Economy Size Geek

Murderball (2005)

I’m not sure what I thought this film was going to be like. It’a bout quadriplegics who play a modified form of rugby. The sport was invented in Canada and originally called “Murderball”.

On a certain level I expected the normal sport team documentary. This film ended up being a lot more than that. Sure the sport was the thread that tied it all together, but you actually get to explore the lives of some of the players, a coach, and a guy who was recently hurt.

I’m very nearly at a loss for words about this film. I love documentaries (I watch a lot of them). And this one is truly a fine example of why you should love them too. It doesn’t have a political adgenda. It doesn’t want you to feel sorry for anyone’s plight. Instead it ends up telling an amazingly compelling narrative while still telling what actually happened.

I really feel like the filmmakers managed to capture some really amazing moments on film. Sometimes subtle and sometimes not so much - but all amazing.

This was the other documentary that came out about the time of March of the Penguins that was highlighted as a trend of documentaries stealing the thunder of more traditional films. It sounded cool - but I thought they were grouped together more because they were released together rather than that they were on the same level.

Don’t get me wrong - March of the Penguins was beautiful - and must have been incredibly difficult to film, but I would take Murderball over it any day. I guess you can just chalk it up to finding the trials and tribulations of a groups of people more facsinating and complicated than watching a process nature worked out a thousand years ago.

Bottom Line: See this film! It really has something for everyone and shows just how great a documentary can truly be. No really - it’s going to be better than most of the stuff you have to choose from last year.

It’s a good thing I’m on a diet or this is just the sort of thing that would force me to get on a plane -fly to vegas and take my shot at finishing one :)
Food Porn: 20×20 - Slashfood
Food Porn: 20×20

Following Brett’s Lead:
I am a BENEVLOENT CREATOR and have the test to prove it!

It turns out - I’m a Advoating Inventor (Approx ENFP)

Kind of funny since I actually took an official Myers Briggs test a couple of months ago. When I did I was an ENTJ/P (That last one was almost too close to tell).

Not far off on most things - if you want to join in the fun

goto Here. They even allow you to take it anonymously - no email required.

I wrote the author of the Rails integration for SCGI. He now has a project up at RubyForge. Hopefully we’ll be able to get SCGI and SwitchTower to play nice together.

RubyForge: SCGI: Project Info

Ok so I’ve been running Rails apps on my server for a few months. So far the experience hasn’t been that great. I’m currently running Apache2 & FastCGI. If you’ve been following the discussions on the net you already know this isn’t a very good combo.

Basically FastCGI under Apache2 is a memory leaking, zombie creating mofo. Which translates into kicking over apache on a semi regular basis - or you risk allocating all memory and hanging the box.

So far I’ve managed to keep that from happening (The up time on my server is currently 383 days). I have some more apps to roll out and I figure this is only going to make things worse.

Basically there are a couple of options:

Goto Apache 1.3 - this is a little annoying since I have to run Apache2 for svn already. I would prefer not to have to run two webservers. Plus I’m not sure that FastCGI under Apache 1.3 is any better.

Run LigHTTPD with FastCGI. Basically you proxy the requests thru. Again I would prefer not to run two web servers if possible. This is especially true since I don’t know squat about l lighty. This seems to be the preferred route for people who have to run Apache for other sites on the server. I get the feeling if SCGI doesn’t work out - I’m headed down this route.

Run the apps as CGI. This is possible. They end up being pretty slow. To be honest in some cases you might not notice so much, but I can tell you as soon as you switch to AJAX type stuff it is painfully obvious that you are running in CGI mode.

Run SCGI (More about SCGI & Rails can be found here: SCGI Ruby on Rails Runner). This is a replacement for FastCGI. It follows the same ideas but is built without all the cruft.

I ended up starting using SCGI because I was doing dev work under Windows and Web Brick wasn’t able to handle the load of my test app. SCGI was ridiculously easy to get setup to run under apache on windows. So I figured maybe I should give it a shot on the server.

This weekend I spent some time trying to get SCGI to integrate into switchtower.

I wrote a small wrapper to demonize the scgi start process so that switch tower will work.

It’s still not working exactly right. One problem is that if you call stop/restart and the scgi isn’t running - it raises an expecption and falls down. This also happens if you try to start the scgi and it is already running. This makes it a little akward to script.

I sent some comments along with my simple wrapper to Zed. I’m hoping he is able to help me to get this to work ( I really really don’t want to have to deal with lighty if I can help it - my web server is complicated enough as it is).

Anyone else using SCGI with Apache2 on Linux? I would love to hear from you about your experiences.

Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

They managed to Lo Pan in there (from Big Trouble in Little China) as well as David Cross as a blue man. Totally great!

Props to Curtis for finding this.

Ned Batchelder: Deleting code

The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)

I’m not sure what I thought about this film going in. I heard some good reviews - or at least that is was positivly recieved - inspite of the thin plot. I liked Steve Carrel on the Daily Show.

I was totally reminded of this episode of this American Life. There was a lot more cringe than comedy in this movie.

There were certainly some funny parts. The supporting cast of “helpful’ guy friends was especially funny to me since I feel like I got some of the same advice once I broke up with a girl friend after a very long relationship and tried to get back into the world of dating.

I didn’t realize until I took the DVD out of the player that I watched the “Unrated” version. I looked it up and they only added 15 minutes for the uncut version. This film was 133 minutes. For a comedy that is a freaking long movie. Near the end, I just wanted them to get to the happy ending. Which is a shame really, because if they had kept it to 90 minutes I think the film would have kept more momentum instead of starting and stopping so much.

And I will say that for some strange reason I really liked the very last scene in the film - even if it seems like an odd homage to both Hair and There’s Something About Mary.

Basically, I thought this was going to be a comedy. A stupid, crude, very funny comedy with a thin plot. Think American Pie or Road Trip - or even Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. Instead, they tried to have more of a message of “romance” in the film. I’m sure people liked the fact that it managed to elevate some of the dialogue above the purly purile and scatalogical - and even tried to deal with some ideas of insecurity and misconceptions about the opposite sex. That’s all well and good - but it didn’t end up being that funny. In a way, it was like there were two very different screen writers fighting over how stupid and crude or sweet and sentimental the movie was going to be. On top of that, there were scenes inserted to give you a better understanding of all the side characters in the story - which actually didn’t add very much to the story other than some cheap laughs.

Bottom Line: Unlike with sex, if you’ve waited this long - you aren’t missing anything by skipping over this film. But the This American Life episode is awesome :)

Fine - if you’re into linux you might find these funny - other wise move along

Index of /despair-linux

Fine - I love VIM - and didn’t know * - this is probably a little terse if you don’t already use vim…

Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing
If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes.