July, 4, 2005 archives

bubba ho-tep is a bit of a cult classic, but i have to say i was a bit underwhelmed. a large part of that is probably because i failed to stay awake through the whole thing — twice. so there’s a chunk of the middle/end that i didn’t see.

there are some great moments: the flashback explaining how elvis traded places with an impersonator, the interplay between campbell as elvis and ossie davis as john f. kennedy, and the decoration of jfk’s room.

maybe i’ll have to try again some day when i can make it through the whole film. but for now, i’ve got another 100 films in my netflix queue to work through.

happy independence day! it seems like a very appropriate time to make a contribution to the institute for justice, which litigates to protect various freedoms.

and once again, i’m contributing to a recent supreme court loser: the institute was involved in kelo v. new london, which has cleared the way for government to use its eminent domain powers to take property from its owner (paying “just compensation”) and give it to another private developer.

if there is one thing that redeems war of the worlds, it is that it is so entirely inconsequential that i will have completely forgotten it by tomorrow. it will be like i blacked out for three hours this afternoon. it sucked so hard that (i hope) my brain will simply purge the memory of it.

there was a hole in the pear xml-rpc package, and as a result many php-based applications had a security hole as a result, such as the many php blogging apps.

the thing is, this came about because the xml-rpc library builds up some code and calls eval(). whoever wrote code to parse xml-rpc by building code and calling eval() should have their computer taken away. and then possibly be beaten with it.

the pear code is actually a fork of edd dumbill’s php xml-rpc code, and this is not the first security hole that has been discovered in that code as a result of this positively shameful architecture. i will not be at all surprised if it is not the last.

and for those keeping score at home, i pointed out how dumb this was almost four years ago.

i caught terence blanchard at grand performances on saturday, or at least part of it, and one funny thing that happened is that these two older gentleman and some woman started dancing on the secondary stage that is sort of off to the side of the main stage, in front of the amphitheater-style seats.

one of the organizers of the grand performances went to ask them to knock it off, and got booed by the audience and then applauded when he relented.

the old guys were pretty funny, but had a great purity to them. you really got the feeling they were just into the music, and letting it move them.

the place was full — not quite as packed as for mad hot ballroom, but more people than i remember from the performances i went to last year.