For today’s double movie review, we take a look at the world of cage fighting and what happens when you mix it in with a classic movie framework.

Warrior

It’s like Rocky, but the square ring is an octagon ring. There’s the rather incredulous idea that two long separated brothers are going to meet in the last round of the ultimate ultimate fighting tournament, but the storylines individually are pretty reasonable. Of course, we have unknown underdogs defeating the reigning champions, but isn’t that a requirement for these movies? I think a little more of Tommy’s motivation should have been explained, but in the end, he’s more there to provide a little excitement and the foil for his brother.

Haywire

Initially I was comparing this to The Bourne Identity, but after a little more thought, it’s really Mission Impossible with the gadgets replaced with figure fours and arm bars. Gina Carano is probably the most impressive special agent I’ve seen in a while. She looks like she could really beat people up, because, well, she really can. I would have been scared to tangle with her for one of the fight scenes, which is also something the actors mention in a special feature (actually worth watching for once). As a movie, the story is so so, and there’s nothing imaginative going on here apart from casting Carano, but that’s impressive in its own right.

In reading about the CRIME attack and another post I thought about how this affects cross site request forgery tokens_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet) (or anti-CSRF tokens I guess). The spark really came from the second Tor blog post.

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From the time Intel released CPUs with hyperthreading until quite recently, I was a skeptic. A hater even. But now that I own some computers that feature hyperthreading, I’ve naturally had to change my mind, so now I like it.

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I’ve been using a Soekris 4801 as a router for several years now, but it’s time for an upgrade. There are a couple projects I’ve wanted to play with that require more cpu, and it appears that my internet connection will exceed 100Mbps. I looked at the new soekris models, but the 6501-50 starts at $360, plus power supply and mounting hardware. I decided to take a risk on the OEM Production 2550L2D-Mx from newegg.com. Yes, that really is the manufacturer’s name. It appears I bought the last one. It’s out of stock now (and has two bad reviews it didn’t have when I ordered it three days ago). Atom processor, fairly regular PC motherboard, but with two Broadcom gigabit chips. Perfect for a router I suppose. For $129? Done.

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Bit the bullet and installed the Windows 8 Release Preview on my HP laptop for poking around. Here are some initial impressions, likely to be updated as time goes by. I haven’t yet done anything with it, this is just from an hour of trying to bludgeon the system into shape.

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Assuming you have discovered the secret login ritual, flak now supports posting comments. This post mostly exists to live test the feature. You can reply to a comment, but there’s no replying to replies. Deeply nested comment threads just don’t work well, so not supporting them is my way of hinting that “you are communicating incorrectly”.

Or did.

I realized I was using an old email address for my Apple account. Besides some bizarre rules which make it hard to juggle active and backup emails, they send broken confirmation emails.

Here’s what I read:

Just click the link below to verify, sign in using your Apple ID and password, then follow the prompts.

Verify Now >

Yes. That’s the link. They oh so helpfully took the HTML part of the email:

Just click the link below to verify, sign =
in using your Apple ID and password, then follow the prompts. <br><br><a hr=
ef=3D"https://id.apple.com/..." cla=
ss=3D"aapl-link" style=3D"color:#0088cc">Verify Now ></a>

And converted it to text for me. Thanks! The ... part of that, btw, is about 400 chars of base64 encoded something. I approve, except unquoting and line folding it by hand is quite the chore. The strangest part is I have three slightly different emails from Apple, regarding my primary email, my backup email, and my security questions. Some of them have the above link, but omit other links.

I’m going to start posting examples of broken emails that companies send me. It’s 2012. What are you using to send this crap? I plan to exclude spam, which is almost always broken in some way (perhaps on purpose, the theory being that spam is designed to target the people who don’t filter it), but large companies which should know better.

Amazon can’t pick a charset in their order emails. I bought an MP3 album by The Crüxshadows (let’s not discuss that right now, or ever). Here’s part of the email:

------=_Part_10851441_1164149591.1346373530449
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
...
<meta http-equiv=3D"Content-Type" content=3D"text/html; charset=3Diso-8859-1">
...
The Cr=C3=BCxshadows

Yes, it’s quoted printable and it is utf-8. So why is there a meta tag saying it’s latin-1? End result? This shit: The Crüxshadows

In ruby, the new cool thing to do when interfacing with a C library is to use FFI. The same is true with luajit as well. Instead of writing a bunch of C code, you just declare the existing C functions you want to use, and the runtime mostly handles things for you. There’s still a bit of a mismatch, because you’re not writing in C, so I generally stack a couple layers of abstraction over the top.

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