strange birds

Go see it. If you like Bond or if you hate Bond but like action. There’s a better plot than most, though it weaves a bit. The acting and action is typically good. Most of my problems with it are niggling—things that could’ve been ironed out with another few weeks in editing, or me in charge (naturally).

This movie is better than Casino Royale¹, but the previous movie has more memorable scenes.

¹ Thus negating one argument of my rant about sequels from several days ago—except that it is more a continually rebooting franchise so I count this a mulligan.

I submitted a bug report and it came back as a duplicate, for this:

Notice anything strange? How about the virtual memory size? No wonder the system has been feeling crufty! That can’t be right though, what does top say?

8 GB! That’s a lot different than almost 42 GB. (The screenshots were taken a few minutes apart and I started Safari in there—so that discrepancy is irrelevant)) What gives? I’m not sure what the problem is, but the fact that my bug was deemed a duplicate seems to point to me not being the only one bugged by this. Yes, I realize that it might be requested and not allocated or used numbers, but I’m looking for used VM (“Expected behavior” in Bug Report parlance) when I use Activity Monitor or top.

A workaround until it is fixed by Apple is to choose to show an additional column. # Ports works well, as does messages sent /received and real memory and private / shared memory. Kind does not help, nor does CPU Time, and # Ports is small enough that it isn’t that annoying.

Ah, that’s a little better.

The main argument for saving the Big 3 automakers from their own horrible decision is how their death would affect their workers and communities. I fail to understand why it’s that important to keep the loads of manufacturing jobs afloat.

Our economic greatness isn’t founded on manufacturing but on innovation (and consumption (not the disease)). Distress is one impetus for innovation. Yeah, yeah. blah, blah: lost jobs.

So, go make some more. Create something new—ideas, products, revenue streams, processes, wealth. Stop bitching and work. (I read Matthew Yglesias because one of us thinks like the other—I’d claim pre-eminence, but he has more readers. He tackles this issue similarly)

Those losing their jobs weren’t necessarily in the auto industry because they had no options, but because the job is cushioned: health benefits, pensions, etc. The unions have equal to greater blame for the current situation in Detroit (just as teacher’s unions are the primary cause of the current state of education in the United States). Their glory days are long over and they were never the great good they claimed to be—they were influential, but also self-absorbed (a temporarily benevolent parasite). Unions abhor change because they exist for those at the top, not the masses of their membership

Obama wants change: ban unions and let manufacturing jobs die. Then we’ll see some change.

• They tend towards sucking-ness…dom…hood…ishness. Name a sequel definitively better than the original. I prefer The Empire Strikes Back (original version, revisionist fools!) to A New Hope, but they’re both arguably good.

• When your eye is on the next prize you don’t concentrate on the game at hand in the bush down the road. Spider-Man 2 was good, but I think the pacing was better in 1. Raimy lost sight of the movie he was making as he and the studio were already focused on 3 (and apparently beyond).

• If you aren’t focused on the sequel to the movie you’re making, you’re thinking about the movie that came before, viewing it wistfully through nostalgia and regret: SHould’ve had more of, less of, etc. Indiana Jones 4 (and 3 to a lesser extent)—I will brook no argument to this point. Raiders is definitively the best movie—pacing, acting, script. It all lines up into hokey, takes itself too seriously, magic. It takes the Constructicons and makes Devestator!

• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is difficult to draw the viewer in as there is no threat to the main character. S/he will always survive, and usually the villains will as well (a throwback to both familiarity and G.I. Joe (and James Moriarty)). It’s a major issue with comic book movies as in the source material there is often little threat to the main characters: Why was the death of Superman such a big deal? The X-men never lose a member permanently and often telegraph their benedictian intentions tens of issues before hand, switching sides willy-nilly. It’s alright to let your hero survive, but the chance must exist for them to die.

When I read The Wheel of Time I was sucked in. Jordan did a great job for awhile. Somewhere in book 3 or 4 (possibly earlier) the immobility of the plot became apparent, but in book 5 there’s a death near the end and I cried as I read it—that’s a good writer (or an overly sentimental/romantic reader). Fifteen pages later she was back alive! I read a few more books and his inability to kill off a major character destroyed the series for me (and then the dragging plots, the new twists (in book 9!), the authour’s death) and I haven’t gone back to it (except once, when I read up through book 5 again and stopped).

There has to exist the chance that the hero will die, despair, turn evil, whatever—be changed. Superman is a difficult character to write for as he is good at heart, there is no internal conflict over what the right thing to do, only which choice is at that moment more right. The Hulk is equally difficult as he is personified rage—where’s the chance for change, redemption, turning absolute evil, anything other than rage?

Iron Man did well despite posturing for a sequel (and the issue of him fighting a mirror image of himself, but evil—another post) because Tony Stark is essentially flawed. The fiction holds a mirror up to the world and we see…ourselves. He’s a patriot, a business man, a genius, an alcoholic, lonely. In the comic he turns against Captain America for not being blindly patriotic—Captain America. The movie only dealt with one issue and introduced still more (loneliness, attraction to Pepper Potts, friendship with Rhodey, the terrorist cell (10 Rings)(which should have been the focus of the first movie and leave Jeff Bridges in there for awhile longer)).

The Dark Knight had the hype of the first movie, which was plotted not for a sequel but as existing in a mutable world that exists even when we aren’t viewing it, and the tragedy of Heath Ledger’s death, but also the conflicting bits of who is the Batman. Where does he fit in the world? The comics asked it first, but Christopher Nolan asked it again (with both less and more nuance)—doesn’t the existence of a superpower create enemies of equal power? Would al-Queda have been as influential if the US didn’t have to paint them as such to avoid being the bully at the fight (when we could obliterate their entire region several times over in seconds, it’s hardly a fair fight)? The super-crazies seem to crawl out of the woodwork in the light of improved crime statistics: were there always baby-murderers and torturers, school-shootings and murder-suicides, or did they appear as a result of better policing (there’s fewer minor robberies reported and fewer criminals are weeded out by their peers—it’s a philosophical stance, not a practical one. Of course improve policing, but be prepared for some blowback).

I hope there isn’t a sequel to The Dark Knight. Let another director reboot the franchise once again and take a turn, but the Nolan/Bale version has asked questions, leaving them unanswered to improve our experience as the viewers. Enjoy that moment and stop wondering about the next one.

So after the OS reinstall and bringing over my music, and then obsessively fixing every wrong detail in the details, I was still having library issues.

Some songs wouldn’t let changes stick. I’d change the title to something more appropriate (like the correct title) and when selecting the song it would revert back to the wrong one. The most egregious case will serve as an example.

1. Import “Labyrinth” soundtrack into iTunes.
2. Change the tags to match the correct information. There a few songs that had the wrong names or no track number, and there is always album art issues (sometimes easily solved by looking up the album on iTunes & making your title, etc. match theirs. Sometimes).
3. Move on.
4. Later, when organized by album and with ⌘G, showing the cover art, to fix remaining issues, realize that even though I applied art to some albums it didn’t stick. So select track 1 (Opening Theme) and see that the name had reverted to incorrect.
5. Spend half a day figuring out the problem.

It isn’t permissions, I checked that first. I even downloaded PathFinder to check some extended attributes (and because I wanted to play with the new version). No dice. There was no unifying factor among the various files where I couldn’t modify the name or the artwork.

Until I checked in iTunes and realized that the offenders had ID3 V2.4 tags. All of them. Some of the 2.4 tagged files worked files, others not so much. An electronica album would let me alter any data except the art. The Labyrinth track would revert the name even if I changed it in the Finder.

Bad metadata. Bad.

So I stripped the ID3 data from the offenders. I googled and found a script and tried it on a copy first.

On a copy first!

And it still didn’t work, but going off another rumour of a hint, I did it again with iTunes open and after stripping the ID3 header, then selected the same tracks and Control-Clicked > Convert ID3 Tags… and changed the offender to version 2.3. After that I could change it back and forth willy-nilly and the changes stuck.

Why it works: the header gets corrupted. In the electronica album there was an image file stored in there that was null so nothing else could be written there. The Labyrinth track had the song title embedded incorrectly in the header so it was read out on importing into iTunes, which then handled the file into the correct location changing the filename along the way.

Not every v. 2.4 track had problems. Most of my tracks had no problems whatsoever, but the few that did were super-annoying to fix. Until now.

One More Thing! The changes will appear in iTunes, but nowhere else as iTunes stores most of these changes in the database (iTunes Music Library.xml) and doesn’t necessarily write them to the individual files. To fix them, here’s a clever hack that I can’t take credit for:

• Select the songs you stripped ID3 from.
• ⌘I > In the comments field type something, anything. Exit the info window. iTunes will write the comment to the metadata, in the process updating the ID3 tags to match what you entered in iTunes (for artist, Title, etc.)
• If you wish you can change the comments back to something else.