Checksum Arcanius

Movies that gain something with subsequent viewings are a rare commodity in this world. Movies that you like the first time, AND gain something with subsequent viewings are rarer still.

Indeed, Primer is a very rare movie. From first time producer, writer, director, actor, editor, and promoter Shane Carruth comes this complex and engaging cerebral sci-fi idea thriller. What Carruth lacks in budget (the entire movie was made for $7,000, “About the price of a used car”) he more than makes up for with a stellar screenplay that puts his few resources to the best use. Instead of leaning on hollow effects that look more like cheese-whiz than science, the props are grungy boxes and hacked-together electronics – how prototypes are in real life. Along with the grainy look of super 16mm film blown up to 35mm, decisions like this lend an authentic feel to the film that helps ground the viewer as they embark on a journey that will have but a few reference points thereafter.

The first time through, I lost my grounding about half the way through. This time, I faired much better, not getting significantly lost until later in the film. Future viewings, I hope, will continue to clarify more what is going on.

This movie also makes for excellent discussion afterwards, from the physics to the ethics and the paradoxes in between. Highly recommended – the movie to see this year, if it is opening near you. Check out trailers and schedules at primermovie.com

John Stossel is an anchor of ABC’s 20/20. His book Give Me A Break is the best introduction that I know of to the Libertarian perspective. If you’ve ever heard Stossel report, you should immediately hear his voice come through as you start reading this book. He gets down to business pretty quickly, but he doesn’t get bogged down in it, so you will always be wanting to read more.

While it is not as securely grounded in in-depth and tested research like the Friedmans’ Free To Choose, it is much more engaging reading, and comes highly recommended from yours truly. I have even been known to call it “The Best Book Ever,” although I admit that may be a bit of hyberbole. But only a bit.

I just returned from the Harvard Exit theater where I watched, along with Ben, Jim, Dan, Alex, and others, the movie “Primer.” It was incredible, bar none the best time-travel movie I have ever seen, and it was all done for $7000. FIRST Robotics, which is increasing its fees next year, could learn something here. But I digress. The movie was excellent, I need to see it again, and I recommend it to anyone and everyone when it becomes more widely distributed.

My current web browser is Mozilla Supervulture. You’ve probably never heard of it, but it’s a great web browser based on Mozilla Firefox. Actually, Supervulture is Firefox, but with a plug-in. You see, Mozilla’s sleek browser project has undergone a name change in each of the last two versions. Firefox was formerly known as Firebird, and before that, Phoenix. Each of the previous names was objected to by other software groups, but regardless of the reason for the change, its kind of funny that the name has changed so much. So someone went ahead and used Firefox’s excellent extensible architecture to make a plug-in that randomly changes the name for each browser window you open. The plug-in is called Firesomething, and a Google search will find it for you. This never would have happened had Bernie Zimmerman’s not posted about Firesomething in his weblog. Google it, I’m too lazy to put the link in myself (I’m thinking of switching blogging software again — maybe to b2 or a modification thereof that makes links easier for me to put in.)

By the way, Firefox (or whatever its nom-de-jour is) is an excellent browser, and I would suggest changing to it from any other web browser.

As promised, my adventures with my computer from Friday… Working at accomplishing one of the items on my to-do list, I was turning oasis, my former desktop machine, into the replacement for the current silverfir.net server. I’m now giving the different incarnations of silverfir.net version numbers… wadi was v1, currently you are being served by v2 (named sf2) and soon you will be served by oasis (v3). Well, I wanted to test out the SCSI drives from the dead-by-power-supply as-of-yet unnamed dual P-II 300 machine. So took out the 13.6 gb hard drive that will still (theoretically) boot win2k with all sorts of useful utilities, and put in the two SCSI hard drives. I installed the PCI SCSI adapter in oasis and started the machine up. It froze in the middle of the boot-up screen. I rebooted, took the card out and rebooted. Things started up fine (with the exception of anything actually booting, since it had no bootable devices connected). I turned it off, put the card back in, and it froze in the same place as before. Resigned to the fact that the system wouldn’t accept the SCSI card, I took it out again and took out the SCSI drives as well, putting in the two 80 GB drives I got from Fry’s last year. Then I booted the machine again, with the Gentoo 1.4 LiveCD in the CD Drive… but this time, the machine froze in the same place as it has with the SCSI card. I rebooted, and then the CMOS setup screen came up, saying that the system had frozen last time because of an incorrect frequency configuration. So I set the proper settings and rebooted again, and then nothing showed up. I was beginning to get worried, and at the advice of Dan, I started stripping the computer down to find out where the problem was. I got to the point where all I had installed was the graphics card — and I even tried a PCI graphics card. Everything else was unplugged. And nothing showed up on the screen. I tried a new power supply, reseating the processor, memory, dusting, and everything else I could think of, and I was ready to declare oasis deceased. In frustration, I began doing things that make no sense to anyone but me — including a little prayer. Apparently that worked, since the next thing I tried was plugging the floppy drive back in — and on the next reboot, things started working again. It’s the most valuable floppy drive ever — the one that makes the computer work. Also, thanks god, if you’re up there, for giving life back to oasis. I proceeded to put cards and everything else back in. I even put the SCSI card back in and it worked without any problems. I do not, however, understand SCSI and how it works in Linux well enough to get those drives working under Linux right now.

So, that was the computer adventure of Friday. It continued today as I shutdown sf2 (silverfir.net server v2) to liberate a cd-writer from it to give to Virginia Tech’s division of Society of Women Engineers along with the ide zip drive already liberated from sf2. I took the chance to further liberate sf2 of wadi’s old hard drive, which had been piggybacking in sf2 while I switched everything over after the hack, or whatever that was.

I quickly had sf2 back up, with minimal downtime. Then I put the 30 gb drive into oasis and started setting up Gentoo Linux on it, with remote help from Bobby. We started from stage 1 and currently oasis is bootstrapping, released from any shell and redirecting its output for future reference. Tomorrow we’ll continue the process. Gentoo is fun, powerful, and cutting edge, but setup is lengthy due to all the compiling involved. Of course, that’s because we’re starting from stage 1, the most basic place to start, but since don’t plan on doing this again on this machine, I think its well worth the extra performance and customization we’ll be getting out of the system. Thanks for your help Bobby.

Also today, I helped Adam set up PHP-Nuke over at http://adam.silverfir.net/. Go check it out if you have time. Today was good, even though I missed robotics. I’ll make up for that on Monday.

Being Saturday, and having been pretty uninvovled in the ultimate frisbee group I set up and hoped to keep going, I made sure to get to Robinswood park by 12:00 today. Sure, nobody else showed up except for little Dan, whom I picked up, but I had a backup plan. Dan and I put together a remote control airplane kit that I received from my dad for my birthday. We did it mostly without instructions, and got it mostly right, except for the wing struts which we forgot about (which the plane paid dearly for later).

The first attempt at flight started on the ground and never got up from there. Instead, the grass at robinswood got cut a little bit. The seocnd attempt, Dan launched it and, amazingly, it responded quite well to my attempts to command it. I made about a quarter of a large turn before bouncing off the ground once, opening up the battry cover, and crashlanding otherwise harmlessly in the grass. The seoncd flight started better – once again with a hand launch – but ended up worse. After making a full circles about the size of the two soccer fields at Robinswood (having the plane come right out you is quite exciting!), I was looking for a way to slow the plane down on the remote control. I should have figured it out before, because I looked away for too long, and beforeI could recover the plane bit it hard, breaking its main wing. Now I have to try to find a replacement wing, becuase the overall exeperience was far too much fun to stop now.