Economy Size Geek

The Guns of Navarone (1961)

What can I say - I love this time of movie. It is not as harsh as “The Dirty Dozen”, but it is still a very solid infiltrate and destroy movie.

I suppose it is a little closer to my heart lately because I’ve been playing a lot of “Battfield 2″ where I end up jumping out of helicopter to blow up command posts behind enemy lines.

Beyond it’s greatestness as a war movie where the band of not entirely compatabile specialists works togther to kill Nazis, there are also some interesting moments in the movie that deal with “Responsibility”.

The team has been inserted to destroy the “Guns of Navarone” to help save the lives of over 2000 allied troops trapped on an island. With that many lives in the balance - the question becomes - what is acceptable?

David Niven in the movie tells Gregory Peck that , “I never let them make me an officer - because I didn’t want to be responsible.” They have an argument over whether or not they should kill some one who turns out to be a spy.

Peck argues that he is here to get the job done and that he will do what it takes even if that isn’t pretty. This balance between how far is too far in the quest for achieving your mission is a re-ocurring them.

One other interesting momemt to me is that there is a scene where the group is captured. The nazi base commander tried to get them to confess their plans before an SS officer shows up. They don’t and he does.

The SS officer proceeds to tap a pistol on the broken leg of one of the team members. The base commander tells the SS officer to stop.

This is interesting because it shows that the writer didn’t want you to think of all Nazis on the same level of evil. There were evil ones and then there were just normal guys wearing a nazi uniform.

Please don’t mis-interpret this as some kind of apology for the crimes that the Nazis committed. Only an observation that it is incredibly rare for the Nazis on screen to be anything other than two dimensional targets in grey uniforms.

Bottom Line: If you have the time (156 min), you like a good war movie, and you can handle a couple of slow parts. Check it out.

Ok I’ll admit that I mostly skimmed this article :

TheServerSide.com - Hibernate vs. Rails: The Persistence Showdown

I don’t do Java - so it’s not like I’m going to be working with Hibernate any time soon.

This crash course in the difference though gives me two great insights into Rails (Which I’ll have to confirm over the next few weeks)

1. Rails is built around ActiveRecord pattern. To be honest that works great when things are simple - but I already have a couple of apps that out grew that - it does how ever explain how Brett was able to build everything so fast and automagically.

2. Hibernate uses Identiy Map,Data Mapper, Unit Of Work. What can I say - I’m such a big fan of these patterns I actually implemented them from scracth in PHP. The good news it - it was pretty easy to do it in a dynamically typed language like PHP - and with Ruby real Object model it should be even easier to work with.

Now I’m offically intrigued.

Tony Parker, Trophy,And Eva Longoria at the river parade

NOW that is some chocolte cake - Liberty Bar

Ok so I’m working on a side project to calculate statistics for cards. (Possibly poker - but I also wanted to test out strategies for BlackJack) I figured I’d use it as a simple test case for my ability to program in Ruby.

I managed to build up a couple of classes for cards and decks. Then I got to the part where you say - deck.shuffle. And I thought - hey I bet there is something online for that - I’ll just borrow someone else’s hardwork for this part of the project.

So first I found this from Paradise Poker Apparently they take shuffling pretty seriously. Though I find it interesting that they are using data collected from the clients to augment their entropy.

Then in the classic move - multi player poker uses even more bits of random data. (though it looks like they also run or were ripped off by this place And here and here and here

PartyPoker.com - the leaders in the field of online play - don’t use either of the above per se - Thier RNG is apparently based on Sun Technology - and counting the loops a vm is able to complete. They’re using SHA-1 - so basically Government grade cryptography is being subverted so people can gamble :)

Apparently the single pass Knuth is the standard (Anyone know where I can find a version of it in code form to translate into ruby) - but Paradise now uses a 10 pass version to reduce bias. Multiplayer doesn’t something simpler - basically they just used a heck of a lot of really random number and assign them to each card and then sort and deal.

So looking for a runy library for all this leads me RealRand which is a Ruby interface to some sources of truly random numbers - one uses atmospheric noise, one uses radioactive decay, one uses a collection of sources.

So basically I have some great sources of random data - which means if I find or figure out a good shuffling system - It’s all good.

The thing that really strikes me is that this will end up being a terribly small part of the code project itself - but if the shuffling system isn’t actually as random as real cards then the statistics will all be biased towards the wrong kind of action - ah the joys of computer science.

Ok I admit it - I’m into home brewing as much because I’m a science geek as a beer lover. Don’t get me wrong - I love beer - but something there is something nice about going to the beer fridge and just picking the fruit off the tree -right - it’s a heck of a lot easier than brewing it yourself.

But the science geek in me loves it. I mean - I’ve already bought some erlynmeyer flasks for preparing yeast (Extra nice because you just bake them to sanitize them). There are even pH meters and automatic stir plates (Who doesn’t love that).

There are a couple of skill areas I could explore - one its lagering (which is going to happen at some point when we run out of ales I’d like to make) and the other is all grain brewing. The all grain is just going to wait. It requires a lot more equipment than I want to deal with .

There is another path you can take - and that is growing/milling/producing your own ingredients. At this point I’m not going to mess with home malting or milling - I just don’t brew enough - and frankly it’s not terribly interesting.

Growing - for example hops - is pretty cool - only down side is that I’m guessing it would be hard to get them to survive in San Antonio heat - and I don’t have the room for the vines at the house.

There is one other area that is not terribly space consuming - but is very interesting - Yeast cultivation.

Yeast has a dramatic effect on the flavor and character of the beer you brew. And frankly I haven’t really done that much beyond making some starters. But the idea of having petri dishes of yeast strains in my fridge actually sounds kind of cool.

Like all good projects - I started with getting a book on the subject -
First Steps In Yeast Culturing. It just shipped from morebeer.com.

I found this on amazon - a Microscope you can hook up to you computer via usb .

I figure I’ll be a regular mad scientist in no time - assuming that after reading the book I’m not just absolutely freaked out by all the complexity of doing bio experiments in my house (Which is already a bit biological with two batches of beer, 1 batch of cider, 2 cats, and a stray dog)

SPURS WIN!!! River parade here we come

If I wanted to move to Austrialia and struggle with the ins and outs of statistical signifigance — iTech Labs

New Version
I meant to post this last night - but here you go!

• Cleaned up the code some more - eventually the main is going to be one line
• You can now turn comments on an off for a given post
• AppleDouble is partially supported (I throw away the apple specific stuff and keep all the files)
• Apparently people like to be able to arbatrarily nest mime encoded blocks - the code handles it now - so attach away
• There was a bug that resulted in times being off - I believe I have found the source and removed it. If you are having problems with timing post and let me know.

Also someone mentioned that they had problems with special characters. Give me an example and I’ll see what I can do in the next round.

Original Source is here WP-Mail 0.312

Slasher (2004) (TV)

This was actually at SXSW two years ago when I was there with Annie. It’s a documentary about a guy who specializes in selling a lot of cars fast.

He is and isn’t what you expect from a car salesman. He has some tricks but at the end of the day he really is just trying to find a price that everyone is happy with.

He’s so jittery it gets on you nerves at first. He kind of bounces between being this twitchy over the top sales guy to this extremely drunk over the top sales guy -with the only stop in the middle when he is balanced out by his loving wife and daughters.

The brutal part of the film was that the dealership the documentary takes place is in such a poor area of Memphis that people are looking at cars for $800. Which makes his job as the slasher even harder.

I guess because I’m not good at selling - I’m always interested to get a peek behind the curtain. Much link the book the The Power of Persuasion he uses a lot of differnt little tricks to get people excited about the purchase of the car - though in the end if the people can’t afford it - they don’t buy.

Bottom line: If you want to see people at their most greedy and guible - and are prepared to acutally root for the guy selling the cars - this is a pretty good movie.