The iPhone apps for Typepad and Wordpress made me jealous. But I found that there's a plugin for MovableType that provides a servicable interface for the iPhone. Typing HTML on the iPhone keyboard isn't easy. But if you have to blog remotely, here it is.

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The Pwnie Awards are like Blackhat's version of the SANS Top 20.  Categories include Best Client-Side Bug, Best Server-Side Bug, Most Epic FAIL, Mass Øwnage, etc...   Check it out at: http://pwnie-awards.org/2008/awards.html

I'm gave sqlalchemy-migrate a try today.  I like it, and I'm going to keep using it.  The one downside is that it's a bit hard to find "the least you need to know" in the documentation, especially if you lean old-school like me and prefer to write your upgrade scripts in raw sql.  So here's my stab at it.

Create your manage script. If you have development/production dbs with different connection urls, create two scripts with the same repository but different urls:

migrate manage dbmanage.py --repository=path/to/upgradescripts --url=db-connection-url

For each database, create the Migrate metadata (a migrate_version table):

./dbmanage.py version_control

Create an upgrade script. This will create a script --upgrade.sql in the "versions" subdirectory of your "repository." That's all, so you could certainly do this by hand if you prefer, but letting the script do it is less error-prone:

./dbmanage.py script_sql sqlite

Edit the script.

For each database, apply the upgrade:

./dbmanage.py upgrade

Repeat the script/upgrade process as needed. That's it! Everything else is optional!

(What this gives you is a process where all your developers can have their own local database for development, and all they have to do is "svn up; ./dbmanage.py upgrade" without having to worry about which upgrade scripts have been applied or not.)

Dr. Charles Knutson concludes his interview of Mark B. Kastleman, author of “The Drug of the New Millennium.” Mark’s book deals with the brain science behind Internet pornography addiction. This is the second of two podcast interviews with Mark Kastleman.

We want to thank our musical guests Jake White and Michael Kelsey.

A huge thank you to our sponsors NetMop and BlueCoat!

I forgot my laptop at home today. Just drove off without it. Left it sitting in the garage. Ugh.

Fortunately, today wasn't a day that I was planning on spending the day coding. My development environment runs in Fusion on my MBP, so that would have been tough. I had a day of meetings and discussion and for that, my iPhone worked just fine.

For the most part, I take my laptop everywhere I go. This mistake has taught me that I could take it fewer places and get by.

What suffered? I couldn't pusblish today's show on IT Conversations from my iPhone very easily. I couldn't blog easily. As I mentioned, I was without my development environment. Other than that, life went on.

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See http://www.liveside.net/blogs/main/archive/2008/07/21/mac-client-for-live-mesh-review-and-download.aspx for the news!!!

Matthew Alan Finnigan

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Actually, it’s hard to write much of a review without giving away key plot points, so this first part will be brief (and spoilers listed below).

Truly an outstanding film. Not perfect (see the spoilers section), but every bit as tense, intelligent, and morally complex as the crime dramas that regularly get Oscar nominations. Put another way: if you took Batman out of the film (but left Bruce Wayne), removed the Joker’s makeup, and toned down the injuries to a certain character — it would be considered one of those Oscar-worth crime dramas, “ripped from tomorrow’s headlines”.

Adding to that verisimilitude is that Gotham City for the first time looks just like a normal city. There’s clearly a lot of effects to make it look both bigger than and different from Chicago — but there are none of the gothic city designs that have dominated the previous five Batman films, including Christopher Nolan’s first one, “Batman Begins”.  Ditto for Batman — with Wayne Manor still under reconstruction, there’s no Batcave, just a large, low-ceiling, well-lit expansive workspace buried somewhere in Wayne Enterprises-owned property, while Wayne himself lives in a large, sparse city-center penthouse. If anything, the city and the sets look normal to the point of banality — which serves to intensify the darkness within the people themselves.

That darkness is indeed the theme of this movie, and it’s pretty unrelenting — except for one grace note (or rather two) towards the end. The acting is all solid, with excellent performances by Aaron Eckert (Harvey Dent) and Heath Ledger (the Joker) — and, yes, Ledger’s performance really is Oscar-worthy. (Quick: who so far this year would you rate over him?) The score is likewise outstanding: it doesn’t call attention to itself but it does build the mood of the movie.

Like Harvey Dent’s coin, “The Dark Knight” is the flip side of “Iron Man”. In the few spots where “Iron Man” turns dark, it’s never more than a quip away from lightening up. In the few spots where “The Dark Knight” turns light-hearted, there’s still a weariness in the humor, and it never lasts long.

Highly recommended; spoilers after the jump

SERIOUS SPOILERS HERE, FOLKS — DON’T READ IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW

At one point, the Joker says that — for him, at least — there are no rules, and he proves it in this movie. He says that people will die until Batman reveals his identity, and then he keeps that promise, killing several key people (a judge, the Police Commissioner) and attempting to kill others (the Mayor). Even Gordon gets caught in the crossfire.

The Joker, while in custody no less, sets up a situation where Batman has to choose whether to race to save Harvey Dent (the DA) or Rachel Dawes (Dent’s current love — and the woman Bruce Wayne wants to be with when he sets down his cowl). Batman races to save Rachel — and find that the Joker has directed him to Dent instead. Rachel is killed, while Dent is saved — but horribly burned on one side of his face. (The effects are gruesome enough that when Dent first revealed the burned and raw side of his face, a number of people in our sold-out theater — young girls by the sound of it — actually screamed out loud.)

In the meantime, the Joker escapes from custody by triggering a bomb surgically implanted in one of his own henchmen (also in custody) and sets in motion several more threats (and deaths). He also visits Dent in the hospital and pushes Dent — the white knight DA — into becoming Two-Face. Dent leaves the hospital and begans seeking his own vengance among the crooked cops who delivered him and Rachel into the Joker’s hands. He also kidnaps (now-Commissioner) Gordon’s family, to make him pay for having these corrupt cops in his squad in the first place.

In the meantime, the Joker sabotages two ferries being used to evacuate the city, stranding them in mid-harbor. One ferry is packed with criminals in custody, the other with regular citizens. Both ferries are rigged to explode — and each ferry has the detonator to trigger the other. The Joker gives them until midnight (about 15 minutes away); if one ferry has not detonated the other, he says he will detonate them both.

For me, the emotional climax of the film is when one of the convicts on the ferry (who appears to be an uncredited Michael Clarke Duncan, looking cold and mean) talks the prison guard supervisor into handing over the detonator, saying (in so many words), “You’ve never killed a man before. I understand why you can’t do this. I have. I know how to kill someone. Give the detonator to me, and I’ll do what you should have done ten minutes ago.” The supervisor lets Duncan take the detonator — and Duncan tosses it out the porthole into the bay. (At this point in the film, I turned to my sweet wife Sandra and whispered, “The red-black game.” She smiled and nodded. Go look it up.) In the meantime, the good citizens on the other boat have voted to blow up the other ferry, by roughly a 2-to-1 margin. One of the passengers, frustrated with the delay in implementing the vote, takes the detonator — and then can’t go through with it. He sits back down, waiting to die with everyone else.

Midnight comes — and nothing happens.

That’s because at this point, Batman and the Joker are fighting, and the Joker can’t trigger the detonation himself. That fight was actually the most disappointing part of the firm; Batman has just taken on an entire SWAT team, and yet the Joker gets the best of him using three Rottweilers, a net, and a metal rod of some kind. One could argue that Batman is exhausted at this point, but it just doesn’t quite ring true.

Batman eventually turns the tables on the Joker, leaves him dangling for the SWAT team to find, then goes to help out Gordon. He ends up getting shot himself but kills Dent in the process. (I must confess that I found myself thinking, “One good right hook and Dent’s jaw would come clean off –and his left eye might fall out, to boot.”)

The movie ends with Batman on the run from the law, being blamed publicly (at his own insistence to Gordon) for much of the mayhem in order to cover for Dent’s fall from grace.

The tragedy of Heath Ledger’s untimely death is only compounded by the outstanding quality of his performance and the fact that at film’s end the Joker is still alive and Two-Face is dead.  It’s unclear what they’ll do for the third movie, but if the quality keeps up, it will be something to behold.  ..bruce..

One big change that I haven't posted about yet was my transition from Visual Studio Diagnostics to Office Security a few months ago.  Here's an article published yesterday in "Dark Reading" that covers my team and the pen test system we're building:

Microsoft Office Security Team Enlists Bots, Pen Tests
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=159305

I discovered Wondermark a few months ago, and it’s become one of my favorite strips. The general conceit is that the illustration largely comes from actual Victorian-era artwork (which has the advantage of being in the public domain). Here’s today’s strip, but click on the strip below to go to the original to read the mouse-over text (and to see an unsquashed version):

It’s well worth spending a few hours going through the Wondermark archives, where you’ll find such gems as this one. ..bruce w..

I just had a phone conversation with my son Jon (LCPL Webster, USMC), who is somewhere in Iraq. Frankly, the phone call quality was better than when he used to call me from San Diego on his own cell phone. He’s doing well, though he said that when his cohort landed in Kuwait earlier this month, the temperature was nearly 140 degrees F. He couldn’t talk long and couldn’t tell me much about where he is and what he’s doing — but he’s doing well.  ..bruce..

My latest Baseline column is up, discussing how to make a distributed software development project work.  ..bruce..

A few days ago I said that we wouldn't be holding a CTO breakfast in August. I was wrong. In fact, we'll be holding the breakfast on August 28 in conjunction with the Utah Open Source Conference at Salt Lake Community College. Please mark your calendars.

If you're a regular breakfast attendee, I have discount codes for UTOSC that I can give you. Just send me a note.

Tags: utah events open+source cto breakfast

No, not the movie itself — I haven’t seen it yet, though I do have tickets for Friday night.

It’s the movie’s title: “The Dark Knight”. It’s not “Batman: The Dark Knight” or worse yet “Batman II: The Dark Knight” (though I guess technically you’d have to call it “Batman VI: The Dark Knight”). It’s not even “Batman and the Joker”.  Yet I daresay that the movie-going public is pretty clear that this is a film about Batman.

Lucas had an excuse for the Star Wars series — he was really trying to do episodes (though read Michael Kaminski’s utterly fascinating The Secret History of Star Wars — a free downloadable electronic book), and he had the cojones to label “The Empire Strikes Back” — the second Star Wars film made — as “Episode VI”.  Beyond that, the “Star Wars Episode XX” part wasn’t part of the titles for posters and promotions for “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi”. Everyone who had a pulse and an above-room-temperature IQ knew that these were all Star Wars films and needed to reminding.

Spielberg, on the other hand, had no excuse for sticking “Indiana Jones and” in front of the successive “Indiana Jones” movies or, worse yet, retroactively in front of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (yep, that’s what the DVD cover says, though the title within the film itself remains untouched). Somewhere in here there is a whiff of Hollywood’s fear that we’re all secretly idiots and that no one would realize that “The Temple of Doom”, “The Last Crusade” and “The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (which should have been “The City of Gods“, and I don’t just mean the title) were Indiana Jones films.

The nadir is probably “Spider-Man”, “Spider-Man 2″, and “Spider-Man 3″. Given how many different “Spider-Man” titles that Marvel has had over the years, surely Sony could have used some of those instead (as Marvel did for the Hulk reboot, using “The Incredible Hulk”).

A useless rant, I know. But if “The Dark Knight” turns out to be the top-grossing film of the year, maybe other studios will sit up and take notice.  ..bruce w..

The Onion, as usually, hits the nail right on the head:

WASHINGTON—A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.

“What America needs right now is not more talk and long-term strategy, but a concrete way to create more imaginary wealth in the very immediate future,” said Thomas Jenkins, CFO of the Boston-area Jenkins Financial Group, a bubble-based investment firm. “We are in a crisis, and that crisis demands an unviable short-term solution.” . . .

“Perhaps the new bubble could have something to do with watching movies on cell phones,” said investment banker Greg Carlisle of the New York firm Carlisle, Shaloe & Graves. “Or, say, medicine, or shipping. Or clouds. The manner of bubble isn’t important—just as long as it creates a hugely overvalued market based on nothing more than whimsical fantasy and saddled with the potential for a long-term accrual of debts that will never be paid back, thereby unleashing a ripple effect that will take nearly a decade to correct.”

Heh.  Read the whole thing.  ..bruce w..

With the high price of gasoline, lots of people are looking for ways to save money on gas. The simplest method is simply to slow down. The drag on a vehicle goes up with the fourth power of the speed. That implies a very crisp knee in the curve.

Of course, the standard answer would be "lower the speed limit to 55MPH." But that would really be a bummer for people on long trips. We have better technology than in the 70's. Most people cruising down the highway at 75 don't know that they could slow down 10 or 20 MPH and save real money. Let's give them data. Here's my proposal.

Why don't cars come with a meter that shows how much you're spending right now on gas. Turn instantaneous mileage into instantaneous dollars and you'll see real behavior change. That leaves people free to choose and most will choose saving money when there's no compelling reason not to while leaving people the freedom to spend money to get where they need to be.

One step further: create an online game where people can compete for best performance over a given route.

I'm looking for an iPhone app that does this for starters.

Tags: politics gas

I've been using the mt-twitter plugin to automatically publish blog articles to Twitter. I find that I get more readers that way than RSS or my newsletter at this point. One problem is that you don't get any good stats that way. I've modified the mt-twitter plugin to use bit.ly now to solve that problem. With bit.ly you can click on the "info" link and get good stats about who clicked from where.

This is the code I added to the _update_twitter function:

 my $bitly = LWP::UserAgent->new;
 my $url_response = 
       $bitly->get("http://bit.ly/api?url=" . $obj->permalink);
 my $small_url;
 if($url_response->is_success) {
    $small_url = $url_response->content;
} else {
   $small_url = $obj->permalink;
}

Of course, you also have to change the line that creates the twitter message to use the new shortened URL ($small_url) instead of the permalink directly.

Tags: blogging perl movabletype

Dr. Charles Knutson interviews Mark B. Kastleman, author of “The Drug of the New Millennium.” Mark’s book deals with the brain science behind Internet pornography addiction. This is the first of two podcast interviews with Mark Kastleman.

We want to thank our musical guests Jake White and Michael Kelsey.

A huge thank you to our sponsors NetMop and BlueCoat!

Here's the top ten shows on IT Conversations for June:

1. Episode Nine - StackOverflow (Rating: 3.28)

   Joel and Jeff discuss Apple's WWDC (and the correct pronunciation of OS X), the use of JavaScript on modern web sites, affiliate programs, and much more.

2. Episode Ten - StackOverflow (Rating: 3.43)

   Joel and Jeff discuss the fine art of listening, source control, the risks of being an internal IT developer, and the state of current mobile platforms. Oh, and how to clean the toilet.

3. Episode Eleven - StackOverflow (Rating: 3.28)

   Joel and Jeff try to avoid talking over each other while discussing data generation, full text searching, cross-site scripting, Markdown, Microsoft's Silverlight, and how to get a job at Fog Creek software.

4. Scott Ambler - Are You Agile or Are You Fragile? (Rating: 3.72)

   A presentation by Scott Ambler at the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series in 2003 entitled "Are You Agile or Are You Fragile?" The software industry is shifting from large-scale, prescriptive processes that mandate rigorous procedures and policies to lighter, more agile methodologies. Are these agile processes appropriate for your organization? If so, which should you consider adopting? What challenges can you expect and how can you overcome them? (Audio from IT Conversations. This is a long one: nearly two hours.)

5. Episode 8 - StackOverflow (Rating: 3.35)

   In the first episode hosted by the IT Conversations, Joel and Jeff discuss Joel's keynote address at the recent Rails conference, the attitudes of some of those who don't use Macs, and Clay Shirky's recent book, "Here Comes Everybody".

6. Stuart Kauffman - Reinventing the Sacred (Rating: 3.44)

   Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with biologist and author Stuart Kauffman, about his latest book "Reinventing the Sacred," which discusses a new way to look at science, the universe, and the mystery of life.

7. Ken Ledeen & Harry Lewis - Blown to Bits (Rating: 3.50)

   Ken Ledeen and Harry Lewis are co-authors (with Hal Abelson) of the forthcoming book "Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion." All three authors are veteran information technologists. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell speaks to Ledeen and Lewis to reflect on the rapid and sweeping changes these technologies bring.

8. Connected Innovators Showcase - New Business Ideas (Rating: 3.21)

   The Connected Innovators program showcases emerging technologies and new business ideas likely to make an impact on the networked future. After a competitive application process, Supernova's Kevin Werbach and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington invite a dozen top company leaders on stage to present their best, quick pitch. Then, a panel of start-up experts analyzes the offerings, judging their potential in the marketplace, and their meaning for the tech industry.

9. Ken Schwaber - Wrestling Gold from Today's Software Projects (Rating: 3.79)

   "You Thought it was Easy: Wrestling Gold from Today's Software Projects." The benefits of Agile are many, the implementation is easy, and the problems are daunting. Ken Schwaber, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium & Chairman of the Agile Alliance, discusses the obstacles to wresting the gold from today's software projects. (IT Conversations audio from SDForum Agile Summit.)

10. Mark Shuttleworth, Tim O'Reilly - Talking Ubuntu (Rating: 2.71)

    Mark Shuttleworth began Ubuntu in 2004 with a dedicated group of developers intent on creating a revolutionary new Linux desktop. Now, many in the Linux community are calling it the Linux desktop for real people. After three years of phenomenal growth, Shuttleworth sat down with Tim O'Reilly at the first ever O'Reilly Media sponsored Ubuntu Live Conference. During the interview, Tim asks Mark for insight into Ubuntu's meteoric rise and about key challenges for Ubuntu going forward.

Interestingly the Ambler and Scwaber shows are not recent, but getting a lot of play and quite a few ratings (in the hundreds). Stack Overflow is doing well, as you'd expect given the audience both Jeff and Joel bring to the podcast.

Since Doug put up the new ratings system, the overall number of ratings per show are up considerably--all of these ratings numbers have enough behind them to make them credible.

Tags: itconversations

We're doing the July CTO breakfast a little early this month because of Pioneer day. For those of you not familiar with Utah, Pioneer day is a state holiday on the 24th of July and it's a pretty big deal. Celebrates the day the first pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley in 18481847.

We'll do the usual thing on Friday. Anyone with an interest in technology products and companies it welcome to come. Hopefully Phil Burns will come and we can get into heated discussions about the iPhone. :-) If you've got other things you'd like to discuss, bring them up.

There's no breakfast in August. After that, here's the schedule:

• Sept 26 (Friday)
• Oct 30 (Thursday)
• Dec 5 (Friday) - Combined Nov and Dec breakfast

Here's a Google calendar for the breakfast.

We'll meet in the Novell Cafeteria (Building G) at 8am and go until 10am. I hope to see you there.

Tags: utah events cto breakfast