Dec 10, 2008
Che is a movie about a prolific revolutionary. Not his early years like Motorcycle Diaries. It's a huge story so it involves a 4.5 hour investment with an intermission. If you don't know whether you'll like it, let me answer for you: no. If you're looking for a long movie and you don't know whether you'll like it, you might like it. It's long and it doesn't mince words until the end. The first part is very glorious, heroic at times, and heavy on ideals. It explains what happened, why they did it, what role he and Castro had to play. If you know the story a tiny bit, you might not waste your time watching it, it's the details about city to city stuff. The second part explains the struggle in Bolivia. If you know a bit about Che, you probably understand that to compare the two parts of the movie is lame. A failed revolution is never going to be heroic or wonderful. And so Che is going to get a lot of flak from people who didn't really want to watch the second part. It's important for me to watch the second part because it shows that Che was mortal, died in a blaze of gunfire, and lived his ideals. Che has been symbolic for those who wish to shrug off the shackles of imperialism, tyranny, and dishonest governments. His life was powerfully lived as well as he probably could. A revolutionary who fails once or a hundred times has done what he or she can.
Am I trying to glorify Che? No, he probably gets as much credit as he deserves. It's the movie that I'm trying to redeem. People probably expect too much from the movie because there really isn't a revolutionary who can be glorified a lot more than Che and yet the second part of the "roadshow" was about him failing. If the directors had decided to stop at the end of part 1 and done the same as Motorcycle Diaries and printed the text saying: "Ernesto 'Che' Guevara went on to organized failed revolutions in the Congo, Venezuela, and Bolivia. He died in a hail of gunfire," it would certainly be a disservice to him. People would exit the movie and say: "and look at Cuba now, I bet they wish they were like Bolivia*." Describing what happened in Bolivia explains the duality of revolution, armed and unarmed conflict. Che partially led a successful armed revolution in Cuba because the support was far surpassing the enemy's number. In Bolivia, the lack of support and the overwhelming enemy military force was easily enough to defeat Che and the Bolivian rebels. What's this I talk about duality then? If revolution is just about numerical superiority, then no duality exists, does it? The duality of revolution is that numerical superiority comes from popular support, and popular support has nothing to do with violence. Popular support comes from ideals. If a revolution has better ideals and can sway the popular opinion, it will have the support it needs to win a war against an oppressive government. But here is where it gets tricky because if you have popular opinion, is armed revolution necessary? Che obviously thought it was and he has evidence. Evidence to the contrary is quite difficult to obtain. Pacifists may never obtain enough evidence that non-violence is the solution. So far we have India and possibly Tibet (which is in progress). Other evidence may possibly exist, but I'm not going to get into it. What people most certainly know is that when faced with a dictator who murders people, violent revolution has done the trick quite a few times.
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Nov 14, 2008
On Feb 24, 2008 I wrote specs and a simple parser for my own programming language. The first level of parsing returned a list of types. The second level (currently nearly finished) would sort the types into statements that could be executed line by line using an interpreter or that could be translated into assembly (see ASLang2). The language was designed to compile in automatic bounds checking and would not allow non-deterministic code to compile. This is not an outrageous goal, in fact most interpreted languages do the same. Funny examples of non-deterministic code being executable exist in Python, PHP, and Perl. To a developer, though a magic bullet would be nice. In fact, it would be nice if the compiler was able to print out a list of possible boundary breaks. But before I finished my language, I decided that it would be possible and easy to simply write the same compiler for C/C++. I would get a list of variables, find all pointers in the code, and count whether it's possible to overwrite anything.
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Dec 10, 2008
Talk is cheap, but talk takes time, time being money is not cheap, so why do we talk at all? Communication is important to life as social animals. Humans are bound to their society by needs, wants, and so forth and communication is needed to properly satisfy those tasks. From communicating for work, to community, and friendship, communication connects people in a way that no other medium can. Television, blogs, essays, and speeches fail to solve this because they are one-way monologue communication. If a person is properly coherent, people can glean meaning from a monologue form of communication. For example, a person who knows me well or who doesn't know me can read this and understand what I'm saying because I'm a straightforward speaker and I speak my mind in the same way I write a one sentence blog.
E-mail, IM, blog/forum comments, and telephone (a certainly dialogue form of communication) are notorious for their lack of appropriate guides for meaning. Face to face communication solves this issue by adding very quick responses, control over who gets to talk when, and facial expressions which help a lot for context and meaning. The obvious problem with face to face communication is that it takes time and energy to get to the same place at the same time. Since face to face communication is so important, people put a lot of work into making sure it occurs.
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June 9, 2008
Doing a bit of preliminary analysis, I found out that I could cheaply portscan a single port on every machine on the internet. To what end? Since I wrote a research virus that exploits weak passwords on SSH, it makes sense to know what servers exist and how likely an SSH attack would succeed against the network as a whole. Though I don't plan to unleash this attack and I don't expect that my virus adds to the already widespread SSH bruteforce attacks currently underway by malicious entities, I would definitely like to research and release data on who is using SSH. Since portscanning is quite easy, I started my server on the task. Note that I'm not releasing a tarball at this time since the software to do this can be printed in the usage section.
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