For no other reason than the geeky amusement it will provide, here’s Wil Wheaton in a clown sweater:

Here it is, the second trailer of J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek movie, all hellzapoppin’ and complete with an homage to the "chicken run" scene from Rebel Without a Cause.

I’m keeping in mind that it’s the job of the people who produce trailers to make a movie seem more interesting and exciting than it actually might be, but I’m still holding out hope that Abrams has been taking the story-crafting skill he hasn’t been using on the TV series Fringe and pouring it into Trek. I guess we’ll find out in a few months…

It’s a busy day for me: I’m gearing up for my first presentation on behalf of "The Empire", which will happen at Microsoft’s TechDays event in Calgary (Wednesday, December 10th and Thursday, December 11th). More on that in a later post.

In honour of this preparation, I thought: here’s an opportunity to riff on the theme of “The Empire” (and to provide you with some reading material)  — I can present the storybook version of Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope. Of course, back in those days, it was known simply as plain ol’ Star Wars.

The book came with a vinyl record that was meant to be played along with the book; I’ve included its audio below in MP3 format:

• The Story of Star Wars, Part 1
• The Story of Star Wars, Part 2

The voice work on the record is terribly off – whoever’s playing Darth Vader sounds more like Count Dracula, but you have to keep in mind the book was released in 1979, well before Star Wars had firmly established itself as part of the pop culture canon. Enjoy!

It could be that programmers are getting larger, but it also could be that Linux Symposium is using American Apparel shirts. They’re supposedly not made in sweatshops and are made from really soft cotton, but they’re about a size smaller than the corresponding Hanes Beefy-T’s.

In Fear and Loathing at RailsConf, Giles Bowkett examines what it means to “Keep RailsConf weird”. It’s worth a read, especially if you’re attending, planning or gate-crashing RubyFringe.

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the latest trailer for The Dark Knight, the upcoming Batman movie with Christian Bale in the title role and Heath Ledger as the Joker:

Better still, here’s a trailer that mashes up the audio from the trailer above with scenes from the 1966 Batman movie, in which Adam West plays the title role. It’s camp-licious!

Links

• YouTube page for the latest trailer for The Dark Knight
• You Tube page for the trailer that mashes up 2008 Batman movie audio with 1966 Batman movie clips
• The 1966 Batman movie, silly as it was, had some lovely visuals, which you can see in this page of stills from that movie.
• Bat Battle: Who’s The Best Movie Batman Ever? Cracked.com investigates.

If you’ve been following the usual programmer and tech new sites, you’ve probably read (or at least heard of) Zed Shaw’s rant, titled Rails is a Ghetto. If you haven’t read it yet, go there now, give it a quick read and come back. I can wait.

High-spirited stuff, isn’t it? As you might expect, there have been a number of interesting responses to Zed’s polemic, but only one made me laugh out loud — it’s this entry in Jesse Stay’s blog:

Ruby on Rails is weak right now, it’s breaking apart from the inside. Now is the time for the Perl community to show its strength and unite in an effort to make Perl once again the most used platform on the web!

Perhaps it’s time for Larry Wall to update his maxim about the great virtues of a programmer: it should now be laziness, impatience, hubris and revenge fantasies.

So Bad, Even George Lucas Wants Nothing to Do With It!

Even as an eleven-year-old back in 1978, I knew as soon as voice-over went…

with special guest stars…Beatrice Arthur! Art Carney! Diahann Carroll! The Jefferson Starship! Harvey Korman!

…that something was about to go terribly, terribly wrong with the Star Wars Holiday Special, a show so terribly bad that even George “I’m no longer qualified to tell good from bad” Lucas has disavowed any involvement with it, no matter how minor.

Now, thanks to the miracle of Google Video, you too can enjoy the so-bad-it’s-goodness of the Star Wars Holiday Special, either in the tiny window below or on its Google Video page at a larger size. After watching it, Episode I: The Phantom Menace seems like The Godfather in comparison. At least Phantom Menace had the decency to not include a scene featuring Bea Arthur doing a Broadway number and dancing with Greedo.

Click here to watch a larger version.

The Five-Minute Version

If you can’t bear to watch all two soul-crushing hours of the Star Wars Holiday Special, you’re in luck: some kind sould has created an edit that sums it up nicely in five minutes. It spares you a lot of painfully bad wookie pantomime…

Click here to see the video on its YouTube page.

Links

• Wikipedia page for the Star Wars Holiday Special
• Stomp Tokyo’s review: “Like so many of the films we end up watching, The Star Wars Holiday Special is a curiosity best left to extremely hard-core fans and to the corners of history. No matter how appealing it sounds to begin with, we guarantee this viewing experience can bring you little but pain. Fast forward to the animated sequence (let the Force be your guide) and turn the VCR off immediately after it ends. Trust in these words: you’ll hate the rest of the special, and hate leads to the Dark Side.”
• BadMovies.org: “Arrrrggghhhhh! Why am I watching this?”
• i-Mockery.com: “I don’t care how many public claims he’s made about wanting this holiday special wiped off the face of the planet, I still have a hunch that George Lucas watches it every night, masturbating furiously as he cackles like a madman. Oh you knew what you were doing Georgie boy… and just because you made sure your name didn’t appear in the credits doesn’t mean you’re not still responsible for it. Come on George! It’s time for you to let the world see that twisted stepson known as “The Star Wars Holiday Special” whom you’ve had locked in the attic all these years. After all, if you can show the world “The Phantom Menace” with no shame, I see no reason why you can’t give this special the same treatment.”
• The Unknown Movies: “Though I was really pained by many moments of this terrible special, I must admit that several hours later I found myself laughing out loud, remembering some especially horrible moments. As I write this, it is 24 hours since I’ve seen the special, and I am still laughing out loud at times as I write, even remembering some of the material that while watching almost made me scream in agony. So I guess in an indirect way, I did get some entertainment value out of it.”
• OhTheHumanity.com: “If you want to beautiful childhood memories to disappear, if you want to brag about how much Star Wars stinks and this shows it, if you want to take your mind off how happy your life is and want to wallow in misery for a couple of hours, please see this. Hell, please see it anyway, if you can find a bootleg, because it’s probably the most messed up thing you could ever watch around the holidays other than your aunt hit on your older brother. I’ll be washing this movie off me for weeks.”

Don’t you wish stuff like this actually happened?

Click the comic to see it on its original page.
Comic courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

You get bonus bragging rights if you spotted the missing precondition.

I’ve been tied up with all sorts of work- and life-related things, hence the lack of posts over the last few days.

By way of apology, allow me to offer the so-bad-it’s-good nerd TV show from the 1980s, Automan! Loosely based on the movie Tron and driven by the then-new interest in personal computers (this was the age of the original IBM PC and the Apple ][). It had all the earmarks of a cheesy Glen A. Larson production, plus all the technobabble of that era and made the old Buck Rogers series look like hard sci-fi by comparison.

Click here to see the video at full size.

A Different Kind of “Code Smell”

First, let’s look at a new ad for Axe body spray…

Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

I think the suggestion in the ad goes double if you start pointing out what’s wrong with the code (“you == understand.this? get as an object name? Couldn’t they have hired a real programmer to write the ad copy?”).

359 is the new 555

Fictitious phone numbers on many TV shows and movies begin with the number 555, which I presume is to avoid the legal hassles that arise when people try to call those numbers (I remember that a number of people whose phone numbers were actually 867-5309 had their phones ringing day and night when Tommy Tutone’s song Jenny became a hit).

The people behind the TV show CSI: Miami probably wanted to avoid similar legal trouble in an episode where an IP address was shown onscreen. I don’t think I’d go to the trouble of portscanning some IP address I’d seen on a fiction TV show, but somewhere, out there, someone just might. Hence their invention of an IP address whose first “octet” is 359. It’s IPv4.5!

And finally, here’s a graphic that I whipped up for an article with links to recent articles on version control on the Tucows Developer Blog:

Enterprise Computing in a Shipping Container

The idea of setting up a computing center in a shipping container isn’t new. Sun has Project Blackbox, “a prototype of the world’s first virtualized datacenter–built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies”. The idea is create a computing center that you could move anywhere in the world with relative ease:

If you’ve ever watch ships loading and unloading, you’ll know that nobody handles cargo containers gingerly. A shipping container full of computer equipment would have to be able to withstand a fair bit of abuse, and it looks as though the Blackbox container can take it — here’s a video of one in a simulated earthquake of a 6.7 magnitude on the Richter scale:

Sun’s not the only company working the the concept. Google have patented a similar idea. One major difference is that while Sun’s container-based datacenter would be a self-contained computing cluster, Google would treat their containers as very large rackmounts, where a container could operate on its own or as part of a cluster of other computing containers. Robert Cringely has some interesting speculation on the way Google might use these datacenters.

1337 H4X0RZ in a Shipping Container

“Invisigoth” from the X-Files episode Kill Switch

The idea of setting up a non-enterprise computing center in a shipping container isn’t new, either. Kill Switch, one of the X-Files episodes written by William Gibson, featured a hacker who went by the handle “Invisigoth” who lived and did her work in a shipping container.

The episode also featured a down-market version of a computing cluster in a shipping container: an old trailer, packed with computers, sitting in a remote field and connected to the internet through a T1 line, which was an even bigger deal back in 1998.

A Cafe in a Shipping Container

Where there are computer programmers, there must also be caffeine. Consider the fact that the nerd store ThinkGeek has a whole section devoted to the substance. One of my favorite sayings was adapted from a line in mathematician Paul Erdos’ biography, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: “A programmer is a machine for converting caffeine into software.”

It logically follows that if there are computing centers in shipping containers, there should also be some kind of caffeine dispensers in shipping containers as well. Here come artist Adam Kalkin and fancy-pants coffee vendor Illy to the rescue:

Here’s an excerpt from Illy’s news release:

For the 52nd International Art Exhibition in Venice illycaffè is partnering with the Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia for the fourth time.

At the Biennale illy will provide art-lovers and coffee connoisseurs a beautiful space to relax, reflect and enjoy a perfect cup of espresso. Visitors to illymind, the rest and refreshment area founded by illy in 2003, will be introduced to the Push Button House which opens like a flower and transforms from a compact container into a fully furnished and functional space with the push of a button. View video.

After the preview at Art Basel Miami Beach, the Push Button House, a work designed by American artist-architect Adam Kalkin and redesigned for the presence of illycaffè at the 52nd International Art Exhibition, arrives for the first time in Europe.

Kalkin is known for designing comfortable spaces and placing them in unusual contexts. Visitors to the Push Button House will experience the artist’s ability to transform industrial materials into a domestic masterpiece, beautifully contrasting between the indoor and outdoor worlds, while enjoying complimentary illy espresso for a complete authentic Italian experience. The entire work was created from recyclable materials.

If I had the money, I’d take one of these things wherever I went.

I’m working on an article (working title: Walled Garden…or BEER Garden?), so here’s something to keep you amused in the meantime…

My Obsessions, Circa 1980

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

The “Star Wars Trumpet” Video

Well, I can’t make a reference to Battlestar Galactica (the 80’s version) without making one to Star Wars, can I? How ’bout the video that’s making the rounds right now — this so-bad-it’s-good performance of the Star Wars theme on trumpet for the “talent” portion of an old beauty pageant?

Can’t see the video? Click here.

Remind me to tell you folks about my worst on-stage music performance ever sometime.

The description of the video on its YouTube page is as follows:

I work in TV Sports, this tape has circulated amongst our tape rooms for years, I figured it was only natural to be on YouTube. I’m of the understanding it was a statewide beauty pagaent, and Stacy is Miss Douglas County. I have no idea who she is, or if she even knew there was a talent portion of the contest.

It’s believed that the tape has origins in the Kansas City area, and I thought it was a Nebraska beauty pageant.

Obligatory Star Trek Gag

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Remember the eBay auction for the statuette of “Master Chief” — the character from the Halo series of games — recast as a hot woman?

(In case you missed it, I covered “Ms. Master Chief in this posting.)

The auction ended last Thursday at 9:47 Eastern, and the winning bid was US$2,222, placed by “vetusnox”.

My heartiest congratulations to vetusnox on both winning the bid and having the disposable income to blow a couple of grand on videogame-based collectibles. I salute you with my Star Wars “Cantina Band” figurines!

[Found via Illustration Friday] Luke Ramsey submitted this “Facehooked” design to Threadless. Let’s hope it becomes available soon!

Want to see another cool T-shirt design? There’s one on my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Cheer up, emo geek!

Looking for a present for a geek who like (or needs) to dress up? How about ThinkGeek’s 8-bit tie? It’s a clip-on, so it’s easy to wear, and polyester microfiber, so it’s easy to clean. Yours for US$19.95 at ThinkGeek.

Click the photo to see the eBay page.

Ever wondered what Halo’s “Master Chief” would look like if he was a hot woman? Ever wondered how much you might bid on eBay for a statuette of a hot woman version of Master Chief? You’ve got until tomorrow — October 4th, 2007, 6:47:07 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time — to place your bid.

10% of the final price will be donated to the American Breast Cancer Foundation. The current bid as of this writing is US$2,222.

[via Forever Geek.]

Here’s a video of two guys doing pair programming, purportedly taken with a hidden camera:

Can’t see the video? Click here.

We’ve been told that “Master Chief” from the Halo series of games reveals his face at the end of Halo 3. If you can’t wait to finish the game to find out who he is, the webcomic Godmode has given away the answer:

Click the comic to see it at full size on its original page.

Oh, those crazy MIT Guys…

Click to see the photo on its original page.

Here’s what the MIT Hacks gallery has to say:

During the night prior to the release of the heavily advertised Halo 3 video game, MIT hackers transformed the statue of John Harvard into the Master Chief character from the game. In the game, the character’s real name is known only as John. John was wearing the signature helmet from the game and was also holding a gun from the game. The hack was removed by around 8am.