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A non-review of Avatar

It's not very often that I see a movie that moves me enough to write something about it. Sure, a couple years back, I put together a list of some of my favorite comedies, but those were capsule summaries written about movies that were, in general, quite a few years old.

Yesterday, however, I saw Avatar, and was, for the first time since the 1977 release of Star Wars (I refuse to call it 'Episode IV'), absolutely amazed by a film. As such, I felt moved to write a little bit about Avatar.

This is not a review, and it (hopefully) doesn't contain any spoilers. Instead, I've focused on my reactions to Avatar, some comparisons to that original Star Wars movie, and what I think it means for movie making going forward.

First off, after sleeping on it, I definitely stand by the three-word (five, counting the parenthetical) review that I tweeted yesterday:

Go see it (in 3D)

Go see it because it's entertaining. Go see it because it represents the state-of-the-art in movie visual effects. Go see it if you're a fan of cinema in general, and want to see where filmmaking may be headed in the future. But really, just go see it—Avatar is well worth the cost of admission, regardless of the reasons.

Does that mean it's a perfect movie? No, in fact far from it—the story, in particular, is too predictable and has been seen many times before. Then again, Star Wars wasn't necessarily a completely original story, either. Another recent favorite of mine, Star Trek, was itself very similar to Star Wars (this funny video demonstrates just how similar). In short, I don't necessarily mind a predictable story if it's presented well and the rest of the movie works with the story.
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One way to password protect a WordPress site

I was helping a friend set up a site for their family, and they wanted it to be password protected. I protect our family site using Apache's basic access protection (httpauth), and it works well enough, so that's how I set up his site as well.

However, we then had nothing but trouble with the Flash-based image uploader in WordPress, which is a tool I don't personally use. After some digging, I discovered that the Flash-based image uploader simply won't work with httpauth.

Because the objective was to keep out unwanted visitors, I found a workaround -- it's not perfect security, but it seems to do the job well, and allows the Flash-based image uploader to work. I disabled the httpauth access restriction, then installed two plug-ins:

  • Restricted Site Access: This plug-in prevents anyone from seeing the site without first logging in. We then created one generic username/password for my friend to give out to all his relatives (which is what we would have done using httpauth, too).
  • Peter's Login Redirect: This sends users to the home page of the site after login, instead of to their control panel. I'm not sure why, but after logging in, our generic user was going to their control panel. This plug-in solved that problem.

The end result is a site that's protected from casual visitors, as well as robots (though we've also got a robots.txt file set up, just in case). It'd be nicer if WordPress would just fix the httpauth issues, but it seems they're not interested in doing that.



GPS, daylight savings time, and cars

With this morning's semi-annual changing of the clock for Daylight Savings Time (DST), I'm once again left to ponder...why, in this era of GPS-equipped automobiles, do I have to manually set the clock in my car? We had, until very recently (we sold one), three cars with factory GPS units. Of those three, only one uses the GPS signal to set the car's clock. In the other two vehicles, we have to manually adjust the clock, even though an extremely accurate time and date signal is one of the features of the GPS satellites.

So my car knows the date, and it knows the correct time...so why can't it figure out that DST has started or ended?

Things have definitely improved over the last 30 years, though--today, we had only a handful of clocks to change. In addition to one of the cars, there were a couple of televisions (another device that seems to me should be capable of changing its own clock), our microwave, and a few assorted clock radios and wall clocks. But most of the clocks we own synchronize automatically with a time signal, so they were correct when I woke up this morning. The computers, of course, handle the change seamlessly. (The fact that I stopped wearing a wrist watch a few years ago also helps; I have ten or so sitting in a drawer somewhere, but I no longer bother to set them.)

I'm not sure I'll live long enough to see a DST start/stop day where I don't need to manually set a clock...but I'm hoping I do!



Indoor flying fun

For quite a while, I've wanted an electric radio controlled (R/C) helicopter--one of the small ones you can fly around inside the house. Over the last couple years, I've tried cheap versions (complete waste of money; they fly like crud), and the expensive versions seemed too, well, expensive for what would be nothing more than a silly time waster.

Then, just before Christmas, E-Flite released the new Blade mCX, a smaller, lighter, and easier-to-fly version of their Blade CX2. The CX2 was one of the expensive models I'd passed on earlier. The mCX, however, comes in $50 cheaper than the CX2, and came close enough to my self-imposed $100 limit that I bought myself one for Christmas :). (Click the image at left [and any image in this writeup] for a larger view.)

After only a few minutes with the mCX, I was hooked. This machine is unlike any other R/C helicopter I've ever tried to fly. Within a couple minutes of my first power-up, I had it hovering in place, and could maneuver it relatively well. Even for me, a complete novice to R/C flying, this machine is incredibly easy to fly. R/C purists probably dislike it, though--relying on dual counter-rotating rotor blades and a gyro, the mCX isn't a "real" R/C helicopter in any sense. But for my desires, it's (nearly) perfect.

The mCX weighs one ounce (with battery), and has a rotor span of just 7.5 inches. Everything about this machine is tiny, including the motors (the round items in the image at left) and the battery (visible at the bottom of the image; it's got a red dot on it). The front of the machine is the brains, though--a circuit board there holds the gyro, motor control units, fully proportional servos, and radio receiver. Amazing that it all weighs but an ounce.

Combine that with very sensitive flight controls, and you can fly the mCX almost anywhere--I've flown it above the garage's workbench, for instance. The throttle is amazingly precise, making it easy to fly at whatever altitude you desire. As a brief example, here's a video of me flying around in the den, trying to keep the mCX within view of the fixed video camera:

Read on for more about this amazing little machine...
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Deals to be found at the Apple refurb store…

If you know me at all, you know how I feel about glossy screens, especially on laptops. As nice as the new MacBook and MacBook Pros are (and they are very nice, based on some early hands-on time with the new MacBook at the local store), the glossy screens are a deal breaker for me. I tried to use a MacBook for six months or so, but in the end, the glossy screen was too much for me, so I went up to the MacBook Pro and its nice matte display.

With the lack of a matte option on the new MacBook Pro line, I won't be buying another Mac laptop (of the 15" variety) until Apple comes out with some form of non-glossy screen--whether that's a true matte screen, or just an effective anti-glare coating, I don't really care. But until there's a solution, I'm going to use what I have for as long as I possibly can.

My current machine is a two-year-old 15" 2.33GHz MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM--and it's a very nice machine. However, it's already two years old, and I want to get at least five more years out of my matte screened laptop...so I figured I'd go look on eBay for used last-gen 2.6GHz MacBook Pros--the fastest 15" machine with a matte screen available, basically.

On my way to eBay, though, I got sidetracked by the Special Deals section of the Apple Store--otherwise known as the Refurb Store.
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Music in the new iPod nano ad…

Because I couldn't find this anywhere else on the net, here it is ... the music in the new iPod nano ad is a song called Bruises by Chairlift from an album called Does You Inspire You. I found this by doing a lyric search on the first line ("I tried to do handstands for you..."), which led me to this blog post [dead link removed] -- not directly about the iPod nano ad, but it does mention the song and the lyrics.

iTunes store link

The new nano may just get me to upgrade my original "tall" nano, which is one of my favorite iPods ... but the new one has some really nice sounding features; I'm going to try to go see one in person tomorrow.



Macs, clones, and license agreements

As you may know by now, a company known as Psystar has announced they're selling Mac "clones" for $549, complete with Leopard pre-installed. From a legal perspective, these machines clearly violate Apple's OS X 10.5 end user license agreement (EULA). If you're so inclined, you can find a full copy of all of Apple's EULAs on this page--the 10.5 EULA is a 2.1MB download. The relevant portion of the EULA is section two, part A:

This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time. You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so.

Seems pretty black and white, doesn't it? Use OS X in this manner, and you're violating the EULA. So how can a company like Psystar hope to stay in business, given this legal transgression that's key to their business model? Wired offers up some legal opinions on how they may be able to survive--basically, violating an EULA isn't in nearly the same class of legal violation as is violating copyright or patent law. A breach of contract suit won't prevent Psystar from selling their clones, and probably wouldn't even serve as a financial deterrent: as one attorney notes in the Wired article, "the maximum damage Apple would be able to claim is the price of Leopard -- actually, the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) price of Leopard, which might be a few dollars." Another attorney comments that EULAs are problematic in court, as they've vague by nature. He says, "Companies make them as broad as possible but there's no way to basically enforce them. It's a scare tactic, a way to say, hey, we're reserving all these rights."

The Wired article is a good read, and notes that Apple's best defense may be in technology, not the courts--future system updates may render cloned systems unusable, which will certainly cut down on Psystar's ability to attract and retain customers. So that's what the experts think. From where I sit, over in the "just barely passed the required business law class" section of the room, here's my take on why I don't think it'd be wise of Apple to bring their EULA into the court system.
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Now speaking WordPress 2.5

After a mostly-painless upgrade, we're now running WordPress 2.5. About the only hiccup is that the Addicted to Live Search plug-in (which I am addicted to) doesn't seem to work right with anything other than the default permalink style. (Permalinks are the URLs for individual stories.)

The default permalink style is ugly and doesn't necessarily work well with search engines, but I love the search feature so much I'm using them for now...hopefully the plug-in will be patched in the near future.



A Windows Vista hint…

Clearly this one doesn't belong on Mac OS X Hints, but I wanted to have it documented somewhere. There's usually a Windows box of some sort in my home, for testing and game playing. The testing role for my physical Windows box has pretty much been replaced by VMware Fusion, so it's really now a game playing machine.

As such, I upgraded it recently (well, rebuilt it from scratch is a better summary) with a new CPU and video card. I also wanted to put Vista on it, for one reason only: to run Crysis under DirectX 10, which only works in Vista. My Vista DVD is an upgrade installation, which must be installed from within Windows XP. Windows XP, when it came out, didn't support SATA drives, so for a fresh install of XP (it was a new install on my newly-built machine), you must set the SATA mode in the machine's BIOS to IDE. I did that, installed XP, and upgraded to Vista.

Vista includes AHCI support, so my SATA drives can be used in native SATA mode. However, if you just switch your BIOS to ACHI mode, and you were using XP in IDE mode, then your box will fail to boot -- that's because the AHCI drivers are not installed by default in Vista if you start with XP in IDE mode. So how do you switch Vista from IDE to ACHI mode?
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New WordPress attack floating around…

I use a shell script to back up my web sites each day -- it exports and downloads a SQL file of the database contents, as well as rsync's the actual HTML files. When I was checking the log file for last night's downloads, I noticed something very strange in the output:

  receiving file list ... done
  ./
  html/wp-content/
  html/wp-content/1/
  html/wp-content/1/3c-texas-holdem-poker.html
  html/wp-content/1/american-poker.html
  html/wp-content/1/bonus-code-party-poker.html
  html/wp-content/1/casino-poker-gratis.html
  html/wp-content/1/come-giocare-a-poker.html
  html/wp-content/1/come-giocare-poker.html
  ....
  ....

In total, there were 71 files in the newly-created 1 folder: 70 .html files, and one g.js file. There was also a new oddly-named backup folder, and the index.php file in wp-content (which is just a blank placeholder) had been replaced with basically the same file but with an added line break on the first line.

I googled on some of the .html filenames, and found a number of WordPress sites with the same issue (the "1" folder), but nobody who was talking about the cause of the problem. So I posted about it to the WordPress forums, where someone pointed me to this page, which contains at least a little more background on the issue. I'm also posting some of the html filenames here, in case others are searching for more information on the attack.

As of now, I don't know how they got in (though I suspect via one of the plug-ins), but I don't think it's through any sort of direct site access: none of the site's other files and folders were changed, nor were any posts or comments created. It also doesn't seem to be an automated attack, as the 1 folder hasn't returned after I manually removed it yesterday. But if you run WordPress, keep an eye on your wp-content folder for anything other than what should be there: index.php, plugins, and themes by default. If/when I find out more about this, I'll post a follow-up.