Archive for October, 2007

Anti-Intellectualism on TV

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

I keep noticing a recurring trope in mainstream TV and movies which really bothers me. Maybe you noticed it too. Next time you watch a random sitcom, or some crappy a movie on some cable channel look for the way it portrays smart people. More often than not, the main protagonist will be an average Joe (or Jane) who is good looking but usually not terribly smart. Whenever the hero needs to tackle some scientific/technology related problem he/she will call on the token geek, almost invariably portrayed as a socially inept, reclusive eccentric with taped up glasses and a pocket protector.

Medical doctors are exception to this rule. They can be portrayed as highly intelligent, well adjusted characters with multi-faceted personalities and are allowed to be role models for the audience. But only if they are holding and MD. Anyone who has a PHD or any other doctoral degree automatically becomes an walking plot device or comic relief.

Even when the writers decide to skip the traditional nerd attire, the smart characters are almost always depicted as outsiders. They are never as a member of the inner circle of protagonists, and once they fulfill their role (hack into the main computer, identify someones DNA, explain a difficult subject to the audience and etc…) they are promptly discarded.

Sure, there are shows and movies where the protagonist is a highly educated scientist - but more often than not, these suffer from what I call the Gordon Freeman syndrome. Just like the hero of the Half Life series these characters spend most of their time shooting bad guys, and saving the world using bullets and brute force. Their education and experience only comes into play when they need to overload the flux combibulator to disable the shields on the alien mothership or something like that. And whenever they do apply science in this way, they need to explain themselves to their sidekicks almost apologizing for doing something clever.

This bothers me. How come being ignorant of science and technology is almost always portrayed in such a positive way? How come education and intelligence of a character must always be offset by his social ineptitude, or condescending attitude toward his “techno babble?” How come being above the average in some area is so often portrayed as some sort of socially undesirable eccentricity?

It would be nice to see some dynamic flipped around more often. Why not portray intelligent, educated and insightful characters in positive light, while relegating the ignorant brutes to the role of comic relief. There are shows and movies that try to do that, but many of them do it the wrong way. For example picking a bunch of socially backwards, stereotypical nerds as your protagonists, and then spending most of the time poking fun at their silly habits, hobbies and behavior is just the same kind of anti-intellectual comedy. People keep telling me about the IT Crowd but after watching few episodes, it seems almost as bad as the classic Revenge of the Nerds movies.

Let’s make a smart educated character play the straight man for a change. Instead of caricaturing geeky interests into some monstrous proportion lets elevate them into normalcy. Lets lift the stigma from science - and also science fiction while we are at it. How come characters on a show can never discuss a work of SF or Fantasy without the whole thing turning into a big joke.

How about characters have intelligent and insightful discussions on geeky topics, without making fun of them. For example, take the famous Star Wars conversation from Clerks. There you have two characters who are not stereotypical nerds, discussing a Science Fiction show, making interesting observations without turning the whole thing into a big joke about unhealthy SW obsession. I thought it was brilliant - smart, insightful, and hilarious at the same time.

We need more of that kind of stuff. Let’s make geek or scientist play the straight man for a change - make them be the “normal” character that the audience identifies with.

What do you think? Am I off the mark here? Perhaps I’m watching the wrong shows and movies. Do you think this sad state of affairs is a deeper social issue, or just a side effect of TV and movie makers pandering to the lowest common denominator?

Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

After some deliberation, I decided to pick up a nicer keyboard to replace a very old Compaq piece of junk I was using as my external keyboard at work. That thing has been at the company longer than me, and likely changed hands several times before it became mine. It was time to retire it, so I picked up the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite.

Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite

Everyone keeps saying how awesome these things are so I decided to try one out. My first impression? Holy crap - this thing is really high. With the retractable legs up, the back of my keyboard lifts up about 2 inches from the surface of the table. That is really high for a keyboard. If you usually keep your keyboard under the desk on one of those retractable shelf things it might not fit! It really takes more space than a regular keyboard - especially since it has a big, built in palm rest that is not detachable. That said, once you get used to the height it’s actually quite comfortable.

Typing the first sentence on this keyboard was kinda odd, but by the third one I was going with my normal speed again. The split really doesn’t bother me at all now. What does bother me is the odd layout of the arrow keys and the block that holds Home, End, Delete and etc.. The arrow keys are arranged in a + sign formation instead of the normal inverted T. The keys are also smaller than regular ones which totally throws me off. I typically hit right arrow instead of down now. Why the hell would they do that:

Elite Keyboard Layout

The edit button block is also messed up. Instead of 3×2 formation they made it into 2×3 to save horizontal space. First column contains Home, End and Delete while the second one has Page Up, Page Down and Insert. It’s confusing since I’m very used to quickly hitting nearly all of these buttons (save for Insert). This will take some getting used to. In fact, these changes will be harder to get used to than the split.

Here is a tip for keyboard designers - do not change the relative position of any keys - even the purely functional ones. We know where they are supposed to be, and if you switch around the key order it messes us up.

The keyboard is PS/2 but it ships with a PS2 to USB converter. You don’t see many of those around these days. I keep seeing those little green USB to PS/2 plugs all over the place, but not the other way around. Despite not being native USB device Dapper flawlessly recognized it as soon as I plugged it into the USB hub.

All in all, it’s a good keyboard. Its big, and sturdy so I don’t see it breaking any time soon. And I don not have an urge to go back to the standard layout yet. I think I will stick with this one for a while. I mean, typing in the split layout is not some mind shattering experience or anything. Once you get used to the size and hight of this thing, it turns out to be very comfortable. Oh, and it looks cool on my desk. :) Too bad they decided to mess with the arrow keys and the home/delete block. If they left it alone, it would be almost perfect. Then again, this would actually make the already big and bulky keyboard one or two inches longer. I guess this design choice was somewhat justified but that doesn’t make it any less annoying or inconvenient.

Download Website for Offline Reading with Wget

Monday, October 29th, 2007

My boss had a tad unusual request the other day. Like me he is also living a double life of working at this company by day, and teaching at a university by night. It turns out that for some reason he can’t connect to the internet in the lecture but he wanted use some nice resource/tutorial site in class.

Seemed like an easy solution - mirror the site locally with wget, use it in the presentation and then give the students the URL for the real thing. So I went back to my desk and did:

wget --mirror -p --html-extension --convert-links -v http://example.com

If you are unfamiliar with wget, let me go over the options really quickly:

–mirror tells wget to recurse through the linked documents creating a local mirror.

-p forces wget to download all the additional files such like images, css, js, sounds and etc.

–html-extension since our website was dynamically generated, a lot of URL’s looked like this:

http://example.com/?p=1337

This parameter will ensure that these URL’s will be cached locally, and the files will be given names ending in .html:

http://example.com/?p=1337.html

This way you can easily browse them locally without worrying about browsers not recognizing the file type or something like that.

–convert-links this is the parameter that will actually make it possible to browse the site locally by converting all the absolute links that include the websites domain, into relative ones.

-v is of course a purely optional parameter that forces verbose output.

You can pretty much use this trick on just about any website out there. Might be useful if you are going to be on a plane for several hours without internet access. You can easily mirror some of the resource sites you often use. Then again, it’s probably not the best idea to mirror Wikipedia or something like that. :P

But there is a catch. If you are indexing a dynamic website that has the ? in a lot of URL’s you need to be careful. I ran wget on my Ubuntu box, where ? is a perfectly character for filenames. Then I moved the files over to a mounted Windows network share so that my boss could get them… And it stopped working. Why?

The question mark is illegal file name character under windows. So all the URL’s above became something like:

http://example.com/@p=1337.html

Of course the links (converted, relative links) pointed to the original file names that included the ? character. How to solve this? You need to tell wget to use Windows mode:

wget --mirror -p --restrict-file-names=windows --html-extension --convert-links -v http://example.com

The –restrict-file-names=windows parameter will tell wget to properly escape illegal windows characters such as \, │, /, :, ?, “, *, < and >. Of course if you use wget compiled for windows, this will be the default behavior.

Portal: The Flash Version

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

I really want to play portal. I have yet to meet a person who played this game, and did not love it. I may need to reinstall Steam and see if they have it available as a standalone download. Last time I looked it was only available in the Orange box bundle. I mean, OB is a great deal if you don’t own any HL titles already. If you do however, it seems kinda wasteful, even if you also get Team Fortress with it. Valve should really just offer it as stand-alone title for like $20 bucks or something (since the game is really short). If they do offer that, let me know - I don’t have Steam on my machine right now.

In the meantime, I found this:

Portal Flash
click on the image to play the game

Now this simple 2d flash game does not even capture half of Portal awesomeness. Still, it’s incredibly fun. I literally spent several hours playing it and I loved every second. Now add 3rd dimension, and the unique humor and atmosphere and image how much fun the original game could be.

Caution - the flash game will really, really make you want to play Portal. Playing it might be hazardous to your wallet or your bandwidth (if you choose to obtain the game in a less than legal way). :P