yanoblog

Annie and I saw Juno last week. It’s a great movie overall. There were two annoying parts (highlight text to read partial-spoilers: There was one use of “gay” as a pejorative and it was a bummer she didn’t just get the abortion (of course, then there wouldn’t have been a movie. that’s a longer discussion of how to script that in a non-anti-abortion way).).

Anyway, the opening credit sequence is amazing and the song is great. If the job of credits is to get you in the mood for the rest of the film and feeling pumped to be in the theater, these credits are a solid 5 out of 5.

Fresh Air also had a long interview with the writer and director.

Here’s the song: “All I Want” by Barry Louis Polisar.

Enjoy!

I didn’t find this elsewhere, so I’ll give you my kludgey solution to a problem created by Leopard.

Leopard now helpfully launches an ssh-agent for you and will keep your passphrases in the keychain.

That’s all well and good, but the SSH_AUTH_SOCK changes with every boot (as near as I can tell).

AFAICT, there’s no easy way to get the SSH_AUTH_SOCK value which means you can’t easily set it in crontab which means cronjobs that you want to have use passphrase-protected ssh keys won’t work.

Here’s my solution.

SSH_SETUP='export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=`find /tmp -follow -user $LOGNAME -regex ".*/launch-.*/Listeners"`'

then, where you might’ve had a crontab line like:

1,16,31,46 * * * *  /Users/yanowitz/bin/backup_igtd.rb
@daily /usr/bin/rsync -aqz --delete --rsh="ssh -i /Users/yanowitz/.ssh/id_dsa_rsync" /Users/yanowitz/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library mini.local:/Volumes/raid

you instead write:

1,16,31,46 * * * * eval $SSH_SETUP; /Users/yanowitz/bin/backup_igtd.rb
@daily eval $SSH_SETUP; /usr/bin/rsync -aqz --delete --rsh="ssh -i /Users/yanowitz/.ssh/id_dsa_rsync" /Users/yanowitz/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library mini.local:/Volumes/raid

Yeah, that sucks, I know. But it’s better than nothing.

Please let me know what obvious and superior solution I am missing.

(And yes, I’m too lazy to write launchd plist scripts. I’m sticking with cron. It would also be more of a hassle to do this solution, because you’d be invoking /bin/sh to do the rest of the work).

I don’t even have to evaluate every slick hack from 2007 to know this is the greatest one of the year.

Holy. Shit.

Go to his website to read more, download the software, and see more Wiimote hacks.

And you don’t even have to buy a Wii, since Wiimotes are available separately.

If I had any spare time, I would so be playing with this.

Damn.

So, it’s a little embarrassing to suggest a TV show that’s well into its second season, but I figured that we’re about to have tons of reruns on TV, so if you are looking for a good show to check out, this may be of use. If the producers continue to refuse to give the writers a decent contract we’ll be seeing reruns and non emoting pets for a lot longer.

Ugly Betty is an hour-long show on ABC adapted from a Colombian telenovela.

The show has some great acting but what makes the show more than just a guilty pleasure is its politics, in particular, its treatment of immigration and gay rights. The show isn’t didactic at all. But for a story set in the world of a fashion magazine, they do a great job weaving the issues real people face into the plot. In the second season they even show two men talking about their relationship (although I don’t think we ever see them kiss).

You can rent the first season as well catch up on the last few episode on ABC’s website. Or, you can just download the thing. But I don’t approve of that last option at all.

My friend, Bijan blogs (“tumblrs”) constantly. One of the things he likes to do is post a song every so often.

Ever the copycat, I’ve decided to do the same thing.

So, this (week’s? month’s?) song is “The Green Fields of France” as performed by the Dropkick Murphys. These are also the guys that sing “I’m shipping up to Boston,” which was featured in the movie The Departed (it too is amazing).

But for a punk band, their arrangement of The Green Fields of France is amazing. Once again, punk demonstrates that it has many strands, some of them quite mighty.

So, enjoy the song.

And if you want to read more about its origins, go to its Wikipedia entry.

Our three-year old seems to acquire toys at ferocious rate (in these days of divorced grandparents, there’s just a lot of people to be giving gifts. Not that we would ever buy extra toys for her).

We’ve been having good success with keeping things in check and keeping our home from becoming overrun by her… stuff.

Most of her playing occurs in our family room area. We have bookshelves in there and we’ve devoted the bottom shelves to her toys. This has the side benefit of protecting our books.

Toys in boxes (puzzles, some blocks, etc.) just go straight onto the shelf. Loose toys have containers that go on the shelves. She has the strength to move any box on and off a shelf.

When new toys come in the house, we just remove toys that have fallen out of favor. She’s getting to be old enough where we can ask her to make that decision, but so far she hasn’t objected to our choices.

If it can’t fit on a shelf, it doesn’t stay in the family area. The result: toy clutter is capped but she has a wide variety of “stuff” with which to play.

At the moment, we’re saving toys removed from circulation for when Izzy is older, but after that they’ll probably go to the Amherst Survival Center.

Our next step is to enforce more actively the rule, “clean up toy A before playing with toy B.” Parent Hacks has a good approach to this.

This is a fantastic example of using graphics to share information.

(I have to display it smaller to fit in my lameo blog. Try reading the article.)

Wow. Showing the full length of the dive to scale with the size of the whale is unreal. It’s also amazing that their mouths can hold more than their bodyweight in water. And all they get is 20 pounds of krill per bite that size.

From this article.

I just have one correction today. But it may win the award for most mistakes in a single article. (Maybe that’s not the right metric – it should probably be mistakes-per-column-inch.) Witness:

An article in the Arts & Leisure section last Sunday about the No Music Day campaign in Britain included several incorrect references to Muzak, the company that sells prerecorded background music. Muzak is not distributed in the United Kingdom, and lobbying groups there are not protesting the company; they are against piped music. Many musicians there oppose piped music; all practicing musicians do not “tend to despise Muzak.” The pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim joined in the protests last year, but he did not angrily denounce Muzak. A group leading the campaign, Pipedown International, is against all forms of background music; it has not been campaigning against Muzak for 15 years. And a bill currently in Parliament and promoted by Pipedown seeks to ban piped music; it does not call for banning Muzak in hospitals. (Go to Article)

Sadly, the article has been updated to reflect the corrections, which I had thought they didn’t do.

Enjoy!

There are no spoilers in this review. Although I’d probably be doing you a favor if there were.

It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. A new Coen Brothers movie is out. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 95%. My brother-in-law is in town. Seems like the perfect setup to go out to a “late” movie (9:45pm. Oy, I can’t believe I now consider that late) and have a good time.

Sure it’s supposed to have scenes of graphic torture, blah blah blah. (There’s some violence, but after some gruesomeness at the beginning, it was about as bad as episode of CSI).

The first two-thirds of this movie is great. Fantastic. Coen brothers at their best.

Then they decide to tell the audience to go screw. I believe the film makers enter into a social contract with the audience based on the kind of story they start to tell. The Coen brothers decided two-thirds of the way through to change everything. It felt like they just hated the audience. At least with Spiderman 3, Sam Raimi didn’t hate us – it just seemed like he was sick of making Spiderman movies.

I have not read the book. Perhaps they were being slavishly faithful to the book. But I doubt it. When making a movie, there’s a bazillion choices they can make and it seems like all of them were made to set the audience up for being disappointed.

I say this as a Coen Brothers fan. I even liked The Hudsucker Proxy. But Do Not see this movie. Or at least wait to rent it.

I would’ve been better off spending the time rewatching a movie I know that I like.

UPDATED (2007-12-13) Here’s a funnier, better version of my rant. I’d like to think I just was too angry when I wrote this post, but I think the person who wrote this may just be funnier than me. Peter – thanks for providing this. Your intellectual honesty is a great as your penchant for abuse (judging by your comments below).