full time job, graduated from RIT, and moved to the Boston area. But now I have some time and figured I might as well put something up.

Right now, my brand new Palm Pre is syncing a small selection of my music library from iTunes, which in and of itself it kindof cool. The iTunes syncing is amazingly easy, but I'm going to hold judgement for now until it finishes. If it got my contacts it'd be sweet. The rep at the Sprint store was able to sync from my iPhone several things, but I didn't see the contacts list. We'll see if iTunes syncs them. I did add my facebook account and as promised it created a contacts list from that information, but I was driving at the time so I didn't see if they were combined with other contacts.

On first impression I'm a little ambivilant about several aspects of the phone. I like the weight and I don't mind at all that it's a little thick. But the slider and the keyboard feel a little cheap. Although the one handed mechanics of the slider are great. On the software side of things, finding certain settings is a little odd sometimes, but the app catalog is ULTRA easy to use. And the phone is FAST. Everything is FAST, loading new applications, quitting, backgrounding, switching, using. It's all so very smooth.

WebOS 1.0.2 is out, I'm going to update to it.

In which goals are fulfilled, part 2.

2009-04-11T01:09:00.004-04:00

It is now after 1am, and I have returned from my Scotch tasting at my friend's house. We lined up several grades of Johnnie Walker Scotch, as well as an Islay single malt called Caol Ila. The center pieces being the Blue label and Caol Ila.
I broke the foil seal and uncorked my bottle. Sniffing the cork and the top of the bottle, I got my first hint of what I'd been coveting for a long time. The smell of peat was immediate, followed by a nice soft oak and an undercurrent of an almost syrupy sweetness, like maple syrup or grenadine. I couldn't get anything more out of the smell other than whisky and soft.
The taste of it, cut and uncut, was delicious. Everything that came through in the smell, everything I always imagined GREAT Scotch would taste like was there, and all in perfect balance. Not too much of anything, or not enough. Wood, smoke, earth, sweetness, apples, nuts, spices, vanilla. It was all there, sitting nice and warm in my mouth.
I'm afraid I lack the professional taste to fully describe the whisky, all I know is that it is was really worth the wait. It may be the smoothest and most well balanced whisky I've ever had.
For now it will stay on my shelf, only to be enjoyed in the best of company.

--PXA

In which goals are fulfilled, part 1.

2009-04-10T19:14:00.003-04:00

Almost since I've been drinking, I've drank whiskey. Not exclusively, but after a few months of the obligatory cases of mass produced Beer of Questionable Quality, my first real purchase request was for whiskey. Any. Since then my palate has become more discerning. My 21st birthday gift to myself was a bottle of The Glenlivet 12 year single malt Scotch. Today, I purchased a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label blended Scotch Whisky. Since I began reading about Scotch, this particular name was mentioned over and over again, for taste...quality...class. I've desired this whisky for years.
I decided to buy the bottle about a week ago. My tax returns had arrived and I filed for my final RIT tuition refund, I was feeling rather minted. To this effect I placed an appointment in my Exchange calendar titled simply: It's time.
I waited anxiously through the week, until finally Friday afternoon rolled around. I left work with a good friend of mine, who shares my appreciation for fine whiskeys, and collected my better half, who shares my appreciation for fine states of inebriation. We went to a local liquor store, whose staff have come to recognize me due to the intensive research I usually put into my purchases. The store's owner was busy ringing out another customer, so I approached the other register and stated a request I'd been waiting to make:
I'd like a bottle of the Johnnie Walker Blue Label Scotch.
The store owner heard this, and immediately stated that he would be helping me today.
A few minutes later he returned from the back with a blue leather case, and set it on the desk. He opened the two clasps on the box, and opened the lid: revealing my bottle of Scotch, and small leather booklet. I paid, which was anticlimactic. I wish I'd have had the foresite to visit my bank and get several $20 bills.
I returned home and opened the case, the smell from the inside is a rich scent of age, class, and wood. Something I haven't smelled in years, not since I had the fortune to open the case of a very old and very expensive violin. I never had the pleasure of playing that violin, but tonight I will have the pleasure of drinking this Scotch.

Good things come to those who wait
--PXA

Name NASA's Node 3 Contest

2009-03-05T17:52:00.003-05:00

So I noticed something today on Facebook: A group for the purpose of altering the outcome of the contest NASA is running to name the ISS Node 3 module, so as to name the module the Colbert.
I voted and then noticed the names the NASA has proposed as well as the write-in's. Some of them have a pretty decent comedy value.
Here's the list.

Earthrise, Legacy, Tranquility, Venture, Vision, Hope...all lame. Ignore them.

Serenity, clearly winning. But consider why most people are voting for it. The Serenity is a ship of pirates, named after the pivotal lost battle of a lost war. It is constantly in disrepair, barely kept running from stop to stop and only then by girl-genius mechanic Kaylee. Ok, maybe a bad namesake.

Enterprise. Seriously, stop naming things after the Enterprise unless they're gonna be epic. The Node 3 is an over glorified bathroom and air filter. Not epic. Picard wouldn't even shit in this thing much less captain it.

Xenu. Are you serious? I appreciate the irony of naming something which would have a positive impact on the lives of several people with very public lives after the fictional "bad-guy" in the creepiest religion to be created in the last 100 years...but really? Xenu? On the ISS? Well, he is from space.

Vista. This is obvious. Naming the Node 3 after the worst technical and public relations screw up in the history of Microsoft? Seriously, people hated the Bob less. Do you want this thing to crash and burn?

Buddy. Ok. Makes sense. It fits the purpose of the module. Really nothing to say except IT'S LAME! BUDDY! Might as well call it Bob!

Synergy. It makes sense, matches the purpose, and follows the feel of the names before it. ...It's better than Buddy.

Horizon. Sorry guys, this is way to close to "Event Horizon" for my liking. We all know how that ended.

At least no one wanted to call it Miranda.

The Real RIT, thoughts and concerns

2009-01-22T00:22:00.003-05:00

So I haven't posted in a while, so I figured I'd writing an editorial about some RIT stuff.

SG recently challenged several RIT administrators to live in the dorms, eat at Gracies, walk the quarter mile, and park without a reserved pass. I unfortunately couldn't make it to the closing meeting, but I did read through the blogs that were posted by the administrations and they seemed very positive. I'm not sure they got the "full" experience. It seems the admins completely missed out on several joys of campus living I got to experience.

1. 15 hour days. The reason sleep schedules are so odd in the dorms is because of how hard students have to work to survive. Between classes and work, some of us start at 8AM or earlier and don't get to put face to pillow until almost midnight. When you're looking at something like that, try to imagine what video games at 3am feel like. NOW try to go to Gracie's and eat that salad or that wrap, after a long day of frustrations that started way too early.

2. Sexile. It happens, even at a place like RIT. I bring it up because of its affects primarily on morale. Yes it keeps you up sometimes, and sometimes keeps you from getting into your room to do your work. But unless you get your own chance to do some sexiling, being forced to do your work in the hallway or the lounge because your roommate is bumping uglies is a pretty crushing blow to your morale. Couple that with the bonechilling cold of walking the quarter mile in winter and all the other frustrations of life at RIT (Parking, bad professors, over priced food, class registration, etc) and you have a recipe for a miserable existence.

3. Parking. Someone had to say it. It was part of the poster. When did these administrators have to deal with THIS daily thorn in my side? As far as I know, never. Actually, from what I read on the blogs, they marveled at how easy it was to walk to their offices from the dorms. SG, what gives? I wanted to see Destler tooling around E and F lot in his Prius for 20 minutes trying to find a spot not marked reserved. These administrators have dedicated parking or easy access to reserved passes, in the spirit of the challenge shouldn't they have had to deal with parking like the rest of us do? Yes, this is the DORM challenge...but why would you so obviously ignore commuters? Personally, I'm a little disappointed by this.

4. Food outside of Gracie's. Yes Gracie's is bad, we all suffered but then moved on. Unfortunately the food on the rest of campus isn't particularly good...or more to the point, fairly priced. It really puts my nuts in a twist to go to the SAU and see people running the line to grill twice as fast as people going to the Deli, walking out with these greased up cheeseballs that cost worlds less than getting a salad and yogurt. Living at RIT, going to class, suffering the weather makes it hard to WANT to eat healthy, and the PRICE makes it hard to afford eating healthy. It's crap. Sure administrators can deal with it since they pull down some decent change, but what about the student employee limited to 20 hours a week for minimum wage? The cost of good food on campus hurts.

And I'm sick of writing. Go go gadget "Publish Inane Rantings to Public" button.

Phone Review: BlackBerry Storm

2008-12-24T12:29:00.003-05:00

I'm eschewing my standard phone review format and making a more editorial format review. The Storm showed up on a list of the top 10 embarrassments of 2008. I really don't think that's fair. In the current market I really doubt any one is going to get very excited over a phone unless it can absolutely STOMP the iPhone...or IS an iPhone. But to call a sluggishly adopted phone an embarrassment just isn't fair.

The phone did almost everything right. They took a very mature platform, put a highly advanced touchscreen and very innovative UI on top of it. Created a very nice media player and packaged it into one of the best looking BlackBerries ever. There's nothing about the phone to NOT like. The detractors have constantly complained about the lack of WiFi, and while NICE to have, the phone doesn't NEED WiFi because the Verizon network is so good. I had the phone for over a week and never sat around thinking "Boy I wish I had some WiFi so I could use some data".

I feel the Storm is better than the iPhone in several ways:
1. Native multi-tasking. This makes on-the-go IMing work out quite a bit better since the connection is actually persistent and real-time and not some kind of answering machine service. 2. The device wide notification API allows any application to let you know you have messages RIGHT on the main screen. You don't need to depend on sound cues to know what you have.
3. The keyboard is worlds beyond what the iPhone has. The spelling correction and predictive text features are golden, I never really got into an argument with it. Also the extra physical buttons makes for an easier "No I really meant to type it that way" experience since the key is always in the same place.
4. Just about every application changes orientation as opposed to the like 2 blessed iPhone applications that do that. RIM understands that people will want to TYPE type on the phone and let you do it with both thumbs if you want.
5. MMS. Had to say it.
6. Copy & Paste. Again.
7. Haptic feedback. The phone cleverly simulates pressing a real button when navigating its interface by...making you press a real button. Yes it's the whole screen, but it really doesn't make much of a difference pressing one button for every key or each key is a button like the inside keyboard on the Voyager.
8. Programmable "convenience" keys. No matter what application you're in, these keys will do whatever you tell them. So you have 1 touch access to your camera, or your email, or anything else you can think of...without having to go back to the home screen.
9. The camera, more mega pixels, better focus, and a real flash. Physically better in every way than the iPhone's...too bad the software for it was no good.
10. It's the little things, when you're using the media player tapping one of the Up/Down keys on the side below the headphone jack will increase or decrease the volume. But if you HOLD down that button it will skip to the next song or go back to a previous one. On the iPhone you need to unlock the phone to change volume, and work your way all the way to the "Now Playing" screen to move around in the playlist. Laame.

It's a very BlackBerry thing to have several functions built into a single control depending on how long you hold it or how many times you hit it.

They missed the boat on just a few things:
1. They put out the phone a little too early (Wow where have I heard that before?), before the BlackBerry store for the phone was launched. Most of the success of the iPhone was due to the app store you had access to the first day you opened the box. Without the app store, it's difficult to find programs for the phone and even then the quality is questionable.
2. Without a "Corporate" data plan from Verizon, which costs $15 extra on top of the $30 unlimited PDA data plan, the phone will not sync anything over the air. It will RECEIVE email, and somehow mine managed a one time sync of my calendar. But after that the only way I could get appointments would be to send myself invitations. The phone does understand invitations. But reading or deleting a message (Even when selecting "Delete from mailbox & handheld") will never sync back...so you need to delete everything twice. The iPhone does this synchronization without the extra data plan. It just may not necessarily be pushing those changes, but I can live with that. This is the big point for me. Had they managed to pull this one off, I may have not cared about the lack of apps or ...
3. Pandora Radio. I love Pandora. I love it so much I paid money for access to a free service. I think what they do is innovative, unique, and high quality. They deserve to be paid. There is a Pandora radio application for any phones on the AT&T or Sprint networks, and also for any Windows Mobile phone. BlackBerries, regardless of network and ESPECIALLY Verizon, are SOL. This really irked me. While not RIM's fault specifically, this is very disappointing, especially given all the other mobile platforms the app is available on. Considering the howling the BlackBerry community has been doing to both Pandora and RIM, it may behoove both of them to sit down and work something out since it's long overdue.
4. Not really a major detractor, I really do wish that more applications too advantage of the device's multi-touch capabilities. The API includes these features. I'm betting they wanted to get the phone out to market and didn't have the time to implement it, probably the same situation as the app store. It may be coming in a future update.

Verizon didn't let me try the Omnia, which is unfortunate since it may have saved them in my eyes. But this is it folks. I tried. I tried so very hard to avoid it. I bought and tested 3 phones, and did extensive in store trials and market research on 4 others. The best of the best, available in the US. And nothing quite got it right. The Storm was the closest. And some phones that SHOULD have been amazing got crippled by manufacturers not realizing they can't bully and short-change the market.

It makes me sad.

I now own an iPhone.
I admit this likely makes me a sellout...but no one can deny the pains I took to make sure it was the only way to get the features I wanted, and I don't think I wanted much. I'd like to go to Verizon the next phone cycle in 2 years. Let's hope the market gets their shit together and learns to compete.

--PXA

The perfect phone

2008-12-16T21:19:00.004-05:00

I had originally written an article describing several mistakes phone manufacturers are making in their quest to compete with the iPhone. I realized that was too negative. Instead of describing all the stupid stuff other companies are doing I should describe what I've seen that would make a phone capable of truly competing with the iPhone. On its own terms, and not just a "this is as good as I can get, being stuck with this carrier."

The phone should be about the same size as any recent BlackBerry, and weigh about as much (4-6 oz). This is important. If the screen is too small no one will be able to read the increased font and picture sizes required of a touch screen phone.
Fully or mostly touch screen phones are catching on, while full touch screen phones may not last... the idea is here to stay.
Also the weight is very important. Any lighter and the device will feel too cheap, any heavier and no one will want to tote it around as a phone.

Using a capacitive touch screen like the BlackBerry Storm and the Apple iPhone opens a few interface possibilities which the iPhone has leveraged (in a small way. If you hold the phone to a heat source while in a call, the screen turns off to save on battery.) This also allows the phone to exist in your pocket while locked and not accidentaly call people. The Storm and the iPhone are also capable of leveraging multi-touch. The perfect will leverage its advanced touch screen to save battery and provide cooler applications.

This is purely my opinion, but I love the "click" screen included on the BlackBerry Storm. It allows to have not only "tap", "flick" and "hold" events in your interface but "click", opening options like "click and hold". I'm just theorizing here, but as interfaces advance to and past the touch interface of Minority Report, differentiating between a "tap" and a "click" will become increasingly important. Having the feedback of actually clicking a real button actually helps me type incredibly fast on this keyboard. RIM done good. The perfect phone will include some form of haptic feedback, preferably in a clicking screen.

Include a real headphone jack. I'm serious. I threw the HTC Dream (otherwise known as the Google Phone or G-1) out of the race for forcing you to use a mini-USB dongle to use a standard pair of headphones. This behavior may have been acceptable when the major companies (Samsung, Nokia, LG, and Motorola) ruled the market with a laconic fist, but now that Apple has rocked the boat the consumers rule. If a jack is not offered, people will quickly jump for a new phone that offers this as soon as possble. You can't annoy the market into buying shitty Bluetooth headsets to listen to music. Not anymore. The perfect phone will let me use my own headphones without being annoying, it will let me listen to my music on my terms.

Wait long enought to offer your phone. Apple kept the lid on the iPhone for years before its launch, waiting until they could offer a comprehensive and integrated solution for each feature they wanted to include. They let the store cover anything they couldn't think of by themselves, which I imagine is what the fabled BlackBerry Storm application center will be like. Samsung/Sprint jumped the gun on the Instinct and released an unstable and immature phone into the market, and they're paying the price. Their development SDK couldn't even mimic KEY features of the actual phone (like the keyboard), crippling 3rd party development (which they tried to encourage with the Instinct Developer Contest). Make sure your device is ready to play with the big boys before you get into the game. The perfect phone will mature enough that the existing features of the existing applications will work.

Be productive. The line between entertainment phones (RAZR, KRZR, Vu, Dare, Instinct, Rant) and business phones (BlackBerry ANYTHING, Windows Mobile ANYTHING) has begun to blur since the iPhone includes all these features. The line between the "hip" and the business-folk is also blurring, as younger people become industry leaders. Pulling the RIM (Research In Motion) and charging an extra $15 a month to access your exchange/exchange clone calendar is not going to fly for much longer. This information is accessible via IMAP, just check that when you check your email and be done with it. The iPhone already does this, and Windows Mobile does it even better. BlackBerry/RIM and feature phones are the only groups not on board with this idea. Just drink the koolaid, already...people are scheduling their lives online. The group that offers this without making a big stink is the group that is going to win. If everyone puts it out there, that's one less stupid thing to judge a carrier on. The perfect phone will let me WORK and PLAY.

The perfect phone will let the user community enhance this phone. I'm talking to you, Verizon. iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, etc provide a relatively complete SDK which allows software developers to create applications for the phone. Even if they're not blessed by the carrier and not included in a central "Application Store", you can easily install these things on several phones as long as you accept it as a security risk. The perfect phone will let me screw around with it, since it's good enough that anything I do will be enhancing the phone, not hacking around its limitations.

Realize one thing: As a mobile device manufacturer in 2008/2009 you are now a slave to the market. If Apple has proven one thing it is that a hand-held device is capable of more than anyone thought possible. Except the BlackBerry people, they've had half these features for YEARS...they're just too busy to say anything. But the other half, if your phone doesn't do it people are going to leave you for the phone that does. Apple is not exempt from this. They have a very poor history of paying attention to the market, people just happen to like what they do a lot of the time. iPhone users have been asking for haptic feedback, MMS, camera flash, video camera, flash enabled web-browsing, etc, since the phone hit the market. If they don't deliver soon, some of their customers may jump ship to a different carrier when their contracts expire...which should be soon.

Two more phone reviews will be coming soon. I will be exchaning my BlackBerry Storm for a Samsung Omnia within the next few days and will review both of those soon. Then the winner takes all championship match: The iPhone v. EVERYONE ELSE.

--PXA

Twitteriffic?

2008-11-03T19:26:00.004-05:00

Eh, Maybe not.

If you do read this blog, there's a chance you've noticed the new Twitter sidebar widget. It says "Reluctantly". There's a lot of buzz around Twitter and that's got me on guard. Just like the iPhone (which I'm still trying to avoid), Twitter has to prove that it's really as good as everyone else thinks it is.

Every since I got into blogger and started trying to grind my writing skill I noticed there were certain little blurbs and short statements I wanted to blast into the ether of the intarwubs, but I really couldn't justify full blog posts for them. That's where I hoped Twitter would come in.

Unfortunately, I'm really not impressed. The Linux clients available are dismal, but there are some OK plugins for Firefox. When I went to add my little icon, the service told me it was "overloaded". Further, it said the cause of this was "Too many tweets." Somehow people actually USING the site had placed such a strain on their backend and/or bandwidth that user profiles couldn't be updated...but tweety activity on the main site continued unaffected. Huh? Whatever. Only it's done the same thing every subsequent attempt to get a picture up, and that's pretty annoying since the default icon is brown and lame. Also, with only about 140 characters per update...I'm not sure how the service could get that overwhelmed. That'd probably fit into a single packet.
That's another disappointment too, the character limit. I hit it with the FIRST post I tried to make, and took 3 minutes to edit and cut down...not really the amazing avenue for "mini-blogging" I had in mind. If I wanted to make updates that were this small, I'd just use Facebook's "status" feature. But everyone else seems pretty excited about Twitter so I'll continue the effort in good faith...but I'm still looking for the service I was hoping to find. Anyone got any recommendations or am I going to have to homebrew this one too?

...At least it's not completely "Web 2.0 Trendy", and called "Twttr."
--PXA

I haven't written about jQuery yet.

2008-10-27T11:54:00.000-04:00

I realized that while I've had jQuery listed as an interest of mine for all this time I still haven't written about it. Shame on me.

One of the coolest things about jQuery, aside from the fact that it is generally kind enough to stay out of your way and let you write YOUR javascript the way you want to with just a bit of help from it (unlike some other JS libraries *cough*prototype*cough*), is the rather robust extensibility. It's almost trivial to write your own plugins for jQuery, which other people can then simply include and use like it was any part of the library. You can even override or extend existing jQuery functionality if you wanted to.

On a recent project I had to add functionality to a page to create a dynamic list of filters for some log information, which was presented on a table. The filters had different types, some were time/date fields, some were plain text, and some you could pick from a preset list of values.

Some of my favorite programming features and APIs are the kind where you can setup a large list of parameters, instantiate an object or call a method and let 'er rip. Plugins, especially jQuery plugins, really lend themselves to this sort of programming.

I ended up using this approach to write my filter feature, eventually realizing I could turn it into a jQuery plugin without too much effort.

Here is a link to my actual .js file for the plugin-ized version. And here is a basic example of how to use it.

$(document).ready(function() {
$('#filterform').filterselector(
 {filters:[{value: 'state', name: 'Status', type: [[0,'Open'],[1,'Closed']]},
 {value: 'customer', name: 'Customer', type: 'text'},
 {value: 'opened', name: 'Date Opened', type: 'datepicker'},
);
});

The code above is used by the plugin to create the HTML to display the initial form, which consists of 3 buttons and a single drop down list. The dropdown list is constructed using the value and name attributes, where value is the and name is the pretty name. It's probably easiest if value corresponded to the name of a database field somewhere, for ease of writing the backend.
When an option is selected from the original dropdown, the script looks at the type in that filters array to decide what to add. The types of "text" and "datepicker" both create text fields, but the datepicker has a special event attached to it to popup the jQuery datepicker and let you pick a range of dates. The only other option right now is to set an array like "[[0,'Open'],[1,'Closed']]", each internal tuple (python terminology), consists of a value and a name. The plugin uses these to make another dropdown list using those tuples.

Right now creating your own types involves adding a new elseif to the code, but it'd be pretty easy to add a hook to write new type handling functions.

Anyway, I finally wrote about jQuery. Even if I suck at writing.

--PXA, apologizes for this mess.

Sound the alarms

2008-10-20T18:44:00.003-04:00

So I was walking to my car after work today and saw something VERY curious. On the corner of RIT's building 77 (The admissions/financial aid/co-op office building) there was what looked like a glow stick, duct taped to the side of a pillar.

Seriously? It wasn't glowing, and wasn't as green as they usually are. What I'm wondering is what paranoid idiot will call some sort of terrorism warning in on it. (Boston, anyone?)...I stood around for like 3 minutes looking at it...but I was thinking about if taking it.

Fun.

--PXA

Spreading the wealth

2008-10-19T19:14:00.002-04:00

So on my recent trip I spent a few hours (like 9) trapped in Chicago's O'Hare airport. And at one point received a phone call from a good friend of mine who I had tapped to tend bar in my absence at Steak and Whiskey night last night. The woman next to me at the bar had a son who was a bartender and was interested when I started talking about a drink recipe.

At Steak & Whiskey 2 we created a drink which was tremendously popular called "Stand back! I'm about to try science!". Science was created through use of the scientific method.
Hypothesis: Irish Cream and Amaretto curdle.
Evidence: several shots with these 2 ingredients were curdling in the glasses.
Experiment: Mix the 2 ingredients in equal portions.
Conclusion: Not only do they not curdle, they are delicious together.

It occurred to me that by telling her the story so that she could tell her son, this drink could suddenly start being made in a remote corner of the country - Far from Rochester.

Why not the world?
Now I call on the power of the internet to spread the good word of this drink.

Go forth and get blasted!

I <3 Launchy!

2008-10-02T22:18:00.003-04:00

It's no big secret that Launchy is one of the best programs ever to be written for Windows.
For those unfamiliar, Launchy is an open source keystroke launcher for Windows. Effectively a clone of the incredibly useful OS X tool Quicksilver. Launchy binds to a global shortcut key combination (defaults to alt+space) and then indexes the links in your start menu as well as others, allowing you to simply begin typing the name of the program you'd like to run and then hitting enter when you've given Launchy enough to work with. Launchy also learns what your common shortcuts are, so the first time you need to launch Firefox, you'll probably need to type almost the whole thing. However, after a few weeks you'll be able to launch Firefox by typing "f" into Launchy.

I have previously made the statement the Executor was better because it allows custom keywords to be set in the application so you can configure it to...say, run Internet Explorer when you type "turdpile" :D. However, as cool as it was, it took so freaking long to display the window I couldn't deal with it.

But this isn't the reason I bring it up today. I wanted to make note of the fact that Launchy has recently released a Linux version, bringing the power of keystrokes to the GNU desktop.

Launchy provides a .deb package for Linux distributions whose package management is based on dpkg or apt-get. They also provide a source tarball which can be used to build just about anywhere else. My preferred Linux is Gentoo. Some say this is because I like to suffer. Gentoo's package management system is based on ebuild files which are a set of instructions for retrieving source, patching, configuring, and compiling. To this end I decided to install Launchy on Gentoo legitimately, using an ebuild and an overlay.

Included in this zip file is a folder which can be unzipped into your portage overlay and installed using emerge. If you do use it, you should note:
The Launchy portion itself depends on qt4, while the calcy plugin requires Boost. Since Launchy can be built without calcy, I have set this in the ebuild as a USE flag. If you would like calcy, make sure to add 'calcy' to your USE flags before emerging launchy.

As an interesting note, with any luck you may not have to go through the trouble of creating an overlay for this as the ebuilds and associated patches have been submitted to Gentoo's bugzilla to be added to portage. (YAY!)

The bug can be found here.
Vote for me!

P.S.: My good friend, Sam, has offered me some of his bandwidth and hosting space. I will be hosting all future packages and patches on his server. Check out his stuff at www.samplusplus.com He does webdesign and also makes sweet little desktop enhancement applications like Jango Desktop.

That is all.
--PXA

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG! Part 3a: Intersections

2008-09-23T16:08:00.002-04:00

I haven't written a YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG in quite some time now, and most of this whole time I've been getting pissed at more bad driving habits...and some of the same old ones.

One topic that I've been thinking about quite a bit is intersections. As a driver and as a pedestrian. They're just another thing that it seems like the driving community can't figure out.

So part 1 of intersections is the pedestrian perspective.

I tend to cross the road 2 or 3 times a day, due to the retarded parking situation at RIT, and I HATE doing this when there are cars on the road. Not that I worry about getting hit or anything like that, I HATE the way other drivers react to pedestrian intersections.
We're all taught pedestrians have the right of way. Unfortunately this combines with the modern driving tendency of relentlessly giving up the right of way when they shouldn't be (in the name of COURTESY) and you have people in command of ~5,000 lbs vehicles wearing their break pads and wasting energy (read: GAS) to stop their cars in intersections they could have CROSSED before a pedestrian got to it.

So this whole wasteful habit comes from an overdone forced politeness that society is too fond of today. But it's actually very rude.
Because you stopped your car before I even got NEAR the intersection, because you were so scared of my pedestrian ass feeling offended at you blasting your car past me now I need to hurry up and jog past you so I don't make YOU wait.

You would get pissed off at a driver who stopped at a green light because there was another car 40 feet up the road.

I'm pissed at you stopping at a crosswalk when I'm still 10 feet from the road. Seriously. If you can make it through before I get there...or HEY if your passing would make me wait a whole 3 seconds...do it. It's easier for me to stop 260 lbs than it is for you to stop 6,400 lbs.

Learn to judge distance, if I'm 10 feet away I'm NOT in trouble. LOOK OUT for pedestrians, but stop this overly polite bullshit and drive your damn car.

This installment of YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG is brought to you by Sudafed.

--PXA

Mini-update: KDE4

2008-09-09T22:51:00.003-04:00

I just rebuilt KDE 4.1++ from SVN sources, and frankly, it makes me want to kill small puppies.
This is the list I have compiled after approximately 15 minutes of use.

I tried to use the auto-hide, KDE4 does not like this. To trigger the taskbar's visibility you need to get all the way to the screen side where the panel lives, then back off several pixels. And hope. The panel would sometimes not respond or become visible then immediately fade. But the edge of the screen itself does not respond to input at all.
For me, KDE starts without window decorators, if I try to enable them the panel gains a title bar which doesn't seem to accept input. This causes some problems when trying to open the panel settings. The panel settings are cool when they open since they attach to the panel. But when this titlebar is open you need to quickly cross it to get to the configuration panel, a lot of the time you will lose both panels.
Desktop Folder is the crappiest thing I've seen in a long time, I would LOVE to turn this off and get a real desktop. I can't.
The focus is very strange, to bring a window to front you need to click on its TITLEBAR, not anywhere in the window... I'm hoping that's a settable option but I couldn't battle the interface enough to get to the control panel so no idea here. If this is default, it's just a stupid idea.

Maybe I'll try more later, maybe I'll delete it again and wait for KDE 4.2. Anyone have any GOOD things to say about KDE4?

--PXA

Cisco Linux VPN on kernels 2.6.19+ (And x86_64)

2008-09-08T12:04:00.003-04:00

Cisco seems to have been screwing the pooch recently when it comes to releasing good installers for their VPN software. A version of the VPN client for windows released last February had a nasty glitch where it tried to iterate every group in RIT's active directory environment 4 times. And the previous version of the Linux VPN (4.8.00) unceremoniously broke with kernels higher than 2.6.19 and remained officially unpatched (There were only community written patches) for several years. Cisco recently released 4.8.02, which brings with it full compatibility with modern kernels (tested up to 2.6.25)

However, to compile on a 64 bit kernel the module included code which modifies the compiler flags (or CFLAGS) to build correctly on 64 bit kernels. The linux build system for kernel modules (called Kbuild) does not allow makefiles for modules to modify CFLAGS directly, so it accepts a parameter called EXTRA_CFLAGS. The Makefile for Cisco VPN Client for some reason uses EXTRA_CFLAGS fine normally but in the conditional for 64 bits uses CFLAGS directly, causing the build system to throw a hissy fit. So the simple fix is to change line 15 of the Makefile for Cisco VPN 4.8.02 from

CFLAGS += -mcmodel=kernel -mno-red-zone

EXTRA_CFLAGS += -mcmodel=kernel -mno-red-zone

Then there's a whole slew of other issues with 64 bit kernels which are fixed by this patch.
(patch linked from http://www.lamnk.com/blog/, and written by Steven Frost)

At least there's a positive note with that: A codebase patched for 64 bit will still compile (albeit with warnings) on 32 bit systems.

I see stuff like these issues, and I've gotta wonder...Do they TEST this stuff? At all?

--PXA

How To: Break MOLLY!

2008-09-02T13:30:00.004-04:00

I have wanted to post this for a long time now, but I had previously been afraid of retaliation by RIT's IT department since this exploit was discovered using their public facing website. However, http://it.rit.edu and http://nssa.rit.edu have both recently switched from Molly, a pseudo in-house solution written mostly by Ronald Vullo. Molly's status as a publicly available CMS from sourceforge opens the possibility that other people outside of RIT will be using it, and these people would probably appreciate being told about a security vulnerability in their software...unlike the IT department which would likely try to expel me or prevent me from graduating on schedule. (Yeah, I have great faith in these people.)

Anyway. Molly stands as a key case example for how you should NOT write PHP. It makes heavy use of BAD-THINGS ®, does not use any sort of legitimate string munging to prevent SQL injection, and has almost no concept of session security.
As for bad things, I mean things like polluting the global namespace, using .html files with PHP in them, the eval() statement, old functions like eregi_*(), and heavy use of $_REQUEST as opposed to $_GET and $_POST. The PHP manual itself states that $_REQUEST cannot be trusted, as you do not know which of Environment, Cookies, Get, Post, Server sources provided the variable you're looking at in $_REQUEST or if one has over-written what you actually want.

The most glaring exploit I've found, however, is related to the rendering engine the the database module (Called forms). Molly controlled pages will often have some string in their URL which tells the Molly engine how to render said page, example: people.maml?id=77&renderAs=output Or renderAs=edit
Yup. I can just see all the tech minded people thinking "What if I change output to input?".
When RIT used Molly, exactly what your worst fears were, is what happened. Each element on the page became HTML Input.

After that point it became trivial to use the Firebug plugin for Firefox to modify the contents of the page on the fly to make Molly bend over for you. To update any record you wanted, it was a simple matter of navigating to that page, changing the URL, using firebug to change the form action from "insert.html" to "replace.html" and adding a value to a hidden input element named something along the lines of "form[0][id]".

Since Molly doesn't understand security, the files which parse the form input and create the SQL queries are wide open for all to access, as long as you can post the right information.

One way these can be protected is through the use of an .htaccess file using the directive and some form of HTTP authentication. And that's probably the simplest way, but I don't know if there's anything resembling security on the rest of the engine that could be expanded to these files.

YOUR CODE IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD TOO!

--PXA

Tech Fix: Windows Update fails when using XP SP3.

2008-08-27T15:12:00.002-04:00

Short tech fix, intarnets:

When using Windows XP that has been upgraded to SP3, Windows update will begin to fail to install ANY updates. It will run, download, initialize, then fail. If this problem begins immediately after updating to SP3. What the root cause of the issue is, is that wups2.dll has become unregistered. This file is described as the "Windows update Client Proxy Stub 2", and I have no idea what that means. The fix is to stop the WU agent, re-register the DLLs involved in Windows update and restart the agent.

As an administrator, run these commands from the command line:

net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wups2.dll (this is the real culprit)
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll
net start wuauserv

Then Windows update should actually finish some updates.

Another issue seen with installations from a slipstreamed XP SP3 CD is that the installer will fail to update the web client itself, claiming certain DLLs to be in use. This is rare but it does happen.

The solution here is to simply delete the files it complains about, this is usually wuapi.dll, wups.dll, and wups2.dll...found in C:\Windows\system32\.

This message is brought to you by RIT ITS CSS Desktop Support Operations. ;)

Side note: more updates coming soon, just getting busy working and doing battle with some new computer hardware.
--PXA

Spare me the humanity

2008-08-19T20:37:00.003-04:00

Ok, what? This is going to be pretty rant-ish, I apologize.
The internet today is very much about the idea of human interaction. Even in forms that are not immediately interactive. The rise of bandwidth and sites like youtube and metacafe have brought about the concept of "Vlogs", or "Video Web Logs". Before that people would record radio shows as MP3 files and attach them to RSS feeds.

All in the name of attaching a more human facade to the cold dark cloud that is the internet.

I say...STOP! I beg you!

Not that I'm saying your goals are illegitimate, far from it, I like the idea of being able to put words in one end of the internet and have some other person on the other end give me their words back...I just hate content being offered in this format. Maybe I'm just a fading member of the old guard, but I grew up on the text-based internet, and I don't see adding new venues for delivering content as replacements for text.
Even today I read "blogs", read comics, chat with people on IRC, AIM, GoogleTalk. I enjoy the value the internet has for me as a social tool, but I like those tools to be under MY control.
If I need a how-to for some programming concept, or a brief about some security exploit or idea...I want to be able to read it. Or read half of it and come back to it, or read it while watching an episode of Star Trek or listening to music. I hate the idea of having to pause whatever I happen to be doing in the background just so I can hear what you have to say. At that point you've gone beyond providing content, you've entered the realm of interrupting MY computing activities and are telling me what I can't be doing on MY computer!
And this goes double for the websites of products like cell phones or video cards, or whatever. I want to look up some news or specifications for a product, and BAM some madly loud drum'n'bass beat comes blasting at me. I spend about 1 second looking for the "STOP THIS INFERNAL NOISE" button, and then just close the tab. If you're going to dictate what I can use my speakers for, maybe I don't need to know if I can buy your phone, or your car, or your TV. These sites have even less excuse. They're doing it for flash and marketing. At least people posting their security discussions as podcast are just trying to put a human voice behind an academic discussion, and one presented in a cold and factual way.

I think we need to get used to the idea that words alone, without a face, are just as capable of representing the humanity of the person who wrote them as an audio or video recording. But then again, I grew up here.

When lolz turn to sadness

2008-08-18T22:29:00.005-04:00

My current employment is as the Co-op student for ITS Desktop Support, the only major project so far has been the rebuilding of the department's internal website in a more interactive, database driven format. The new version of the site is being hosted in RIT's new totally redone better-than-the-old-environment-ever-could-have-been web applications environment. Despite the rather cramped space limitation, and unnecessary staging server, it's been less painful than it could be. Until I got around to porting a few of our backend processes that need to run on a regular basis. This involves command line PHP and UNIX Cron. Which would normally be well and good but this environment is really more than meets the eye.
In short, developing in it is like trying to get from point A to point B in this room:
It took a day to get database connections, because for some reason scripts run by Cron run on a DIFFERENT HOST than scripts run manually from the command line or scripts run by the browser. WHAT?!!!

These people have obviously never heard of the principle of Keep It Simple, Stupid. So when any of these points of failure go down, the whole system dies. I found this out over the weekend. Because it went down.
Every 5 minutes my cron task ran, and every 5 minutes it failed. Which meant that every 5 minutes, I got an e-mail saying that there was a problem running the script, and then another e-mail saying the script failed. I was greeted Saturday morning by well over 100 e-mails.

Remember, don't laugh at the convolution of your development environment, for it might come back and pee in your shoes.

:(

--PXA

I done good.

2008-08-14T22:43:00.004-04:00

I found this during random Googling:

Gotta say, that's pretty sweet. I came in 2nd fiddle on a search to Apple, and beat out one of my favorite webcomics on a Google search.

Pretty funny considering all the comics about random Google searches XKCD does.

Edit: At the time I did this, these were the top 3 search results for that term. Just want to be clear.

--PXA

Setting up for failure, redux.

2008-08-14T22:00:00.000-04:00

I realized the first time I tried to write about my opinion on this matter, I pretty much failed to produce anything resembling coherent thought. I'm going to try to do better this time.

I said IT is failing us as programmers. This statement derives from the original impression I got of IT when I first heard of the program, and by extension the reason I chose it. It seems a lot of people think that IT is effectively a "Tech Support" training program, and therefore requires its students to learn basic hardware, software, db, web, etc. What I always felt IT was, and probably why I have pushed the bounds of the program, is a program that aims to create technological Jacks-of-all-trades. Someone with passable skills in just about anything, but not necessarily the depth of study you'd get in a more focused major.

IT, however, seems to have no idea what it's doing. IT is incredibly unfocused, going to rather ridiculous depths in things that have never seemed important but barely skimming over things that could be very useful. Fundamentals of Data Communications, is a course whose entire contents could probably be tacked onto the beginning of Networking Fundamentals, if the sections on manually performing QAM encoding, Hamming Code error correction, Manchester signal encoding, etc were removed... Seriously? Why would we, as IT majors, need to know the configurations of the electrical signal we'd need to program a NIC?
Then examine the 3 course sequence in Java programming. This sprawling mess of an introduction to object oriented programming somehow covers basic OO, static v. instance variables, TCP/IP networking, Filesystem I/O, Basic GUI, Swing, Event driven Java, and we even had some basic game AI in a 3D environment...but no mention of what a singleton was, or a decorator, or a factory. These are BASIC design patterns that anyone should understand to work on software beyond simple scripts and applications. Maybe I'm wrong in my idea that people graduating from IT will gain employment in a development position...and it's very possible that if a student takes concentrations outside development areas they won't. But what about those of us that do? I'm not sure what the courses in the IT Application Development cover, but what about web programming? The Programming For The Web class is a JOKE, and from what I've heard Web Client-side programming (Javascript and SVG) isn't much better. Isn't web programming just as much real programming as system applications in Java or C++? Web programming requires just as much knowledge and skill as system programming. If you prick us, do we not bleed? Assuming they're teaching this stuff to THOSE concentrations...why should an application developer need to know how to write a database abstraction layer, but not a web application developer? C'mon, Guys....not cool!

There's a case to be made for "If you want to be a programmer, why not major in SE?", but SE doesn't train WEB Programmers. IT is where you go for that. I just don't think they're teaching us what we need to know.

I think I did a little better this time.

--PXA

Full Review: The Samsung M800 (Samsung Instinct)

2008-08-14T19:21:00.003-04:00

Unfortunately, the Samsung Instinct, the most heavily advertised phone ever made by Samsung, has been measured and found wanting.
I've had the phone for about 2 weeks now and I am preparing to return it, and Sprint's plan, to the store tomorrow. That means it's review time. I'll try to keep this as pragmatic as my Voyager review but it's difficult to discuss a phone like this without mentioning its potential.

Things about the PHONE that suck:

The battery cover is difficult to get off until you get the hang of it. Also the plastic flap that covers the charging port (at least on the phone I had) is hard as hell to remove. Every time I have done this I've needed to use something else like a knife or a paperclip to open the flap.
The battery life is pretty awful, but the unit ships with a 2nd battery that's easy to change once you figure out how to get the back cover off. The poor performance of mine may have been to the poor Sprint coverage where I live, as I was constantly moving into roaming areas.

Things about the PHONE that are sweet:

A full size stereo headphone jack. Not a mini-jack. It's good to see a media phone with physical media attributes.
The touchscreen is GREAT
The speaker is incredibly loud.
The camera takes good pictures.
The speed is great, WHEN you have signal.

Things about the PLATFORM that are sweet:

The navigation is great, with the scrolls and the flicks, and the taps. They clearly took a lot of cues from the iPhone, and came up with a really fun interface.
The keyboard is amazing. It's incredibly versatile. Everywhere you could type you could use a full landscape QWERTY keyboard, a portrait quasi-dvorak keyboard, or handwriting recognition. (although I really couldn't get it to recognize more than 3 letters at a time. You've gotta write big)
Visual Voicemail is well done
Messaging is really cool, texts and pictures are threaded by contact.
The photo gallery has a lot of TouchFLO style things, makes it real fun to use it.
Pretty much all the updates are Over The Air.
The music player actually keeps playing if you leave the application, you can listen to tunes AND check your email! WOAH!
The email application is easy to setup, works with almost everything (I had mine with 2 OWA accounts, a gmail, and an IMAP). Although word around the forums is it has some problems with POP.
The navigation app is a gem. It is clear, rather accurate, and tied nicely into the movies and live search functions. Location based features on the phone really get tied together here. The thing even checks the traffic for you. It's like having a real GPS.
"Movies Near Me", Such a cool button. It locates you with GPS then finds theaters near you and displays movies, from there you can view showtimes, get driving directions, call the theaters.
Live Search, open the app, push a button, tell the phone what you want. Excellent voice driven functions.
Weather application is one of the best things I found. I checked it every morning, got morning/afternoon/evening forecasts and Doppler radar images.

Things about the PLATFORM that suck:

This phone is too new. Samsung and Sprint rushed it out to compete with the iPhone, and it shows. In the 2 weeks I've had the phone every app has been updated about 2-3 times. Some of these updates broke features that used to work. And Sprint has not done well with communicating timelines for the updates or WHAT they actually changed to their users. Not EVERYTHING about Apple is worth copying.
The browser is slow and kludgy. Opera Mobile won't work (well).
The platform uses a custom set of widgets which doesn't play well with standard J2ME, so most applications that COULD work don't. Mostly because they can't access the keyboard.
The built in calendar can only store 9 appointments at any given time.
The email application will sometimes inform you that you have new messages, when you don't. Or grossly miscount the number of messages you do have. I once had it tell me I had 63 emails when I had 7.
The phone cannot sync with Exchange/OWA for calendar, or use your Google Calendar outside of the browser. This is likely due to the builtin calendar being such a POS. The company that built the email application has software capable of doing this...Sprint/Samsung either decided they didn't want it on the phone or that it would've taken too long to develop the feature.
The phone has no instant messaging application. None of the free ones will work due to lack of keyboard, and the only online ones you have access to are static and awful because of the lack of a good browser.
The music application, while being really good and even having some features my iPod lacks, has an unfortunate habit of rescanning my entire memory card each time I start it. This takes almost a minute for 4-5 gigs of music, and the phone can take MicroSD cards up to 8 gigs.
Sprint's network is pretty bad. I'm roaming in most of the building where I work, and everywhere in my house. Including a decent amount of the area OUTSIDE my house.

That being said I still think the phone is incredibly cool, and for the most part really don't mind the idea of owning it. They need to fix the calendar, add OWA sync with it, either add an IM application or fix the keyboard problem, and get some version of Opera Mobile supported fully. If they can pull this off they can win, but people are rapidly losing faith in the phone...time is running out. If they work these kinks out they have a major edge over Verizon or iPhone, since they have a free SDK and you don't need to pay licensing just to get your apps on the phone. Without a certificate you can't access "restricted" APIs, but a cert with Sprint is much less expensive than the Qualcomm version you need to do BREW development. Also the whole thing is Java (J2ME), which makes it simpler to write applications for than C++ or Objective C. (in my opinion anyway).

I'll be paying close attention to this one and might try it again after I graduate, if I move somewhere with better Sprint coverage.

--PXA

Movie time: The Mummy - The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

2008-08-12T16:37:00.003-04:00

I find reviewing this rather appropriate given the other movie review on the site so far. That being said this will not contain major spoilers, but will however hit on major characters and their interactions. From a broad perspective.

This is the Indiana Jones 2, of the 'The Mummy' franchise. The characters are all right, and the danger, adventure, and safety of the world are not in question. Yes Indiana Jones 2 had nothing to do with the safety of the world, but bear with me.

Think about this: Indiana Jones 1 and 3 (Raiders of the Lost Ark and Last Crusade, respectively) are commonly considered the best 2 of the series. 1 set the template and 3 actually followed. 2 and 4 lag behind, and I think the reason is this... They are missing the Indiana Jones standard plot version 1.7. Movies 1 and 3 can be boiled down to Indiana Jones being witty and incredibly lucky while running from Nazis chasing after an object of Bible Myth that if in the wrong hands could end life as we know it. The 2nd movie found Indiana being clumsy almost, bumbling in misadventure running from cultists chasing obscure Indian stones. To save...a village. Yes he also did some running from a crazy Chinese businessman. And #4 found Indiana being OLD, but almost superhuman sometimes...running from RUSSIANS, chasing ALIENS. What just happened? Am I in the wrong movie franchise?
But the point remains that the fundamental pillars upon which Indiana Jones is built are: Archeology, Bible Myth, Nazis, Indy Rocks.
In that same vein the fundamental pillars of The Mummy can be seen as: Bad library research, Mummies, Mad Arabs, Rachel Weisz is clumsy yet endearing, and a hell of a lot of sand.

The Mummy 3 was actually pretty entertaining. However it seemed to focus more on the O'Connell's son, Alex, than Rick and Evelyn. Which goes against template. It's the parents trying to follow their son on HIS OWN adventure and generally being overshadowed. It doesn't help the case that the writing of, Evy especially, is just strained and BAD. Yes, they have retired, their life is boring...we GET IT ALREADY.

There isn't any research, any books, in this one. All the information they need is given to them by a magical old immortal Chinese lady.

The "mummy" here isn't even a real mummy! It's Jet Li, cursed to live out his life as Terracotta. He doesn't even get to fight for 90% of the movie. There's ONE GOOD fight scene and it's only like 10 minutes long right at the end of the film.

There's no sand, and no Rachel Weisz! Evy's been replaced! NOOOOO!

The tense dialog that worked so well between Rick and Evy, doesn't quite work when they try it between Alex and his squeeze. Later in the film there are some genuinely nice moments with these 2 characters. But they had to try really hard to get there.

It's important to note I don't think this is a BAD movie. I even think it's better than Indiana Jones 2. There's no Short Round, the fate of the WORLD is still at stake. It's even got some bad ass kung fu and a pretty cool undead army. All pluses in my book.

If you can get to the flick for under $5, it's worth it. Otherwise the lack of Egypt...and more specifically Egyptology make it a little disappointing if you paid more. The Mummy is supposed to involve a cute girl in glasses reading out of a huge ancient book trying to figure out who Brendan Fraser needs to punch to save the world. This one just doesn't deliver that.

--PXA

How-to: Full read/write access to ReiserFS in Windows Server 2008 x64

2008-07-29T19:15:00.004-04:00

Yes, I am fully aware of the ReiserFS IFSD project. However due to the somewhat draconic driver signing requirements of 64 Bit Server 2008 this driver doesn't load. I have heard you can convince it to in 32 bit versions of the OS. There's something about the image hash integrity that prevents it from working. I may try to recompile this in 64 bit but that is a project for another week.

However, it's still possible to gain access to your ReiserFS (and any other linux filesystem you'd like) using free tools in Windows Server 2008. All it takes is some time and a rather twisted hack.

You will need:

An installation image file (ISO) for your favorite linux distribution. If you don't know linux that well I'd recommend Ubuntu or Fedora. I used Gentoo, since I knew I could make it a very small installation.
VMware Server 1.0.6. VMware Server is free, you need to fill out a web form to request pretty much any number of license keys.

At the end of this article I've provided the kernel configuration file I used for Gentoo as well as my smb.conf.

Start VMware Server, before you install you should reboot. Press F8 before windows loads, and make sure to select "Disable driver signature enforcement". Before some recent patches, this could be set permenantly using bcdedit, but no longer works. It is recommended you suspend your windows installation instead of shutting down to avoid having to do this every time you boot your system.

Connect to localhost and create a new VM, use typical settings. Selecting the type of OS you'll be running is only really useful for VMware tools, which I won't discuss here. Feel free to comment on this. Call it whatever you want.
At the networking screen, for security's sake it's advisable to use NAT or host-only networking. I used NAT.
The next screen is for the size of the virtual hard disk. This doesn't really matter, and should only be as large as absolutely needed for your linux of choice, but really shouldn't need to be much bigger than 6 or 7 gigabytes. My Gentoo installation is about 1.3GB, and could probably be made smaller.
For the CD-ROM drive, if you've burned your installation disk use the physical drive, otherwise select the image file you downloaded earlier.
Finish setting up your VM and start it. With no data on the virtual hard drive, it will boot off the CD. For the sake of the length and scope of this article, I will assume you know how to setup the distribution you selected. When you get to a point where you can, make sure to install the most recent version of Samba you can.

Once your linux VM is installed and working, shut it down.
In the VMware console select the VM and click "Edit virtual machine settings", then click "Add" to add hardware. The 3rd option when adding a drive should be to directly access a physical hard disk, for experts only. Click 'ok'.
The names VMware gives the disks in your system are probably not the most descriptive things in the world, but you select to use Invidual Partitions and click next you can see the partitions and their types that are available on the selected disk. Select your Linux partition(s).
Start your VM again.
Once you are up and running, fdisk -l or the system browser should recognize the new disk.

Open the file /etc/fstab as root in your editor of choice and add a line similar to this:
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/reiser reiserfs user,defaults 0 0
Where /dev/sdb1 is the name of the partion as shown in fdisk -l. Also make sure the directory /mnt/reiser actually exists. If it doesn't, create it (you will likely need to be root).

Now mount /mnt/reiser.

The final piece of this convoluted puzzle is samba, the smb.conf file.

[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
netbios name = vmlinux
server string = Samba Server %v
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
dns proxy = no
[reiser]
path = /mnt/reiser/
public = yes
writable = yes
browsable = yes
guest ok = yes

Make sure samba is configured to run on startup...in Gentoo this is
rc-update add samba default
in Ubuntu or Fedora you can configure this in the GUI. If your desktop is GNOME, this will be in System>Administration>Services

Either reboot here or start the service /etc/init.d/samba start

Now back in Windows, open the explorer and go to Network. If you are using Aero you will need to hit the 'Alt' key to see the 'Tools' menu. Select 'Tools' and 'Map Network Drive'.
Select whatever drive letter you want, and as a folder use:
\\vmlinux\reiser
Click 'Finish' and you are done! Yay! You can now open your linux partition under windows and have full access to it.

If you left 'Reconnect on logon' checked when you mapped the drive you should edit the virtual machine. In the options tab of the edit dialog, select the Startup/Shutdown setting and from the dropdown box under "On host startup:" select "Power on virtual machine"

Click here for the Gentoo kernel .config file

As a note I wrote this while incredibly hungry, so it might but hard to understand some things. I might be rewriting sections of it to word things better later...if it looks like anyone's coming here and reading this.

--PXA

How-to: VLC/Windows Full Screen Video trick.

2008-07-26T21:40:00.005-04:00

Once upon a time, nVidia cared about us. The nVidia control panel was hard to use but pretty slick and it had one feature that I thought was absolutely great: There was a video overlay feature that would automatically clone any video output from either screen in full screen on a screen you specify.
In Linux I can simulate this by selecting a screen for full screen output, and VLC will comply without hesitation every time I go to fullscreen mode and every time I add a file to the playlist...it opens in full screen ON THAT SCREEN no matter where the VLC window is.

Windows has befuddled my every attempt to do this. In Direct X output mode video uses the wrong aspect ratio in XP and forces Vista to change from Aero to Vista Basic, and displays on a portion of the video. (Your milage may vary). And OpenGL requires me to move 51% of my window to the other screen, but then if the next video on the playlist starts and I have moved the window to a different screen, it full screens there. Usually on top of my work.

After some experimenation using VLC 0.8.6i on Windows Server 2008 I have managed to get an affect that is close to my Linux experience.

The final result is this: A VLC player with controls, but no video in the main window and video automatically playing in full screen, on the same screen each time (even after the next video in the playlist.)

First enable full screen off the bat so you don't need to force the video into full screen when you start VLC the first time:

1. Go into the settings menu and open preferences, check the box that says "Advanced Options"
2. Select the "Video" section from the box on the left.
3. Check the box that says "Fullscreen Video Output"
4. Scroll the main settings area down to place where you can see "Window Properties"

"Video Height" and "Video Width" should be set to the height and width of the screen you will be viewing your full screen video on. (In this iteration of the technique this is not strictly necessary, but is a leftover from experimentation with the "clone" video filter which would allow video in both the main window and the extra screen)

In my case this is 1024x768 screen.

5. The next 2 options will be Video X and Video Y. In my case, my 1024x768 screen is to the right of a 1280x1024 screen. So I set Video Y to 0, so it's at the top of the screen, and Video X to 1280 so that it will be in the left corner.

6. Further down the window will be another box for "Window decorations". Uncheck it.

7. The very last option on the left should be "Interface", expand this, and then expand "Main interface". Select "wxWidgets" from this list. Unceck the options for "Embed video in interface" and "Size to video"

While this is incredibly involved and rather inflexible, it does get me video the way I'd generally watch it and could hopefully be of use to someone else.

As a note I already tried getting Windows Media Play, MPlayer, and Media Play Classic to behave the way I want them to (like VLC/Linux) but had no luck. MPlayer wouldn't even play ANY video on my other screen.

--PXA

Full Review: The LG VX10000 (LG Voyager)

2008-07-20T00:17:00.002-04:00

I have had the LG Voyager for just shy of a full week now and I've uncovered several things I haven't seen in any review so far.

Let's get this out of the way.
Things about the PHONE that suck:

The phone is soap bar shaped, there are buttons on only one side. Unfortunately if you're not looking for these it's too easy to hold the phone upside down. In 6 days I have done this twice. Despite the slickness of the phone, it's hard to look cool when you're jabbing the speaker.
The speaker. The speaker is pretty good for regular calls, when speakerphone is off. The speakerphone speakers (Yes, two...AMAZING) are on the inside of the flip. The first time I turned speakerphone on I didn't even realize it, the volume was still so muted. Honestly, who opens their phone to talk unless it's SUPPOSED to be a flip-phone?
They only have a mini-jack, not a 3.5mm
I wish they put a slide cover over the camera lens. Not really a big deal but I keep putting my fingers on it when I hold the phone when it's flipped open.

Things about the PHONE that are sweet:

I gotta say I really like the unique interface. The 2 screens, the flip, the full QWERTY keyboard.
Slide out antenna for mobile TV to improve reception. It makes it look like one of those old battery powered handheld TVs.
The touch screen is very good, so is the keyboard. I can type pretty quickly on both. The locations of the spacebars on the full keyboard is a little eh, and differs from the on-screen one...you have to learn 2 different layouts to use 1 device. But the keyboard is still sweet.

Things about the PLATFORM that are sweet:

Relatively responsive.
Custom shortcuts.
VZ navigator has gotten quite a bit better since I last used it 2 years ago when I got my RAZR.
The keyboard does sometimes self-correct if you shuffle across a key very fast or put in 2 letters very fast that make absolutely NO sense. Or at least it seems that way. The haptic and audibly feedback is good stuff, too.
The mobile IM app is nice, in the fact that it supports both screens.
The contact list is layed out really well.

Things about the PLATFORM that suck:

The mobile email app sucks out loud. It only runs in the inside screen, it's slow. Scrolling sucks. It won't pull URLs from messages, but sometimes finds phone numbers hidden in them.
The mobile IM app is ugly as sin and hard to use from the touch screen. If you open the phone to type a message using the real keyboard (since it's a little easier, and you can see IMs other people send when you're typing.) then close it again, the application quits. Also it has a "SENDING" screen when you send an IM...not very instant, is it? This app also seems to have a HELL of a time connecting sometimes.
There is an application, RemoSync, which costs $10 to install and allows syncronization with Microsoft Exchange. This is worse than staring at a horse's ass for a protracted period of time. It syncs calendar, but to its OWN application not the phone's main calendar. It does this BADLY. When I tested it missed half my recurring appointments and a few standard ones. It also only pulls the last week of email. Also for some reason I had to turn the application's SSL off to work with RIT's servers. This was odd since we use SSL on our servers for MAPI and OWA.
The phone can't multitask at all. If you close the phone while something's running, the app will close. You can't do ANYTHING while the music player is running. There is no rhyme or reason as to which apps require you to open them. Most of them are obviously hacked up ports from the standard platform to the dual-screen/touch screen paradigm.
The SMS app seems to be the only application on the phone that doesn't allow the wide touchscreen keyboard to be used. You're stuck texting your friends on your pimpass touchscreen phone using a touchscreen keyboard that's faking your old 10 button phone keyboard.
The Obligo browser is a piece of junk. Don't even pretend.

I've enjoyed having the phone, but I intend to take it back in another week. It definitely isn't worth the $410 I paid to get it without a contract.

What I would love to see is a phone with the unique physical attributes running something like LiMo or Android. An open platform that the development community can make stop sucking. I daresay that the extra screen would make a linux phone on the Voyager sweeter than the Instinct or the iPhone.

As a closing, I'm sure I missed something here someone wants to know about the phone...I am always available on AIM or by e-mail for questioning regarding anything I write about.

--- PXA

Dark Knight For Dummies.

2008-07-19T21:05:00.002-04:00

I recently had the pleasure of seeing The Dark Knight in IMAX. It was an absolutely amazing film, tinged slightly by the passing of Heath Ledger. Although the movie is really a fitting memorial.

During the movie I was surprised initially at the rambling feel of the plot, and the ridiculous feel of the dialog in some parts. I read a review that described it as "operatic", that's a very good way of putting it. Phrases like "Gotham's White Night", "He's not the hero we deserved, he's the hero we got.", "We'll hunt him, because we have to...because he can take it.", ...the word "MUST", and such are peppered in.

And it seemed like every 20 minutes the movie was reaching an epic climax, which would lead directly into the next building sequence. Not that I don't think movies should do that, I thought it was excellent, but it just didn't fit with the very clear and straight plots modern films and the previous Batman films have had.

It took me until almost the last frame of the film to realize what I was missing. And I'm disappointed it took me so long. I realized all these make more sense when taken in a different context. If you think about it not as a movie, but as a comic book series, it all makes more sense. The dialog while somewhat overstated and strange when spoken is now perfectly at home in a speech bubble. The repeating epic points are like end of each book, keeping you there so you buy the next installment.

Recent films have been following in this trend, emulating graphic novels. Most are far more blatant, being based on the novels, being cell shaded (Or using a very obvious visual style). The Dark Night is very much like these in scope and attitude, but opting for a more striking true-to-life visual look.

Viewed with this in mind the whole thing really does feel more ingenious, a more epic vision. It's a little strange to think that a MOTION PICTURE is made better by imagining it as a photo-realistic, live-action comic book...but it works.

I do not own an iPhone.

2008-07-14T21:39:00.003-04:00

I own a MOTORAZR.
My poor phone has had its balls unceremoniously removed by my wireless carrier. Yes, I admit, I have Verizon.

My Verizon contract is expiring in November. Since the standard cell contract is 2 years, I have been shopping for not only a new phone but a new carrier. I'm going to be graduating with this phone, and this carrier. Verizon got me when I was graduating high school. They were appealing on plan cost, "in" calling. I didn't care much about phones or features. Times have changed. I'm addicted to the internet, I need e-mail at my beck and call, IM available at all times...just in case. My life is ruled by Microsoft exchange. I'd really like to have that calendar at easy access.
My iPod is beginning to die out. Bad battery, freezing hard drive...it's out of warranty. Why buy two devices when I can get one? Unfortunately the only "one" device is the iPhone. There are a few that come close in cool. And given the type of people who've jumped on the iPhone...I've really been trying to avoid buying an iPhone.

So I've been looking for my transition phone on the eve of the release of Apple's next massive lifestyle addon. And HOO-Boy, it's hard to avoid.

However there are several other phones available on the market (Closed source/proprietary OS phones only...I have yet to see hide or hair of a LiMo or Android phone) with compelling feature sets.

This excludes the Windows Mobile and Blackberry phones. I don't know why, but it always feels like these phones are trying to violate my corneas in incredibly inappropriate ways. SO! I ignore them.

The LG Dare: 4 Cool points.
The LG Dare is an all touch screen feature phone. I think it is of note because it is the only phone I have seen that has a concept resembling a desktop, and not just a collection of shortcuts. The "dumped" look of the icons on the "desktop" is very interesting, and very indicative of the amount of eyecandy the phone presents. The phone uses the same mobile e-mail app as most Verizon phones. It also has its balls removed, like most Verizon phones. The calendar is passable by itself, but it doesn't sync to...anything. The e-mail app on the touch phone doesn't provide the most compelling interface, since it's just an update of the old app to use touch interaction, but it serves well. The screen is very bright and clear and the touch is very responsive. But in the pure-touch contest it can't compete with the Samsung Instinct or the iPhone, it just doesn't have the features those do.

The LG Voyager: 6 Cool points.
The Voyager is a dual screen phone carried by Verizon. There is a touch screen on the front allowing access to the phone, contacts list, some other features. It does a very good job here, the phone is very easy to use. To use any of the advanced features like the browser or the text client, you simply FLIP the phone open to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard and another GREAT screen. This one's not touch though. Aside from the interface differences (The keyboard, the dual screen) this one doesn't have anything on the Dare. The Dare I used at the store actually had the e-mail app installed, the Voyager didn't. The phone actually loses there. The Voyager does have several cool points on the Dare, simply by virtue of its unique interface.

The Samsung Instinct: 8 Cool points.
This phone is seriously one of the coolest things I've ever held in my hands, next to girl-parts. This is another all touch screen phone. It has a very large screen, a bit smaller than the iPhone's, but larger than pretty much everything else on the market. Even those eye-porking blackberries. The colors are smooth, the screen is great...even for video. The browser is marginally better than the Verizon standard browser. The phone also has a pretty-ok music player and a standard headphone jack. Which serves my purposes well. I love the interface on the phone, the menus are very intuitive, the keyboard is surprisingly good, the phone app is slick. The haptic feedback is done quite well, it's present but not obnoxious. Sometimes it lags a little bit when switching layouts or moving between applications but it's still better than anything Apple's done. The e-mail application on the phone configures almost effortlessly to work with Outlook Web Access, but doesn't sync to the calendar. The lack of calendar sync is really the ONLY thing I don't like about the phone. Since they're scraping OWA already it'd be pretty inconsequential for Samsung/Sprint to hook this into the calendar, much like the Evolution Linux e-mail client. Unfortunately the platform the phone runs on is closed so no one can write a bridge...Samsung will have to do it, and they really ought to do this, if they want to compete with the iPhone. And WOAH they want to compete with the iPhone.

Apple iPhone 3G: 9 Cool points.
This phone has been written and talked about ad-nauseum. I'll keep it short. Think of the Samsung Instinct: now make it a little wider, taper the edges, brighten the interface, add calendar synchronization to Exchange, add some more applications on the phone by default, remove the haptic feedback, double the maximum storage capacity (but remove the expandability), and add an SDK. The iPhone uses a heat sensitive screen for its touch, not pressure like most of the touch phones on the market, slight difference but given the SDK people could actually use this. Also add that it's an Apple product, and everything that comes along with that.
...Turtlenecks, berets, inability to upgrade computer hardware, a strange desire to round all the corners on websites, goatees...

So there is the not quite objective review of feature phones. Despite my very strong desire to NOT like the iPhone, it still wins on cool...but only barely beyond the Instinct. Unfortunately Apple's always going to have the upper hand since the phone runs OS X under the hood and that allows for the robust SDK. A proprietary platform like the Instinct's will never compete with this. Samsung's only move would be to adopt LiMo or Android. (*wink*) I have reserved the 10/10 cool point rating for a phone like the Samsung Instinct running an open platform. An unencumbered phone WILL beat the iPhone...because OSS developers will make it so.

--PXA

Exchange Form-Based Authentication and WebDAV in Python.

2008-07-09T00:01:00.006-04:00

Since I've become employed fulltime at RIT, in addition to my part-time work with Synacor and trying to maintain something resembling a sleep schedule...I haven't had too much time to write. I did complete a successful test of the gcal sync software and then realized that IMAP won't allow me to place appointments into it making 2 way syncing impossible. So I have been forced to try to re-architect the script using Exchange's poorly documented WebDAV API.
WebDAV is supposed to be an XML web service that goes over HTTP/HTTPS. Unfortunately Microsoft can't do anything right. DAV uses several non-standard HTTP methods, like SEARCH, PROPFIND, PROPSET...instead of the standard HTTP GET, POST, and PUT methods.
Microsoft Exchange also has a bit of a quirk called Form-Based Authentication. When you enable Outlook Web Access, this is the only way to authenticate. Without OWA you can use Basic HTTP Authentication which is pretty easy. With OWA you have to do some interesting maneuvering to get your query in. From a theoretical point of view, what you need to do is simple:

Fake an HTTP Post to the owaauth.dll file.
Receive the response headers and pull the cookies, store them.
Send these cookies back to Exchange while making your "special" DAV SEARCH request.

However, implementing this gets a little annoying. I've been using Python...which has a pretty slick high-level network protocol API, called urllib2. Which can automatically create HTTPS connections, parse HTTP response headers and grep out the cookies, create requests and urlencode GET and POST strings, all sorts of happy things. Unfortunately this library only deals with GET and POST, unless you write your own "handlers". I wasn't sure how to go about extending the library so I chose to go the dirty hack route and implement the functionality I needed at the low level.


 import httplib,urllib2,cookielib,sys,getpass,Cookie

 exchserv = raw_input('Exchange server: ')
 loginex = raw_input('Enter Exchange Username: ')
 passex  = getpass.getpass('Enter Exchange Password: ')
 cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
 opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPSHandler(),urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
 urllib2.install_opener(opener)
 owabody = 'destination=https://'+exchserv+'/exchange/'+loginex+'/&username=main\'+loginex+'&password='+passex
 owaheaders = {'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
               'Connection': 'Keep-Alive',
               'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)',
               'Host': exchserv}
 owareq = urllib2.Request('https://'+exchserv+'/exchweb/bin/auth/owaauth.dll',owabody,owaheaders)
 owa = urllib2.urlopen(owareq)


 conn = httplib.HTTPSConnection(exchserv)
 conn.set_debuglevel(99999999999)

 #there is nothing I like better than manually constructing HTTP headers.
 conn.putrequest('SEARCH','/exchange/'+loginex+'/')
 conn.putheader('Content-Type','text/xml')
 conn.putheader('Content-Length', len(davapptquery))

 stringofdeath = ''
 for i in cj:
     stringofdeath += i.name+'='+i.value+';'
 conn.putheader('Cookie', stringofdeath)

 conn.endheaders()
 conn.send(davapptquery)

 resp = conn.getresponse()

Where davapptquery is an unholy string containing a SQL query wrapped in some XML.
I pretty much suck at python, but this does work. Someone better could probably more easily create a handler for exchange's DAV insanity.

Complaints and Grievances

2008-06-23T20:50:00.004-04:00

George Carlin died today, of what I understand to be a heart attack.
That sucks.

I started listening to Carlin around the time I was a Freshman in High School, and for better or worse, he shaped a lot of my outlook back then. And still does, but really it's hard work being that angry all the time so I had to calm down. He might have major psychotic fucking hatreds, but for me it's OK to have pet peeves.
My first idea for mourning the man was to go to the bar with my friends and raise a pint of Arrogant Bastard Ale, for a real Arrogant Bastard...unfortunately due to the New York State Driver's Assessment fee I'm dead broke. SO for now I'll just recount some of my favorite Brain Droppings. And go to the bar after I get paid on Friday.

"I don't have Pet Peeves, I have major, psychotic fucking hatreds"
"Just last week I either ran over a sheep, or a man standing in the road wearing a sheepskin suit."
"If you're looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else? That's not self-help...THAT'S HELP! There's no such thing as self-help...if you did it yourself, you didn't need help! Try to pay attention to the language we've all agreed on."
"And one more item about children: this superstitious nonsense of blaming tobacco companies for kids who smoke. Listen! Kids don't smoke because a camel in sunglasses tells them to. They smoke for the same reasons adults do, because it's an enjoyable activity that relieves anxiety and depression."
"Either get a hat or don't. No one's interested in the top of your head. Go back to the store and tell them to give you the rest of the hat. They've cheated you."
"And then we're gonna colonize deep space. With our microwave hot-dogs, and plastic vomit, fake dog shit and cinnamon dental floss, and lemon scented toilet paper, and sneakers with lights in the heels. And all these other impressive things we've done down here."
"The truth is obedience and respect should not be automatic. They should be earned, and based on the parent's performance. Some parents deserve respect. Most of them don't. Period."
"You ever notice anyone driving slower than you is an idiot and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?"
"I have a strong immune system and it gets a lot of practice. My immune system is equipped with the biological equivalent of fully automatic military assault rifles, with night vision and laser scopes. And we have recently acquired phosphorous grenades, cluster bombs, and anti-personnel fragmentation mines. So when my white blood cells are on patrol reconnoitering my blood stream seeking out strangers and other undesirables, if they see any...ANY suspicious looking germs of any kind they DON'T FUCK AROUND. They whip out the weapons, wax the motherfucker and deposit the unlucky fellow directly into my colon. No nonsense. There's no Miranda warning, none of this 3 strikes and you're out shit. First offense: BAM! into the colon you go!"

For some reason I can't go a day without thinking of these 2:

"You know when I wash my hands? When I shit on them!"
"You just need to wash the 4 key areas: Armpits, asshole, crotch, and teeth!"

And of course:
"Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits."

Listening to Carlin I noticed how easy it could be to use language to change something that made me mad into something I could laugh at.

Thanks, George.

-- PXA

Indiana Jones and the raiders of the temple of the lost crystal ark

2008-05-26T14:44:00.007-04:00

I have seen Indiana Jones 4. My impression are thus:
Harrison Ford is old, but surprisingly good.
Harrison Ford is old, so his pants are suddenly incredibly baggy.
Mutt is a STUPID name for a character. I don't care if he's a greaser.
It's hard to write a greaser without making them fix their hair every 30 seconds. It's creepy, stop.
Lucasfilm has lied to me. They have billed Cate Blanchett, but in actuality have cast Lime Helmet Cat. I guess he was cheaper.

And (SPOILER)

What the hell is up with the hook? In raiders the ark was just a box until they opened it, temple of doom it was just a sect until the magical heart ripping out thing. Even in last crusade there was nothing magical until they found the knight and drank from the cup. The whole time through #4 there's some crazy crystal skull which is magnetic (despite being crystal) but also somehow attracts gold, scares away plus-size jungle ants, drives space miners insane. (Right: picture of insane space miner)

And seriously...inter dimensional aliens? Maybe you should'nt have explained the skull to us, George.

However, it could have been much worse and I actually enjoyed it. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't be opposed to the concept of more Indiana Jones, even if Harrison Ford is old.

Setting up for failure.

2008-05-11T14:39:00.004-04:00

As an IT student it, certain things about the way IT is viewed by the rest of RIT. Not the least of which being why everyone I meet always says "Oh, don't you mean 'I Tried'?" when I mention I'm an IT major. I always feel like I need to defend my major, because really...in college we are defined very much by our majors, because once we graduate these will be our careers and we'll be defined by our jobs. Sorry, Fight Club.

As depressing as it is, though, I realize there's an amount of truth to the myth of I Tried. In some sense, anyway. I don't know a single washed out CS or SE that went to IT because they couldn't hack "real programming".

RIT's first mistake is using Java to teach Programming and OOP to IT students. At least in CS you're eventually exposed to C++, but that leaves a bitter taste with a lot of people. They get used to the language coddling them and holding their hand, which is what Java does. In addition, it's incredibly well documented which makes it easy to teach. But the way the sequence is designed, all you do is learn to write code...they don't teach anything about design, or WHY OOP, or the more groady low-down details of programming.
Not that I have any idea what would make a better language...Python maybe? The problem isn't the language, but how they teach it. They spoonfeed you things, and never teach you how to be a programmer. It sets people up to fail when they think they know how to code but don't actually know the finer points.

Since I am on the web track, I had to take RIT's programming for web class, but was lucky enough to be allowed to bypass it. I helped out tutoring some of the students and I was initially horrified at the way to class was taught. It taught students to use procedural, spaghetti code. Now while there isn't anything wrong with procedural code...make spaghetti of HTML and PHP is very bad. It's hard to maintain, confusing to debug, and makes it nigh on impossible to correctly design a large project.
Soon I moved from horror to disappointment when I realized that that was how I learned to code PHP, but I moved on. Unfortunately what I had that RIT doesn't (Maybe can't?) teach is the idea that there is more beyond this.

What they're not doing, is exciting people about programming. Now I'm not saying that they should be trying to get people to become programmers if they don't like it, but there's gotta be a decent amount of people in these classes...especially track courses...that already like programming or are just looking for a reason to.
In programming for the web, RIT should show off some cool stuff that PHP can do. CMS, templating code, sessions, security layers, image editing...interact it with some javascript. Make it do cool stuff on the backend, like talk to other services and send info back to the browser...and not just databases.
All they teach is code-by-numbers quizzes and blogs. Some basic "stick some PHP in here to pull from MySQL and bake a dynamic website" stuff. Yes it's simple and gives you enough to learn the basics of the language...but people need to know it's a spring board to REALLY dive in, and not the end of things.

RIT's failing us as IT programmers, and it's making us look bad. Not cool, dudes.

--PXA