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Last night La and I watched “The Last Samurai”. It was a good flick, although when it all boils down, it’s just “Dances with Wolves” all over again. We even had Kicking Bird, played by a constantly weepy Taka, and of course the gradual realization by the main character that the “savages” aren’t really so savage after all…

As rumors of the “Return of the King : Extended Edition” DVD begin circulating, there’s much speculation about whether it’ll be shown in theaters before being released to video (which would be both cool and frustrating), and of course about which scenes will be added.

But on Slashdot, the source of all knowledge, there was a great alternate plot:

Gandalf: That ring is bad news, Frodo, it must be destroyed.

Frodo: How so?

Gandalf: It must be placed in the fires of Mount Doom.

Frodo: Oh well, I guess that means a lot of walking, camping and then running away from monsters, lots of death and almost losing all my friends?

Galdalf: Nah, I know some big eagles that can fly us straight to the mountain and we can drop it in the lava. We’ll be home by tea.

Frodo: Nice one!

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”

— Ernest Benn

The Chinese government never ceases to amaze me. In today’s news, they’ve announced a plan to filter text messages sent between their citizens via cell phones. This is a monumental task, as Chinese people send and receive more text messages (some 200 billion per year) than the rest of the world combined. Not deterred by the sheer magnitude of such a project, the government thinks it has a right to intercept and block communication between its citizens.

Not surprisingly, this goes hand-in-hand with their stringent filtering of the internet– something I would think is a lost cause. Apparently text messages containing certain key words, or even special numbers in proximity to one another, will be blocked by the filtering software.

Although I feel the Chinese government is monstrous for pulling stunts like this, I’m also constantly appalled by the way the U.S. government– and American corporations– continue to treat China like they’re our best friends. They retain their Most Favored Nation status, and as long as the flow of crappy plastic toys continues to flow across the ocean I’m sure they’ll remain our most beloved trade partners. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that the next Olympics will be held in Beijing: certainly a demonstration to the world that it doesn’t matter how repressive you are to your own people, as long as you manufacture cheap consumer goods.

After an epic three-hour struggle with a database problem on Monday, I finally figured out the problem was a deeply hidden configuration option in Microsoft SQL Server. I changed one line of program code and everything worked. As I was wading through documentation, newsgroups, third-party source code, and any other reference that seemed halfway likely to produce an answer, my friend Craig quipped, “SQL Server’s motto should be ‘We make every day feel like Monday.'”

There is, of course, a lot of truth to that. As it’s Friday afternoon now and I’m not feeling particularly motivated to do anything productive, I hopped on the web and downloaded a couple of graphics to make a real gem of a poster.

It’s now hanging in my office.

Today’s stupid web design note:

I’m so tired of using online payment for things– whether I’m ordering stuff or paying a bill– and having to fill out my credit card information without using spaces or dashes or whatever. Just a big old 16-digit number.

The reason? Because I have all my credit card numbers online (secure, yada yada) and I just cut and paste them as necessary, depending on what I’m buying and which company is paying for it. So I paste the number into the field, hit ‘submit’, and get barked at because the number isn’t formatted properly. Sigh.

Note to all web developers who think this is some kind of insurmountable problem: with about three lines of Javascript code, you can strip out anything that’s not a number and get what you need. For heaven’s sakes, guys, let consumers type dashes or spaces!

Pardon me, I have to go now and re-submit my information to T-Mobile so I can pay my phone bill…

There are at least two things I really hope not to burn out on:

1) Computers.
2) Orange juice.

Without the first, I wouldn’t have a job.

Without the second, I wouldn’t have much to drink.

In today’s newspaper I was reading some political editorial and found a real gem of a comment. Apparently some woman plans to vote for Bush in the upcoming presidential election because “Bush hasn’t let me down completely yet.”

Boy, what a great endorsement that is! Although Bush has apparently let her down one or more times thus far, he hasn’t let her *completely* down, so he’s still got her vote.

How wonderful to have voters with that kind of reasoning; I’m sure the Bush camp loves these people.

Wow, in addition to getting my college diploma for a small fee (and no textbooks or classes!) I can apparently become a citizen of, say, Belize. Today’s spam included this message:

“Do you need a new identity, a new citizenship or a new country to call home.

You are pre-qualified. 50 Countries Available.”

Wow, pre-qualified! I’m honored that I passed the rigorous screening process. Now the hard part is choosing which of the fifty available countries I’d like to call home…

One of my clients got hit with a denial-of-service attack on Saturday, and their web site was terribly sluggish for a few hours as the attacker took most of the bandwidth. I was able to make some adjustments on the server and brings things back to life, and today the client asked me if I could do some forensic work to figure out who it was and how they might combat the problem more effectively in the future.

So I sat down this morning to figure out how to do it, and basically had a huge log file. It contained all the web hits for the week, and was half a gigabyte in size. There were millions of hits in the file, and from that haystack I had to find the needles that pointed to the guy (or guys) responsible for the attack.

In about an hour I’d sifted through the data, pinned down about half a dozen addresses who were obviously working together on the attack, and tracked the culprit to China. I doubt anything will ever come of it, but I was able to provide my client with a lot of information that’ll help them determine if it was one of their resellers (or some disgruntled user) trying to get some sloppy revenge.

Afterward, it occurred to me to consider what I might have done if I didn’t have a Linux system at my disposal. Assuming (for the sake of argument) that I had this same 500 MB log file with millions of entries, how would I have sorted through it using a Windows system? I needed to do things like grab IP addresses off lines, count the number of unique addresses, figure out which ones were making more requests to the server over a short time, and so on. Then I had to do lookups on domain records to track the addresses to an ISP, and so forth.

My conclusion was that I have no idea how a hard-core Windows user would’ve been able to do what I did– at least in the short time I did it. I suppose I could’ve imported the data into SQL Server and run some queries on it, but that would’ve been awkward and time-consuming. I wanted to process millions of lines of text in a quick fashion. Unix command-line tools were perfect for the job; what Windows GUI tools would’ve worked?

Contrary to my usual demeanor, I’m not Windows-bashing here. Rather, I’m trying to understand what a Windows web administrator in my shoes would’ve done. It’s an interesting problem. I suppose if I’d been using IIS (again, for argument’s sake) there might be some built-in log analysis tools in the IIS Management Console, but I doubt it. Moreover, processing the sheer volume of data I had presented a whole set of issues; it’s not like I could just import everything into Excel and do some sorting.

So all in all, I remain a happy Linux user and wonder how those poor souls using Microsoft products manage to get things done effectively and efficiently…