Author Archives: Ron Bieber

Movies: House Of Wax

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Yesterday Jonna, Kelsi and I went to see House of Wax, the latest horror movie out in the theaters.

Now, normally I’m the type of person that gets really irritated with movies. If there is no plot, or the movie is just plain stupid, I will walk out of the theater pretty annoyed. Horror movies are one of the genres that I will normally rent, because I just can’t see spending the money to be irritated.

However, yesterday we were looking for something to do and this was the only movie that looked remotely interesting to all three of us, so we went.

Believe it or not, I really liked it. Sure there were extremely slow parts, and sure it was a full on slasher movie, but I walked out satisfied with what I got.

The movie revolves around six kids on their way to a football game. They stop for the night in the woods to camp out. When they wake up the next morning one of the cars has the fan belt cut. Two of the people stay behind to get a ride to the nearest town to pick up a fan belt while the rest of the people go off to try and get to the football game.

Unfortunately, the next town over is relatively abandoned. It winds up that there are a couple of psycho brothers in the town that have systematically killed everyone in the town and coated them with wax and set them up as a huge town sized wax museum. As visitors show up, they are added to the collection.

Now, I know this sounds stupid, but it was actually a pretty entertaining movie to watch. You can think of it as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum — and if you approach it this way you’ll have a lot more fun watching it. I actually walked out of there satisfied that I had seen a decent horror movie.

If you like horror movies, you’ll like this one once it gets going. Be prepared for a really slow start though. For a bit, the movie is painfully slow to watch. Once it heats up though, it’s a lot of fun.

Star Wars and Philosophy

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Star Wars And Philosophy: More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine (Popular Culture and Philosophy)As I was browsing through Borders on Saturday I ran across a book called Star Wars And Philosophy: More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine. This book attempts to explain philosophy using the Star Wars movies as a metaphor.

I used to read a lot on philosophy – mostly Zen and Taoism. At one point in time, Kelsi bought me a book called The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer which I really enjoyed. I have also read The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet, which attempts to explain eastern philosophy through the Winnie the Pooh characters.

From the titles, one would think that I am just a moron that cannot relate to deep thoughts unless it is illustrated by some childhood cartoon character. However, these books are not for 6 year olds. They really go into quite a bit of depth, while making the concepts more accessible by relating them to characters and situations that are known by everyone. They take what usually is extremely dry reading and make it accessible.

This latest book is extremely interesting, with essays ranging from the discussion as to whether Yoda is a Zen Master or a great warrior, to a discussion over whether cloning is morally wrong, to the discussion of free will vs. predestination.

A sampling of the chapters include:

  • “You Cannot Escape Your Destiny” (Or Can You?): Freedom and Predestination in the Skywalker Family
  • Stoicism – Yoda, the Emperor, and the Force
  • Moral Abiguity in a Black and White Universe
  • The Far East of Star Wars
  • The Aspring Jedi’s Handbook of Virtue
  • Star Wars and the Problem of Evil
  • Send in the Clones: The Ethics of Future Wars
  • Star Wars and the Hegelian Struggle for Recognition
  • By Any Means Necessary: Tyranny, Democracy, Republic, and Empire

This book is a pretty interesting read. The book also makes you realize just how much thought went into the stories as you see the characters and concepts such as “The Force” related to eastern philosophy and ideas. If you see it at the store (or Amazon) and have a couple of days to kill, pick it up.

Web Designer’s Reference – An Integrated Approach to Web Design with XHTML and CSS

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Web Designer's Reference : An Integrated Approach to Web Design with XHTML and CSS I recently picked up Web Designer’s Reference : An Integrated Approach to Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Craig Grannell after seeing a reference to it on Slashdot. I have realized since starting to work with WordPress that I am a little behind on things like CSS and XHTML and had to get up to date, since most of the themes and styles looked like greek to me and I had a hard time modifying them – because I didn’t know what they meant.

The book is really well written. It takes you through not only the mechanics of CSS but takes you through step by step examples that you can walk through to get some hands on experience, something I really need when learning something new.

Now that I know a little more about CSS, I don’t think I’ll ever look at web page design the same way again. I’m one of those people whose markup abilities were kind of stuck in the 90’s because of the lack of consistent CSS support across browsers when CSS was first coming out. I figured if it didn’t work consistently everywhere, I might as well wait until it does. It just so happened I waited for what now seems like forever. I had no idea that CSS had gotten so powerful.

Some of the areas Craig covers in his book include:

  1. An Introduction to Web Design
  2. Web Page Essentials
  3. Working with Text
  4. Working with Images
  5. Creating Navigation
  6. Introduction to Layout
  7. Tables: How Nature (and the W3C) Intended
  8. Layouts with CSS
  9. Working with Frames
  10. Getting User Feedback (I found some really interesting stuff in here)
  11. Adding Multimedia
  12. Testing, Tweaking and Uploading

Craig also includes an XHTML reference, a web color reference, an entities reference, and a CSS reference towards the end of the book.

From an XHTML perspective, Craig covers a lot of the features related to accessibility, which wound up really interesting to me as well. I learned a lot from these sections.

If you are like me, and blew off even looking at CSS until now, this is definitely the book for you. It’s an easy read for those of us who haven’t been paying attention to this aspect of software development and includes great examples to walk you through the power of decoupling display from your mark up.

I now have enough detail to know where I need to head next and some practical experience with the examples to understand the basic concepts. Sometimes that’s all you need.

Building Subversion 1.2 on Solaris 9

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I’ve just spent a couple of days trying to get Subversion to build on a Solaris 9 environment. For some reason, it wasn’t as easy as it has been in the past and I’ve had a boat load of trouble, so I wanted to document the final solution I came to.

The Source Control System

We are running Solaris 9 and access the Subversion repository via HTTP/HTTPS through Apache. This means that I have to compile in SSL support for the client, in addition to mod_svn_dav support for the Apache Server. We also use the mod_svn_authz module for access control to the repository.

Software installed On The System

The following software is installed on the system:

Description of the Problem

The normal process I use for building these components is the following:

  1. Download the source tarball
  2. Untar the contents of the tarball to the a /tmp/subversion directory
  3. Configure the software with the following commands: 
    ./configure --with-ssl --with-berkeley-db=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB4.2 
--with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs
make
  4. Build the software with the make command

The software builds until it hits the neon module, after which I would receive pages of the following errors:

make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/subversion-1.2.0/neon'
cd src && make
make[2]: Entering directory `/tmp/subversion-1.2.0/neon/src'
/bin/bash ../libtool --quiet --mode=link gcc -rpath /usr/local/lib
-version-info 24:7:0
-o libneon.la ne_request.lo ne_session.lo ne_basic.lo ne_string.lo ne_uri.lo
ne_dates.lo ne_alloc.lo ne_md5.lo ne_utils.lo ne_socket.lo ne_auth.lo
ne_cookies.lo ne_redirect.lo ne_compress.lo ne_207.lo ne_xml.lo
ne_props.lo ne_locks.lo ne_acl.lo
ne_openssl.lo -lssl -lcrypto -lnsl -lsocket
-lz /tmp/subversion-1.2.0/apr-util/xml/expat/lib/libexpat.la
Text relocation remains referenced
against symbol offset in file
0xd44 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
0xd48 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
0xd4c /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
0xd50 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
0xd54 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
0xd58 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
0xd5c /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
0xd60 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
0xd64 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)
0xd68 /usr/local/ssl/lib/libssl.a(t1_enc.o)

When I saw the errors streaming across the screen, I remembered that I had gotten them before. To fix them previously, I changed into the neon directory and typed the following:

./configure --with-ssl --disable-shared

This had previously fixed the problem (I have no idea why). This time it didn’t and after rebuilding I had the same results.

Finally Getting Things To Build

On a fluke, I decided to run the autogen.sh shell script file in the neon directory and reconfigure neon, enabling shared libraries. Then I went back up to the root of the tree and built again. This time the software built cleanly and all tests ran successfully.

Installing The Software

Since I finally had a clean build and all tests had ran successfully, I decided to go ahead and install it. Upon installing it I received errors that linking failed on the shared libraries being installed and I had to relink everything. This pretty much rendered my source control unuseable until I could figure out why linking failed. Just to be clear, this was not on the production repository box, but on another Solaris machine.

I went through my /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib directory and removed every libsvn* shared library, all apr and apr-util shared libraries and all neon libraries that were present on the system. Once this completed, I was able to install the software successfully.

One of the symptoms of old libraries in the path or linking errors is the ‘undefined symbol’ error some have reported on the mailing list when upgrading. When you run into an error like this, you might want to try finding and removing all of these libraries as stated above, as this is an error I was getting as well. Removing the old directories and running make install fixed the problem.

Conclusion

This install was pretty painful. I attribute most of the pain to the fact that I was doing most of this work between meetings, so the constant start / stop took a toll on entering “flow state” to really think about the problem. As I was experiencing these problems, I couldn’t find any really good write ups on installation of the Subversion software on Solaris, so I figured I’d throw this together in the event that someone else was experiencing this level of frustration. Plus, I figure it will help me next time I need to do this to have an actual documented process to follow.

A summary of what I did follows, for those who don’t want to wade through this whole post again:

  1. After exploding the tarball, change to the neon directory and run autogen.sh
  2. Run the configure script with your desired options
  3. Build the software
  4. Run make check and ensure all of your tests pass
  5. Take the server down
  6. Back up your current installation
  7. Remove your old Subversion, apr, and neon libraries from the installed version
  8. Install the software
  9. Bring the server up
  10. Test

On the bright side, I also upgraded a SuSE 9.1 box to the new software. This took about five minutes after I found these RPM packages for SuSE 9.1.

 

Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith

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Star Wars - Episode III, Revenge of the SithWe went to see Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith yesterday afternoon and I have to agree with many of the reviews out there – this is the best Star Wars movie to date. George Lucas has definitely ended with a masterpiece.

The movie is 2 hours and 20 minutes long, but you are so involved you don’t notice it. This is the part of the story you have always wanted to see. What happened to the Jedi’s? How did the emperor come into power? How did he turn Anakin to the dark side? The answers to all of these questions are finally here.

Earlier in the week I had read Jason Kottke’s review of the movie. One of the things he mentioned was that as he walked out of the movie he felt sadness for Darth Vader — that Lucas had made him into a sympathetic character rather than the evil character you find in the first three movies. I wondered how that could be, but after seeing the movie I understood. It really is a tragic story.

I spent a lot of time once we left the theater thinking about this movie. What made it so good? Was it really that good of a story, or is it really that we’ve waited 28 years for the answers to many of the questions that the movie finally answers? Is it the story, or is it the closure we all get when we finally have the full background behind the first trilogy?

I think the answer is both. The story is great, but as I talked to the boys about it yesterday, one of the phrases that kept creeping into my mind was that the “circle was finally closed”. We finally have all of the answers about Darth Vader, Luke and Leia, and the Jedi Council. We finally know everything about the mythological world that Lucas introduced to us in 1977.

The story is complete and we finally, after 28 years, have closure.

Now, while the movie absolutely impressed me, the people around me did not. At a movie of this magnitude, I am still surprised at how rude people can be.

Here’s some advice for those going to the movies in the future:

  • When the previews start, SHUT UP. There are people who like watching them, no matter how irrelevant they are to you.
  • Stop talking when the MOVIE starts. We paid to watch the movie, not listen to you.
  • Figure out which order everyone is going to sit in before the lights go down. Better yet, figure it out before you sit down. Even better, figure it out in the car before you attend the show. It shouldn’t take three attempts to get everyone in the “right spot”. A seat is a seat and all you are doing is bothering the people around you.
  • If your chair squeaks, do not feel you have to demonstrate it to the people around you over and over again. This should be clue to you to sit still.
  • If you are really, really tired and feel you might fall asleep and you have a history of Darth Vader like snoring (your spouse should be able to clue you in on this), wait until you are more refreshed before you attend the film. We don’t want to hear you.

Aside from all of this, this really was the best movie I have seen in a long time. I highly recommend it and cannot wait until it comes out on DVD so that I can watch it again.

Related Articles:

Some links on Movie Etiquette:

Abandoned Baby Rabbits

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Baby Rabbits
Abandoned Baby Rabbits

Originally uploaded by rbieber.

A mother rabbit left her babies in the yard on Wednesday or Thursday night. Apparently there were about seven of them, but they scattered as Jonna and the kids went out to do yard work this morning.

I, of course, made them take pictures of the rabbits they were able to round up before they set them free in out in the brush in the back yard (per the advice of Animal Control). Now, enough of that. We’re off to Revenge of the Sith.

WordPress 1.5.1.1 update available

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An update is available to WordPress 1.5.1. The text from the release page follows:

In our effort to optimize we made two mistakes in 1.5.1, one related to feeds and one related to trackbacks and pingbacks. We’ve updated the download with 1.5.1.1 which corrects these bugs and a few others.

If you are having trouble with RSS feeds or track/pingbacks, this update is for you.

If you’ve made changes to the existing codebase for your site, the following files were effected, so back them up so you have access to your changes.

wordpress/wp-admin/post.php
wordpress/wp-admin/quicktags.js
wordpress/wp-blog-header.php
wordpress/wp-comments-post.php
wordpress/wp-includes/functions-post.php
wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php
wordpress/wp-includes/pluggable-functions.php
wordpress/wp-includes/template-functions-category.php
wordpress/wp-includes/template-functions-links.php
wordpress/wp-includes/template-functions-post.php
wordpress/wp-includes/version.php
wordpress/wp-includes/wp-db.php
wordpress/xmlrpc.php

Those who use the AuthImage plugin will want to back up wp-comments-post.php.

Google Does it Again with Google Mail

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I received an invitation to the Beta of Google Mail from Tom the Architect a few weeks ago and finally over the last couple of days decided to activate my account. I really like the service. As a matter of fact, I like it so much I’ve configured my main account to forward all mail over to it and it has become my primary mail application, even though I tend to have control issues around things having to run in my house.

The user interface is great. Of course the first thing you will want to do is create folders in which to organize your mail. Google Mail doesn’t have them. What it uses instead are what they call labels. Labels are essentially the same things as “tags” that you find on sites like Flickr and del.icio.us. While I like the idea of tagging on email, and think its a killer feature, I still miss being able to move things out of the way and just look at stuff that is in my inbox that is not categorized. Since I subscribe to a number of email lists for software like Subversion and CruiseControl, my inbox tends to get a little cluttered. While I can automatically filter email to assign labels based on who its from, who it’s to, and subject content, and can display only those emails with a given tag, I still cannot find a way to view email that has no tag.

The user interface is based almost entirely on Ajax technology, which gives the site a very “thick client” feel, without all of the weight. Your inbox even automatically refreshes every now and again, which at first is quite surprising, and really convenient.

And of course, you get full Google search capabilities for your whole inbox. Enough said.

Google has definitely set the standard for web mail applications with the Beta of Google Mail. I’m extremely impressed. Each time they come up with something, my life is a little more dependent on them. First there was web search, then news groups, then news aggregation, THEN maps and now email.

I can’t wait to see whats next.

Intervention on A & E

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Just when you thought they would be out of ideas for reality TV, the folks at A&E come up with a show like Intervention, which airs Sunday nights at 9pm Central time.

This show is as addicting as the gambling and drugs its participants are hooked on. Once you start, you can’t stop watching it.

The premise of the show is that the participants volunteer to do a documentary on addiction and the cameras follow them around as they talk about their behavior. The have no idea that the whole point is to get them into a room with their loved ones and push them into rehab.

The most disturbing episode thus far was episode 2, about a 31 year old man named Gabe who was a compulsive gambler. His view on life was that it was his parents “obligation” to pay his debts. These parents mortgaged their house to help pay his $500,000 gambling debts and the guy still wasn’t satisfied. The guy threw nothing short of temper tantrums every time he didn’t get his way. It was the most painful example of someone who refuses to take responsibility for his own actions that I had ever seen. You have to keep an eye out for reruns of this episode. It’s amazingly disturbing.

The only episode I’ve missed so far is the one on video game addiction. I’m keeping my eye out for that one.

Oh, big news. I’ve been asked to participate in a show documentary about blogging. I’ll let you know how that goes …