Cal Jacobson’s Blog

The whole family went to see WALL·E on Sunday and I think we got our money’s worth.  As usual, Pixar produced a movie with a decent story — something that has been increasingly rare in Hollywood over the last 20 years.

(Minor spoilers follow: consider yourself warned.)

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about Pixar’s movies are the shorts they show beforehand.  I think the one this time around, Presto, is probably their best to date — lots of physical comedy in the Loony Tunes vein.

WALL·E itself is also a step up from their previous work, though I think more in a technical sense than a storytelling one.  Not only have the animators given a (mostly) voiceless, boxy robot character and emotion, but they appear to have overcome a major issue with CGI: dirt.

Yes, dirt.

I’ve heard that every Pixar film has at least one major technical challenge: in Monsters, Inc. it was hair, in Finding Nemo it was water, in Ratatouille it was supposedly food.  If this film had a technical challenge, my money is on dirt — there was a lot of it and it looked as great as dirt can.

My only criticism of the movie involves the use of live-action footage: some of the 1969 movie version of Hello, Dolly! and some of actor Fred Willard as a company CEO.  Both seemed very out of place in a production by a company that has animated numerous human and dancing characters in the past.  My initial reaction after leaving the theater was that it smacked of simple laziness on the part of Pixar, but now I’m of the mind that it was just a very poor decision by director Andrew Stanton (who previously directed Finding Nemo).

I’ve heard that there has been squawking in various circles about a heavy-handed message in the movie, and to be honest when I saw the first trailer eons ago that was my first impression.  But WALL·E is nowhere near the club-you-over-the-head territory that Happy Feet was, thank God.  The movie may flirt with the boundary between story and propoganda, but it doesn’t cross it.  I’m sure some folks will be put off by the notion that the future is populated by fat, materialistic humans…but I wasn’t.  I think there’s some truth there, but the manner in which it is presented is unlikely to cause Junior to renounce worldly goods and embark on a lifetime of communal living.

I strongly recommend going to see the movie if you’ve enjoyed Pixar’s previous films.  Now if we could only get them to can the forthcoming Cars 2 in favor of an Incredibles sequel.

Really, the title almost says it all. Go visit Trumpi’s Blog if you’re interested in having a mobile version control system.

I’m a big fan of the wiki concept.  I have used several different wikis in the past and all, to varying degrees, have helped me keep track of information that I otherwise would have forgotten or lost under a pile of paper.  I recommend their use to any person or organization struggling to organize a mountain of concepts, ideas, how-tos, lessons learned and many other types of information that otherwise wouldn’t properly fit into a database or spreadsheet.

If you haven’t already, go visit Wikipedia; it is the largest and most successful example of a wiki in action.

If you want to set up your own wiki, there are a ton of choices available.  Their features vary, but all should at least permit you to create new pages of information and link them to other pages.   I have two favorites: MediaWiki and ConnectedText.

MediaWiki is the software that powers Wikipedia.  It is free, Open Source, and very robust — Wikipedia has millions of pages of content, thousands of users and billions of hits per day.  Along with full-text search capability, users can upload graphic or audio files and associate them with the appropriate topics.  All changes to pages are tracked, so both vandalism and honest mistakes can be quickly and easily dealt with.  It is, in my opinion, the standard by which all other wikis should be judged.

I’ve written about ConnectedText before.  It differs from MediaWiki in that ConnectedText is a personal wiki — most of the frills of the former but intended for a single, all-powerful user.  Whereas MediaWiki is great for centralizing information for a large number of users (who may or may not contribute further), ConnectedText is ideal for an author or researcher who is unwilling or afraid of making their notes public but enjoys the features of a conventional wiki.  It is a commercial application, however.

ConnectedText’s greatest advantage over MediaWiki is that it can be set up very easily: as a Windows-only application, ConnectedText has a installer that takes care of all the messy details.  Unless you’re comfortable with PHP and MySQL, setting up MediaWiki can be frightening and frustrating experience.

At least, up until now.

About a week ago I stumbled upon this page which takes the user gently through a painless installation process with the end result being a version of MediaWiki that runs on a USB stick with less than 100MB of storage.  The key component here is WOS Portable (Small Edition) by CH Software, which is a self-contained distribution of Apache, PHP, MySQL and a few other useful applications that can run directly from a USB drive without requiring any installation on the hosting system.  In about 15 minutes I had my own version of MediaWiki up and running off of my thumb drive without a hitch.

If you’re joined at the hip to a laptop, this may not be that incredible…but for college students who are dependent upon lab and library computers or anybody who has to shuttle information between their home and work systems, this is hot.  Got USB?  Then you’ve got access to your own data warehouse.  Worried about security?  Install Portable Firefox on your USB drive as well (to ensure local system browsers don’t cache your wiki pages) and use TrueCrypt to lock it all down.  They’re both free, too.

I’ll continue to use ConnectedText — it has quite a few unique features that I like, such as Python and Ruby scripting and the ability to export everything in a self-contained Microsoft Help file.  I’d love for there to be a portable version, but due to prior problems with Chinese hackers stealing his software, Eduardo Mauro (developer of ConnectedText) has had to tie his software to a particular processor ID.  I encourage anybody interested in having a wiki for their personal use to at least give CT a shot if they can afford the $30 (US) fee; Eduardo’s support for his product has been stellar and there are certainly fewer things that can break compared to a MediaWiki + WOS solution.

I am really digging SpamBayes. If you’re not familiar with it, SpamBayes is a Python-based antispam tool that learns to identify good email (”ham”) from junk email (”spam”). If SpamBayes isn’t sure which category the message falls into, it saves it into an “unsure” folder for later review.

I’ve found SpamBayes to be incredibly effective so far. I tend to get a lot of spam, and SB is filtering out about 95% of it at this point. The “unsure” messages are usually spam as well. I highly suggest this application for anybody who is getting flooded with Viagra, Rolex and hot stock tip emails.