<Angered Brackets /> » Geek Culture

Along with water, there’s a woman on the moon

Ethan — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 02:36:51 +0000

The media is all abuzz over NASA’s discovery of ice-water on the moon. This is great news, because it means the moon can potentially sustain more life than was earlier thought.
However, upon further ispection of NASA’s data, I have come to learn that there’s a woman on the moon (in addition to the man in the moon)
Have a look:

woman's face in moon

That ghostly image looks to me like a silhouette reflecting off of a pane of glass – as though this woman was standing in the room from which this photo was taken, with the moon right out the window.
The original image is:

Lunar south pole

Just to be clear, I don’t think this actually is a reflection or the image of a real person. Just a very convincing case of pareidolia. What do you think? Is the finding of water staged, just like the moon landing?

XKCD Knockout Comic Downloader

Ethan — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:00:57 +0000

XKCD, for those of you who don’t know, is a webcomic about (as it testifies of itself) romance, sarcasm, math, and language. In my opinion, it’s the best webcomic out there. I wanted to download the complete comics archive, for the sake of a local backup, and as an idea for a printed, coffee-table style book. However, I didn’t want just the comic’s image file – the best part of XKCD is often the alt-text that shows up as a tooltip when you mouse-over the comic. And of course there’s the comic’s title, as well.

There are several scripts out there that others have written before me that download the comic, and some even do a pretty good job of getting some of the extra data. However, I wanted more. I wanted a downloader that would get ALL the data available about the comics, and store it in an easily-retrievable, transformative manner.

This led me to write my own downloader, which I have dubbed the XKCD Knockout Comic Downloader (or XKCD, for short). I have relied to some degree on those who have come before me, and have modified their code.
Off the top of my head, I used some code by John Lawrence to find the latest comic number; and this discussion on Ubuntu forums got me started with getting the meta-data.

My downloader the most complete I’ve seen so far. of it’s notable features:

Store meta–data, including path to image, in XML file.
Choice of downloading the images or not.
Can append to an existing XML file, and update it since you last downloaded your personal batch of XKCD.
Will store all data about the comic, including seldom or never before used attributes, such as href, src, etc. (more on that later.)

Sure, this script isn’t a nifty one-liner that does all the work, but instead, it does more work, and does it well:

#!/bin/sh #-----user configurable----- append_to_file=true # continue from previous download download_path=~/xkcd/ image_path=images xmlfile=xkcd.xml download_images=true #--------------------------- #------configuration-------- i=1 latest=`wget -q -O - http://www.xkcd.com | grep 'link to this comic' | sed 's/.*xkcd.com.$[^\/]*$.*/\1/'` #--------------------------- if [ ! -d $download_path ] then mkdir $download_path fi cd $download_path if $download_images && [ ! -d $image_path ] then mkdir $image_path fi if $append_to_file && [ -f $xmlfile ] then sed -i '/\/xkcd/ d' $xmlfile i=$(tail -8 $xmlfile | grep '' | sed 's/^.*>$[0-9]\+$.*/\1/') i=`expr $i + 1` else echo "">>$xmlfile echo "">>$xmlfile echo "">>$xmlfile fi while [ $i -le $latest ] do echo " ">>$xmlfile echo " $i">>$xmlfile wget http://xkcd.com/$i/ img=$(grep http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ index.html | head -1) params=$(($(echo $img | tr -dc '"' | wc -c)/2)) for ((j = 1; j <= $params; j++)) do param=$(echo $img | cut -d\" -f$(($j*2-1)) | sed 's/>*<*[a-z]*\ $[a-z]*$\=/\1/') val=$(echo $img | cut -d\" -f$(($j*2))) echo " <$param>$val">>$xmlfile if [ $param = src ] then filename=$(echo $val | cut -d\/ -f5) if $download_images then wget $val mv $filename "$image_path"/"$i"_"$filename" fi echo " $i"_"$filename">>$xmlfile fi done echo " ">>$xmlfile rm index.html i=`expr $i + 1` done echo "">>$xmlfile

Rather than explain all the regexs used, and the logic in the script, if you have any specific questions, please ask.
What distinguishes this script from others (of the rare few that download the meta-data) is that I’m not assuming any attributes exist, but am downloading all of them. This is useful for the irregular comics such as House of Pancakes or Lojban. In fact, I just ran a search for href in the XML file I created today, and found a few nuggets I’ve missed in the past.

The fact the data is stored in an XML file means it’s transformative. write a script to tweet the alt-text (why you would do that is beyond me), or create a tag cloud of frequently used words. My intention is to create an XSTL file that will display all the comics in a pleasing manner and bring it to print. (Dealing with Randal’s irregular image sizes is something I’m still working on, and am open to suggestions).

Let me know if you use this script and what creative ideas you have in mind for your stash of XKCD.

Star Trek. Read this before watching

Ethan — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:27:47 +0000

I had the privilege of watching the new Star Trek movie 2 weeks ago, in a press preview. To answer the question many people have asked me about it – it’s a great action movie, and a decent Star Trek movie. Hardcore trekkies will find many things to get upset at in this movie, though there are tons of references and inside jokes meant solely for them, that will be missed by the uneniciated crowd.

It appears the movie raked in some $72.5 million in opening weekend, a decent sum, making it the fifth most profitable Trek movie – and all in just three days.

But as I said, I’d call this movie a “decent” Trek movie. It has the great characters, and some good drama, but it lacks the touchy moral issues we loved tackling week after week in TOS and TNG. I would have not expected to see the movie address any touchy issues (and it would probably have been an epic fail if it were to try), but this was still missed. The only exception to this, seems to be the (Spoiler!!!) implied waterboarding of captain pike, which was mostly edited out.

captain Pike, in a tight situation

(This very much reminds me of the torture scenes of Geordi in Generations, which were also mostly edited out:)

Anyway, I’d love to see more real-life issues addressed in Trek, and I do believe (and hope) that this movie is a harbinger for several more, if not a TV series. I think JJ has what it takes to make great drama, and Trek offers a ripe setting for his style.
It will, however, require of us die hard trekkies to loosen up a bit, and allow for some poetic license.

And to the point, and the reason I’m writing all this: there are a lot of questions that rise in the movie, and go unanswered. Apparently a prequel to the movie was made in comic form. The four issue Countdown series tells the story of the movie’s villain, as well as that of our favorite TNG characters, which we last saw 7 years ago, at the end of Nemesis (ever wonder what happened to Data/B4?). I only found out about this comic series after watching the movie, and it answered my questions in retrospect. If you have the opportunity, download and read the comics before watching the movie. Your enjoyment of the film will be greater.