Best. Fight Scene. Ever.

After all the trouble I went through to find a copy, I’m delighted to report that the new DVD of They Live is worth the effort. It’s a bare-bones budget release, but they didn’t skimp on the transfer. It’s crisp and clean, sounds great in Dolby Digital, and the film itself is every bit as entertaining as I remember.

The IMDB page currently refers to an older DVD release, produced by Image in 1998. The quality was apparently rather disappointing. I’m glad they did it right this time.

If you’re lucky. It seems that Vida Samadzai, also known as Internet pin-up girl Miss Afghanistan, is in serious trouble back home.

Fortunately for her, she fled to the US at age fifteen, where she’s not only allowed to wear bikinis in public, but also study at a California state university. For her next act of cultural independence, I suggest training at Gunsite; she may need it soon.

Ready? A Major Motion Picture Event, written and directed by the man who brought us Independence Day, about global warming. The sort of global warming that causes a simultaneous breakout of tornados, tsunamis, and other CGI disasters all over the world (or at least the parts Hollywood is interested in), and then brings on an instant ice age.

I figure he’ll find a way to blame it on Bush.

Version Cue is a revision control system for Adobe applications, introduced as part of the new CS suite. It’s off by default. It makes local copies when you check out files, and requires explicit commits. It’s based on public standards (WebDAV and XMP, implemented with Tomcat). You can lock a file to keep others from editing it, and you can break locks set by others.

All good so far.

If you turn it on, it defaults to sharing your projects with everyone on the local network. Privacy and user administration are optional, and must be administered locally, from their GUI tool; usernames and passwords are not integrated into your network infrastructure (Windows or Mac). It appears to be non-SSL WebDAV, which means anyone on the local net can sniff passwords and access anyone’s “secured” projects. For real fun, they recommend starting with wide-open desktop-based project sharing, and adding dedicated servers and access controls later. It doesn’t look like there’s any direct support for branching, labeling releases, or reverting to previous versions. Oh, and turning it on chews up a minimum of 128MB of RAM on each machine.

Not so good.

Makes me glad I don’t do user support for graphics/publishing people these days. I’d hate to have to strangle a manager who insisted on rolling this thing out right away.

On the flip side, if you’ve got the RAM and you turn off sharing, it’s A Good Thing for people who do a lot of tinkering in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. I’m going to be importing a few of my Illustrator projects to try it out, while I read the available documentation. If it runs correctly under Panther Server, I might even use it for photo editing in Photoshop, as a convenient way of preserving the raw scans side-by-side with the corrected versions. After I upgrade my laptop to 2GB of RAM.

Update: I just spotted something hilarious in the Version Cue Preference Pane.

Yes, that’s right; a large Version Cue workgroup is 10+ people. Gotta love that scalability!

At least, not at Borders. Nine days after special-ordering a copy of the They Live DVD, released in September, I received the following postcard:

“The publisher reports that this title is currently OUT OF STOCK. Your order has been CANCELED. Please check back in a few months if you are still interested. Thank you.”

Fortunately I was able to find a copy at Suncoast, and if that had failed, Amazon has it in stock. Hey, Borders, guess what I’m going to do the next time I can’t find something in your store?

Wi-Fi Networking News reports that Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is vulnerable to dictionary attacks. This means you gain nothing by turning it on unless you choose a strong WPA key.

The best source I've found for creating strong keys is Arnold Reinhold's Diceware page. There's a wealth of information here, including a number of alternatives to the main Diceware system, such as creating a strong password using only coins and your keyboard.

A few additional tables are only listed on the original ASCII version of the Diceware article. I particularly like the random syllable table, since you can print it out and carry it in a small container with a set of dice.

There are a lot of online stores that sell casino dice, but if you ever get to Las Vegas, many of the big hotels sell their used casino dice in the gift shop. The Luxor even sells theirs online for $2 a pair. You can get their playing cards, too.

“You realize I’m on the do-not call list?”

“We’re not trying to sell you anything, we’re just offering you a low interest rate.”

The Lending Company. Typical mortgage broker, apparently operating out of Scottsdale, AZ. They did not supply any caller-id.

I want one of these. Screw putting it into a PDA, though. A 300dpi LCD display? I want it on my 15” PowerBook!

Of course, it would probably cost more than my Lexus, but I can dream, can’t I?