Category: Highlights

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Seeing Ragtime on stage is a vastly different experience from listening to it, and not just because it’s live theater. There’s so much context, so many connections, so much subtext that you don’t get from the songs alone. It’s very much a go-home-and-hug-your-kids kind of show.

I’ve been a fan of the music ever since we did a few songs from it in a revue back in college, but I’d never actually seen it until this month, when I caught 3D Theatricals’ production in Redondo Beach.

It’s a big show — forty-six people on stage, according to the director — and they turned in a great performance. The vocal standout, I thought, was the actress playing Mother. The actor playing Coalhouse had a very different voice than the one on the album, but he had physical presence and was able to really convey both his optimism in act one and his rage in act two. The character needs both to work.

Speaking of differences between the production and the cast album, I should note: when you just have the highlights, Father comes off as just kind of clueless. When you have the full songs and the book, he’s a bit of an obstinate jerk.

I found myself struck by the layers of historical interpretation: It’s a modern production of a 15-year-old adaptation of a 40-year-old novel about life in America 100 years ago. And we’re still dealing with the same problems: Institutionalized racism and sexism, exploitation of the working poor, conflict over how to handle immigration. It really hit at the moment when authorities kill a young African-American because they think (wrongly) that she has a gun. You can argue that any historical fiction is as much about the present day as it is about the period it’s set in, and maybe it’s a matter of each era distilling the common themes from the older work, but it was telling (and disheartening) how topical the story still is.

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Here’s a fascinating look back at the spam wars by former Gmail spamfighter Mike Hearn.

I was involved for most of the previous decade as (among other things) the email admin for a small ISP. We used a mix of public blacklists, a private blacklist, virus filtering, SpamAssassin with both shared rules and local custom rules, and various other tools all tied together, some at the Sendmail level and the rest through MIMEDefang. It worked tolerably well, though of course it wasn’t perfect. I find it amusing that Gmail declared victory on spam in 2010, the same year that I changed jobs to a position that was more software developer and less sysadmin.

Privacy is a growing concern these days, so he also talks about the impact that widespread end-to-end email encryption would have on spam fighting. If you’re the mail handler, you can’t filter on, say, links found in the message, or characteristics of the writing or formatting, or anything else in the content. You can’t even run statistical analysis on all known spam and non-spam to see which the new message fits better. All you can do is look at where it came from and where it’s going.

Moving the spam filter to the client lets you do content filtering on your own mail, but you can’t take advantage of the larger volume of data that an ISP can, which means your filtering isn’t going to be as effective. And if your main email client is your phone, that’s really going to slow it down — and chew up battery.

Encrypting more of our communication is probably the way to go, but we’ll have to come up with new approaches to some previously-solved problems like this.

It got me thinking: Most of us not only accept that our email providers will look inside our mail to filter spam and viruses, we expect it. That’s weird. The idea of the post office looking inside our letters is so abhorrent that even tracking programs raise concerns. The idea of an actual person reading our email in transit creeps us out. Many people have problems with the idea of automated systems (like Gmail) reading our email for purposes of targeted advertising. But spam filtering? We get upset if it’s not happening!

That says something interesting about our priorities, and about how big an impact unfiltered spam has on our email.

Via ma.tt.

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I literally found out yesterday about today’s partial solar eclipse. Unlike the last one visible from Southern California in 2012, which was conveniently on a weekend, this ended up being right in the middle of the work day. Add in a lot of other stuff going on, and I didn’t have time to do anything like go out to a prime viewing spot or make a giant pinhole camera.

My original plan was to take a late lunch, see what I could see, then try to head back outside at the point of greatest eclipse. I sat on a bench in the courtyard, surrounded by trees, checking a tiny pinhole camera I’d made from a tea box at the last minute and also looking for a good spot with images projected through the tree leaves.

After about half an hour I started to wonder why I wasn’t seeing any signs of eclipse, and looked up the times again. Apparently the calculator I used didn’t account for daylight saving time. The good thing about that: I was early, not late. The bad thing: Greatest eclipse was actually going to be during/shortly after a production switchover at work that I needed to be on hand for.

So I headed back outside around 2:50 to look at the clusters of eclipsed suns projected by the leaves in the shady courtyard.

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It was a late-summer heat wave, and while the picnic itself was spread out in the shade beneath some trees, it was over 100 degrees. Still, a preschooler can’t be terribly interested in his parents’ old school friends catching up, and my son kept trying to wander off to play in the hot, hot sun.

Finally, after lunch, I decided instead of bringing him back I’d go with him. On the other side of the hill we found a small concrete-lined channel, amazingly with water in it, then followed it upstream to where it opened up into a stream running through the grass.

Exploring the Creek: Running through the grass.

Further up we found a wooden foot bridge, and then trees closed in around it. The shade was very welcome!

Exploring the Creek: In the Shade.

This second photo is looking back downstream toward the open area. Just behind me there’s a chain link fence that marks the edge of the park, and a hill leading up to the road. The stream is fed from a drainage pipe, and judging from the erosion patterns, it picks up a lot of runoff during the rainy season.

I took both shots with my phone in HDR mode to get both the light and shade areas clear. Unfortunately on the second shot it ended up blurring the leaves, since they moved just enough in the breeze between bracketed shots. It looks great on a small screen, though!