Terminally Incoherent

I just saw Resident Evil: Apocalypse on HBO. I expected it to be a crappy movie (considering the overall shittiness of the first one), but this was worse than I could have imagined. I’m really glad I never seen it in the theater, and I didn’t waste money for the rental. There are only two redeemable features of this movie: Mila Jovovich and Mila Jovovich kicking ass.

She actually is the single person on the cast who can actually act. The first movie at least had Michelle Rodriguez. Mila and Michelle basically carried that movie, and made it watchable. And at least Michelle was in full combat gear in the first movie. We didn’t get to see much skin, but hey - at least they made an attempt to make it look realistic. Mila still did high kick in heels but she was the leading lady so I guess that’s forgivable due to the coolness factor they were trying to work.

In the second movie, the second in command in the hot-chick-kicking-ass is Sienna Guillory. While she is attractive, she is nowhere near as good actress as Mila and it shows. Maybe left on her own Sienna could pass for a moderate actress, but when standing next to the freakin Joan of Ark she just comes off wooden.

And what the hell is with these outfits? In the last movie Mila had a good excuse to run around in Heels and a mini. Here we have both tough agent chick and Mila wearing skimpy, restraining clothes by choice. If you were going to fight zombies wouldn’t you wear thick (to stop the biting) but comfortable jeans rather than a miniskirt?

They of course had to put in a token black guy in there too. I think he the single black person with any lines, and he is mostly used for comic relief.

Mila is the star of the show and she simply make everyone around her look like an amateur high school drama club. I’m actually amazed that she could actually emote anything with a script this bad. And yet she does a great job. She is a pleasure to watch, as usual. She is simply too good for a movie like this.

I really hope she will get some more ambitious roles in the future. She should definitely get out of the next installment of Resident Evil. But they probably won’t let her. By now she basically defines the franchise and they will milk it till it runs dry.

She also might be doing another RE like movie called Ultraviolet. I think it will be really, really bad movie, but I might be wrong. The Fade Out movie looks intriguing, but chances are that Billy Bob will ruin it and they will reduce Mila to love interest / token character… I think they should drop Thornton from that one and give the lead role to Mila. She can play these unhinged characters really well - just watch the The Messenger.

I stumbled upon this book while browsing around on amazon. I think the cover shown to the left here speaks for itself. If you actually need this book, you most definitely are a dummy!

I think the dummies books are a good thing in general. They are a great way to make an approachable, introduction to difficult subjects. They usually explain the jargon, and put difficult things in layman’s terms. Someone who read a dummies book on HTML for example is now able to graduate to online tutorials, and can buy a fully fledged book on web design.

But this seems to be kindoff stretching it. Who needs a book on playing games? For me, part of the gaming experience is figuring out all the ins and outs of the game. I bet the author of this book had tons of fun writing it, but I’m really surprised it actually got published.

Alright. This is the first time I feel a need to rant about Battlestar lameness. This always happens when a show or a movie decides to talk about something that I know intimately and then gets it wrong.

Apparently Cylons have installed a hidden “logic bomb” in Galactica systems. I’d call it a rootkit+trojan but who cares. What pisses me off is that to find the rootkit they decided to “go through the code line by line”. What? What code? Does Galactica onboard systems run on a interpreted language? And if you have the code, how the fuck can you not find shit that was not there before? Here is a hint:

diff old_code new_code

Yea, that’s how simple would it be to find a rootkit if you’d have the code. Therefore I call bullshit on this. Any large system with this kind of scope needs to access the hardware directly, and hence it will be written in a fast native language, and compiled. You use the system in binary form only.

When someone breaks into your system, and installs a rootkit - they do that by swapping out one or more of your binary files for a tampered one - which contains viral code. The dead giveaway of a rootkit is the fact that a tampered file will hash to a different value than the original.

Now if you don’t know where to look for the rootkit, you essentially need to take a hash of every single binary on your system. And you can never be sure that something is not modifying the binaries you just cleared behind your back. In other words, you are rooted. The only way to fix this is to recompile or wipe and reinstall.

Which is essentially what they did on the show. But not after much talk about the code. Source code does not have anything to do with finding a rootkit. It’s the binaries that were corrupted - the code is intact! The only thing they could have been reading were hexdumps of binaries or perhaps some disassembler verbiage. I’ll say hexdumps because their “code” seemed very dense regular with separate columns.

Sharon somehow magically takes one look at the code, and recognizes the “virus”. First of all, we already established that they are probably looking at hexdumps. I don’t care if you are a cylon. If you can look at page of hex and say “ah, that’s the malicious code right there” you are a fucking digital god or something. And even if it is high level code - most of the time I can’t even figure out what the hell did I code three months ago without spending quite a bit of time refreshing my memory. Sure, she is a Cylon, but it would be much more realistic to show her studying the code for few hours before freaking out.

And don’t give me that “their technology is much more advanced than this” bullshit. If you think this way, it just shows that you are clueless. Everything I have seen on that show suggests that their electronics are not that much different from ours. Sure, they probably have figured out some really nifty stuff in the OS field, and they probably don’t use C (but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were running on a legacy COBOL system lol). But the basic concepts are the same.

Anyways… It’s interesting to see that Sharon does have mechanical parts in her. The port in the wrist thing is kinda useful it seems. But this type of thing could probably be easily tested for. Wouldn’t it show up on x-rays? Is it bio-based technology?

Now whoever tells me that Sharon “hacked” the Cylon attack ships will be punched in the head. It is very obvious to me that as one of the higher caste Cylons she still holds the absolute power over her metallic brethren. I think any meat-based cylon could do the same thing - ie. switch off bunch of attack grad machines. Furthermore, if Galactica Sharon is an exact copy of the Cylon Sharon model, then they probably can’t take away this ability from her, without locking out all the other active Sharon models out there.

I liked the episode but this stupid rootkit hunting stuff annoyed me.

I checked out Elive Website, a live Linux distro (based on Morphix) using Enlightenment as the window manager. I’m a KDE user, and I don’t see myself switching to anything else at this point I do like to try new things. KDE is not just the window manager - it is a whole application suite. But I digress…

Anyways, I the cd is very nice. It comes with both Enlightenment 17 and 16 and asks you which one you want to load at startup. I picked 17 because I wanted to see the shiny, spiffy version.

First impression after booting - wow, nice! Animated desktop image is definitely cute. I also like how the pager lights up when you switch the screens. Unfortunately to fully experience this windowing manager you need to have a 3 button mouse. I booted it on a laptop so I only had 2 buttons on the touchpad. In addition, by default Enlightenment registers a tap as a left click. Left click on the desktop opens an application menu. This is mighty annoying when you try to move the cursor from one side of the screen to another with a tiny touchpad.

I think Enlightenment uses CTRL click, SHIFT click and ALT click for all 3 mouse buttons. Each unlocks different menu and/or functionality. In the short time I was playing with it never got the hang of this. I actually had a hard time finding anything. I’m used to KDE having configuration stuff in easy to find places (like System and Utilities menus). I could not find a mouse config feature to disable that annoying tap-is-click feature. In the end I gave up and left it alone.

Another mouse oddity is the desktop switching feature. If you scroll off the screen, enlightenment will automatically switch you to the next desktop and wrap around the cursor. It’s kinda like the asteroids game - you go off on the right side, and your cursor comes out from the left edge of the screen on the next desktop. It’s definitely a cool feature. Part of me would like to have that in KDE. but in everyday use it might be really annoying - accidentally switching desktops every 5 minutes might suck.

The file manager called Evidence is horrible. If you hover over a file or folder it dims the whole window and displays properties. I found it annoying as hell - especially when you are looking for something. What happened to the good old non-intrusive tooltip?

I don’t think Enlightenment is for me. I’ll stick with KDE. But the version 17 definitely has some really cool eye candy, non-features that I kinda liked. The LiveCD is worth checking out for the novelty factor. I don’t think it could ever be as useful as Knoppix or Slax. But if you want to check out Enlightenment without installing it, EliveCD is the way to go.

A former co-worker just sent me an email with a picture of some extensive boobage. I normally wouldn’t mind, but I’m at work right now. My cube is huddled in the corner opposite the little printing station (which has the 2 company printers and fax machine). Pretty much anyone walking down the hallway, picking up papers from the printers or sending a fax has a perfect view of my screen.

So I’m sitting here, I pull up my Gmail and see the email from this guy. I open it, and it says something like “hey, take a look at these — scroll down —”. Now this should have tipped me off right away but I did scroll down anyway… What do I see on the screen? Boobs! Agh! Panic! Panic! Abort! Abort! Scroll away, scroll away! Aaaa!

Fortunately no one was at the printers, but geez!

A simple NSFW or at least “do not open this at work” (for acronym impaired people) disclaimer would really be a helpful hint here. I’m amazed how many people do not understand this.