Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at January 20th, 2004

Why do sequels seem to almost always suck? I’ll grant you that that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it does seem that way sometimes.

There are sequels that work like the original Star Wars trilogy. Or for that matter, how about the Godfather 2? That was at least as good as the original. Wish the same could be said about Godfather 3, Matrix 2/3, the second Star Wars trilogy and well… almost all sequels.

Problems with sequels are so consistent that I’d wonder why people even bother–except that I already know the answer. Cash. There’s already a market for a sequel to a successful work of art. Plus, artists need to make a living. Even successful ones aren’t making that much (with the exception of the odd multi-millionaire…).

Also, I suspect that the artists as well as the readers want to find out what happens next. When you write a novel, you come to like the characters. I suspect most artists want the chance to fiddle with things a little bit more or didn’t include some really cool stuff the first time around. At least I hope so.

So, having thought about why they’re made… Why do sequels suck?

First, I think that the first time through, both the artist and the reader are discovering the characters and setting for the first time. The excitement is both contagious and almost impossible to keep up. In a sequel the reader will be coming back both for the excitement of discovery and also with nostalgia for the original.

It’s hard to do both. Too little new stuff and you end up with endless rehashing (Gor, anyone?) and too much new stuff and you end up asking, “Where’s the stuff I liked?” I don’t have a great example of the second, but “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” has elements of that problem. Too little of the contrast between Dr. Jones the professor and Indiana Jones the adventurer. Dr. Jones barely appears at all.

Second, in all honesty, no artist can be at the top of their game all the time. If everything comes together, allowing someone to produce something incredible, well, chances are they just aren’t going to be at that level again. People just aren’t that consistent. Circumstances aren’t always right.

Third, stories take place in the most important periods of the characters’ lives. Sequels must either take place in a less important period (probably boring…) or a period even more important than the one before. In science fiction, characters so often:

1. save the world
2. destroy the empire
3. become all powerful

in the first novel/movie, what can they do in the second? Do it again? Change the back story so that it turns out that the hero didn’t really do it and now has to do it for real?

In Dune Messiah, Herbert has the hero lose it all. That worked. Children of Dune continued the story. It worked too, but only (I suspect) because all three of those books were planned to be one story from the beginning. It just grew too large to fit in one book. In short, it worked because it wasn’t really a sequel. Just a continuation.

The next four books after that (the fourth exists only in notes) were still good, but didn’t appeal to me as much as the originals. I suspect that there was too much new stuff and too little of what was cool about the original Dune to make me entirely happy.

That being said, I still enjoyed them overall.

From what I understand however, the Herbert’s son’s prequels are beneath contempt. I must admit that just flipping through the pages in bookstores has scared me away from them.

In any case, when sequels work well it seems that they often do exactly what Herbert did in the first three Dune novels, what Lucas did with the first Star Wars trilogy, and what Tolkein did in Lord of the Rings–tell a story too big for one novel or movie.

Some sequels/series I hope to hit in thinking about this topic are Zelazny’s Amber series, the Matrix, Star Wars, and most likely, the Lord of the Rings movies. Look forward to it. Or not.

Posted by Jim at January 19th, 2004

The state of things on the distributed computing front goes like this:

The project of the team that I’m on will definitely be a file sharing program. I’m going to mostly be in charge of the gui and Casey will primarily be in charge of the actual sharing part of the code. We’re both still talking about the general architecture of the filesharing network.

The goal is to make it work without a centralized server. One way to do this is to use multicasting. Multicasting, at its most basic and least technical, amounts to sending everyone in a group. Basically, the clients would announce themselves via multicasting and continually add to the list of possible clients by saving the IP addresses announced via multicast.

To query, they would send a request using udp to everyone on their list. And then only the people with something that fit the query would respond.

This has obvious scalability problems, but should be workable for the scope of this project.

Posted by Jim at January 17th, 2004

I made pancakes this morning. Now the whole house simply reeks of pancakes. I wouldn’t have expected the smell of oil, flour and heated griddle to permeate the entire house.

Somewhere in here there’s an entry about physics and the sense of smell, but I’m not the person to write it. Alas.

Posted by Jim at January 16th, 2004

In December, I was finally introduced to the wonderful world of desktop Linux.

As someone who does technical support for some 20 users, manages 3 servers (1 Freebsd, 2 Windows 2000), and does a bit of web/database programming, I am used to troubleshooting computer problems. This is a good thing because your average Linux desktop has plenty of problems to troubleshoot.

What is not a good thing is that they are more usability problems than technical problems.

Here’s what I mean. My current laundry list of things to fix goes as follows:
1. Make my thumb drive work with Linux (this looks easy, I just haven’t had time)
2. Make my wacom tablet work with Linux (multi-step process, but at least I’ve bookmarked the necesary pages)
3. Make my sound card work (must learn more about ALSA, will probably have to recompile kernel or something. I dread this)
4. Mess around with the unholy trinity of apache/mysql/php a bit more (all of these work, but I’m still configuring certain details…)

Where is the usability problem in this list? Scattered throughout.

Mounting
All I it looks like I have to do is load a kernel module and mount the thumb drive for it to work. I will have to mount the thumb drive every time. Just like I do every time I put a cdrom in.

This irks me. The whole point of USB (at least to my mind) is that it’s a transparent technology. You plug it in and it works. Specifically typing “mount” very seldom offers me options that automatically mounting it wouldn’t. Ninety-nine percent of the time I only want to do one thing–access the drive.

Heck, the Amiga back in 1985 automatically detected a floppy placed into it’s drive. OS X, the BSD based Apple operating system does the same today. Why hasn’t someone done the same for Linux?

Kernel Modules
If people really want Linux to be a contender for the desktop market, they will have to either

1. come up with a very usable gui for kernel configuration,
2. enable the most commonly used modules by default, or
3. figure out some way for Linux to automatically add new modules when needed.

Possibly all three–though I’ve got to admit that option 3 makes me nervous. In any case, kernel configuration is not something that your average user needs or wants to know–but if they want to use all too many devices (some sound cards for example) they have no choice.

Documentation
Man pages suck. Other documentation is not much better. In the process of installing some things related to mysql and php, I was given the option of adding certain lines to the configuration files for apache/mysql/php. I was never told why I should or shouldn’t add those lines. In some cases, I already knew I needed them and happily allowed the installer to add them for me. I’m still tracking down the reason for or against adding certain lines.

The Funny Thing
Despite the annoying problems I’ve just outlined, GNOME/KDE do seem to have moved past the “usable only by geeks” stage. My wife (a social worker) can happily use the Linux box for almost everything she uses a computer for.

At least until she wants to put a cdrom in and listen to music.

Posted by Jim at January 14th, 2004

Living in Michigan, you don’t automatically get constant snow every day all winter, but sometimes it feels like it.

We’ve probably gotten 10-12 inches in the course of the last 2 weeks. Granted, some 5 of those inches melted into slush (and now ice) last Sunday/Monday, but that still leaves 6-7 on the ground.

It also means that 6-7 inches are on the driveway.

In past years my tactic for dealing with this problem could be described as “wait for spring.” As a general rule, the driveway would be level with the yard–except for the tire treads from my wife’s car. They’d be about 2 inches thick of a densely packed ice/snow mixture not unlike a glacier–well, at any rate not unlike a small, hard, unmoving glacier.

This year, with the newly found responsibility of a parent of two toddlers who want to walk up the driveway, I’ve shoveled every time it snows. I’ve even shoveled the sidewalks (the city doesn’t).

It’s sad how much of a sense of accomplishment I feel.

I feel so good, I may even mow my lawn next summer.

Posted by Jim at January 13th, 2004

Every year around this time, I get the urge to roast a turkey.

I’m not sure why it is, but I can guess. I do all the cooking around the house and I can probably be described as a bit of a hobbyist. I particularly like to make Mediterranean, Indian, African (Ethiopian in particular) and occasionally Chinese food. I’ve got books on Southeast Asian and Japanese cooking, but these books are so far unused despite the fact the Japanese cookbook actually includes directions for sushi.

I love sushi, but I’m not yet confident enough of the freshness of fish in my area to try to serve it raw.

Actually, I’ve also got a few vegetarian cookbooks. It’s not because I’m a vegetarian, but rather because the lack of meat in the meals pushes vegetarian cooks to try interesting things. And also because I don’t believe eating meat on a daily basis is necessary.

So anyway, I made a turkey.

I got it for about a dollar a pound, making it rather cheap–$11.87. That’s still more turkey that we can eat, but it was the cheapest (and smallest) one I could find. I saw $45 turkeys in the freezer.

I hadn’t realized just how long it takes one of those suckers to thaw. Two days for the smaller ones. According to the label you could make it thaw in 19 hours if you let it thaw on the counter for 7 hours and then inside the fridge for another 12.

I tried that. It didn’t work. The outside was a little soft but the inside body cavities were like rock. So after calling my mom and younger brother Derek (both of whom had made turkey before), I put the turkey in the cooler with cold water and kept it there for an hour and half. In an effort to avoid disease, I changed the water every half hour, pouring it into the sink.

This is more of a pain than it sounds because it takes time to fill up the cooler with water, the cooler is a bulky object, and you pretty much have to wash your hands each time you touch the turkey.

Why would you touch the turkey? Because you want to get all the water out and you don’t want to have the turkey fall into the sink while you do it.

Also, we have 5 cats. So while I could have placed the turkey on a plate while pouring out the water, I didn’t want it out of my sight. It did thaw eventually though. It was juicy despite having the temperature go up past the maximum on the thermometer (190).

Not that Abby and Rebecca (my daughters, both under 3) ate any. When they noticed we had mashed potatoes, they refused to eat anything else (unless you count gravy).

And so, I now have at least 5 pounds of leftover turkey.

Anyone like turkey sandwiches?

Posted by Jim at January 12th, 2004

Had class tonight.

This is, as always, a good thing. This semester I’m taking the last of three classes in the distributed computing series and the first of the classes in the database series. As a result, I’m probably going to be writing a lot more about distributed computing than databases. Advanced topics in distributed computing are likely to be much more interesting than the basics of database design.

At any rate, tonight was the distributed computing class. We’ll be graded for two things in this class: A project (60%) and readings and discussion (40%).

As you might guess, the project is the main point of the class. We’re supposed to create a distributed system. What’s a distributed system? Basically a system that allows multiple computers to access services.

The internet is one example. Napster is another.

The team I’m on is considering creating a file sharing program. We’re trying to figure out how to make it both scalable and decentralized (ala Gnutella). We’d also like to make it impossible for people to figure out exactly what sort of files your sharing–but that’s something we’ll implement only if we have time.

Trying to figure out the basic system will be complicated enough.

Posted by Jim at January 11th, 2004

I’m struggling to come up with an exciting first entry for this blog and to be honest, it’s not happening. In an ideal world, I’d write something really cool. In this world you’re going to have to be content with a list.

Here are the some topics I hope to hit:

1. My ever unfinished novel “The Interurban Electric Band”–currently stalled due to graduate school.
That being said, I am on the third draft. I hope to get back to it this semester. Unfortunately, I say this at the beginning of every semester.
2. Graduate School: I’m currently nearing the end of a masters in Information Systems. I’m pretty strongly interested in distributed computing, databases and (in particular) data mining. Look forward to reading about my thesis when I figure out what it will be on.
3. Sociology: I’ve got a masters in sociology. I’ve got to do something with it.
4. Religion: I’ve got a BA in religion and attended seminary for 2 years. See above.
5. Storytelling: Particularly as it applies to movies, books, comics and role playing games.
6. Life in General: I’m married, have 2 daughters and 5 cats. Also, I work for 2 cash-strapped non-profits (non-profits are cash strapped by definition). There’s got to be some material there.
7. Music: When I have time (i.e. not recently) I play bass guitar, trumpet and sing (I have a few years of voice training/choral experience).
8. Politics, economics, philosophy, history and a bunch of other areas in which my opinions are unconstrained by actual knowlege.
9. Progress in my goal to find a full time, decently-paid job before I finish my degree.

Despite the numbers, I don’t plan to pursue these topics in any particular order.

Also, for the benefit of those readers who happen to be my wife, I’d like to indicate that the numbers don’t indicate the relative importance of any particular topic.