How to Die a Virgin.

I've run into a lot of people are afraid to commit anything to the Internet tubes until they have it perfect. These people are idiots.

Nothing is ever going to be perfect. You just have to let it go. If you hold on too tight you'll never get any better.

It's like never dating until you get to be a great lay. The only thing that happens is you end up with blue balls and a right arm that looks like Popeye's.

Then you die a virgin.

In keeping with the tradition of leaping before looking, I'm going start publishing some of my short stories.

I'm not saying that they're good, but I'm having fun writing them.

Here's an example:

Why I Am an Atheist, by Dale Wiles

One day, while sitting in the park, I was bathed in a heavenly light.

"He who transcends time" himself descended on a beam of pure light and glory and spoke unto me.

"Dale", he said in all voices at once, "guess what."

"What?" I said.

"That's what!" he replied, and disappeared.

I've been a atheist ever since.

C'mon, it's not like I didn't warn you.

Battlestar Galactica Really Sucked

I don't think I've ever missed the mark on a show as much as I have on Battlestar Galactica (BG). I'm not trying to be the guy who doesn't like the popular show, I just really thought it sucked.

I've liked shows that have bombed (Brisco County Jr.) and hated hits (Seinfeld), but I could always figure out why. Sometimes it's me, sometimes it's them. This time it was different.

With Battlestar, a lot of people, from all walks of life, really liked this show. People who's opinions I value, truly liked this show.

Most went out of there way to point out that it wasn't Science Fiction, it was drama. And they really like drama.

One, Science Fiction can be drama. Quit making excuses.

Two, I love Science Fiction. Hell, I love SciFi. I think the coolest station in the world would be the "Naked SciFi Channel". You take popular SciFi shows, rename them enough to avoid lawsuits, and then add plenty of nudity. This week on "Space Trek" frisky space moths attack the "USS Stimulus Package." MOTHSSSSS!

Three, given that, I REALLY though BG sucked. I mean A LOT! The fact that 99% of you vehemently disagree with me leaves me baffled.

I remember when it premiered. I was going to watch it with an open mind. I needed something to fill the hole left by Babylon 5 and was looking forward to chatting about it on Slashdot.

I watched the show and was amazed at how stupid it was. I went on Slashdot and was amazed again at how positive the reviews were. I couldn't, and still can't believe that we all watched the same premier.

This is my memory of the show:

People are hanging around being middle class. A hot babe in red shows up wearing a "look I'm a hot babe in red" blinking neon sign. Thank god for that because I can never notice attractive women myself. This was PG porn for the mentally challenged.

She chats with Rachel Ray or someone for a couple of seconds, and then she strangles a baby. She strangles a baby. A baby leaps on her hands and crushes it's larynx on her thumb. Eshay anglestrays an abybay. Nope can say that without sounding stupid.

Anyway, she then has PG9 warm monkey sex with Steve Jobs and her ass lights up. Yup, you heard me. Her ass lights up. Make notes, if you noticed that then you can be a doctor on the Galactica.

We then hop aboard the Galactica where we find out that Uber-president Douglas Adams has placed all the middle managers, hairdressers and telephone sanitizers on one ship in an effort to get them the hell off the planet.

There is only one rule to be part of the Galactica crew. You must be a complete dick. No semi-nads apply.

Suddenly the Cylon robots attack and invade our suburbia lifestyle. They're robots, but they look just like us, but have a different religion. Then they knock things over. Um guys... They weren't robots, they were Muslims. Muslims in space.

Back to the story. The heroic space crackers try to defend our turf, only to find out that all the space fighters, from 12 different planets mind you, all run on IPod Nanos. Oh, and Steve Jobs has gone commie. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Come back here Mister Brain!

Why would all the ships use the same computers and what the hell would weapons systems have to do in space anyway? Ships turn at, oh, max 40Gs (much more would liquefy the pilot). Space bullets move at, oh, a zillion miles per second. And in space they go in perfectly straight lines! Put your gun on a gimbal and blast away with your l33t Atari 2600 skills. You can't miss! For this they need a computer?

Now we go to the Galactica. The Galactica is run by a big Zune. Actually they don't have networked computers at all on the Galactica, so they can fight Cylons. That's because having the ship's email on one network and the ships weapons of death on a second is too much like SciFi. Yeesh!

No one aboard knows who are Cylons and who are Christians (oop! humans). The fact that one of the two has an ass full of Christmas lights never tips anyone off. The fact that you really can't have 2 wildly distinct creatures that match down to the chromosomal level kind of slips by here too. Do they have Cylon midichlorians? That can't be good.

Oh, and, spoiler alert, it turns out that the second in command, the unlikable Saul Tigh is in fact a gruff but unlovable alcoholic Cylon. Picture Bender from Futurama, but, you know, not likable. If he's a Cylon, couldn't he have just whizzed on a disk drive or something and had the Cylons win on the first day? Bender would have whizzed. He would have whizzed like a hero.

Oh well, I'm done picking on the plot, and I'm only an hour or so into the show. I don't mean to imply that your dumb for liking the show. I love SciFi. I'm just saying you're dumb for thinking it ain't SciFi. It was Emo-SciFi.

I watched BG for most of the first season. For those who say that I bailed too early, let's review the plot of the whole series:

Space Muslims knocked down the 12 space trade towers. The only survivors are space Republicans, half of which are really space Muslims and everyone, down to the dust bunnies are dicks. Everyone. Space Bush goes decider and tortures the space Muslims and everyone is a dick and almost has emotions about it. Then Obama gets elected and they all decide to land and become hippies and angles and ignore technology so they can get small pox and invent racism and ignore plot holes.

How did I do?

One last jab, then I'll shut up.

I'm getting really tired of show writers coming up with scenes and characters that are deep and mysterious and then slapping on some BS ending that leaves the viewers hanging.

Apologists will mew about writing like this as being like "real life". They claim it's depth. It ain't. It's just sloppy writing.

Watch:

I usually work late Thursday nights, but tonight I came home early. As I pulled to the curb in my Teal 78 Ford Fairmont I noticed that something was amiss. There were no children on the streets, just their toys. A small 3 legged dog trotted past me. Across the street another 3 legged dog trotted past on 3 other legs. Both glanced at each other knowingly. Somewhere a midget laughed. I picked up my mail. All the letters were from Ed McMahon. Each letter had a different spelling of my name. Each had a different picture of Ed. I entered the house. My mother was gone! My dear sweet mother! Where could she be? Then I remembered, Thursday is her bowling night.

Pretty good huh? Really deep with lots of loose ends? It must show that I'm profound or something.

That or it's easy to add neat stuff to a story and hard to make it all work.

A friend and I used to write comic books together. In one story he wrote so much stuff that he couldn't tie it all together. It ended with "The Ender Of Comics" walking in holding a sign that said "The End". No matter what happened, when he showed up the comic ended. Deep huh? We were 16.

Death By Wiki

One the biggest software concepts of the past decade is the wiki. It's a really great concept that should have been invented 15 years ago. We had the technology, but it took Ward Cunningham to figure it out. Yay Ward!

A wiki allows almost anyone to contribute to a project, and you get instant gratification when you do. If you're reading a page, and see a typo, you can edit the page yourself, without waiting for a blessing from above. Once you edit the page, then your edited page becomes the page everyone else sees. Lookie what I did!

Unfortunately one of the biggest strengths of the wiki is also it's Achilles' heel. The great unwashed masses can maintain it, so, too often, the great unwashed masses are left to maintain it. That doesn't work.

Projects need leadership. The leadership needs to hop out of the ivory towers now and then and spend some time hanging out with the peasants and documentation.

I know it's boring. I'd rather be spend time writing code than documentation. Almost everyone would, but the docs got to be done.

I'm seeing more and more projects that aren't really projects. They're just inbred code excretions. A new version of the code comes out, and you have no idea what it does, or how to use it. Those in the know know how to use it, but the rest of us are stranded.

In the inbreeder's mind once the project becomes popular someone will swan in and write the documentation. Sometimes it's even worse and they try to make a virtue out of bad documentation by claiming that anyone that uses their code is a l33t h@x0rs and should read the source code.

Adding to the problem, a project opens up a wiki. This is supposed to magically fix all the documentation problems. Users are supposed to gather like worker bees and create documentation. The problem is that one user can't tell if another user's solution is good or a bad. They have no high level view of the project.

For a wiki to work, the project heads need to invest time in checking what the wiki writers are writing. If someone puts something up that's a bad idea, it needs to be edited out and the writers need to know why. If it's a good idea, it needs to get official praise so other users know it's a valid solution.

There also needs to be an editor who chops out entries that are no longer relevant. If version 2 has a bug, and version 3 fixes it, then a 2 page discussion on the version 2 bug is no longer needed. Especially when the current code is version 10 and version 2 hasn't existed for 5 years.

Wikis are a great tool for empowering non-technical users, but they're not babysitters. If you write code for others, you have to listen to them. If you don't you'll find your babysitter goes psycho and your project will die from "shaken code" syndrome.

The Watchmen are ... Old.

I went and saw "The Watchmen" movie last night. It was an interesting experience.

First, to get my propers in.

I'm a middle age guy who's been reading comic books most of his life. I love the medium, I love adventure stories and I think people who can't deal with pictures in their story books are idiots. I'm a nerd, but I'm a literate nerd.

When "The Watchmen" came out, it was a series of 12 comic books that told one well written story. It had a beginning, built really well and had an OK ending. A serialized novel in the best tradition. Not bad.

But what made it ground breaking was the time it was printed. This was the mid 80s. Comic books had become banal. Before "The Watchmen" Batman fought "Cavity Creeps". After, "My Pretty Pony" had abortions. Actually, everyone had abortions and scabies and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Watchmen was first, but everyone followed.

That was 20 years ago. A lot has passed since then. The new cynicism of the 80s was replaced by the cartoon cynicism of Dennis Leary was replace by the parody of Steven Colbert. We're not really buying it anymore.

The "Dark Hero" is pretty much the norm in movies now a days. Even though they drew it from "The Watchmen" the clones made it to the silver screen first. As a move, "The Watchmen" is a copy of itself.

Overview

Some books can be translated almost directly into a move. "The Maltese Falcon" is an example. Take the book, have the actors read from it and you pretty much have a movie. Other books, like say, "The Bible" are going to require a bit of editing if you're going to pull in the popcorn crowd. Unfortunately for the director, "The Watchmen" falls into the second category.

While not particularly long by book standards, the novel spends a lot of time getting into the heads of half a dozen characters and taking the reader for a ride. That was one of the things the made the novel so good. People who enjoyed it don't talk about the plot, they talk about who they liked and disliked.

To invoke the same feeling, a director would need to film the graphic novel, giving plenty of time for each characters and make a 14 hour movie. Not many people will sit there eating Ju-Ju-Bes for 14 hours.

The second option is to forget the depth of the novel and concentrate on making a movie. Either make it more plot driven and trim back the character's emo, or trim back the number of characters. It's counter-intuitive, but to get closer to the feel of the novel they needed to deviate farther from it.

Unfortunately the director tried to have it both ways and it only sorta worked. They spent a lot of money for "sorta".

Details, From Good to Bad.

Patrick Wilson was perfect as Nite Owl. I was really impressed by his acting and how solid his whole performance was. Unfortunately, solid performances like that are often overlooked when they share a stage with a big blue CGI penis.

The rest of the cast was good. I though Jackie Earle Haley was very good as Walter Kovacs, and OK as Rorschach.

As for layout, a lot of the shots came right out of the comic book. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it don't. Either way it makes the fanbois (myself included) happy.

The special effects were lots of CGI. Wowie Zowie and all that rot.

Ozymandias was inane. I don't blame Matthew Goode, he had nothing to work with. Ozymandias was an embarrassingly bad character in the novel and the movie made him worse.

The most clueless decision made by the director was to give the caped vigilantes real super powers. They could do things like punch holes in bricks and jump so high that It looked like they could fly. Huh? The whole point of this was that people didn't have powers. They were just regular people. Regular people can't walk the streets dealing out justice. That's called assault.

There were a lot of little tweaks to the dialog that didn't seem to add anything. If you haven't read the novel you won't notice it, but that kind of stuff drives me crazy.

Egress

The Watchman movie isn't a bad movie. It's not a great movie either. It is out of it' time. What made the Watchmen special is long over, which is probably a good thing.

As an experiment, I've decided that I'm going to the comic shop and pick up a bound reprint of the comic books that I read 20 years ago. I want to see how much of what I remember was never in the novel, how much has been beaten to death by 2 decades of imitation, and how much doesn't work when read by a 48 year old man.

It's going to be interesting.

Just an Artist without a Canvas.

About 3 weeks ago I posted a question on a user form at gnomesupport.org. The question was whether or not a particular widget (the Canvas) was being actively supported and, if not, how to replace it's functionality.

After 3 weeks I've had 125 looks, but no answers.

The problem is that it's not really a technical question, it's more of a "which direction is Gnome going" type question. A regular user can't answer it. It requires an opinion of someone higher up in the Gnome hierarchy. Apparently they're not reading the forums.

Gnomesupport.org is the official support forum for Gnome. We need for people higher up to scan these boards once in a while or Gnome is going to suffer from "user rot". If we don't know Gnome's direction, we waste time going in the wrong direction. If it's wasted time, then why spend it on Gnome when I can be productive somewhere else?

We seem to be falling into the "self maintaining user-base" fallacy. It's been growing pervasive in many projects in the past few years.

It goes something like this: Because users can share information, developers need only provide a platform for sharing and the users will take care of themselves.

Um, that don't work. Some questions can only be answered by the developer or someone who has a big picture view of a project. A user can't tell another user the "correct" way to do some things unless they've received the word from someone higher up.

I'm not saying that the people running Gnome should spend all day monitoring the user forums, that's petulant and wastes developer's time. However, someone with access to the top, should check the forums for questions that have been in the queue for more than a few days and don't have answers. The questions that aren't being addressed by other users should be looked over and, if relevant, kicked up to the next level.

There should also be someplace where people can have limited access to high level Gnomes (Uber-Gnomes?) to ask "big questions". Things like "I'm thinking making Fortran bindings for Gnome, does anyone else think that's awesome?" or "I don't like sound server X, let's write a replacement." or "Hey Uber-Gnomes, what do you think is most needed in Gnome?"

The place would need to have the participation of the higher ups for it to be useful. Spending a year writing a replacement for sound server X, when there is already an official project in place to replace it with Y would be a colossal waste of time and programmers. People need to know that before they waste time.

Sometimes a Chimp is Just a Chimp

Has anyone, besides the pundits, been following the tempest in the tea pot that is the "dead chimp" cartoon?

What happened is, a cartoonist named Sean Delonas drew a cartoon for the New York Post.

The cartoon is clearly a reference to this event.

I don't really have a big opinion on the actual cartoon. It's the kind of "meh" humor that make up most political cartoons.

The tempest is coming from elements of the "official" left who do the following: Cartoonist says Stimulus bill is written by a crazed chimp. Barack Obama is the author of Stimulus bill. Therefore Cartoonist says Barack Obama is a crazed chimp. Racism. See?

Um, no. No I don't.

When I see the cartoon, all I see is what I think is the cartoonist is saying. "The nasty liberal Stimulus bill is so icky poo that it must be written by a crazed chimp." I don't see the "obvious" connection to racism. Don't get me wrong, I get the argument. I've listed it above. I just don't buy into it.

I don't profess that no one's ever portrayed Obama as a monkey. There is the stupid "curious george obama tshirt" (google it), but I just don't think the Post cartoon is an example of it.

What annoys me the most is how rabid the "official" left is on this.

First of all, many of the blog posts that I've seen don't reference the original monkey incident. That's dishonesty. It's a single link and any blog that doesn't at least reference it is trying to with their point by deception.

I also don't like the "agree with me or your a racist" attitude. You can disagree with an opinion and not burn a cross. I don't think that anyone that sees the cartoon as racist is a fool. I just think that they're reading in something that isn't there.

Before the tiring name calling starts, I'm a pretty hard core liberal. I loath Rush, despised Bush and think that listening to Ann Coulter is like watching a post syphilitic Al Capone talk about Chicago in the "good old days".

I've also seen these talking heads consume some of my best friends. Friends who've I've respected all my life have become talking head wanna-bes. They parrot the ideas ejaculated by media liars just to feel like they're in the know. They know it's crap but it's easier than thinking. I don't want to become one of those.

My biggest fear is that the mainstream Democratic party is going to be taken over by the left wing equivalent of Rush and the party is going to be as far left as the Republicans are to the right. If we walk off that cliff then we're not only going to be as big a pack of self righteous fools as the right, but we're also going to loose the support of the middle and get Daemon Reagan elected in 2012.

I'm not a liberal because I can play games and shout down my opponents, I'm a liberal because I like being right. If someone can show me where I'm wrong I'll change my opinion. Until then, "Bad monkey, no banana!"

Getting real with "The Joker".

It may come as a shock to you all, but I'm kind of into comics. A computer nerd AND a comic nerd? What are the odds!

For those who don't follow comics, about 20 years ago a 12 issue miniseries called "The Watchmen" came out. It was gritty, it was profitable, it was copied. Whoo boy was it copied!

Unfortunately it was copied badly. In the Watchmen reality the heroes get shot and villains get sent to jail. The heroes stayed dead and the villains wait for parole. Close enough for Jazz.

In Watchmen copy world, heroes get shot, kicked, spit on and get their cars stolen. Villains get laid.

Not quite the same thing is it?

Let me give you an example: Reality Batman Vs Reality Joker.

In the DC world, Batman was recently killed. Bruce Wayne ate some raw oysters in a month with an "r" in it or some such nonsense and now he's tits up in the morgue.

This is the highlight of his life as of late.

He's also been accused of being a child molester, had a pile of Robins killed, got his spine snapped, his stately manor burned to the ground and ended up playing second fiddle to the villain in all of his movies. No wonder he's such a grouch!

We all know that he's going to come back in a year or so. It always follows the same script.

• First all the heroes will get to emo. All villains will have a drunken orgy.

• Then the heroes call each other names and fight over who gets to be the new Batman. The villains will make a YouTube video of zombie Batman having sex with zombie Robin.

• A few heroes will run around in a Bat suit and fight crime. A few of the villains will hire strippers to dress like Batman and slide up and down their Batpoles.
  

• None of the heroes will hit on Catwoman. All of the villains have already hit on Catwoman.

Once the novelty wears off things will get back to normal. We know it. We wait for it. We expect it.

But this dog pile of sadness only happens to the heroes. They never take a major dump on an A-list villain. I'm not talking dropping some unremembered fad based villain like "The Rubic's Cuban" (the commie puzzler!) I'm talking about a five star Alpha-Male villain.

I elect "The Joker!"

For the last few decades Batman has been little more that the Jokers butt monkey. All the biggest Batman movies have really been Joker movies. The best Batman graphic novels have be Joker based. Best Batman cartoon voice? Mark Hamill's Joker from "Batman: The Animated Series".

The writers wizz on Batman constantly. Batman has Robin. The Joker gets Harley. Robin is cute, but Harley puts out! No wonder the Joker is always smiling.

Batman spent his entire life studying to be Batman. He know Bat-fu and is rich and has tons of cool Bat crap. I get that.

Superman is strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Ok.

The Joker... is a dick. That's it. He's a dick. He shows up one day, stops at the Good Will for a lavender jacket, acts like a dick and he's running with the big boys.

Let's get real on his ass.

Before we can smack down the Joker, we need a hero in his league.

Joke vs Superman? It would be one punch and then a large stain. Joker can't hang with the S-man.

Joker vs Batman? Who's going to give Batman a banana when he's a good butt monkey? Nah. Batman has "issues" with Joker. And by "issues" I mean he's a butt monkey.

Wendy and Marvin from the Super Friends? Maybe. They all have the same fashion sense. Up no. They had Wonderdog. Wonderdog was retarded, but he was a big dog and a big dog is more than a match for the Joker's bad fashion sense. Hell, Gleek could probably kick the Joker's ass.

Hmmm.

I make up, and nominate "Melvin Palmowitz", better known as "The Completely Normal Guy."

Here's the origin: Melvin works at a toll booth up on the Gotham interstate. One day someone gives him a quarter with a Joker face on it. Melvin says "Hey, this isn't president Obama, what's the deal?"

It turns out to be a "Joker Quarter". (You know you have a good police force when escaped criminals have time to mint coins.) The Joker says that he sells them on late night infomercials and now Melvin has to be his new butt monkey because Batman keeps dieing and getting crippled.

Everywhere Melvin goes, he sees the Joker grinning and looking threateningly at his children and making sawing signs on his throat when ever Melvin goes to stroke his pet alpaca (The Lockport Alpaca, come for the wool, stay for the mullet!)

The police are, of course, oblivious to all this. It's not like it's the 800th time the Jokers escaped. It's not like he's wearing a lavender jacket. It nothing like he's got a pancake white face and is the most recognizable villain in the entire world. Nope. No Jokers here. Carry on!

So Melvin is forced to go along with the Joker's next zany plot to kill millions of Americans, most of which have guns and would shoot the Joker the first time they saw him, yet oddly, they don't.

Melvin is called to the warehouse where the Joker gets his evil shipments. FedEx can find the Joker, the cops can't.

The Joker is explaining his plans and dancing around and calling Melvin a butt monkey. Melvin is wishing that the Gotham police had higher entrance requirements.

Melvin sees a big pair of scissors sitting by the shipping receivable receipts. He picks up the scissors, sneaks up behind the Joker and stabs him in the neck. No big speeches. No fancy Vulcan neck stab. Just a plain old American puncture, the way god wants a neck stabbed!

The Joker, being a dick in a lavender jacket, is not known for his stab proof neck. He gets a "Did you? Are those scissors in my neck?" look on his face, and falls over dead.

Melvin, realizing he is no longer a butt monkey, wipes off his finger prints from the scissors, drives home and pets his wife and alpaca. We never hear from Melvin again! The Joker says dead!

There's no way Melvin would get caught. The cops show up and see Joker dead. They're happy! They're hanging around the crime scene singing and dancing and putting funny hats on the Joker's corpse. The Joker has killed something like 1000 cops at one time or the other. They're not going to lift a finger to find his killer.

What would Batman do? Cry? Would he swoop in and threaten stoolies until he was too pooped to swoop? That wouldn't get him anywhere. What do stoolies know about toll takers?

He could use his alleged amazing deductive powers. Deduct a way! Warehouses have millions of people tracking through them, and the cops won't stop doing a conga line around the stiff, so Batman's screwed.

Besides, doesn't Batman have other, bigger criminals to fail to catch. Maybe the Joker was killed by that probabilistic villain "The Rock/Paper and/or Scissor" (He'll kick your ass 1 out of 3 times.) Nope, it's just Melvin and a found pair of scissors.

Like it? I think if they're trying to make comics more "realistic" then this story works. The Joker is just a dick. Sometimes dicks get stabbed.

Really.