Entries for February 2006
Blogging in Movies
I think that I am not alone when I say that I wince every time I see instant messaging play more than a minor role in films. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the only successful movie featuring mainstream Internet activities was You've Got Mail, and that clearly featured e-mail, not instant messaging. I'm using my relative ignorance about what movies are out there as the yardstick for being "successful."
On a side note, doesn't the term "instant messaging" seem totally dated? It's so not-catchy, I wonder how it ever stuck. It's like the exact opposite of an idiom -- weird because it's so literal.
For instance, look at this trailer for Hard Candy. Does anyone else say "God damn it" as soon as they see the intro? It doesn't even matter if the rest of the movie looks good or bad, that part just ruins it for me. Those were the first words out of my mouth.
Why?
This is an honest question, because I really can't think of an explanation. I considered the Early Adopter argument, wherein early adopters of a trend are bitter when they see their habit get mainstream attention. But I actually was a late adopter of instant messaging (and Internet access itself), so that can't be it. Maybe it has something to do with me being such a computer nerd. Or maybe it just seems like a forced attempt to capitalize on a popular activity.
This led me to thinking about when we'll start seeing blogging in movies. Certainly blogging has seen more press than instant messaging ever did. Who will be the first to capitalize on this attention? Am I behind the times, has it already happened?
Here are some predictions for the first movie plots we'll see come out of Hollywood that feature blogging.
- Man and woman write popular competing-interest blogs. After months of posting innuendo-laden comments on each other's blog, they meet and fall in love.
- Crazy guy stalks high school students through their blogs and murders them one by one, taking over authorship of their blogs in the process, making it appear that nothing ever happened.
- Girl writes popular blog, but her world is falling apart around her. Twist ending: the author is really someone else, and Girl is just a psychotic fan.
- Guy's small record shop is going to be shut down and replaced with Conglomerate's store. Guy rounds up Internet denizens by creating a blog to drum up support. Conglomerate is defeated by a landslide and Popular Band even plays at Guy's shop during the finale.
Anyone care to take bets on these? Feel free to comment and add your own tired plot ideas. Or, hey, you could even post something original.
Update: Hey, I think I owe myself $50 or something. The winner: prediction #3. Chris just alerted me to the movie Perfect Blue, in which:
A pop star Mima ... finds a website called "Mima's room" that has public diary entries which seem to be written by her discussing her life in explicit detail. ... It turns out that the diarist herself is delusional as she believes herself to be Mima and has made a disillusioned psycho-fan believe that she is the real Mima and the girl in the show is an imposter.
Pretty close, huh? Sadly, Chris says the web site plays only a minor role in the film. Plus it came out in 1997, way before blogs became mainstream.
Fostering Python Development at Case
I love programming in Python. Despite what your opinions of Python might be...
Alright, so instead of mirroring Greg's post, I'll just talk a little about the new Python Case classes.
Right now you can easily:
- Authenticate someone with CAS
- Search and retrieve LDAP attributes
- Query the USG web service
- Read syndicated feeds from Blog@Case, KSL, CaseWiki, Housing, Help Desk, Case News, UPB, Photos, and Forum
- Manage files with Filer
- Read and manage mail over IMAP
- Various little niceties like validating Case IDs, guessing someone's Case ID from their name, and checking all the valid mail domains (having a single alias at Case is like having at least 10 e-mail addresses).
Sprinkle on some HTML and you've got a portal. In a later posting I'll go into the usage of these modules, since seeing it in action might encourage people to tinker around with it. By the way, I found all those RSS feeds (and a few more) with this Google query.
I had my first experience creating a Python Egg for easy distribution of Case Classes. Eggs are the Python equivalent of Java's Jars. It was all quite painless. You can grab the latest egg (Case-0.1dev-py2.4.egg) from Subversion.
Me and Python Case Classes
Five minutes after commenting on Greg's latest entry, I saw him and said "hey" but I don't think he knew who I was. That, or the blank stare was because he wanted to kill me for trash-talking PHP. Anyway, here's a picture of me looking stupid ("looking pretty much like myself," according to Patty) for you to click on. If you want to punch me for anything I say on here, this will make it easier. Hi, Greg!
I'm getting tired of this blog template, so maybe when I redesign (along with Patty) I'll follow Aaron and Mano's lead and put my picture right on there.
Speaking of who I am, search engines these days are pretty sweet! Even though I've never mentioned my last name on here (comments aside), Google, MSN and Yahoo point you here if you search for me.
On to Greg's post. I was a bit pessimistic in my comment about Python Case classes. I've got nothing to lose by adding them to Greg's repository, so I might as well hand 'em over sometime. Maybe tomorrow.
Is there anything besides CAS login and LDAP attribute lookup to plug into? Greg, what other PHP classes do you keep around?
Update: Python Case classes have been committed. Browse the sources in the Trac browser. No web framework dependencies like I was whining about.
Clepy
On Monday night Steve, Gary and I went to a Clepy meeting. Clepy is the Cleveland Area Python Interest Group. It was the third or fourth meeting of the group, and the first time we had the chance to attend.
In short, it was pretty awesome and a lot of fun — well, as much fun as sitting in a conference room with a bunch of twenty to forty year old programmers can get, I guess. There were two talks, but the majority of time was spent on open discussion. About fifteen people were there, all very nice. There was free pizza, salad, and soda. The roundtable format made it easy to jump in and out of discussion.
At the next meeting, I'll be giving a talk about how to interact with eBay using Python. eBay recently opened up their Developer APIs so that registration is now free. They have code snippets for a bunch of languages, but unfortunately most of them suck, including the Python code. So I'll be showing how to do it right using a little library I made, or how easy it is to write your own little library to talk to eBay.
I met a KDE developer & maintainer there, Jaison Lee. We chatted about my experience doing a KDE project for Summer of Code. Hopefully I'll be getting back into KDE development very soon!
The latest news in the AIM bot saga is that the Case Phonebook account has been suspended, with the mysterious message that it "violates the Terms of Service agreement." Well, I've read the Terms of Service and I don't see anything wrong. I wonder what the problem is? I read something about AOL offering a bot API for lots of money, so I wonder if they're cracking down on rogue bots? That's too bad — the phonebook bot got about a dozen messages a day and got some good feedback, so at least someone found it useful. I hope AIM dies a slow death in light of Google Talk.
I swear our MovableType interface used to have a Log Out button. Blogging on the same computer as Patty is a real pain because we have to clear cookies to log out of Blog@Case!