Movies I Hate: I, Robot and S.W.A.T

I have only one "Top Ten List" on Netflix, and it is titled Movies I Hate. The description reads, "Not just movies I strongly dislike. Movies I wouldn't piss on to put out a fire." Here are two more from that list. Enjoy.

S.W.A.T.

0.5 out of 5 stars

I'm actually not entirely sure I've seen this movie. It's hard to tell if I was somehow strapped down and forced to watch it, or if I just ate a bad chicken salad sandwich, went catatonic for a couple hours, and woke up to a preview showing on TV. I'm pretty sure the two experiences are comparable, right down to the taste of expired chicken left in my mouth by the end. All that I can come up with is vague recollections of explosions, shooting, and guns. I assume there were some protagonists and antagonists involved, but they were so forgettable the movie would likely have gone up in quality without them. Sometimes I worry that it's not normal to be missing such a large chunk of time from my memory like this. But mostly I just worry that I actually got tricked into watching this movie. Given the choice, I think I'd take food poisoning.

I, Robot

0.5 out of 5 stars

Well, here it is. The stinkiest stinker. The crappiest crapfest. The travesty of all travesties. If movies were animals, this would be the tapeworm. How not to make a successful movie: First, take the work of a greatly respected science fiction author. Next, spew vomit all over it. Now, feed that mess to your dog and hire some two-bit hack to make up a script that is, in fact, a disgrace not only to Isaac Asimov's collection of short stories, but to all writers everywhere. Finally, to add insult to injury, plaster blatant product placement everywhere, just to make clear exactly how little you respect the moviegoers who have made the unfortunate mistake of wandering into your film. And there you have it! I, Robot. If there is a convincing argument for why humanity will not survive another millenium, this is it. And that's not because we will design killer robots that will turn on us, it's because a society that actually condones sewage like this is in moral decline. Heck, the robots would be doing us a favor. Look for an exciting matchup sometime later this year, as I, Robot's right to the title of "worst movie ever" is challenged by a newcomer, I Am Legend, also starring who else but Will Smith.

Radio Sucks

Radio programming is just that!

-- Saul Williams, "Penny for a Thought"

Radio sucks! The same fucking songs over and over again! All the weak ones, all that disposable crap that isn't gonna matter in 3 months, it's just shit!

-- Matt Pinfield, Significant Other hidden track

Turn on the radio, nah, fuck it, turn it off!

-- Rage Against the Machine, "Vietnow"

When I posted my analysis of The Current's playlist a while back, I mused about how it might stack up against a station run by the mainstream corporate borg that is ClearChannel. The problem is that no other stations make their full playlists publicly available, so I had no data to work from. Most of them offer the 10 most recent songs played, and that's it.

I dropped the idea for a while, but when I got myself a cheapo hosting plan, suddenly I had an always-on box that could, say, run a cron every ten minutes, perhaps a cron that scraped some radio sites for their recent songs. And even better, since every ClearChannel subsidiary uses the same template, I only had to build one scraper and I could collect data on half the music stations in the Twin Cities. Score! A little later, I discovered Yes.com, a cool service that even provides an API, and worked out a way to scrape the other major stations in Minneapolis.

The code is available here. The data you see below is the averages for the period of 3/22/09-5/22/09. If you'd like more discussion of my analysis techniques, check out my original post. Don't worry, this post will not contain any sad kitten pictures. Without further ado, the results:

I went into this expecting KDWB (Today's Best Music) to suck, and they did not disappoint. They come out swinging with an absolutely abysmal level of uniqueness per week - which only gets worse when we measure over a month. However, they're facing some heavy competition from KS95 (Variety...80's, 90's and Today!). Those people seem to be rather confused about what constitutes "variety." Apparently the 80s, 90s, and today just didn't have that much to offer.

Most of the other stations muddle along between 0.2 and 0.3 - not as bad as they could be, but if you've spent any significant amount of time listening to Cities 97, you'll know that's still bad enough to drive a person to murder.

There are a couple notable standouts at the week level - KQRS and Love 105 (the latest owners of what was once Rev105's signal) do respectably. And Jack FM, who brags constantly that they are Playing what we want!, actually beats the Current for uniqueness at the week level. All these stations suffer significantly in the month-long measurements. To me, it looks like these stations have fairly large playlists, but simply rotate the same playlist over and over again. This isn't entirely a bad trait, especially for KQRS (Minnesota's Classic Rock), who doesn't have a growing field to work with.

Still, this demonstrates to me the importance of not only playing good songs, but playing different songs. Sure, it's fun to sing along with "Dirty Deeds" once and a while. But we've been singing along with it for decades now. And yeah, it's quirky when JackFM plays The Bangles right after Linkin Park, but it's a quirkyness that's manufactured by CBS Radio and shipped out to countless identically-named stations nationwide, and I don't think I'm the only one who starts to notice the cracks in the veneer after a while. So, hooray for The Current! Hooray for quirkyness that's actually just Mary Lucia being wacky and saying whatever goes through her head. Yes, Mary, I was listening that one day when you suggested that Mark Wheat take up cocaine.

Interesting. You'll notice The Current is definitely not ahead in this race. Jack FM, KQRS, and Love 105 again all put up very impressive numbers, and KOOL 108 isn't bad either. It makes a fair amount of sense - these are the stations that are drawing from several decades of music and shying away from new releases. So they're not under pressure to spin the latest single that some manufactured star just released. Good for them.

The Current, of course, is still a long, long way from the real offenders here. KS95 again manages to compress three decades of music into playing one song almost 50 times per week. And B96 pulls out a surprise win over KDWB here, playing the top song for a given week roughly 85 times in that week. I just threw up a little in my mouth.

Radio sucks, people. It sucks, sucks, sucks. Some stations suck more than others, but I can't lionize anyone here. The best we can ask for in playlist variety, it seems, is mediocrity. Listen to WLTE, who's completely unremarkable in every degree. Or, listen to Rage. Turn it off. There is no guerilla radio. The war was lost to the strains of Howie Day's simpering falsetto.

Epilogue

I've got one last graph for you all because, well, I still have an agenda. Here's the uniqueness graph again, but with one new data point: values from The Current for the same two-month period in 2006 as opposed to 2009.

This is what I had hoped to see in the earlier charts. It's completely dwarfing the other stations. The scale is all off. It's not even worth debating how one conglomerate scores compared to the others, because The Current is embarrassing all of them. That's what it looks like when one station is single-handedly saving radio. That's where I want us to be.

Enacting my own Terms of Service

I currently have a couple web crawlers running that periodically request content from a couple websites and store it in databases. It struck me as strange that these websites deigned to stipulate certain "Terms of Service" (ToS) over my use of their content and believed that these terms formed a contractual agreement, even though there had been no negotiation over these terms, and I had never signaled my assent (I haven't clicked any little "I agree" buttons on any of these sites). So I decided to bring the art of negotiation back into the formation of these previously one-sided agreements.

So, when one of my spiders makes a request, it adds a name/value pair to the query string of the URL, like so:

http://server.contentprovider.com/requested/1234567?tos=http://static.iangreenleaf.com/TermsOfService.md
This parameter directs the content provider to my own Terms of Service for the transaction. My terms start out by making clear how a content provide may accept or decline them:

By serving the content I requested, you are agreeing to all the terms and conditions set forth in this document, without reservation. If you do not wish to agree to these terms, do not serve your content in response to this request.

They go on to detail how I may use the content I am requesting. My favorite part is this:

By serving the requested content, you agree to hereby waive any and all restrictions on use of your service that you may stipulate in your own Terms of Service, Terms of Use, or other legal document...

So if the content provider responds to my request, they have agreed to my ToS and waived any terms that they may subsequently try to stipulate on my use of their content.

Now, you might think this is stupid or absurd. You might even think that this is totally unenforceable, seeing as how all I have done is provide access to the terms I am stipulating and take continued participation as consent. And I would tend to agree with you.

However, I claim that if my terms are unenforceable, so are those stipulated by the content provider. How is my request any different than providing a tiny link to the Terms of Service way down at the bottom of the page?



I have as much right to place limitations on the transaction as they do. My limitations just happen to nullify all of their limitations. They're welcome to stop serving me content if they don't want to accept my terms.

Think I'm wrong? Tell me why.

Rsync and retrying until we get it right

Ok, this isn't all that special, but I scoured the first two or three pages of Google results and didn't come up with anything that solved my problem. So here it is, Internet - may the next person be luckier than me and not have to read any man pages.

Rsync is a cool utility, especially when I'm trying to plonk my 10Gb backup onto Dreamhost's flaky backup server. But I wish I could make it retry when things go south. There are various threads on doing this, but it would seem it's not built into rsync itself.

The obvious solution is to check the return value, and if rsync returns anything but success, run it again. Here was my first try:

while [ $? -ne 0 ]; do rsync -avz --progress --partial -e "ssh -i /home/youngian/my_ssh_key" /mnt/storage/duplicity_backups backupuser@backup.dreamhost.com:.; done
The problem with this is that if you want to halt the program, Ctrl-C only stops the current rsync process, and the loop helpfully starts another one immediately. Even worse, my connection kept breaking so hard that rsync would quit with the same "unkown" error code on connection problems as it did on a SIGINT, so I couldn't have my loop differentiate and break when needed. Here is my final script:



On a side note, duplicity is pretty neat. I only wish it would support resuming of interrupted backup sessions so that I didn't have to do this in two steps. My current backup workflow is

PASSPHRASE="backup" duplicity --encrypt-key 77XABAX7 /home/youngian --exclude "**/.VirtualBox" --exclude "**/.kde" --exclude /home/youngian/tmp/ --exclude /home/youngian/backup/ file:///mnt/storage/duplicity_backups/ --volsize 100

...and then the above rsync script.