Kleo: Season 2 - Netflix Series

Kleo: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Very entertaining. Previous posts about the show:

• Kleo - Netflix Series
• Christ the Redeemer
• Tubular Bells

Peter Pan - Keller Auditorium

Peter Pan - A New Musical
BwayAmerica

We went to see this at Keller Auditorium last week. The show was okay, my wife enjoyed it. Didn't do much for me, did remind me of the animated Disney version of the story, which I liked much better than this show. In my book it was the best Peter Pan story ever. Yes, I won't grow up.

Someone gave a very annoying introduction, yammering on about American Indians. Typical Portland bullshit, wearing their heart on their sleeves, expressing sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, but not doing anything that would actually change the situation. Kind of like what they've been doing for / to the Palestinians for the last hunnert years as that would be uncomfortable. Morons.

They had a black girl playing Wendy and that grated on me. Yes, there have been numerous incidences of blacks being assimilated into English society, but this was a very fine fantasy just as it was, and now you've dropped this very jarring note in the middle of it. For someone who hasn't heard the story before, that might be okay, but I have seen it and having a black girl in there pretty much spoiled it. Okay, it was a Broadway musical and I mostly don't care for them anyway, so maybe it's just something for this old reactionary to complain about. But you know, if you want to put Africans on stage, maybe you ought to be staging African stories.

The sound was decent this time - no over-driving the speakers - and I could actually understand about half the words, which was pretty good for me. The flying was done with wires and there was some careful choreography there with people flying in front of others. The bit with Peter's shadow was also impressive. I couldn't quite figure out how it was being done. There must have been lights in front, back and high and low. Somebody put some effort into staging this.

Wikipedia: Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, often known simply as Peter Pan, is a work by J. M. Barrie, in the form of a 1904 play . . .

 

Text Editor

I've been thinking about text editors, Aedit in particular. Aedit was like the first text editor I really got to know. This was back in the early 1980s and we were using Intel blue box development machines that the company was renting from Intel for the astronomical price of a thousand dollars a month, least ways that's the way I remember it.

I kept using Aedit when I went to work for Intel. I spent, I dunno, five or ten years using it. Then Windows came on the scene with their fancy schmantzy bullshit and I got to learn a whole new way way or ruining my life. 

So here we are 30 years later and I am still pining for my lost Aedit text editor. Then I got to thinking that I should probably just write my own. I mean, how tough can it be? So now I'm thinking about this and I start thinking about different ways of storing text in memory. Do we do it by the line, or maybe strings, or just as one big block of text? This leads to the question of how do you handle the case where the text it too large to fit in memory? Kind of an unlikely scenario, I know, given the amount of memory modern computers have, but Aedit ran in like 64KB and could Handle any size file. Well, any size you could fit on a disk and our 8 inch hard disks were only 10MB. I do remember tackling files that were over one megabyte and Aedit did not complain. It might have gotten a little slow, but it handled the file just fine. So now I'm wondering how would I handle a multi-terabyte file. That is probably a ridiculous case, but if you are going to allow a program to handle large files, someone is going to push it to the limit, so you need to be prepared.

And then I thought: I wonder if maybe somebody else has already done this, and lo and behold, they have:

Port of Aedit to C

Using the source of Aedit shared on https://github.com/abiliojr/aedit.git, the code here is an attempt to port from PLM to C and to support newer operating systems.

So now I have another reason to get myself in gear and get a new Linux box and get away from this stinky Chromebox.

 

A Killer Paradox - Netflix Series

A Killer Paradox | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix K-Content

Convenience store clerk gets into altercations with people. Pushed beyond his limit he retaliates and kills them only to find out that the people he killed were reprehensible killers themselves. Now he is stumbling through life with all these murders on his mind. Needless to say, he is a little confused. Local cop tasked with solving the multitude of murders that have suddenly started showing up on his beat kind of / sort of suspects our guy on account of him always being in the area. Cop also has a long term project of looking for the ex-cop who put his father in a coma. 

Turns out both our clerk and the ex-cop have connections to a computer nerd who researches suspected dirt-bags. When he confirms his findings, he directs his killers to their targets. Ex-cop goes off the rails and just starts killing random people. Perhaps because they are dirty dirt-bags, perhaps because they annoyed him, perhaps because they looked at him funny. Anyway, he kills the granddaughter of some corporate honcho and then the heat is on and things get very messy in a John Wick kind of way. Will our clerk and the nerd escape the manhunt? We'll find out tonight. Or maybe not, if there are plans for season two.

Wikipedia article about the show.

P. S. Couple of items. One is when a prisoner is being transported to jail. He is inadequately restrained and attacks the guards who are with him in the van and causes the van to crash. And because he is the evil villain, he is in the only one who manages to get out of the wreck on his own. This same thing happened in season 2 of Dark Winds. No wonder cops are often getting in trouble for the way they treat prisoners. Can't say as I blame them.

The other is something that seems to happen fairly often in TV shows. Some guy, full of himself, makes some kind of accusation against the hero, the hero is nonplussed, and then after a second or two, the guy laughs and says I'm just foolin' with you or some such. I find this kind of behavior juvenile and irritating. However, the guy is often right, so it's doubly disconcerting. Our hero was within a hair's breadth of getting found out by some moron. Bah, double bah and humbug.

INSTC - International North–South Transport Corridor

International North–South Transport Corridor

This is a curious story:

In Asia, New Wars Are Opening Long-Dreamed-of Routes by Emanuel Pietrobon

He lays out the problems with the current shipping route from India to Moscow. He spends some time talking about the possibility of shipping across the arctic ocean since it is now possible. And then he talks about the INSTC (International North–South Transport Corridor). It's much shorter and possibly quicker and cheaper as well, except, well, there are a couple of problems they are going to have to deal with:

The average cost of shipping a container from Mumbai to Moscow is around $3,000 via the Suez route but could drop to approximately $2,000 using the INSTC. However, political tensions and regional instability pose risks, and infrastructure development is still needed to fully untap its potential. Huge investments and huge diplomatic efforts are mandatory to make all the INSTC's stops safe, and thus attractive for want-to-be investors and merchants: Azerbaijan and Armenia must settle the Karabakh issue once and for all, India and Pakistan must solve the Kashmir question, and Israel and Iran must find a modus vivendi.

Modus vivendi is a Latin phrase that means "mode of living" or "way of life". In international relations, it often is used to mean an arrangement or agreement that allows conflicting parties to coexist in peace.

So there are only three intractable problems that will need to be solved. Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen, but with enough money I suppose anything is possible.

 

Houthis

Houthi fighters take over a cargo ship (Houthi Movement via Getty Images)

Curious story:

Why the Houthis now rule the Red Sea - America has silently admitted defeat by Malcolm Kyeyune

Excerpt: 

This should probably be huge news: one of the most important trade routes in the world is now blocked by a rag-tag group of militants, and the US Navy has thrown its hands up in defeat and sailed away. And yet, we just don’t want to talk about it.

Basically it sounds like tactics and our hide-bound military has yet to adapt. They are rightfully hidebound I might add, I mean it's tradition to be hide-bound, that is, until you start getting your ass kicked by the new kid on the block. I'm sure they will adapt, eventually, hopefully before the collapse of civilization, but whatever.

Malcolm does make the argument that maybe Europe should be doing the heavy lifting here, after all they are the ones being most impacted by these hijackings. Europe might be able to contribute more to this endeavor if they hadn't been listening to the USA telling them to quit buying cheap gas from Russia.

Note - the ship in the picture is RORO - a ship for transporting automobiles. RORO stands for roll on, roll off, and that big thing sticking up on the right rear of the ship is a ramp that folds down to enable cars to be driven on and off of the ship. My main point being that it is NOT the tanker that was recently attacked.

I'm surprised to see the helicopter in the picture. I thought all these hijackings were being done by guys in speedboats.

Movie Magic

This Invention Made Disney MILLIONS, but Then They LOST It!
Corridor Crew

Here we've got a couple of devices developed by Disney for making special effects. The one above popped up on YouTube this morning, which reminded me of this one:

Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (Filmed: Feb. 13, 1957)
fireurgunz

I didn't remember the name, but it didn't take long to find it.