Today, I received Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse: Death Proof from Netflix. Unlike Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse: Planet Terror (which I received yesterday), this DVD floats the above-quoted phrase on the screen after the usual copyright warning.
I do not think that that holds any legal oomph: Dimension (/ Weinstein) wouldn't have let Netflix buy and distribute the DVD if they weren't actually okay with the DVD's being lent / rented (and it's not like Netflix is fly-by-night here; also, they've listed the DVDs as save-but-not-queueable roughly since the theatrical release), and I doubt they'll refuse sale to Blockbuster either, but it indicates an interesting new plausible trend in the MPAA's assault on their consumers. It's possible that an overly broad interpretation of trademark/copyright law could determine, in court, that Netflix's use runs counter to the mark-holder's intentions and, thus, is illegal.
I wonder if this is the reason that the DVDs have been distributed separately, rather than together, as the films were presented theatrically. I think that technical constraints (getting both of these and all the fake previews, and all the extra doo-dads that consumers have come to expect of DVDs onto even a double-layer DVD or two would be rough) and financial avarice (far more money can be made selling two two-DVD sets than can be made selling a single four- or five-DVD set) are probably the more compelling reasons, but the notice's presence on Tarantino's film and absence (Unless I missed it? Please do correct me if so!) on Rodriguez's is, at least, Intriguing.
A couple of days ago I asked, in a rather aggressive fashion, whether any of you had done backups for Lucene, especially Solr.
None of you had, but at least a couple of you were concerned, for your own reasons, that I was concerned about the safe way to do that.
For the time being, I'm putting a thumb in each ear, one hand over my eyes, and the other hand over my mouth (mostly), and following the Party Line: make a hard link to the index files, back up the hard link, and that's Enough. Lucene will create a new file when it goes to write out a new copy of the database.
I'm less than fully convinced by this, and I certainly haven't performed the degree of recovery validation that I would in my Day Job, but I'm making myself believe that the vendor knows what they're talking about in the context of being paid hourly by a friend's startup that needs things to work but is comfortable with working by the seat of their pants.
A few relevant links (possibly subsequently updated) can be found here.
Apparently two people way at the bottom actually got it. Good for them.
It pains me to write this.
Has anybody ever done backups for Apache Lucene? (In particular, Solr, though I've no reason to believe that means anthing special for backup/recovery.) What did you do to do that, in broad strokes?
Note that I'm interested in responses in accordance with 's rules here. I do not want to know what you think might work after you google those terms. I am interested in what you already did iff (no spelling error there) you have created backups of a lucene database (index, whatever you want to call it) that were usefully recoverable.
If you don't have a real answer, please, just say nothing.
The NetBSD flamewars are tired, and don't get me started on my local LUG, but this shit has got the lulz that just don't quit.
I especially like the image on the second post:
Now, I get the immediate joke. Duh. But there's a second joke there, if you've read your Hemingway. First, that's with the cape, its not a muleta. If the bull is so worn out it can't even charge without tripping after nothing but pics (and maybe one set of banderillas, but it doesn't even look like a single set has been planted yet), this is shameful. The matador has done no real work at that point, so if the bull can't even manage to stay on its feet, he's totally corrupt as a performer: he's had his picadors bleed the bull so hard it is no longer an adversary but only a victim. There is no art in this.
As a side note, I think that's Mexico or Brazil rather than Spain, but that doesn't make much of a difference in the corruption of modern bullfighting. The bull is at most three years old (it's TINY!), and its horns are fake (they look sharp but they've been cut and shaved, without even bothering to blacken the ends, because nobody even bothers to look any more).
That's enough rambling, more than enough for those of you who've never read Death in the Afternoon (or The Dangerous Summer), but I think the image is a very eloquent exposition on the current state of Web 2.OMFG. Maybe it was inadvertant on uncov's part, but I'd like to hope they knew what they were saying, since it was so very clever…
Cf.
I dropped three movies in the mailbox at the same time.
The one, which I reported mislabeled as described in the referenced post, with the Swordfish sleeve and the Apocalypto content, as well as two others. Netflix has reported the other two “received” and generated “For Fri:” emails based on them. The one that was never what I asked for? It's still not received. There is literally no way it didn't get to them at the same time: the envelopes were all put in a mail slot inside the central PHL USPS building with the same addressee at the same time.
Whiskey tango foxtrot, Netflix.
(And yes, I still can't re-add the movie they never sent me and bump it to the top of my list, if I actually cared to do so, since it's still “at home”. The interface still also gets a Fail.)
Update: Okay, it showed up a day later. So stuff they have to handle manually, rather than just scanning the barcode on the returned DVD (potentially through the window on the envelope, if you're conscientious about putting the sleeve back in the right way forward) and repackaging it, takes an extra day.
I guess I'd kind of prefer they actually made sure the DVD and sleeve matched every time, but I can see how this falls under Cray's (apocryphal? The only citation I can find is me) “Divide is better Fast than Right”.
PostgreSQL's pg_dump[all] commands always output to STDOUT. Their man pages laud this as a great idea: you can do whatever you want with the output data, including piping it to something that reformats it. Good for them. That's exactly half the utility I wanted. You can't supply any sort of flag to redirect their output to a file besides a standard shell redirect.
The thing about shell redirects is that they assume zero layers of indirection in the shell. N layers of shell indirection require something like 1+(N * 2) layers of escaping (but maybe not, all the time, depending on how you escape and how you quote, and whether you use single- or double-quotes, and don't get me started on backticks… Never mind which shells eat \ escaping and which don't, and when some do and others don't). When those layers are sudo, ssh, and su postgres -c, it gets really complicated. Some of those eat escapes, some don't, some do with but not without a tty attached (which isn't really the same as “interactively”). Every single time I have to do this, I have to start blackbox testing from the ground up.
Just give me a mother-fucking -o, bitches. Please. Thank you.
Just in case the half of you that don't already know better than you'd like to admit were wondering.
Yes, I know you can't read anything. I don't actually have quite enough monitor that I can read what's in the windows when I do that, but I can choose the host I want based on the title bar.
Mark: yo so whats this?
Mark: SELECT garnish FROM recipe WHERE drink = 'manhattan';
Mark: ?
: haha
: Well, that's obviously a maraschino cherry
: On the outside edge, an orange slice.
Mark: yeah, heh. but actually its a maraschino query
groans.
: How long did you work on that one?
Mark: been saving it for a rainy day
Be glad they're into finding you better wine rather than stand-up comedy…
Update: Just when we thought we were being funny:
As some of you may have already noticed, Valleywag is my new favorite source for chuckles about the celebrity A-list side of what I suppose is “my industry”. I'd been a Ditherati subscriber for quite a while, so when Paul and now Owen moved over to the Gawker (no link necessary, I assume) monolith and started churning out way more content faster, I was obviously happy.
And they've pointed to some real gems of other regularly updated snark recently. Joe the Peacock's An unordered list of thoughts I had during a conference call with a potential client today is the single funniest thing there, but he's funny enough to get added to the RSS feed for a bit. Like:
IF YOU SAY “Drink the Kool-Aid” ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME, I'M GOING TO BURST THROUGH THE WALL AT YOUR OFFICE, KILL YOU IN A VERY UNSIGHTLY AND BLOODY WAY, AND THEN SCREAM “Oh, YEAH!”