More of my imaginary Broadway career

I wrote this in a comment to a friend's status update on Facebook. He suggested I put it somewhere more public (more public than Facebook?!) so he can share it with his cow-orkers. Blame him.

As usual, the choice of music is left as an exercise for the Reader.

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Spiral of Doom

Just sit right back for the conference call
A call that'll take all night,
That started with some Powerpoint
And no agenda in sight.
Facilitatin' this fine mess:
A Man'ger shiny and new,
But his reports they spanned the globe
And none of them had a clue
(Three hours and no clue.)

The meeting started getting rough
And they all blamed the boss,
If not for the drinks in the mini-bars
Action items would've been lost
(But at least they'd all be sauced.)

When that meeting hit hour five and he'd not passed chart two,
The Manager...
Said "Drink up lads!
Put it on the
Expense account.
We'll try again
Same time, next week
And there will be more attendees!"

[imagine a really great montage sequence here]

So this is the tale of a meeting gone wrong,
Stuck there for a long long time.
They'll have to make the best of things,
It's an uphill climb.
The Manager will get his boss
And try their very best,
To make the others sign on to
A plan that's now a mess:
No time, no spec, no budget left
Not a single new resource.
Like Babbage doing Engine work
As primitive as old Moorse.
Don't join us in the Spiral of Doom
This weekly misery
'Cause the fun's not over when we're done,
It's on...to...Version 3.

Some thoughts on the Watchmen movie

Saw the Watchmen movie last Saturday (Mar 7) in Vienna. Enjoyed it very much, even though I had to watch the German dub (the English version will probably not get here before June; they're not getting Slumdog Millionaire until April). Sadly, my German is not good enough to catch the subtleties of the dialog, so it was probably a good thing that the writing team lifted so much of it directly from the comics. However, that did mean that I spent quite a bit of the movie actually looking at the images, which is a significant part of the movie going experience, after all.

So, I can't really review the movie when I haven't actually experienced it fully, but I can (and, of course, am going to) say a couple of things about the quality of the differences between the movie and comic (hereafter "Movie" and "Comic"). I'll try to avoid spoiling anything. But, if you're the kind of person who doesn't want to know anything about a movie before going into it, you should stop reading right now. Also, if you haven't read the Comic, ur Graphic Novel Comic (dammit) this may not make a lot of sense.

You have been warned.

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So Zach Snyder has not quite repeated what he did with Frank Miller's 300. That's a good thing. It wasn't that 300 was a bad movie, but I would argue that the movie was more-or-less a remake of Frank Miller's comic book, which was all but a kind of full fledged storyboard/pre-vis for the movie that was running through Miller's head, and which eventually come out via Zach Snyder (though not quite in the same way that Robert Rodriguez's Sin City relates to the comics, but I'm not going there in this post).

As a fan of the Comic, I loved seeing many of the iconic "shots" show up in the Movie (though not the symmetric centerfold from issue #5, AKA "Fearful Symmetry"). However, I'm not alone in wondering if viewers new to the story get the same frisson from those scenes that even blew Dave Gibbons away for the attention to detail on matching the Comic. Roger Ebert mentioned in his blog that he was a bit lost in the first viewing, though he still enjoyed it even as someone who hadn't read the Comic. Any other non-Comic reader feel that way?

The thing that absolutely blew me away was the opening credit sequence. In what could only have been a couple of minutes, Snyder condensed an enormous amount of background material; essentially giving the audience a series of thumbnail sketches of this alternate reality in a handful of moving tableaux. In particular, I really liked the Dr. Manhattan/JFK bit, partly because I had issues with the insertion of Tom Hanks into historical footage of LBJ in Forrest Gump. And as a not-so-subtle wink to the comic origins of the Movie, these sequences were composited like multi-planar cartoons, where different characters were on different planes, and they moved at different speeds as the camera pans, creating the illusion of depth. Of course the "cut-out" quality of the movement defeats any suspension of disbelief from the opening sequence, which is very meta; sort of like Snyder is telling us: look at this animated comic of the movie I made from a comic book.

One thing that did surprise me was the bloody-mindedness of the Movie, which in retrospect, made perfect sense. For the Rorschach bits, clearly there needed to be Blood (apropos Stoppard's "The Player" in Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead). What caught me off guard was the sheer viciousness of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, particularly in their first fight scene. Again, Snyder is working well within the Comic's canon; and it's obvious in hindsight that this is exactly what Alan Moore had intended with these characters. I, like many who read mostly Comics Code-compliant titles while growing up, was certainly conditioned to an almost antiseptic version of personal violence in comics, as typified (and only slightly parodied) in the "Biff!", "Pow!" and "Bam!" of the Batman TV series. Even recent, comic-based film outings suffer a form of reality distortion (at least for the "hero"). How many fingers did Batman break in succession on one person? How many necks did Iron Man snap with his (enhanced) hands)? How many limbs did/will Wolverine sever with his adamantine claws? Those are supposed to be things the bad guys did, which of course, brings us right back to the name of the Comic and Movie.

Right. That's probably enough for now. Though did anyone else hear a little Blade Runner-esque Vangelis in the scene where Dan Dreiberg is walking home in the rain? Hmmm.

Maxtor is Dead to Me

The following is an IM exchange between me and Maxtor/Seagate support:

Hello. How may I help you?

Paul T.S. no name: Hi. I just bought a OneTouch4 Plus and failed to format it under OSX 10.5. The support page for the drive says I can email Tech Support to get a link for the software that allows HFS+ formatting under Leopard, but the link to Tech Support expects me to register in your database. I DO NOT wish to register. I DO NOT want to be on a mailing list. I want software that makes your product work with my computer as advertised.

Jared J.: its not going to put you on a mailing list it does that so it can send you the correct software

Jared J.: there are people out there that want software that shouldn't work with there drive and some of stuff has encryption which can't be used in certain courtries so we have the registration process to avoid international trade issues

Paul T.S. no name: There is absolutely no technical reason for your process to require my email. Product ID, serial number and country of origin is all you need.

Thank you for using Seagate products. You may now close this window.

Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

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30 Minutes Earlier

I bought a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus drive and started to reformat it before looking at all the documentation. While it would format to Fat32 and NTFS (under MacFUSE) just fine, the volume erase command fails when I tried HFS+. When I finally check the docs, I find out that to format under Leopard, I have to run this piece of software that came on the drive only. Ok, so I'm an idiot for not checking the software on the drive. But Maxtor is brain-dead for not including the software on the CD that comes in the box.

So I go to Maxtor's site to download said software. It bounces me to Seagate (fine) and I navigate down to the download area for this drive and eventually get this message:

If you have erased the software and need to obtain replacement software for your hard drive, contact Seagate Technical Support by email. [emphasis mine]

If you click on the Seagate Tech Support link, you don't see a list of email addresses. You get a SalesForce generated login page, in which you have to root around before finding out that if you were not registered, you need to click on the "Register and Create a Support Case" link. Of course, you'd first encounter a secure certificate mismatch dialog, because Seagate apparently registered "sso.seagate.com" for the certificate, but is serving these pages from "apps1.seagate.com". I then tried to find an email address from the Contact Us page. Guess where it redirected me: back to the apps1.seagate.com login page. So I clicked on the IM link from the Contact Us page and the above is the result.[1]

So Maxtor is now Dead to Me.

Epilogue

I managed to work around this problem by booting up my Powerbook that's running 10.4 and formatting it there. Once that worked, I can reformat it in HFS+ all I want under Leopard. I still don't have the "official" Maxtor software, but I don't need it since I'm not using their drive encryption apps.

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[1] Now, it's unclear if they disconnected my chat deliberately or not. It appears that their chat system is a bit eager to boot people. However, it also doesn't use audio feedback when a new message comes in, so waiting for an available agent requires 100% of your attention.

Fixing iTunes 8 Podcast Refresh with AppleScript

I have a problem.[1] I am addicted to podcasts. I blame Leo Laporte whose "netcasts" were some of the first I subscribed to, and who just kept adding more shows to the TWiT network.

But that's not my real problem. My real problem is that Apple added one feature to iTunes 8 when they should have added two, or even three. iTunes 8 let users set the refresh frequency (and other attributes) on a per-podcast basis. This is a reasonable feature as far as it goes, though even daily podcasts tend to be somewhat irregular in their posting time.[2]

The problem is that while I can now tweak the individual podcasts, I can't seem to consistently apply an overall setting for the update frequency. The UI is ambiguous: the "Use Default Settings" checkbox is underneath the "Settings for:" drop down, which has a horizontal rule separating it from the "Check for new episodes:" drop down. Even worse, I can't manually enter a time or date for the update schedule. The whole point of having iTunes update my podcasts automatically is so that I don't have to get up at 5:30 AM and click the damn "Refresh" button myself, not even the first time to get the ball rolling. UI Fail.

Admittedly, a comprehensive UI for configuring various podcast options might end up looking like Cast Away from Wooden Brain Concepts.[2] That might be a bit too much for most users, but the failure of iTunes to include a simple date/time entry box seems pretty stupid.

That said, I did come up with a relatively simple solution using AppleScript and iCal. I did try it first with Automator, but it didn't give me access to podcast updating actions, and recording a "See Me Do" workflow failed because Automator was recording the name of the Podcasts "row" in iTunes and the number of podcasts. So instead of just matching on "Podcasts", it would try to match on "Podcasts (100)", which of course changed every time podcasts were added and deleted. FAIL.

The actual solution was to delve a bit into AppleScript and create the following script:

tell application "iTunes"
	updateAllPodcasts
end tell

I saved it as an application, then created a new event in iCal which opened this application as an alarm action at 5:35 AM, repeating daily. In theory, I can now create another event to update my iPhone, and this I can do using an Automator workflow.

Now I can sleep soundly at night, knowing that I'll get all my podcast updated before I have to get up for work. At 5:45 AM.

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[1] There are many other problems like it, but this one is mine.

[2] And I'm not sure I ever understood the "update hourly" setting for podcasts. Really, you really need to check every hour for something that you might not listen to for days? And if you are listening to something every hour, why isn't it just being streamed? Sounds like some OCD designer/programmed added the option for completeness only.

[3] Playing with Cast Away right now. Lots of interesting features, but nothing obvious for explicitly setting podcast update times.

Intermittent Quality

Who programs rain-sensing intermittent wipers? Have they actually driven in the rain? In traffic? In a car with a windshield?

I've driven two cars with rain-sensing wiper systems. Two is a poor sample rate, but since I drive/drove them all the time, and one of them in a place where rain is not seasonal, my sample rate of their performance is very high. And I have zombie Richard Feynman on my side.

Our Toyota Corolla Verso[1] has four levels of "rain" sensitivity, as well as two, fixed speed settings. To me, this implies a speed spectrum like this:

0 - 0.2 - 0.4 - 0.6 - 0.8 - 1 - 2

This was certainly the case in all the cars I've driven that had variable speed wipers that were directly controlled by the driver.

However the actual spectrum I get on the Verso is:

0 - WTF! - 1 - 2

Changing the variable setting doesn't seem to affect the sensitivity of the system. What's more, the lowest sensitivity setting will cycle the wipers as fast as the highest setting. What??!!

This is not rocket science, people. Regardless of how much the "rain sensor" is a technical black box, the data it outputs should be some normalized value which reflects how "wet" the windshield is, which is compared against a trigger value that's associated with what the driver has set.

And this is probably one of the easiest features in a car to test. You don't need a track, you don't even need most of the car. A correctly configured windshield and wipers and a couple of spray bottles will iron out 80% of the bugs in the system. The other 20% will require misters and a shower head.

Get on this, people. And fix my system while you're at it.

 

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[1] The Verso is something like a Sienna squished into the wheelbase of a Rav4. I wanted an actual mini-van, but neither Honda nor Toyota sold theirs in Europe.