Thoughts on Green Wing, Series 2 (With Spoilers)

Having watched the entire second series of Brit sketch comedy/soap opera Green Wing this weekend, I have only one question to ask the show's producers.

What the hell? What the hell? You fans know what I'm talking about. I'm not a Mac fan by any stretch of the imagination but seriously, GW staff. Not cool.

There were highs. There were lows. Overall, I thought the second series was simply not up to the same level as the first series was, but then again it's hard to strike out as sharply with existing characters as you can with new ones. I don't know. It just seemed like their hearts weren't in it this time.

In series one, there was a huge amount of time devoted to Alan and Joanna maintaining their bizarre love affair as one of the hospital's worst-kept secrets. This time around they lack that dynamic, so what did the writers say at the series 2 production meeting? "I don't know about Alan and Joanna, mate. How about they just kill a midget?"

The show has definitely taken a more serious tone as the light-hearted indecisiveness of central character Caroline as she wonders which of her coworkers she should fall in love with has given way to homicides, pimping, and pregnant women breaking up their marriages. This isn't funny. It's just bizarre.

Maybe I'll have a kinder opinion of Green Wing series 2 after a repeated viewing. Considering that there's precisely one Christmas special left for the show before they turn off the lights and lock the door behind them, I sincerely doubt that I'm going to get the resolutions I want to see. Green Wing series 2 has broken most everything that series 1 set right. Series 2 needed:

• more hopscotch
• less Alan
• more banter
• less gall bladder eating
• more Mac/Caroline/Guy
• less Sue White all by herself
• more Guy/Martin/Mac
• less Holly the baby-killer
• in fact, make that no Holly whatsoever
• more Caroline
• less useless use of the word "twat" (in England, it rhymes with "hat")
• more cabinet fucking
• less Alan in his underpants
• more "less Alan in his underpants". Seriously, Alan. Keep the trousers on or I will hurt you.
• less sincerity in Guy's actions
• more knives in people's heads

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy to know what happened after Guy stole the ambulance and wedged it precariously on the edge of a cliff. But these eight episodes were to be treated as a gift, and I instead feel that they were wasted attempting to contrive more drama when a situation could have called for comedy, or crazy-go-nuts drama when perhaps a lesser event would suffice. I don't know how to express in words the difference between Sue White cutting the brake lines on Dr. Mancu's car in series 1 and Dr. Statham beating a green-skinned dwarf to death with a stuffed heron in series 2, but it is a difference, and one worth noting. Green Wing series 1 was, if anything, a delightful romp through a hospital where there were no consequences. No matter what Boyce said or did to Alan, no matter how furious Alan became, we knew that they would always be back at the next radiology lesson to provoke each other again.

When you start introducing consequences, the physics of Green Wing breaks down. Suddenly Sue White can't go around with a crossbow trying to kill surgeons anymore. (Sue, by the way, was utterly wasted this series and that should be against the law.) Instead, you're seeing characters grow as they face the realities of their situations. While this is great for developmental purposes, it sucks for comedic value. Comedy is a character's ability to stab another in the shoulder with a scalpel or to reenact the last scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with a ping pong paddle. Comedy, it seems, was not in the cards for series 2. You can't get absurd when your actions have serious consequences, and conversely serious actions without consequences are utterly absurd. Series 2 hit both extremes and spent very little time in-between.

Disappointing.

Get Out of My Dreams and Into My CARP

Redundancy is all the rage these days. People want to have some sort of backup situation in place to handle the inevitable hardware failure. If you have two webservers hosting your files and one of them crashes, wouldn't it be great if the other system could recognize the problem and take over the other system's requests?

Yeah. Yeah, that would be nice. Here's how to do it in two lines on OpenBSD 3.5 and up using CARP.

Step 1: Before you type a single character, you need to pick four pieces of information: the virtual host ID, the password, the network interface you want to use, and the IP information.

I'll just pick some example values.

Virtual host ID: this is an integer v such that 1 <= v <= 255. I'll pick a vhid of 7. This value is what creates redundancy groups, so every system I want to run CARP on a particular address needs to have the same value here.

Password: this is a plaintext string that I include in the configuration in order to prevent forgeries. This password is not sent to other hosts in the clear, but it is used to authenticate them. I want my password to be "never1dropofH20onarrakis".

Network interface: I need to tell CARP which interface it's going to listen on for advertisements. I only have one network card, and OpenBSD calls it "dc0". I'd have to be more careful if I had more interfaces.

IP information: CARP creates a virtual IP address. If you have two OpenBSD servers with IPs 1.2.3.4 and 1.2.3.5, you can create a new IP, say 1.2.3.100, which you will assign to multiple systems with CARP instead of with DHCP of explicitly setting the Ethernet interface. I want my IP to be 192.168.0.123 and have a netmask of 255.255.255.0.

# ifconfig carp0 create
# ifconfig carp0 vhid 7 pass never1dropofH20onarrakis 
carpdev dc0 192.168.0.123 255.255.255.0

That's it, folks. I can go around to every OpenBSD box I want to use, type these two lines, and have redundancy working on them in no time flat. If I want to determine a precise order in which hosts will take over in the event of a failure, I can use "advskew". Hosts advertise to each other, literally saying "Hey, everyone. I'm still alive. Just so you know." They do this at regular intervals, and if you skew advertisements accordingly, then certain hosts advertise more slowly than others. Lower numbers = higher probability of a system becoming the master. The system with the lowest advskew value will usually win.

There's only one snag with implementing CARP, and it's that a system who has assumed control of a virtual IP address will not by default relinquish control. If host1 and host2 use CARP and host1 crashes in the middle of the night, host2 will take over. If host1 reboots and everything gets sorted out, host2 doesn't care. It's still going to keep control of the IP until it crashes or has control taken away manually. If you want to disable this behavior so that when host1 comes back up it forcibly reasserts its master status, you need to set a sysctl option:

# sysctl -w net.inet.carp.preempt=1

None of these will withstand a reboot, of course, so you should probably put some of this into an /etc/hostname.carp0 file:

# cat /etc/hostname.carp0
inet 192.168.0.123 255.255.255.0 vhid 7 carpdev dc0 pass
never1dropofH20onarrakis

Pretty easy to set up. Next up? UCARP.

Dear The Internet

Anybody out there still have a copy of the highly-unauthorized Flash game X-Assault hanging around?

¿Quien es mas duro?

It seems that the task of booting Debian 3.1, a.k.a. "Sarge", using a boot floppy and a netinst CD ISO is only slightly more difficult than the task of the Debian project maintainers updating the documentation on debian.org to explain the process by which booting from a floppy can be successfully done.

The latter, it appears, gets the difficulty ranking of "utterly impossible". Great work, guys.

A Litmus Test

You're not a true nerd until you have to instruct someone as to how to properly use your calculator.

For me, that day occurred years ago in college, when the instructor for my American Sign Language class asked to borrow my TI-85 to grade some papers while the rest of the class broke into groups to practice our new vocabulary.

It wasn't five minutes before she came up to me asking why the cryptic symbols on the screen were not, in fact, giving her valid results, or any results whatsoever. When your calculator has 50 buttons, it's easy to miss the right ones, or to misinterpret the symbols on some of the wrong ones.

I'm just glad I never owned an HP.

Tonight's Top Story

I don't want to panic anyone, but I think my RAM might be waiting for me downstairs.

More as this story develops.

Update: After running Memtest86+ on my system for a full pass and then leaving it on overnight like I always do, the RAM seems to be performing adequately.

Compared with the CL2.5 of my existing RAM, I may just swap the two chips' locations and hope for a negligible performance boost.

But probably not.

Human Key Holders

What would happen if Bed, Bath, & Beyond bought Spencer Gifts? They'd probably take that "light switch cover that makes the light switch look like some guy's penis" novelty item, chrome-plate it to make it look classy, and turn it into some unnecessary utility that every yuppie just can't live with out.

Thank You, Captain Obfuscate

In a recent[0] post to the GURPS mailing list, someone named "hal" writes:

I'm pondering a translation from another game system over to GURPS and wondered how others might approach the concept...

The basic idea from another game system is that of building a construct - be it a pyramid or a stonehenge like edifice - that channels ley line energy into a broadcasting scheme to other "objects" that translate the mana into usable mech—

Stop. Stop right there. "Another game system"? Channeling ley lines?

Dude. Just say "RIFTS". It won't bite. Much.

[0] By recent I mean "last Wednesday". Work's been a bitch this week and I haven't read any significant quantity of e-mail in several days.

Filter RSS feeds with Feed Rinse

Filter RSS feeds with Feed Rinse: "Feed Rinse is an easy to use tool that lets you automatically filter out syndicated content that you aren't interested in. It's like a spam filter for your RSS subscriptions."

"Do I look Italian to you?"

"Because I'm not. I'm German." Long live Anthony Grasso. Long live Max Makowski. Long live Wikipedia.

A Brew to a Kill

There are few things in life as sublimely harrowing as running out of your favorite brand of tea. It tugs at your soul, quietly, totally. And don't try to find a replacement. That's a fool's errand.

But no more. I will never run out of tea. Never again.

Software in Review - OpenBSD 3.9 review

A month or so ago when the bsdtalk podcast interviewed an OpenBSD developer, I wondered what he meant when he said that a mini-hackathon had produced remarkable improvements in the ports tree. Now I'm starting to see.

Software in Review - OpenBSD 3.9 review: "I found the improved package tools to be a huge benefit. Rather than compile everything from source or download the packages and dependencies that I wanted to install, I set the configuration to download packages automatically when I try to install anything from Ports. So I go to /usr/ports/editors/vim and when I run make install clean, a package is downloaded instead of compiling it from source; if a package isn't available, Ports goes ahead with the compilation."

A "review" of Silent Hill

Finally, America gets a movie based on a video game that isn't associated with Uwe Boll in any way. Considering this fact, the Silent Hill movie plays out like Citizen fucking Kane. To wit: in the video game, you go to the town of Silent Hill and your daughter disappears. In the movie, these events faithfully transpire with minor variation.

If Uwe Boll had made it, Silent Hill would probably be about people who go to a dance party on a remote island and get attacked by zombie dogs or something. Don't believe me? There are no raves in The House of the Dead video game.

There isn't much more to say about the Silent Hill movie if you've played the game: parent takes adoptive daughter to sleepy town of Silent Hill > car accident > daughter disappears > fog > snow > grey children bite at you. Silent Hill is a sleepy resort town that co-exists with its dark twin nether-realm of nightmares and barbed wire. (In the movie, Silent Hill is a tiny coal town in West Virginia. This doesn't explain why they have an enormous hotel in the middle of downtown.) I'm just happy that the director actually played the game before he made the movie. Silent Hill legitimately bears more than a passing resemblance to the video game series from which it hails. Thus, if you know one, you know the other. In fact, there's about ten contiguous minutes of full-on exposition that will ruin the video game's horrifying twist ending. The only difference is that in order to discover Alessa's dark secret in the game, it takes seventeen hours of getting your ass chomped on by inside-out dogs and hunchback nurses, plus solving lots of ridiculous, contrived puzzles. In order to fight the sideways-mouthed lizard in the school basement, you'll have to find the beaker of acid in the closet, pour it on a statue's hand, take the gold medallion from it, grab that rubber ball, use it to plug up the hole in the gutter on the roof, and then turn some knobs to open up the water tower. And that's just to get the key you need.

Damn dude. Bullshit like that makes sitting through this movie for two hours practically like being on vacation.

The good news is that the movie version of Silent Hill can, more or less, stand on its own. Not that I'd recommend watching it if you aren't familiar with the games. It doesn't stand that well. Like a newborn baby giraffe shakily hobbling across the African savannah, Silent Hill plants its paws on the survival horror landscape and attempts to make headway on a heavily overtrafficked path already stamped flat by the likes of Resident Evil and a dozen five-figure budget movies that wound up on MST3K and everyone who ever made a movie with the deliberate intent of outdoing George Romero. If you aren't walking into the theatre with a clear idea of what Silent Hill really is, the movie isn't going to make it a whole lot clearer. What's with the rusted metal cages and the barbed wire? There's this dude there with, like, a pyramid for a head. What's his deal? This movie is assuredly not Penitence Through Puncture Wounds for Dummies, though I'm happy that they actually explore this angle, albeit for only a line or two: "There are many kinds of justice. Man's. God's. The Devil's."

The whole concept of Silent Hill is that it's a place where, beyond heaven and God and all the angels, someone is still pushing you to confront your past and atone for your sins. Except of course that these folks who put Silent Hill together are rooting for you to fail. Remember that whole Job part of the Bible? Silent Hill is like that: boils and pestilence and the whole nine yards. The only real difference was that Job didn't deserve what he got in the bible. Had Job ended up in Silent Hill he'd be personally OK; he'd just be fighting pus monsters because he'd murdered his wife or something.

There are some nice parts to Silent Hill. The movie looks amazingly accurate: fog, snowfall, crucified men bound to chain-link fences and disemboweled gutted by lumpy child-beasts or flensed by beetles with tiny, Zanti-misfitted faces. It's all in there. In the game, if you turn off your flashlight the monsters can't find you as easily, but then you can't see a damned thing. In the movie, someone hands the mom a flashlight and says the exact same thing, practically word for word. If you have a hard-on for Lisa the Red Nurse, you'll be happy to know that she shows up, too. The music is great; the visual effects are compelling. Just about every scene was CGI'd by a different company, but you wouldn't know that from watching them. The final result is, in light of this fact, remarkably consistent. The little touches that matter are all there, right down to accurate reproductions of some of the camera angles used by the original game. I suspect that one of the reasons why Silent Hill works as a scary movie is because it so closely follows the pattern of Silent Hill: downright bizarre camera placement, overturned baby strollers, "I feel like I need a tetanus shot just looking at it" decor. The producers of this film actually gave a damn about how their film was going to work. Take that, Uwe Boll!

There's also another benefit to Silent Hill: Anna, the religious fanatic that brings momma and Cybil the Motorcycle Cop to the church was also in Regeneration, a fantastic movie about soldiers in a Scottish mental hospital in World War I. (Basically, all this means is that I've seen her naked and I have a hankering for seeing Jonathan Pryce wring his hands again. It is imperative for me to locate this film, preferably on DVD. Little help?)

(Furthermore, for those of you who care, Dahlia Gillespie, outcast extraordinaire, was also the hooker from David Cronenberg's Crash. For a film that has exactly two male characters in it, I'm not surprised that just about every actress save for the little girl has had a nude scene.)

wget Outta Here

I don't know what they did to make wget v.1.10.2 so amazing. It was probably a contract with the dark lord, written on sheepskin and inked with a virgin's blood.

Doesn't matter, because it is so much better than previous versions of wget. Makes me wonder why I said "curl -O is good enough for now" in regards to my iBook for so long.

Screw you, curl. wget is my master again.