May 11th, 2008
First, I’ve got to say that the Iron Man movie is fantastic! It’s been a while since I’ve been compelled to see a movie a second time and IronMan has certainly given me motivation to do so. In some ways, it’s a pretty standard superhero story: hero is transformed from who they were, hero experiments to determine his capabilities, hero has some early trials, hero has a showdown with a Big Bad. It’s intelligently written, there’s a lot of smaller dialog that just flows (maybe improvised?), and the action is not the over-the-top hyperkinetic style that has plagued a lot of actioners these days. Plus, the suit of armor is nicely detailed and at least movie-plausible in how it’s functioning. Watching Robert Downey Jr. spring into action as Tony Stark in the armor sent a thrill like I was seven years old again.
As a kid, I loved the idea of Iron Man. He was like a pocket version of the giant Japanese robot toys I collected. While it would be great to have a giant robot and fight against giant monsters, it just seemed more practical to have a briefcase with power suit easily on hand. I mean, I could never hope to have a Mazinger or a Combattra in my closet… but IronMan armor could work! Yes, it would fit right next to my t-shirts and Luke Skywalker Dagobah fatigues. I would pour over the Marvel Universe entries for IronMan and all the other powered armor heroes and villians: Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man, Guardsmen and so on. My quest for fictional stats would even spill over to ever loosely associated tech like the Avenger’s Quinjet, Ultron and Alpha Flight’s Guardian. When I wasn’t reading about Iron Man, my Mego and Secret Wars series figures got a lot of use, right up there with Spidey.
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March 18th, 2008
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February 25th, 2008
The California convention season got started for me this weekend with WonderCon. WonderCon is produced by the same group that handles Comic-Con and the Alternative Press Expo (APE). After existing in Oakland for a number of years, it migrated over to San Francisco’s bigger venues. Unfortunately, it’s coincided with the Game Developers Conference the past two years and has been squeezed into Moscone Convention Center’s South Hall after a turn in the newer and visually impressive West Hall. The South Hall fits well but the layout makes the overall show feel cramped and the location for some of the smaller panel rooms is not ideal for good foot traffic.
WonderCon has become mostly a TV and movie panel show for me while I concentrate on shopping and autographs at Comic-Con. Compared with the insane lines at Comic-Con, it’s relatively easy to get a good seat and see actors, writers and directors of current and upcoming genre shows. This year had well known television shows and movies like Get Smart, X-Files 2 and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles represented. Actors and creators like Steve Carell, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Chris Carter and Anne Hathaway took the time to show up and answer audience questions. It was a nice, relaxing weekend.
Pictures from the panels and the exhibit hall are available for your enjoyment.
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February 14th, 2008
I really love SPAM. Spam musubi, spam & eggs, ramen with spam… the list goes on. Sure it’s made from unknown parts of a pig with surely unhealthy amounts of salt and other things but it tastes good. And millions of people throughout the world love Spam. I never got why we call unwanted mail or postings “spam” when it’s such a good thing. Shouldn’t we call it something else like Treet? Really, who eats Treet? And why would you eat a chicken and pork product when you could have 100% pure pork and ham? (Apologies to my kosher friends out there.)
Why am I talking about this? Well, after a couple of months of minor spam comment postings, my little blog fell under attack in the last day with dozens of bogus comments advertising all kinds of gambling services. Most got flagged as needing moderation but a lot still made it through and needed to be manually gotten rid of. If you’ve seen the commenting area of a post, you’ll notice I’ve been using reCAPTCHA to help prevent spamming. Since it’s turned out not to be an end-all solution, I started to look at alternatives.
First step was to straight away ban the most common IP addresses. Current WordPress versions have this as an option. Since the traffic and number of comments is very light, I don’t think there’ll be much collateral damage to legitimate posters. It’s also possible to alter the .htaccess file to totally deny access but that felt to be a bit much since I’m not really under a heavy attack. As a longer term solution I’m looking to see what other options are out there. A couple of notable are Spam Karma 2, Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Image Plugin and Bad Behavior. Depending on how effective updating to the latest reCAPTCHA and just blocking annoying IP addresses turn out to be, I’ll take a look at these solutions.
Thanks to a posting on Jammed for some of these plugin pointers.
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January 28th, 2008
While I’m writing posts, I’ll update on my Comics DB web app. I’ve started to do a mock up of a user interface for iPhone. Not that I did a huge amount of investigation, but the most serious choice for a framework looks to be Joe Hewitt’s iUI. It’s a combination of JavaScript and CSS which neatly transforms simple HTML elements into nice iPhone-like menus.
I really need to put more time into this as I’d like to get it up and running in time for field use at WonderCon next month.
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January 28th, 2008
I finished reading the latest issues of Amazing Spider-Man, the end of the One More Day story line and the first three issues of Brand New Day. From this post title, maybe you can get the drift that Brand New Day brings back a lot of old Spider-Man themes and accents. Initially I was pretty disappointed with end of One More Day. Not just what was done but how it was accomplished. Brand New Day has at least turned my feelings lukewarm. Strangely, this arc was enough to prompt me to actually send mail to Marvel for the first time. When I suffered through the ’90s Clone Saga, I was so disgusted near the end that I just stopped collecting for a few months and started reading the coincidently revamped Green Lantern. This time, since it feels like as much of a reboot as Spidey has ever had (let’s not think about Chapter One), I felt the urge to comment.
Here’s what I wrote:
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November 28th, 2007
The long Thanksgiving weekend was a good opportunity to make some progress with my comics database web application. I was actually surprised how easy it was to get something more or less fully functional running in a few hours spread across the weekend.
I ultimately decided to just go with CakePHP. For the reasons listed before, it ended up making to most sense based on what I’ve already had experienced with and what seemed to be installed by default with my ISP. I just followed the Cake Blog Tutorial, recasting blog postings into comic book titles with the appropriate field changes. Some retyping of code and minor editing of values and voila! a complete web application was born.
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November 18th, 2007
I spent a little bit of time this past week familiarizing myself with the current crop of web database application technologies. Of course everyone’s heard of Ruby on Rails. I checked on Django, which has been used at my work for some projects. Lastly, I read up on CakePHP. My search for some introductory screencasts on CakePHP lead me to railsenvy.com and some critical videos of other solutions.
I’ll have more in depth to say after I’ve finished my reviews. I might settle on CakePHP if for no other reason than to be able to apply increased PHP knowledge to my blog at some point.
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November 3rd, 2007
I’m still planning to write some additional articles on Japan, specifically on Akihabara. Since pictures are always good, I’ve started to look through my backlog of trip photos. Unfortunately, organizing family pics have taken precedence. In the mean time I’m contemplating my first private programming project in a while.
I have a lot of comic books… when I stopped counting years ago I must’ve had around 3,000 by estimate. With many short boxes added in the last few years, the count should be over 3,500, maybe even 4,000. Since I’ve long stopped remembering comics by issue number or cover, I’ve turned to databases over the years to keep everything organized.
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October 13th, 2007
Among the shows I watch is Tekzilla, Revision3’s follow on to InDigital. Tekzilla is a weekly show aimed from beginners to intermediates with topics spanning all areas of technology. Besides gadgets, CE devices, computers and software, they’ve covered other things too like the 50th anniversary of Sputnik and visited the Exploratorium but with just three shows under their belt it’s hard to say what are the limits of their coverage. So far I’m thinking I liked InDigital a bit more but maybe I’m still a bit miffed that it was pulled not long after I started regularly watching it.
Anyways, they’re still working on their temporary set and this week they adorned the fake brick backdrops with shelves holding little items including a little red Robby the Robot tin toy.
Not much to see but it’s always good to see something of Robby.
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