Diver's Pursuits

Invite codes on an alpha

2009-11-06T13:59:29Z

(This was half-written but not posted yesterday. Here it is in all it's technical "glory" today.)

kokoinai and I have been talking about how to manage the LifeThunder.com alpha; specifically, how do we (a) make people want to try it out and (b) prevent too many people from seeing it while it's still in a (to be polite) "unfinished state" (*). Obviously, problem (a) is more likely to be an issue, but (b) matters as well.

Two words: invite codes.

Invite codes make people feel like they are special, like they are being let past the "velvet rope" to play with the Cool Kids. (At least, so goes the theory.) They also make it easy to control how many people can access the site.

Of course, implementing an all-up invite code system is a bother. You need to add the relevant tables to the database, track the code, delete them from the table correctly (watch out for race conditions!), hand them out to new users, etc, etc. That's a lot of work for a feature that we're only going to use while in alpha, and then will rip out forevermore. So I thought for 60 seconds and said "Forget that." In about 10 minutes I knocked up something where, when a person tries to register, it asks them for an invite code, checks to see if there is a file with that name in a particular directory and, if so, it deletes the file and lets them in. Modulo a few typos and such, it worked the first time out the gate. I then spent another 50 minutes or so testing and handling edge cases ("what if they submitted an invite code that was a relative path--could they escape up out of the directory and then nuke, for example, the system password file?" or "is there any way to submit a string that will be executed?" [answer to both of these: no, you can't]).

Ah, but I can hear you cry out: "But wait, Dave! How will people get the codes? How will new users invite their friends? What about logging which user signed up with which code? What about race conditions on checking existence of the file before you delete it? What about...?" To all of these I say: "this is an alpha-only feature."

Users will get invite codes because we send them an email that says "Hi there, in our market surveys, you expressed interest in the site. If you'd like to join, here's your invite code. And here's a half-dozen others in case you have some friends that want to join."

As to race conditions on checking before deleting files: meh. This is unlikely to happen at all--how did two people end up with the same code? But, if we get a false positive, it only means one extra person in the alpha: no problem. If we get a false negative (e.g. we gave two people the same code, so one of them is refused for a code we told them was valid)...well, that's a little more serious because we told them the code was good. But it's unlikely enough that I don't care to code for it--we can handle it via email in the unlikely event that it comes up.

Bottom line: we're a startup, and this is a short-term feature. The 20/80/110 rule (**) applies.

(*) More commonly known as "looks horrifically ugly and we're still working out bugs".

(**) Most people are familiar with the 80/20 rule and know that it derives from the Pareto principle. (Yes, I'm aware that Pareto never actually said this, he said something that involved a lot of math and other people boiled it down.) In the context of a startup, however, it's better to think of it as the 20/80/110 rule: Outside of the core, do only 20% of the work to get only 80% of the benefit. Inside of the core, do 110% of the work to get 110% of the benefit.

No joy on YC

2009-11-06T13:16:43Z

Re: our YCombinator application: denied.

We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding.
Please don't take it personally. The quality of the applications
continues to increase with each cycle, and since there's a limit
on the number of interviews we can do, we had to turn away a lot
of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know
we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group
to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that
we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall
just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain
that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups.
If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us
about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Y Combinator Staff

Twenty four hours ago, I wanted to make a fortune because, hey, money. Now I want to make a fortune just so I can send YCombinator an email with a link to our billion-dollar-acquistion deal and the two words "Neener neener."

Well, ok, not really. But it's a nice fantasy.

Actually, this is what I expected--they get a huge number of very qualified applicants, and our idea has no baked-in viral component which always seems more attractive--and the rejection letter is much nicer than I expected. I would definitely apply to YC again. In a couple of days, I'll respond to them.

Nah, I'm not checking my inbox obsessively...

2009-11-05T15:56:28Z

A few weeks ago, kokoinai and I applied to YCombinator for "venture capital" funding of LifeThunder. I use the quotes because YC doesn't really do VC in the traditional sense; they invest $17,000 in a 2-person startup (like us), and their value is more on the business and networking side.

It's a four stage process:

1) Apply
2) Hear back that you have been invited to demo for them
3) Hear back that you have been accepted for investment
4) Profit!

(Ok, step 4 may not *necessarily* follow....)

Today is the day that we hear whether or not we've been invited to demo. And no, I'm not compulsively checking all three of my email accounts (since I forget which one I gave them). I mean, after all, they're in CA and therefore 3 hours earlier than me. It's 11am here, so they are probably just getting started with the final reading of applications.

Huh, I wonder if the email came in since I started writing this....<click>

Forget security through obscurity, you can't even have obscurity

2009-11-04T18:47:30Z

We are in the process of setting up the LifeThunder.com website. This includes a lot of very unglamorous jobs like "install the web server and make it go."

As I type this, the site consists of nothing but a single page that says: "It works! AND it's modifiable! (Still)". Tremendously life-changing, I know. This is what you get when someone (namely me) is installing and testing web server modules one at a time while tracking down a syntax error in the config file.

Here's the thing, though--I pretty much expected that, since we haven't listed ourselves on any online directories, and we haven't submitted to any search engines, and we HAVEN'T ADVERTISED ANYWHERE WHATSOEVER (aside from verbal discussions with some friends), that I didn't really need to worry about what the Internet would think of / do to the site while I was working on it.

Hoo boy, was I wrong.

Checking the access logs, we've been getting hit since yesterday. Google and Yahoo have both tried to crawl the site. How did they find us? By trolling whois.net for recently registered domains? Google might have found us because we signed up to host our company email on Google Apps, but where did the hits from Yahoo come from?

On the one hand, I'm glad to get the exposure. On the other hand, it's going to be a pain in the neck as they spam the logs and (shortly) index a site that is still in alpha. On the gripping hand...hey, exposure.

Pissy day

2009-10-27T16:27:40Z

It's grey.

It's raining.

I spent the entire paid part of the morning troubleshooting a bad Internet connection in a Linux virtual machine, and failing to solve it.

I spent the unpaid part dealing with insurance. My choices are: insurance I can't afford, insurance that doesn't let me use my current doctors, or effectively lie to them, plus pay $900 up front and I can afford it and use my current doctors.

Life sucks and I'm gonna eat worms.

Looking for hippos

2009-10-16T13:22:36Z

To the many people on my f'list with more artistic talent that I have (which is essentially all of you :>): I'm looking for a picture of a cute hippo. Specifically, one that would be suitable for use as a logo. If you felt like doodling such a beast and mailing it my way, I would be enormously grateful.

Background: A friend and I are doing a startup. We decided to name it "Life + X" where X would be the collective noun for a group of animals. After going through all the collective animal names to see what we liked, what was available as domains, and what a limited number of test surveyees liked, we are currently going with LifeThunder (a thunder of hippos). Personally, I was really hoping for LifeRomp (a romp of otters) but that did very poorly in the test survey. Which is a shame, because I'm pretty sure that even *I* could draw a cute picture of an otter. (Indeed, short of giving it a bloody butcher knife and hockey mask, I'm not sure it's possible to draw a *non*-cute otter. Hm....actually, I think it might still be cute even with the knife and mask, just in a rather psychotic way.)

The problem with our court system.

2009-10-03T22:06:09Z

Background: Red Hat is submitting an amicus brief to the Supreme Court saying that software patents are bad. The link is to their press release, which they close with the words:

"...may the best argument win."

NO. You have that exactly backwards, Red Hat. We don't want the best argument to win. We want the truth to win.

Idle thought: outpatient brain enhancement?

2009-09-28T00:15:01Z

What would the world look like if, on a cheap, safe, outpatient basis, you could get 100 points added to your IQ? Or simply get a skill implanted--anything from karate to linear algebra, with complete mastery and access just like you had spent the time learning it the hard way? I'm trying to think of cyberpunk or "post-Singularity" books that have dealt with this, and I'm not thinking of any.

What does "trustworthy" mean to you? (in a website)

2009-09-27T19:34:23Z

Question for the room:

When you come across an unfamiliar website that has something you want, how do you assess whether to trust them? I'm talking about a site where you're going to have to give them something personal, like your credit card number, a password to another site, etc.

Reason I'm asking is that a friend and I are working on LifeData, that online service that I've posted about before. The first survey I ran made several things very clear:

1) There is a market--i.e., enough people willing to pay for it that it could be profitable.

2) I've got a bunch of people chomping at the bit to sign up. We better get it launched ASAP.

3) As expected, the single biggest concern that people expressed about this idea was security. One person summed up their concerns quite succinctly: "It sounds like an invitation to give phishers everything you don't want them to have!"

So, we're faced with two problems:

1) How do we make the site BE secure?

2) How do we make people AWARE that the site is secure?

#1 is a technical problem, so I'm not worried. I know many of the answers already, and I know how/where to get the rest.

#2 is about people and perceptions; it's much harder, and I only have a vague idea where to start, and most of the things that I can think of are technical (HTTPS, certs signed by Verisign, etc). I am very aware, however, that I'm not representative of the broader population, so I decided I'd do a general survey and ask regular people what they look for and how important each piece is. Of course, this just pushes the problem back a level--how can I create the survey to ask how important the various pieces are until I have some idea of what pieces to put on the survey? So I figured I'd break it down. I am starting off by asking a group of very smart but not entirely mainstream people (that would be YOU, Fearless Reader, and my other friends) for their thoughts. Using that as a starting point, I'll post a general "what do you look for?" fill-in-the-blank survey to the general public on Mechanical Turk. From there I'll build the actual "how much do these pieces matter to you?" survey which is what I ultimately need.

Phew!

LJ, DW, and the Case Of The Lost Security

2009-09-24T22:12:06Z

Imagine the following scene: a man in street clothes is standing near a police officer and whispering to him in that "jail-yard side-of-the-mouth" way that we've all seen in movies and no one does in real life. Neither of them are looking at each other, they could just be randomly standing near each other.

AL (whispering): Psst! My name is Al Smith and I'm an undercover cop. I want to tell you something important.

BOB (whispering): Ok, Al. Prove it. Tell me the password.

AL (whispering): <provides the password>

BOB (whispering): Ok, I recognize you. What do you need to tell me?

AL (whispering): The identity of the person that we're putting into Witness Protection next week.

BOB (turns to face AL squarely, starts speaking through his megaphone): OK! I'M READY FOR YOU TO TELL ME ABOUT THE PERSON WE WILL BE PUTTING IN WITNESS PROTECTION! PLEASE GIVE ME HIS PICTURE, NAME, GENDER, BIRTHDAY, THE LIST OF SCHOOLS HE'S BEEN TO...

AL (starting to panic; no longer whispering): What are you doing?! Shut up!! You want to blow my cover!!???

BOB: OUR PREVIOUS RECORDS HAVE NO PICTURE OF HIM, BUT APPARENTLY HIS NAME WAS K. AMABO, BORN AUGUST 4, 1961, LIVING IN ZIP CODE 20001, INTERESTS ARE POLITICS, ECONOMICS, DEMOCRACY....

AL: Aiiieeee! <flees>

Did any part of this seem familiar? Well, if you're reading this, there's a good chance that you've played the role of both AL and the person who was going into Witness Protection.

When you log into LJ or DW (or probably DeadJournal or any other site based on the LJ code), you can connect over a secure (i.e. HTTPS) connection so that your password is safe from eavesdroppers. A well-behaved website *should* adopt the Las Vegas security plan: "what starts in HTTPS, stays in HTTPS." But, nope. Watch your address bar; the login page is HTTPS the landing page is HTTPS, but as soon as you go to edit your profile (on DW it's "Manage Your Account"), you are redirected into HTTP...which means that everything you are sending is plaintext, and visible to everyone between you and the site. Yeep.

It actually doesn't bother me that LJ expects you to ship this over HTTP--after all, this data isn't exactly your credit card, SSN, and mother's maiden name. Nope, the part that bothers me is that I made a deliberate choice to connect securely, and then they deliberately stripped that security away without informing me, when I had a reasonable expectation that the data was being shared only with LJ / DW.

Table saw + finger + no damage = Jaw-drop

2009-09-24T14:09:03Z

Go watch a man's finger NOT get cut off by a table saw.

This guy designed a safety feature for table saws: the blade has an electrical conductivity sensor in it. Wood = not conductive, so it cuts. Meat = conductive, so it isn't cut. More specifically, the blade--you know, the one that's spinning at ~5000 rpm?--stops within 1/1,000 of a second.

To demonstrate, they put a hot dog on top of a board and ran it through the blade (i.e., the hot dog is representing the thumb of a clueless operator). Board is cut, dog is not. Then, for the true show, the inventor put his own finger in the blade on high speed camera. You seriously need to watch this...my jaw was literally dropping at the end.

This. THIS is why I love technology and have faith in humanity sometimes.

Stupid body

2009-09-13T15:54:07Z

Last night, my body informed me in no uncertain terms that we were going to sleep at 8:30pm. No reading, no nothing. Feh.

I slept 10 or 11 hours, got up around 7:30 or so, and was still feeling a bit draggy for the first couple hours. Double feh.

Today, I'm hungry. No matter what I eat or how much I drink, I'm still hungry. It's righteously pissing me off. ARGH.

Why is it that the human body doesn't come with an LCD readout on the forearm??? It could just tell me: "Required: 1 cup spinach, 1/2 oz chocolate, 1 hard-boiled egg, 16 oz water." Then I could give it what the hell it wants, get back to doing something useful, and we could both be happy. Think how much easier this would make life for new parents, too: "WARNING: Release of vomitus in 5...4...3...2..."

Maybe it's salad. I'll go get a salad and see if that helps.

UPDATE: Yep. Salad was what I needed. Salad and sunlight. Much better now.

People amaze me

2009-09-13T11:56:23Z

So, as y'all know, I have that survey up over on SurveyMoneky. The last question is "if you'd like to hear more about this, please put your email here...no obligation...no spam...blah blah blah."

Now, I thought it was pretty clear that question was optional, but it's true that I didn't put the big "(OPTIONAL:)" label on it that I had done with a few of the others. I've been very pleasantly surprised at how many people provided their email, but I'm not too surprised that have a dozen people just wrote "No" (or, more forcefully: "NO").

But, what about the guy who wrote "good"?

*blink*

Survey

2009-09-11T17:39:49Z

Hey, all: I've got a survey up at SurveyMonkey. Anyone who has 2-3 minutes available, hasn't already taken it, and wouldn't mind helping me out, could you drop by and fill it out? It's 4-5 pages, most of which only have 1 question (it needed to be multiple pages so I could skip over certain questions based on prior choices).

Many thanks for anyone who's willing.

Holy god twice over

2009-09-11T02:09:37Z

So, I just posted a test batch of survey requests on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Wow. It was up for something like 3 minutes before I had my first half dozen responses. It's been up now for 15 or 20 and I'm almost done with the 20 requests that I posted. From those 20, I've got 2 people who are interested in signing up for the service if and when it launches.

How much did all of this cost? $0.70 Acquiring customers for $0.35 each? Oh yeah. The future is now, baby.

The second holy god was dinner tonight. Spinach and feta chicken sausages with Beemster cheese (a form of Gouda), sauteed mushrooms, and scrumptious 7-grain bread. Oh, my mouth and belly are so happy.

Which of these is more "holy god" worthy? Tough call. Probably the first, but only by a whisker.

Which survey site should you use?

2009-09-09T16:43:38Z

I want to do an online survey for market research. At WorldCon, I attended Howard Tayler's panel on "Running a Web-Based Business" in which he particularly recommended SurveyMonkey.com. Howard is a pretty smart guy who has made a real success of his online venture, so I figured this was probably solid, but I figured I'd do my own checking anyway, just to be sure.

The short answer was: SurveyMonkey.

Yup, everyone loves the monkey.

Here were the requirements:

MUST:
- Not cost more than $30. (I only need 1 survey, so I'm fine to pay for a month and then cancel, or to pay on a per-survey basis, or get it free).
- Allow up to 1000 resps / month (for the account type that is within my budget)
- Allow me to post at least 10 questions (more is preferable)
- Host the survey and collate the data
- Allow me to export the results
- Support conditional logic (e.g., if someone answers "I would not pay for this service", don't show them the questions pricing)

SHOULD:
- Provide an easy way to get people's country name in standardized format (i.e., not a free-form text box). When I am sorting the results, I don't want to have different categories for "USA", "U.S.A.", "America", "United States", etc. Ideally, the service should provide a droplist with the names of the countries as options). Failing that, give me a way to enter my own HTML and I'll create the droplist.

I checked out all of the following sites. I investigated each site only until it failed one of the MUST requirements, at which point I moved on. None of them really satisfied the SHOULD, although a couple

http://freeonlinesurveys.com
- FAIL: Does not support 1000 resps at my price level
http://wufoo.com/
- FAIL: No conditional logic
http://esurveyspro.com
- FAIL: $30 max for required time (1 month, 1 survey, etc)
http://zoomerang.com
- FAIL: Does not support 1000 resps at my price level
http://polldaddy.com
- FAIL: Does not support 1000 resps at my price level
http://checkbox.com
- $30 max for required time (1 month, 1 survey, etc)
http://insitefulsurveys.com
- FAIL: Does not support 1000 resps at my price level

Looking for contract work

2009-09-07T17:33:09Z

I'm getting back into an active job hunting mode. If anyone needs a contract Perl programmer, or knows anyone that does, could you send them my way? Thanks.

Does this exist? Would you use it?

2009-09-01T23:44:55Z

Hey folks, I'm doing some market research and hope that you all will participate. This is an idea I've had and I'm wondering about implementing it. I'll probably do so just for my own use, but it occurred to me that it might actually be something that other people want, and might be a potential startup idea (and, hence, a way for me to get out of this lousy jobless state).

Does anyone know of a web service with the following features, or something like them:

Stores all of your personal data (name, address, email, etc) and the names of your various service providers.

Allows you to change any piece of your personal data and then pushes the changes out to all of your providers. So, when you move, you just update this site and it automatically files a change-of-address card with the post office, notifies all of your magazine subscriptions of the new address, updates your address info on LJ/FaceBook, tells Netflix to ship to your new address, etc). Same for changes to email, phone, whatever

Allows you to lie to certain providers while still giving correct data to others. e.g., you can notify the Crate and Barrel people that your new address is "123 NoSuch St, Notown AL 10000", and they would start shipping their unwanted catalogs there instead of to you (they would then be sent back with the postal equivalent of 404, and hopefully C&B would eventually stop shipping them)

Allows you to keep your data encrypted when not in use with a private key that is not stored on the server. (i.e., whenever you aren't actually using the site, all of your data is gibberish that will not benefit a thief should it somehow be stolen)

Would anyone use such a service if it existed? What would an acceptable business model be--advertising, monthly charge, micro-fee per update, etc?

I'd really appreciate any input you can offer and if you wouldn't mind spreading the word a bit so I get more feedback, that would be fantastic.

Mmmm...dead cow waved near fire

2009-08-30T17:15:19Z

I went to Alonso's Steak House on 20th and 8th for dinner last night. Rare steak (filet mignon), mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, a nice glass of Malbec to complement my steak, some cappuccino to stave off the food coma from my steak – the cappuccino came with not one but three biscotti, for free – and a chocolate souffle afterwards, made fresh to order, piping hot and the perfect end to my delicious, only-very-lightly-cooked dinner that was centered around steak.

Did I mention the steak?

Ohhhh, my god it was good. I was full for almost twelve hours, and simply filled to overflowing with happy-happy joy-joy feelings. It is amazing what a positive effect the combination of dead animal flesh and very small amounts of heat can have...particularly when accompanied with all kinds of complex carbohydrates, creamed spinach that tasted almost exactly but not quite like Gogo's used to, a very nice wine, and mega doses of pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters.

Of course, adding to my good mood (and providing me an excuse to celebrate) is the fact that Gogo just got through her surgery: one night in the hospital, then home and feeling great.

Aaaahhh, life is good.

The really scary thing...

2009-08-28T20:49:55Z

...is that I have no idea if this is a joke or not: http://xkcd.com/629/

And, honestly, I'm afraid to ask Google.

Huzzah! The printer works!

2009-08-28T04:43:51Z

Finally got around to figuring out why my printer has been on the fritz the past few months¹: it hates me.

Somehow, the "HP OfficeJet J3600 Series" entry went missing from the list of printers, meaning that the list now consisted solely of "HP OfficeJet J3600 Series (Fax)"...of course, that's too long for the display window, so the "(Fax)" part wasn't displayed, which meant that the only printer in the list wasn't actually a printer, it was a fax machine², but I couldn't tell—whenever I looked at the list, it seemed fine.

So, I told it to redetect the printer, which it did just fine (I love having an Apple!), and then I asked my perfect printer pixies to strut their stuff. When the spiffy little word "test" came flowing off the page, it was a beautiful thing.

Clearly this hatred is based on my heartless lack of feelings for the printer. It's been on the fritz for months and I'm only just now investigating? You can see why it's angry.

For some strange reason, attempting to print to a fax machine has highly sub-optimal results...at least, if the optimal results are anything along the general lines of "convince the magical perfect princess printer pixies to carry the words and pictures from the screen to the piece of paper!"

Random philosophical musings over tea and TV

2009-08-28T02:21:11Z

I'm watching an episode of Stargate SG-1 (S03E10 "Forever in a Day", for the SG geeks), and one character (Teal'c) just said to another "Is there not some form of human ritual in which I may ask your forgiveness?"

You know, that's actually a pretty good question. Western culture is terrible about forgiveness--by which I mean "letting go of the negative feelings you have towards another who has wronged you." We have lots of words for the various shadings of "anger", but very few for "forgiveness."

Here is the list of synonyms for "anger" from http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/anger: Annoyance, crankiness, crotchetiness, displeasure, exasperation, fury, grumpiness, ire, irritation, mad, peevishness, petulance, pique, rage, vexation, and others. (*)

Here is the list of synonyms for "forgiveness" from http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/forgiveness absolution, exculpation, exoneration, purgation. (*) (Note that only one of these, "absolution", is actually in common usage, while the others are far more rarely encountered.)

More interestingly, we have no rituals pertaining directly to forgiveness, despite the fact that society is built on rituals. We have rituals for saying hello (shaking hands) and goodbye (waving), for celebrating someone's birth, death, passage into adulthood, for settling conflicts (everything from how to speak appropriately during an argument up to how to have a lawsuit). We have established rituals for saying to someone "I want to spend the rest of my life with you", but no established way of saying "please let me make this up to you" beyond the simple words "I'm sorry"...which pretty much never cut it when you've actually screwed up.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were something like all those science fiction "warrior people" have (e.g. Klingons, Jaffa, etc)? You know, a few rounds of running in circles while people smack you with sticks and then (after the bruises heal), you're good to go and you and the person you wronged are back on a good footing?

(*) There were plenty of other suggested "synonyms", but they were really just related words, not actual versions of the same concept.

Saw District 9 last night

2009-08-22T15:54:16Z

avivasedai and I went to see District 9 last night. In a word: bleh.

The basic story without spoilers:

This is a pseudo-documentary movie in which a giant startship shows up and hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa for three months doing nothing. Humanity finally gets tired of waiting, cuts their way in, and finds over a million malnourished insectoid aliens. The MNU (Multi National Union or some such) skylifts them down to a "temporary" housing facility, where the aliens live for 20 years; during this time, the housing facility turns into a militarized slum called "District 9". Finally, alien technology does not work for humans because the aliens have designed it to work only for someone of their DNA; therefore, in 20 years, alien technology has no impact whatsoever on humanity.

Our story opens when MNU has decided to evict the aliens ("prawns" as the slur goes) and move them to a new facility farther from the city. Since eviction would normally require 24 hours notice, they send in the first battalion, led by a political appointee, to get every alien to sign a waiver so they can be moved immediately.

Things go explosively downhill from there.

Here are my non-spoiler objections to this movie:

Dear Mr Jackson: Please look up the word "subtlety" in a dictionary, as the concept clearly escapes you. Thank you. --Dks

The complete lack of plot. This movie is pretty much "people commit violence, usually with weapons. Some of the people are aliens."

The complete absence of sympathetic characters. I didn't really care about any of the characters in this movie (well, I wanted to see the bald battalion leader die). But the main characters, human and alien? Didn't give a damn. The chibi-eyed little alien kid was cute, but I didn't care much about him either--besides, his presence felt manipulative.

The complete lack of plausibility.
- 20 years, over a million compliant aliens and absolutely zero impact on humanity? Come on. They were stronger than humans, able to leap higher, and could eat just about anything vaguely organic (e.g. rubber), and their weapons and other technology worked for them. In reality they would have been hired as construction workers, biological waste disposal units, grunt troops in mercenary units, and a thousand other things. Bonus: they could have been paid in catfood.
- The aliens were all confined to District 9. Aside from hammering home the point about apertheid, why were there signs all over Johannesburg saying "no aliens"?
- The entire movie was predicated on the idea "we need to move them because humans are complaining that they are too close, and they commit crimes." Yet, again, I say--the aliens were confined to their camp. When exactly would humans and aliens meet?
- Ok, let's assume that the two separate layers of razor-wire topped fence actually did not suffice to keep the aliens in, and so the crime problems were the result of aliens that slipped out of District 9. I have to think that adding more guards to keep them in would be simpler and cheaper than building a new facility and relocating all of them 200 km, where you will still need guards in order to keep them inside the new facility.
- Um...so, hang on. You needed to give them 24 hours notice before evicting them, but you decided to go in with troops and do it right now instead? Wouldn't it have been easier to just do it the other way? You could have flown over the place in helicopters on Monday, shouting down with bullhorns "We will evict you tomorrow!", and then come back on Tuesday with the troops and armored trucks and done it.
- In 20 years, with full access to the technology on their ship and whatever they brought down on the airlift with them, we managed to reverse engineer nothing?

CUT IT OUT WITH THE GORRAM SHAKICAM ALREADY! When Blair Witch Project did it, it was novel and impressive. Now it's just nauseating. The premise of this movie is that it's a documentary made by real professionals. These people own Steadicams and are not afraid to use them!

The spoileriffic plot version, if you're interested (I wasn't):

MNU is pointlessly brutal and callous. (e.g. "Oh, look! You've set up a creche to grow alien babies without a reproduction license! Let me pull out the feeding tubes from the reasonably-full-developed child, burn it with a flamethrower, and then laugh about how the popping noise that sounds like popcorn is really alien eggs exploding!" This is done on camera. There are likewise horrific secret medical experiments (think "vivisection") carried out on the aliens; again, you see some of this on camera.

When the movie opens, the audience discovers (although the MNU does not) that there are apparently two surviving "command caste" aliens. For 20 years they have been going through the scraps of alien technology on the local junkheap in order to locate drips and drops of "fluid" (fuel, or general McGuffinite) for their starship. Once they have enough, they can fly their concealed shuttle ship (which was set up at the beginning, thankfully--it's not a complete surprise) away and get help. On the very day of the eviction, they finally have enough. Unfortunately, in the process of the eviction, one of the command caste aliens is killed and Wikus (pronounced Vikus; he's the main character and the political appointee leading the eviction) finds the cylinder of fluid; being a fumble-fingered idiot, it sprays goop in his face, so he confiscates it. Pretty quickly, he starts transforming into an alien. Within a day, his left arm has transformed. Again, we get to watch gratuitous scenes of him peeling off his fingernails on camera.

Suddenly, he's interesting to the government because he can use alien weapons. They know that if they wait too long he will complete the transformation, so they decide to "harvest" his component organs and use them for research. He breaks loose, escapes to District 9 (the alien holding area) and eventually teams up with the remaining smart alien, who goes by the name "Christopher Jones." Together, the two of them break into MNU headquarters, rescue the cylinder, blow the crap out of everything, and escape. On the way back, there is a huge mecha-vs-human-troops battle which separates them; Wikus heroically sends Christopher on ahead while he makes a last stand. Christopher escapes, Wikus transforms, the movie ends, huzzah.

More objections, involving spoilers:

These aliens have not just anti-gravity technology but also negative-gravity (showing just how advanced they are), but human technology can cut through their starship hull, and South Africa has SAM missiles that can shoot the engine right off an alien shuttlecraft? Um...yeah.

Let's say you're a command-caste alien. When the humans cut their way into your ship, why not greet them?

For that matter, since the ship had enough fuel to reach home and apparently needed only food (the aliens were malnourished when they showed up), why not just say "Hi, we'll trade you all this advanced bioengineering information and the secret to anti-gravity for ten million cans of catfood" and then leave?

Ok, let's try to give the movie the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Christopher was born on Earth and learned everything he knew either from hidden alien teaching devices or from genetic memory. You are Christopher. You have considerable mental gifts and two possibilities in front of you. Do you:
- A) Spend 20 years living in a dangerous slum gathering drops of McGuffinite and trying to keep your secret laboratory hidden in hope that you can one day fly away before you are discovered and stopped?
- B) Spend a few months thinking up a safe way to make contact with the world press, then reveal your presence as an intelligent alien, and try to work out a deal that will get you and your people out of their current hellish existence?

Who fed LSD to the Internets?

2009-08-22T15:34:16Z

Could someone please explain to me why the following absolutely refuses to display an image when I put it in a page that I created on my local drive, but works just fine from the W3Schools TryIt editor using the very same browser?

<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Chocolate.jpg"/>

Intriguingly, now I'm starting to see some page that do not load if I copy/paste the link from a local file, but load fine from a Google search. As near as I can tell the links are identical. Argh.

Seeking public lending libraries in NYC

2009-08-22T15:33:20Z

This is rather embarrassing to admit, but apparently my Google-fu is weak, as I cannot for the life of me find a map that shows where the NY general-subject public lending libraries are--by "general subject", I mean one where I can take out 'for-fun reading' (SF, fiction, etc) and fact books (science, technology, perhaps magazines / newspapers, etc). I'd really like to find one around the Union Square neighborhood. I've been to the NYPL site and found nothing for my pains--just research libraries.

Does anyone know of such a critter as a general-subject lending library in NYC? And where would I find a map to them?