Cal Jacobson's Blog

Tonight we watched the latest Indiana Jones film.

I hadn’t seen it in the theater, despite the omnipresent media campaign that ranged from M&Ms to thinly-veiled archaeology shows on the History Channel.  Reaction from people who had seen it was definitely “meh”, and if I’ve learned anything from George Lucas in the last 9 years, its that he can’t make a decent film to save his life.

So I was prepared for disappointment.

As much as I’d like to say something like “but boy was I wrong”, I can’t.  Harrison Ford looks old.  Karen Allen looks as old as Harrison Ford, and she’s 9 years younger.  The absence of Denholm Elliot‘s character is noticeable even before the movie makes a half-assed homage to him (Elliot died in 1992).

This was a movie made 17 years too late.

If I hadn’t seen the original three movies earlier this year, I’d probably be feeling somewhat pissed right now; movies fare a lot better when viewed through nostalgic lenses.  While I had never been completely enamored with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I had forgotten about how bad some parts of Temple of Doom were.  Like I said, I was prepared for disappointment.  I’m not pissed off, I’m just kind of saddened by the wasted potential.

Spoilers follow.  Consider yourself warned.

I think the choice of the Soviets as the bad guys was a decent one; I’m just amazed that Steven Spielberg was talked into directing a movie without robots or World War II as a backdrop.  Then again, it does have aliens.

Ugh, aliens.  I don’t know if this particular stink can be pinned on George Lucas, but he’s my primary suspect.  Spielberg’s range of subject matter looks comprehensive in comparison: George just seems to need a chrome spaceship and some CGI these days, both of which were in attendance.

Would it really have killed them to do a story about Atlantis or the Spear of Destiny or Excalibur or the Fountain of Youth or Aztlán?  Bigfoot?  Even the Loch Ness Monster?

Maybe even better material wouldn’t have improved this movie, because Indiana Jones is tired.  Whether this was an intentional decision by Ford/Lucas/Spielberg or not, he’s a low-energy guy in what should be a high-energy movie.  It’s like he’s got mono, but worse: he didn’t take his Geritol.  All he’s missing is a walker and a chance to snap his whip at some kids on his lawn.

I thought Cate Blanchett was pretty much forgettable as a scenery-chewing Commie.  Ray Winstone was ok as Indy’s longtime-friend-whom-we’ve-never-met-but-are-convinced-of-such-due-to-exposition-desperately-trying-to-cover-19-years-of-backstory, though a better choice might have been Jonathan Ke Quan, reprising his role of Short Round from Temple of Doom.  Now that would have added a little more drama to the story, were he to also side with the Soviets and suffer Mac’s fate.

As for Shia LaBeouf?  I thought he did a fair job, nothing more.  I don’t think he has the screen presence to lead the franchise in the future, but he didn’t deserve a lot of the fanboy hate directed towards him.  He’s just lucky he wasn’t cast as an Ewok.

I don’t think Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a terrible movie — it was certainly no Ultraviolet — it just wasn’t very good.  It isn’t a movie people are going to remember 20 years from now in any context other than “oh yeah, they made a fourth Indiana Jones, didn’t they?”  It is Godfather III-ish in its setup and follow-through.

When I was in my mid teens, I stumbled upon a Computing Explorer post in my hometown of Spokane.  This was an organized group of computer geeks with adult leadership that met once a week under the guise of doing something to further our minds and careers.  In truth, it was more social than anything else…years later, the core members of the group would still meet for pizza (and beer) on the traditional Wednesday nights.  While I didn’t learn much about the PDP-11 that the group had access to, I did make some good friends and had a really good time talking about Commodore 64s, Apples, Ataris, science fiction and dorky things in general.

Nowadays my interests are a bit more focused — with a family and a job, they pretty much have to be.  Still, I thought it would be cool to be able to attend something like the old Explorer meetings and shoot the breeze with other computer geeks.

There’s a .NET Users Group in town, but since I work in the PHP arena these days that didn’t quite cut the mustard.  Then my boss Dan and I got to talking about PHP User Groups — specifically, how there wasn’t one for the Colorado Springs area.  For that matter, it didn’t look like there was an active “PUG” anywhere in Colorado…at least one that had updated its website in the last five years.

This sounded like an opportunity to do something fun.

The easy part was finding people in the office who were interested in attending a group meeting.  Almost as easy was getting a basic website up and running: Dan provided hosting, I bought a domain name, and we threw some pages together.

A meeting location was a bit harder to find, but thankfully we’ve got some good libraries here in the Springs and we were able to secure a free 15-person room.  An in-office meeting announcement found its way to Zend, and through them out into the mailboxes of 20-some local developers who are interested in PHP.

We only had seven people show up for our first meeting, but two folks were from outside of our office so I took that as a good sign — especially since we weren’t working too hard on publicizing things yet.  After all, our first meeting was simply to take care of the boring administrative stuff…anybody coming for a good, meaty PHP presentation was going to be sorely disappointed.

Bylaws — the rules and regulations governing an organization — can be truly mind-numbing.  Were they really necessary?  For our next few meetings, probably not.  But in any small group (online or offline) that I’ve participated in, at some point there comes a problem or conflict…and without even a simple set of rules people end up making assumptions and somebody’s feelings inevitably get hurt.  Aside from getting the dull work out of the way first, we figured that by doing this now we’re going to save ourselves some problems down the line.

We ended up with three pages of bylaws…but all that took 90 minutes of discussion, even after working off of a template and taking some better sections from another user group’s charter.  If you think three pages is a lot, you should see some of the monsters out there: I think I came across a 30-page set of bylaws for a Mac User Group.  Hey, we just wanted to cover some basic rules and responsibilities for the people in charge, a means by which those people can be appointed and removed, and a way to ensure that the general member body doesn’t get screwed out of representation.  That’s hard to do in just three pages, even if you’re assuming that the rules will be interpreted in the same good-faith fashion in which they’re written.

We lost a couple of folks over the course of the first hour, so there were only five of us left when we were done with the bylaws.   You’ll probably not be too surprised when I tell you that by the end of the meeting there were five positions on the Board of Directors: a President, a Vice President, a Treasurer, a Secretary and a Member-at-Large.  It’s an odd thing, nominating yourself and everybody else in the room for an elected position; it smacks of a post-coup staff meeting in a banana republic.

This particular republic is the Front Range PHP Users Group, or FRPUG.  Our next meeting is the 22nd of this month, and now the real work begins: finding presenters and making things interesting for a typical PHP developer.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Until then, if you’re a PHP developer (or just interested in Web technology in general) and live somewhere between Denver and Pueblo, I invite you to check out our website at http://www.frontrangephp.org and consider attending one of our upcoming monthly meetings.  I think we can make this fun.

And maybe we’ll be able to squeeze in the beer and pizza at some point.

ConnectedText on Ubuntu

If you’re a fan of ConnectedText like I am, you might be interested in knowing that you can get this Windows-only application to run on Linux thanks to WINE.   I found it to be surprisingly simple; as the attached screenshot will attest I have CT 3.0.0.5 running on my Ubuntu 8.04 system.  Here’s how you do it.

• Install WINE.  An overview of what this program is can be found here at Wikipedia, if you’re curious.  Obviously, how you install WINE will vary from system to system, though on Ubuntu (in my opinion one of the most user-friendly Linux distributions out there) you can simply go to “Add/Remove…” under the “Applications” menu item, search for “WINE”, check a box, and click a button.
• Download the ConnectedText installation program from this website and save it somewhere on your system.
• Using a command-line terminal (in Ubuntu this is found at Applications -> Accessories -> terminal), cd (change directory) to the location you saved ConnTextSetup.exe.
• Type wine ConnTextSetup.exe (and hit return/enter) to start the CT installation program under WINE.  Follow the installation instructions as normal.
• With a little luck, the installation will complete without a problem.  You should then be able to start CT via WINE — follow your system-specific directions.  On Ubuntu, this is simply a matter of going to Applications -> Wine->Programs -> ConnectedText -> ConnectedText.

There are some differences, of course.  Some CT plugins, such as Ploticus and Graphviz, do not work (RSS, Tex and Highlight appear to be fine for me, however).  Text on some pages may appear odd — I’ve noticed some minor layout issues involving links.

It’s not perfect but it’ll do in a pinch.