Friday, September 24, 2004
Fetching your blogspot blog to your local hard drive
In the name of writing something useful for once, here's a magical wget incantation, useful on *nix boxen or Windows machines with a port of wget (e.g., via Heiko or Cygwin), for fetching the entirety of your blogspot blog to your local hard drive:
wget -m -k -nH -p --domains=yourblog.blogspot.com http://yourblog.blogspot.com
Now you can poke your blog with grep and all the other neat-o tools on your local machine.
UPDATE 20 April 2006: Since Blogger now supports uploaded images, here's the new recipe (which will fetch photos as well; note that the following should all be on one line):
wget -m -k -nH -p -H -e robots=off
--domains=yourblog.blogspot.com,photos1.blogger.com
http://yourblog.blogspot.com
Note that Blogspot puts my photos on photos1.blogger.com, but you may need to substitute whatever host Blogspot puts your photos on.
K's for K
We already knew that the sons of Qo'noS backed Dean in the primaries, but now comes news (via Wonkette) that Kerry carries the day in an informal straw poll.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Quick movie notes
Saw a rash of movies last weekend with SL and AM...
- Collateral: Michael Mann brings us another slickly glittering, trashy thriller that nevertheless manages to surprise with bursts of lyricism. Also, great soundtrack. p.s. My brief experience with Los Angeles nurtured no love for that city in my heart, but Mann makes it look gorgeous, mysterious, compelling, even to this jaded expat New Yorker. Quite a trick.
- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: Pretty visuals. Snappy dialogue. Acceptably entertaining story, which faithfully replicates the plotting of an old-fashioned pulpy comic book. Absolutely featherweight, with not an ounce of pretention to be anything else, and therefore unobjectionable in itself; however, I suspect that the movie's success augurs the rather odious prospect that writer/director Kerry Conran will be given free rein to produce a string of even more comic-book-geeky, obsessively detailed, and thoroughly empty reconstructions of his fantasies. One movie of this sort is harmless fun. Ten movies of this sort, without a single idea or even a genuine emotion among their pretty little heads, would be a colossal waste of animators' talent and labor.
- Also caught the tail end of Seattle's first annual Independent South Asian Film Festival:
- Autumn's Final Country: a deeply affecting documentary, shot in bare-bones style, in the format of four 15-minute face-to-face interviews with South Asian women. The women directly address the camera and matter-of-factly tell their stories of displacement, violence, abduction, slavery, etc. in Kashmir.
- Above film was preceded by the short Battle for Blue Gold, a no-budget 20-minute short about how Coca-Cola's Indian subsidiary is illegally polluting and draining a local village's water supply. I found this film interesting but ultimately frustrating, as the budget limitations prevented the filmmaker from doing much research beyond interviewing the village women. The BBC and others have covered this issue in greater detail.
- Indian Cowboy: the festival's closer. Most festivals reserve the closing spot for a film that's expected to be a big draw, to send the festival out with a bang. So it's probably understandable that they chose a rather conventional romantic comedy feature that allegedly sends up Bollywood conventions. (All the hipsters know that Bollywood movies are fun! It was in Ghost World!) Unfortunately, Indian Cowboy sucks. It's probably one of the worst movies I've seen this year, which is saying rather a lot, since I watch a lot of movies. Boring, interminable, predictable plot, triter-than-trite dialogue, sloppy pacing, lackadaisical and confused character development. Gaaaagh.
- Above was preceded by Portrait of an American Hostess, a low-budget short that, although rather obvious at times, still had effective moments, plus a generally deft feel for character that was sorely lacking in the feature that followed it.
Labels: film, film-reviews
Sunday, September 19, 2004
Bookmarks cleaning
Bookmarks file again out of control...
- Fallacy of the Middle Ground.
- The Asian Equation: what it's like to be an ethnically Asian actor in America.
- Scandal involving sex, cash, and a business leader rocks Montana town:
Until he was arrested this year in his underwear in a motel room with a nearly naked young woman who was behind in her payments to his finance company, no businessman in this town was more respected than Richard Dasen.
As Patrick Nielsen-Hayden put it, it's a miniature Coen brothers movie. - Haskell already supports applicative translucent functors. Who knew? OTOH for real modular programming, I think you want generative functors as well.
- George Soros v. Reverend Moon showdown.
- On my to-watch list: This Ain't No Heartland.
- How to center text with CSS. (Surprisingly non-intuitive, believe it or not.)
- At last, I know how I want to dispose of my remains. Well, not really, but it's an interesting thought.
- Escaped tiger causes brief scare in NYC, July 31, 2004 (NY Post piles on).
- Thoughts on using wikis for teaching.
- India and Pakistan are discussing cooperation over a natural gas pipeline. In other news, pigs were reported flying over Kashmir. Note that the article indicates that several south and central Asian nations are considering reviving the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) pipeline project, which was long held to be a pipe dream (ha, ha) whose feasibility was exaggerated by paranoid anti-American conspiracy theorists.
- Microsoft patent throws shadow over anti-spam measures. Tell me again why it's a wise idea to create government-sponsored monopolies in young, fast-moving technological fields?
Windows worm vulnerabilities
Just to followup the news from the last Crypto-Gram that most Windows PCs get hacked within 20 minutes of connecting to the Internet, here's a story that my friend SL told me yesterday.
Our advisor recently bought our research group a brand-new ThinkPad, with Windows XP Professional, fresh from the factory, for SL (and others) to use on the interview circuit. SL plugged the laptop in, connected to the UW-CSE wireless network, and immediately went to the Windows Update web site to download the patches. After it finished downloading, he rebooted. Crash. The notebook was already infected with a worm.
He had to wipe the ThinkPad and restore its original configuration (fortunately IBM provides a fairly convenient way to do this), and install Service Pack 2 from a burned CD-ROM.
This is amazing. You read the studies, but you think: "Well, OK, it won't happen to me." But it does happen to you. The vast majority of Windows users worldwide who aren't served by an active IT support team --- which is to say, basically all home Windows users --- are probably infected already.
Microsoft Windows: Unsafe at any speed.
Labels: computing
