Nice Work If You Can Get It - Review

Nice Work If You Can Get It is a frothy bit of Broadway magic. The show features songs by George Gershwin, and a plot loosely (very loosely) based on his 1926 musical, Oh, Kay. Other material from the film Delicious, including the immortal love song Blah, Blah, Blah.

The show stars Matthew Broderick, Kellie O'hara and a great cast. I saw a matinee last Saturday with my wife, my son Daniel, and a friend of his. We all laughed and clapped up a storm.

The thin plot involves Broderick as Jimmy Winter, a dissolute young rich boy who prefers chorus girls to nice girls. But he's marrying a nice girl to secure his inheritance. Until he meets a bootlegging dame, Billie Bendix. Hilarity ensues.

Apres theater dinner at Barbetta was excellent.

WAMP Step 2: Install PHP

As detailed in our previous post, we are building towards a WordPress installation on a desktop PC. In step 1, we successfully installed and tested the Apache web server.

As mentioned last time, some documents that are served by the web server to your web browser are static documents - just files sitting on the hard drive. Other documents are actually queries into a database, where the data has been dressed up and presented as a web page. Still other documents are mostly static, but with some customization by a script running on the server.

To support WordPress, we are going to need both a database and a script engine. A very popular scripting language for web pages is PHP, and that is what WordPress requires. The rest of this post will walk through installing PHP.

Setting Up WordPress on a Desktop

My wife is setting up her business and wants to have a website with blog, etc. Great! She'll be getting her domain name and contracting with a web hosting company - we haven't decided which at the moment.

For the blog support, I'm going to test WordPress, since it is very popular. Being the geek that I am, this means setting up WordPress on our home desktop machine.

WordPress (WP) runs on top of several other popular Web tools. Apache is a free web server, PHP is a free scripting engine, and MySQL is a free database. If these tools were running together on a machine using the Linux operating system the whole stack would go by the acronym LAMP. Since I'm using a Windows PC, it will be a WAMP stack for me.

While there are products that claim to install WP and all of these prerequisite pieces of software, I'm going to do it myself and write series of blog posts about the process.

Wish me luck!

ps - The process I will follow is based on Jessie Forrest's blog. Thank you Jessie for putting so much in one place! My posts will include a little background info and changes to the process Jessie posted a few years ago, based on the problems I encountered and how I solved them.

Getting the Most from your Arthur Murray Dance Package

My wife, Blanka, and I have been dancing at the Arthur Murray studio in Montclair, NJ for a little less than a year. It all began as a birthday present from her of a few private lessons, but it has grown into an important part of our life and growth within the Montclair community.

Put simply, the people and staff of the dance studio are wonderful. We have met so many people from different backgrounds that we otherwise would never have met. Our instructors, Gregory and Emma, are simply the best. They are fantastic at communicating quickly and clearly, and giving us maximum value in each 40 minute lesson.

If you are also interested in learning to dance through the Arthur Murray system, or you are in the process of comparing studios, here are a few of the things we have learned that will help you maximize your enjoyment, progress, and value of your purchase.

• Buy a package of lessons if you can afford it. It helps lower the total cost and increases your commitment to continuing.
• Stay an informed consumer, and manage your package to make sure you are learning the dances you want. Ask questions and give feedback. You're paying a lot of money to the studio, make sure you feel that you are getting your money's worth.
• At the same time, I can't emphasize enough how helpful it has been for me to spend entire private lessons just on the basics of framing and leading that are fundamental to every dance. Creating a connection with another person on the dance floor is probably the best part of dancing! Don't cheat yourself out of it by making the mistake of focusing on memorizing steps. That will come at its own pace. The body awareness of your dance frame and the 'other' awareness of your lead (or follow) skills are the most important benefits of dancing - they will extend far into other parts of your life.
• Take advantage of all the free training that Arthur Murray studios give you. Attend at least one group lesson and practice party a week.
• Come early to your lesson and warm up. Practice time is also free! This is an important benefit that I don't see a lot of students taking advantage of. You'll get more out of your lesson time if you've warmed up and practiced a bit on your own beforehand.
• Keep a dance journal. We were told that more serious students did this, and now that we do it also, we can see the benefits. It really helps to review what you've learned, and writing out the ideas by hand helps you remember them better. We haven't got to the point of videoing our steps, but it could happen!
• Make friends and have fun. You are there to have fun, right? Moving to music is a pure, visceral joy. Everyone else is also there to have fun. Smile at all your dance partners in group lessons. Our studio is blessed with a diverse student body, and I think mutual encouragement is important to keeping everyone coming.

I hope your studio does not pressure you to participate in additional activities. These balls, festivals, showcases, or competitions are completely extra - do them if they make sense to you, at your comfort level. Don't respond to any high-pressure sales tactics, and if you experience such tactics from your instructor or the studio owner tell them directly that it is inappropriate when you've already committed to spending thousands of dollars with them. (I'm saying that I've experienced anything like this at our studio, but I have read some horror stories on the web...)

Tomorrow, Blanka and I dance in our first "Freestyles" and we are thrilled to do it, having passed up several earlier opportunities that were available to us. Now we are ready, and now we will have fun. We've geared up, bought some extra 'bling' for each of us and we're looking forward to showing off our skills and getting some constructive feedback on our progress. It is going to be a great, fun day! I hope you have a lot of fun days during your dance experience, and I hope these tips will help you.

The Unfinished Clue, By Georgette Heyer reviewed by David vun Kannon

Georgette Heyer wrote almost 50 genre novels - Regency romance, historical, and detective fiction. The Unfinished Clue is a classic English country house murder detective story. First published in 1934, the story features contemporary characters packed into the country home of General Sir Arthur Billington-Smith, a right hard bastard that no-one is sad to find dead, except for those trying to get his money. With lots of motive, and no clear alibis, the guests are stuck hanging about the Grange, as the mansion is called, while a Scotland Yard detective is put on the case to interview them one-by-one.

The characterizations and dialog are sparkling. Heyer includes a sub-plot of romance for the one known innocent, Miss Dinah Fawcett, a 'spinster' (in her own words) at twenty five. The game of guess the murderer is kept going up to the last few pages, befitting any good mystery. Any devoted reader of mysteries knows to throw out the obvious choices, including the butler, right away. Choosing an unlikely character with no clear motive at the start of the novel pays off in the end, when the author reveals that you were correct in your guess.

Of course, the combination of unlikable bastard victim, unlikable minor character responsible and brought to justice, and successful love affair for main character makes this a novel that is not going to challenge the reader significantly. This is not hardboiled detective noir. You are here to get entertained in an enjoyable way, not forced to think deeper than 'whodunit?' And I did enjoy reading The Unfinished Clue. Heyer sends up English manners, skewers affectations, and pops the bubble of the pretentious with relish. Her strong central female could use a little more witty repartee and smoldering glances before falling into the arms of Inspector Harding (and she doesn't solve the case before he does), but on balance this is a minor issue.

If you are interested in genre writing, I would recommend reading more of Georgette Heyer. Certainly I plan to populate my Nook with more of her stories. As Isaac Asimov's R Daneel Olivaw detective stories show, it is possible to transplant some of the conventions of country house mystery to fantasy and science fiction settings. Heyer is also lauded for her historical research and detail, and credited by some with inventing the Regency romance category in the 20th century.

Fun, and recommended.

District 9 review

Peter Jackson employs his awesome CGI talent to bring us a wicked satire and cautionary, somber tale about race and discrimination, constructed a very new cast and director. However, the story is told in a mixture of cinema verite clips from the cameras ever present in our society and traditional storytelling that I found to be an uneasy blend.

Twenty years ago, a giant spaceship coasted to a stop over Johannesburg, South Africa. It did nothing for a month. and humans cut their way in after getting impatient. They found the prawns, slightly more than man sized aliens, mostly dazed, confused, sick, and malnourished. First contact immediately became a disaster relief effort. The million odd prawns were transfered down to a sprawling tent city that quickly became a slum, with an especially nasty Nigerian crime lord preying on the Prawns as they pick over mountains of garbage and squabble over cow heads and cans of cat food. Human/alien tensions are constant and high. Now the relief agency MNU wants to relocate the prawns of District 9 to a new area, further away from Jo'burg.

The public face of the relocation effort is chosen to be a hapless civil servant, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copely), a clueless bureaucrat whose main qualification seems to be his marriage to the daughter of the head of the agency. While he is casually racist and ignorant himself, he seems to be honestly unaware of the darker death squad/concentration camp guard mentality of the armed forces who regularly confront the prawns.

Things never go right as our antihero is filmed going door to door through the slum, knocking on the doors of shanties and trying to get uncomprehending aliens to sign away their civil rights in a forced relocation. For an American, a lot will resonate with our government's repeated treatment native Americans.

He finds gun caches, an illegal egg hatchery (which is casually incinerated), and stumbles finally into the shanty of the only intelligent prawns around, who have been trying to cobble together a repair for their ship for the last twenty years. Wikus confiscates their fuel source, in the process exposing himself to a powerful mutagen that begins to turn him into a prawn.

For Wikus, things go downhill from there. The last half of the film is a lot ordnance exploding, a lot of bodies and heads exploding, as Wikus tries to save himself and make the switch from antihero to hero, which will necessitate the choice to save someone besides himself. There is humor and it is black. The film owes much to our experience of Uprisings, Intifada, and Iraq on TV and in previous movies.

There are issues of course. Aficionados of the X Files will be muttering "Black oil" to themselves before their popcorn is cold. A major plot point is forcing Wikus to fire alien weapons that only respond to prawn DNA, why this never was done with prawns themselves is unexplained. Why the mothership is not full of human scientists is never explained.

As a morality tale, Peter Jackson' team is working the same ground as JK Rowling. His tale is a far more adult, violent, bloodier version, of course. Pureblood and mudblood, wizard and Muggle, human and Prawn, why can't we all just get along? See it.

Review - I Sell The Dead

My son Daniel and I went see this at the Quad Cinema on 13th St., the only place it was showing in NYC.

This film was a lot of fun!

A real horror/comedy with a good script and many funny moments. The movie is told as a series of flashbacks interspersed with present time dialogue. The dialogue is a bit slow, and had the filmmakers had more money, would have done better and quickened the pace as voice over narration. The take on many tropes of horror is quirky and funny. The ending ties up many story threads in a satisfying way. I was worried while watching the film that the anecdotes would be simply disconnected short stories, but the script brings most of them together by the end.

The main characters are interesting and sympathetic enough, and enough of the cast is still around by the end that a sequel would be doable. If you are in New York, go see it while you can, otherwise look for it on video. A worthwhile diversion.

IEEE Computational Intelligence Symposium

I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week in Nashville, Tennessee. Well, not really. In a hotel just off the runway is more like it, the Sheraton Music City was the venue for the IEEE symposium of the title. It was OK, but the food was terrible. Since we weren't downtown there was not a good chance to get out and experience more of Nashville.

But the science was great! I was there to speak on two panel discussions in the financial engineering track. I actually spent most of my free time in the A-Life track. By pure coincidence, I met up with Wes Elsberry of MSU. Wes is a key figure in the fight against intelligent design and anti-evolutionary creationism.

I thought Wes' talk on his research using Avida to explore the evolution of motion strategies was very interesting.

I made two points I think are worth repeating here. The research opportunities I think will be most helpful to the financial world are ontologies for law, accounting, and financial regulation, and agent based modeling as a way to escape the failed Rational Man hypothesis. One point raised by an audience member was that US federal level financial regulators should be supporting more academic research. I completely agree. Given the billions that are being thrown at problems, it wouldn't hurt to support some hard thinking.

Folding Progress

I'm quite enthusiastic about Folding@Home. My own folding just passed a milestone that means something, at least to me.

F@H awards points for finishing work units (WUs) on time. You can sign on with a user name, even join a team, and watch your individual contribution to science grow. Are points really pointless? Yes, but they appeal to our competitive urge, so they help keep people participating.

So my personal milestone - my number of points is now more than my standing on the leader board! Yes, comparing to different quantities, I know. It happened somewhere between 65,000 and 70,000. Since there are more than 1.2 million folders (not all active right now), I'm in the top 5% of contributors to F@H. Yeah, me! Also, Team Deloitte is in the top 5% of all folding teams. Pretty good for only three guys.

Actually, there are two other lessons you can draw from this progress. 1 - most people who do fold, fold anonymously. 2 - a lot of people tried folding, then forgot about it.

Wrestling with a superhero origins story

Since joining the SFABC and the excellent Writers of the Weird writing group, I've written two SF stories which I'm quite happy about. I've collected one polite rejection, which is also ok.

Now I'm thinking about a new story that is actually a comic book superhero story! I'm not a real spandex-clad fanboi, so this is something of a departure for me.

All I've got right now is the gimmick that creates Our Hero. Our Hero is actually a mild mannered nobody-in-particular until they die, and then are saved by an emergency heart transplant. The gimmick is that they receive the heart of a dead superhero!

So far the dead hero is named Aurion. I don't know much about him so far, except he has golden blood, psionic powers and he's dead. Oh, he's also from somewhere in the EU, because he's a member of a Euro supersquad. Other members

• Bruit - think Thing, but French. "Bruit, le smash!"
• Accelerondo - think Flash, but Italian.

Need more Euros, right?

ps - don't take this too seriously!

The Origami of Life

I just wanted to share my experience with this participatory science project.
Folding@Home is a protein folding research project that is part of Stanford University. While understanding how proteins fold up into their three dimensional shapes is very important, it is also very difficult. The process in the cell takes place in microseconds as the proteins are synthesized from the instructions in messenger RNA (copied from the DNA in the nucleus). Therefore the method of choice today is to simulate the motions of the atoms using computers.
Obviously, this takes a lot of computer power. More than even the largest supercomputer, in fact. So the only alternative is to reach out to thousands of PCs and borrow their spare CPU time. Modern computers are idle most of the time. Even when browsing the web and listening to music through your computer, its processor is just idling away. Distributed computing, also called grid computing, is a way to use those spare cycles to do some good.
Folding@Home is the largest distributed computing project in the world today. Anyone with a PC, laptop, or Sony PS3 and an internet connection can join. The joint efforts of hundreds of thousands of volunteers create a computing engine that is currently five times faster than the biggest supercomputer!
I recently joined, and it is very satisfying to know that for the cost of the electricity to leave my PC on, I am contributing in a significant way to curing Alzheimer's Disease, Mad Cow Disease, Huntington's Disease, studying cancer, and advancing basic science.
To join, I went to the F@H web page http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download to download and install the right F@H client for my machine and operating system. Now F@H just sits in the background while I use the PC normally. Because F@H only uses the spare cycles on the machine, it never interferes with other uses. I can also pause F@H whenever I want.
As you might expect of a grid computing project, the security of the software is a top priority. The software has been downloaded over 800,000 times, and no one has ever gotten a computer virus from joining F@H.
Anyone reading this message probably has all that it takes to participate in F@H. Please try it. It's fun and rewarding to see the molecules your PC is working on, and to earn points for completing work. But the real reward is knowing that you are helping to make life better, one spare cycle at a time.


ps - SETI@Home is a similar project aimed at detecting signals in radio waves collected from the Arecibo radio telescope.
pps - This is not meant to be an internet chain letter, but obviously a volunteer grid computing project grows mostly by word of mouth. If you try F@H and like it, you have my permission to forward this message to your friends, or use parts of it to convince the powers that be at local school districts and college campuses that F@H is safe, fun, and something that can make kids excited about science. PCs in classrooms are exactly the kind of underutilized resource that would greatly benefit Folding@Home.

Catching up - SFABC

First order of business - catching all of my faithful readers up on my life.

Science Fiction Association of Bergen County - a great group of folks I met in July at a Barnes and Noble in Paramus. Thank you, BN for hosting that meeting! I'm now a regular member and a member of their writers group. I'm very happy to be writing fiction again!

Paprika

I'm not a complete otaku, which is probably why it has taken me until now to notice this movie.

If you appreciated the way The Matrix played with "is this reality?" than you will love++ this anime. The mix of traditional cel animation and cgi was well done and the music was excellent. The playfullness of the OP (opening credits) was amazing and set the tone for the whole movie. Buy it on DVD!

Can't wait for Spring!

My recent look into science standards here in New Jersey popped up the factoid that the Garden Sate has a state dinosaur (as do several other states). Now I've found that the best place to look for fossils here is Poricy Park. Thank you NJGS!

Since you have to wade out into the stream to seive for fossils along the sandbanks, I'll have to wait for the spring before dragging the family out for the fun. This is gonna be great!