This weekend jennyaxe and I went and saw Avatar. Since everyone and their neighbor have already reviewed it, I thought I'd just give my opinions in brief.

1) Computer graphics have come a long way since Tron.

2) Visually, this movie was awesome.

3) I liked the world, the background and much of that, but the plot was crap.

4) Zoë Saldana did an amazing job playing Neytiri. I can't really figure out how she did it, considering she never actually appears on the screen. Of all the Na'vi, I thought she was pretty much the only one that gave the impression of being an actual living being rather than a very good model.

Today I had to figure out why we could log in to the database using the same credentials from all machines except the one the database server was running on. To possibly ease the pain of anyone reading this who may ever have MySQL's login system inflicted on them, I am now going to describe how MySQL logins work. Hopefully, it will be clearer than their documentation.

1. The most important factor in deciding if you're let in (and if you are, as which user) is not your username or password. It's the host you're connecting from.
2. The right to connect to a MySQL server depends on three things: the host you're connecting from, a username and a password. The host can be specified explicitly or with wildcards. A more specific host trumps a less specific one.
3. When making the decision to let you in or not, MySQL uses the most specific entry (or entries) available for the host you're connecting from that also has a matching username.
4. An empty username works as a wildcard.
5. This means that if there is a wildcard name with a narrower matching host specification than for any entry with the username you gave, MySQL will try to log you in as the anonymous (wildcard) user instead of the one you wanted.
6. If that wildcard user has a different password from the one you gave, you will not be allowed in. If it does have the same password (the empty one, for example) you will be logged in as another user than the one you expected.
7. The MySQL documentation suggests doing SELECT CURRENT_USER(); to see which user you really got logged in as if you're experiencing privilege problems.

It was the second to last one that bit us, of course. The database server machine had a wildcard user entry with no password, so when we tried to connect from there with a user and a password we were not let in. Once you know how it works, it's kind of obvious.

For the question of why in Cthulhu's name it works this way in the first place, I have not been able to find an answer in the documentation.

jennyaxe had an idea. So, for fact-checking reasons we watched Angel S5:20 "The Girl in Question" while eating dinner. And her idea really fits the canon extremely well.

You remember the guy that Buffy is said to be dating in that episode, the Immortal? Who had been in a pain in the ass for Angel and Spike several times before over a period of centuries? Who had had a threesome with Darla and Drusilla? It's totally Jack Harkness from Torchwood. Everything we hear about him, from appearance to tastes to behaviour, just fits perfectly.

Today is my 14611th day alive.

Clay Shirky just posted a very interesting blog entry on newspapers.

At this point, I've heard about the game The Path from as wildly different sources as ursulav's LJ and a blog on computer game design. In all cases, the verdict has been along the lines of "weird and/or brilliant, but definitely trying something new". Which makes me curious. Curious enough to go and have a look at the game's website, just to verify that it's as usual Windows-only.

Only it turns out it has a Mac version. So now I have to make up my mind if I want to buy it or not. At only US$10, I probably should give it a try. If nothing else, it'd give me something to play when WoW is down for maintenance.

Eliza Dushku posted a picture to her Twitter feed that kinda looks like it's for Dollhouse femslash fans.

jennyaxe is watering the kitten. With the watering can she uses for flowers.

It seems that Associated Press have decided to shoot themselves squarely in the head.

For those interested, I have now posted a Martha Jones/Sarah Jane Smith story to femslash09.

I have written a story for the femslash09 ficathon. Since I am for once in plenty of time, a beta-read would be nice. It's a Doctor Who (new series) story, and quite short (3200 words). It'd be a bonus if you're British, or familiar enough with UK English to spot my USAisms. To the best of my knowledge, the person I'm writing for does not read my LJ, so if you see this it should be safe for you to read the story before it's published. You should have watched the show up to the end of the 2008 season.

So? Anyone?

A week and a bit has passed since the Swedish EU parliament elections. Before and after those, there was (and, I believe, still is) quite a lot of noise about the Pirate Party. What I have seen of that noise in old-style media has focused heavily on the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet, and if that is wrong or not.

The answer to that question is that the question itself is faulty.

Online filesharing is not a problem. It is, in itself, just a technology that makes something that was once hard very easy. And therein lies the rub.

Let's rewind time half a century or so. It's the heyday of radio, TV, newspapers, movie studios and record companies. They all thrive like crazy, they to a very large degree drive youth (and other) culture. Lots and lots and lots of money pass through them and their cousin Advertising. Megastars are born, some people make enormous fortunes, all that stuff. You're familiar with this. Now, all these companies have one thing in common: what they actually do is to produce, reproduce and distribute information. Radio program? Just information, when you come down to it. TV? Also information. Newspapers, movies, LP records? Just the same. Now, the actual production of that information isn't much harder or easier than it has been for as long as humanity has existed. It was no harder for Shakespeare to write his plays than it was for a scriptwriter in the 1950s. What was different was that reproduction and distribution of the information on a massive scale was possible but hard. To have a radio show you needed a radio station, which was a serious investment. The same goes for TV stations, printing presses, trucks to ship LP records and so on. So companies grew up to get over that threshold; they made the investments and made a big profit from the fact that at the bottom of it all people are social creatures who want to communicate in some fashion with each other.

( Fast forward to today again )

On my way to work I listen to podcasts. Today, it was BBC World Service's Digital Planet and the Swedish P1's Vetandets Värld ("Knowledge's World", literally translated). The first happened to be about blogging and the second about podcasting. Both of them at some point talked about why people blog or make podcasts, treating it as some kind of unknown mystery. Am I weird in thinking it totally freaking obvious that when given an opportunity to communicate, people will do so?

There must be Sarah Walker slash. Where do I find it?

One of the cats was playing with a piece of Lego in the hallway. This would not be noteworthy, except that we don't have any Lego.

Thursday night when we came home from the cinema the kitten had managed to shut us out of half the flat.

We went to see the new Star Trek, jennyaxe, citikas and I. It was a lot better than we expected. A decent action-oriented SF movie in its own right, and a surprisingly fun reimagining of ST:TOS. At first I had a serious case of cognitive dissonance from Sylar the Vulcan, but that passed. All in all, Quinto did a good of his Spock. As did most of the actors, with a bit of an edge for Karl Urban's Dr McCoy, who was simply awesome. Uhura didn't have much to do, which was disappointing but very much in line with the original series. Overall, I think her role was more active and participating than the original's. Also, Zoë Saldana is every bit as hot as Nichelle Nicholls was back then (possibly more). The plot wasn't too bad for a Trek movie, and the occasional screaming scientific wrongness gave it the feel of a true Trek movie. The shockwave from the supernova unexpectedly reached Romulus? WTF, people? You can figure out how to build FTL spacecraft but not how long it takes for something with a fixed speed to cover a linear distance? Back here on Earth we cover that in seventh grade. Maybe the Federation Academy scientists could go back in time and get a couple of 13-year-olds from the 20th century to help them out.

And then we went home.

First a word about our flat. It's a two-story four-bedroom one. The entrance is on the upper floor, which also holds the kitchen, one bedroom, the computer room and the living room. In the living room there is a staircase going down to the other bedroom and the sewing room. There is a door between the living room and the rest of the upper floor, which is rarely closed.

This time, we came home to find the living room door closed. Which was suprising, since it had been open when we left. We quickly discovered that it was not only closed, on the other side of it was an ironing board that had previously been leaning against the wall now solidly wedged between the door and the side of a bookcase. As well as a kitten looking at us through the glass inset in the door with an expression of "O HAI! WHY ARE YOU OVER THERE, HOOMANS? OPEN DOOR SO I CAN REACH FUD PLZ". On our side of the door were two cats looking increasingly like "Yeah, ok, food is on this side, but, you know, food turns to, like, other stuff, and that goes on the other side of that there door, so, like, open the door, please? Nowish, if you don't mind?"

Some upset ensued. Different way of breaking into our own flat through the back without actually damaging anything were tried, with the result that we now have greater confidence in the flat's ability to resist burglars. Eventually, we pried loose the wooden ribs holding the glass pane into the door and lifted the pane out. Later still, we reassembled the door and made sure to move the ironing board elsewhere. Still need to repaint the door a bit, but that can wait.

Possibly we should not have named the kitten Arthas.

And they cancelled this show! The bastards.

Since so many on my friends list were writing about Dreamwidth, I went over and OpenID-registered. And this morning they sent me a proper invitation. So now I have an account there, under the same name as here. I'd appreciate it if those of you who see this and have Deramwidth account would somehow prod me over there, so I can add you to my reading list.