Yearly Archives: 2002

The Thing from Another World (1951)

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Before I start let me state that I have only watched the German version of the movie. Likely, the US original differs somewhat, but except for the occasional translation error I had the impression the German version can’t be too far off target. I’m still waiting for this movie to make it to DVD.

The action: The Arctic, early 1950s. A small flight crew is sent to a remote outpost to check out reports of a meteorite or plane crash in the area. So, they discover that it wasn’t a plane: It was a flying saucer. But there’s more: The scientists and soldiers uncover a space alien, frozen into the ice! They bring it back to the outpost, where the alien escapes, putting everybody in grave danger.

To make it short, I love this movie. It’s simply a joy to watch. I enjoyed the characters and the dialogs, the interaction between them. There are some occasional funny moments, and there’s lots of conflict, mainly between the soldiers and the scientists. The alien stays in the background for most of the time: They are fighting it, but never face to face. Thus, the movie is suspenseful and thrilling even 50 years after its creation. Had they shown the alien any more than they do, the movie would have lost a lot of it’s appeal because quite frankly a 1951 space alien looks just like a guy with some makeup.

The Thing from Another World was re-made in 1982 by John Carpenter. I didn’t see the remake yet, but I hear it’s more a splatter kind of horror movie and key elements of the plot were changed, so you could probably watch both versions without getting bored.

To sum up, I can only recommend The Thing From Another World to anybody who enjoys suspenseful science fiction movies, or who has a flair for old horror flicks. This one is probably one of the best of the flock. Watch it late on a Friday night, you won’t be disappointed.

_Update, June 3rd 2003:_ I was able to find an English version of The Thing from Another World. Having watched most of the movie in English, I have to say that the dubbing – while inaccurate in some places – is still pretty charming. A rare case. So, whether you get the English or German version, I can recommend this movie wholeheartedly.

Halloween 2002

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My favorite holiday is coming up: Halloween. My neighbor across the street had a jack-o-lantern outside her window for a few days, but they took it back inside. Probably afraid it’d fall down. Okay, understandable, but too bad. I loved that grinning thing. At my local supermarket, they started to sell Halloween candy – instead of easter bunnies or Santa clauses we now get witches and ghosts made of chocolate, and the M&M’s have little bat wings printed on the package and are colored orange and black. They’re still normal M&M’s, though, and not the peanut-butter Halloween kind they have in the United States. Actually, that’s a good thing, or I’d buy and eat _way_ too many of them.

But that’s not all; my local Woolworth (ha) is selling jack-o-lanterns made from clay or plastic, and many a store is offering masks and similar Halloweeny accessories.

I love Halloween. Not because of the trick-or-treat thing, though that’s a nice addition and definitely part of the “feel” of Halloween (except that nobody in Germany does that anyway). And also not because of the costume parties. Nah, it’s the whole atmosphere. Ghosts and goblins, ghouls and zombies; demons and witches, autumn, foggy nights, staying up late, watching old horror or science fiction movies – when you do it right, it’s just the most perfect day of the year.

Also, for me, Halloween marks One Year of Frankfurt. Yay me, I survived for one year in this town. That, truly, is scary enough.

If anybody knows anything cool to do in Frankfurt, let me know.

Quatermass And The Pit

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613It’s October – Halloween time! That’s why I decided to review some of the scary movies I own. First in this series: Quatermass and the Pit, written by Nigel Kneale and filmed by the BBC in 1957.

Chances are you never heard that name, so what’s Quatermass and the pit all about?

During construction in London, a skull is found. Police seals off the area, and a team of archaeologists is brought in to investigate. Eventually, Dr. Bernard Quatermass, founder of the British Rocketship Group, is called in, when events take a turn for the weird.

I’m not going to give away anything of the plot here, I always hate when people do that. You do have to think of Quatermass as a sort of precursor to Mulder & Scully, though, and you’ll get the right idea: In the end, the fate of the world hangs in the ballance.

Quatermass, like all old Sci-Fi movies, has to be taken with a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief. We all know the true history of spaceflight by now, and we’re all used to ultra-realistic special effects. Still, if you’re willing to give it a try and to just enjoy this movie, you’ll be in for a wonderful thriller, mainly because the creators realized their limits, and much of the horror is implied and not shown in close-up.

I recommend to watch this very late on a friday night, when you’re home alone, in a dark apartment. Preferably in the autumn, during a rainstorm or foggy evening. I do admit, when I first watched this movie, it scared the hell out of me. Of course I have been known to be scared by E.T., too. Okay, so that was a long time ago.

Quartermass was a sort of loose series of two or three miniseries in the 1950s, performed live on TV. This DVD contains the restored and almost complete version. It contains no extras, but at least it’s Region Code 0 – you can play it with any DVD player.

I bought this DVD a while ago. I had never heard of it before, but I came across it while browsing the web. I bought it from amazon and I certainly didn’t regret it. In fact, I really enjoyed this DVD. I wish there had been a few extras, and I really wish the series had been complete, but still Quatermass and the Pit is worth the money. If you’re a fan of old Science Fiction / Horror movies, you’ll definitely want to give this one a try.

Roadmap for this Website

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It’s the middle of the night, and I cannot seem to find sleep. It’s not like I am not tired, mentally, but sleepy? For some inexplicable reason, the answer is “no”. I have absolutely no clue, but experience shows that the longer you stay up, the better are your chances to find peaceful sleep. Now, getting up in the morning is a totally different matter.

So, I figured, now that my web server is back up, I could post a little note on what I have planned for this website. Ah, yes, I am really getting into coding with PHP. And I love mysql. It’s totally amazing how much easier you can make your life with so little code.

If you’ve been around for a year or so, then you will remember that my website was mostly static. Sure, I updated it now and then, but not very often, and above all, everything was done manually. I shudder at the thought of manually editing my Euro coins collection; or even this news section. Impossible. Yes, Zope would have let me do all these things. A database is a database. I meant the principle behind it.

So where are we headed? I will slowly expand my codebase and turn my scripts into a sort of basic CMS. There are many software suites out there these days that claim to be CMS, but few deliver, and none provides what I want. I do not like the Slashdot approach – I mean, /. is fine for weblogs, but if you re-implement slash please do not call it cms. Blogs are at best a subset of CMS. I do realize that I will probably never achieve anything like it, but if I had to give an example of a website that I would like to "emulate" then it would be news.bbc.co.uk. Something like that, just a little bit more generalized.

But enough about the long-term idealism, Nils. What concrete things do you have up your sleve?

I’ll really have to work on the **admin frontend**; right now, I edit and maintain my data with phpmyadmin, which is really not a good long term solution.

I want to offer **subscriptions** to users – Basically, I plan to send out emails in regular intervals to notify users of new or updated stories, and I want to change the homepage so it can display “news since your last login”. The basic framework exists, and I do send out emails to a few test users, but this part needs a lot of work before it is done.

The **image database** already works pretty well, but it needs to be extended. The zoom view needs to be improved and show some data about the picture displayed. I need to finnish the auto-creation of thumbnails, too. Also, I need to store photographer information and a timestamp with each image.

I also need **better topics**, including a tree-like structure, the ability to assign multiple topics to one article, and also the ability to categorize other things – like images or links – via this hierachy of topics.

Last but not least: **Article parsing.** Right now, articles are pretty much taken as-is from the database, and output into the html code. Formatting inside the articles is done by including html tags in it. Needless to say, this is a really bad idea, so I need to come up with some sort of metalanguage. My first goals are basic formatting, links, and also the ability to include images (inline) in an article. Should be reasonably easy.

This should keep me occupied for a while. Don’t expect a lot of these features to pop up all of a sudden, it will be a slow process and improvements will appear gradually.

If anybody has any clever suggestions, feel free to contact me (see link below). I appreciate all feedback.

Old Email Address

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I just learned that one of my oldest remaining mail addresses – *nils@work.de* – has been switched off a while ago. If you are trying to reach me that way, you will be out of luck. Use my current address – nils [at] jeppe.de – to contact me. (Or just leave comments on this website, if it’s about something “public”).

Update November 15th, 2005: Not only has the above address been canceled, they eventually assigned it to a new employee. You have been warned.

How Ignorant Do People Have To Be…

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…to fall for this?

You all know these advertisement banners that look – more or less – like Windows error dialogs. Yes, faking a dialog of an OS is really so difficult that you cannot expect these people to get it right. Anyway, today I came across one that really tops all the others I have seen before in terms of stupidity:

> “Security Alert: Your Computer Is Currently Broadcasting An Internet IP-Address. With This Address, Someone Can Begin Attacking Your Computer!”

It was also not oriented horizontal like normal dialogs, but vertically. Never seen a windows error dialog measuring 100×400 pixels. Or with such a capitalization, either. Ah, but nevermind that – the text! The text! How little do people have to know about the very tools they use to fall for this? It’s like stating “Hey, your car has a license plate that could be used to identify you! Someone could seek out your car and smash the window in!”. So? What are you going to do about it? Stop using IP Adresses? Yeah, well, … good luck with that.

The URL behind it looked genuinely enough like an ad server. No satire, I am certain. I was almost tempted to click the thing and see what method there is behind this madness. I mean, you obviously can’t just stop using IP Adresses. But then I decided that even a single click is way too much support for this nonsense.

It’s things like this that make me wish that people had to take mandatory exams before being allowed to use a PC. Like a driver’s license.

_Update, October 12th, 2002:_ I seem to be getting a lot of hits from people who are looking for information regarding this banner ad. Just ignore it. If you want to secure your computer, buy an anti-virus program (from a reputable vendor) and keep it up-to-date (and running!), disable active components in your web browser (especially active-x), never click on attachments you receive in an email (make sure your virus scanner has a go on them first), and always, **always** keep your operating system up-to-date.

It's a Boy!

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My website has a second “child”. [Martin Lormes](http://www.martinlormes.de) has started his own [weblog](http://www.martinlormes.de/) and I can claim enough influence in this decision to call his ‘blog a [child of my weblog](http://www.blogtree.com/blogtree.php?blogid=543).

Congrats and good luck Martin, I think you will not regret it. It’s fun. And never forget: Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.

War Brewing

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The US airbase here in Frankfurt is full of Galaxy transport planes. Combined with the news a few weeks ago that the US Navy was renting commercial container ships, I fear that the war against Iraq has already been decided upon.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair prepares the world to the coming war by detailing evidence of the Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction. I just wonder whether the US and UK will get the UN resolution they seek, or if they will just go ahead and attack Iraq anyway.

As an aside: Whatever happened to declarations of war? Those seem to be really out of fashion these days.

Election Day

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Today was Federal election here in Germany. I had misplaced my registration card, but after some searching I turned it up – it had fallen between the desk and the bookshelf. No matter. I went around noon, earlier than usually. In voter district 322-06, there was a line, in 332-05 – the next room – the officials had nothing to do. The entire procedure took me about 10 minutes – including the walk. So I really don’t understand why there are people who do not vote. Alright, some have a further walk but that’s hardly an excuse.

First predictiuons see a slight lead for the christian democratic union and Edmund Stoiber, their right-populist candidate. Ah, well: I do have to say that if he does in fact become chancellor, it’s _not_ my fault. But if the Union wins, I will finally start with that immigration database (to find alternative places to live, just in case).

_Update September 23rd, 2002:_ The election is over and the (preliminary) [results are in](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2275185.stm). Basically, Schröder and Stoiber have equal shares, but the SPD can continue their goverment thanks to gains by the Green party.