News You Can Bruise for 2013 April

(2) Mon Apr 01 2013 09:25 March Film Roundup: Okay, look. I don't see movies just for their entertainment value. I dig film as an art form. But my permit to dig is premised on an amateur understanding of film as a narrative art form. If you want to present an endless stream of disconnected images, let's do an installation piece, because I want to decide for myself when I've had enough. I'm not going to be your captive for fifty minutes. (I'm looking at you, Andy Warhol.) And all that aside, I'm not gonna see a movie called Trash Humpers (2009), when the nicest thing the folks doing the screening can say is that it "rewards the open-minded viewer with moments of astonishing and unexpected poignancy."

Which is to say that I skipped most of the museum's highly avant-garde March offerings. I also got this book I have to work on. So not many movies in this roundup. Let's-a go:

• Fallen Angel (1945): Decent noir with a fake mystery and an interesting twist at the end (in terms of which characters got what they wanted and how, not in terms of plot). John Carradine appeared as a classic comedic noir conman, but he had to appear in twenty other movies, so he left after the first reel, much to Fallen Angel's detriment.

  Turns out a noir film is my popcorn movie. I'll go see any number of them but I'm not expecting great things from them. PS: there is no popcorn allowed in the museum theater.

• Horse Feathers (1932): Still really funny, but this is the first viewing where I noticed that the Marx Brothers' general disrespect for society encompasses a lot of misogny. It's not just Harpo chasing the choir girls. In fact, Groucho's the worst. It doesn't help that there's no Margaret Dumont here to take up the flag of society and fight back. But Chico filling bottles in the speakeasy will never get old.
• Ikiru (1952): Watched on Hulu during the free Kurosawa weekend. Highly recommended. A little heavy-handed at the beginning, but it really started paying off when the main character died. (Not a spoiler.) At that point I saw a masterful display of one of the most difficult and most important things that fiction can bring to our attention: the mechanics by which we all construct narratives for our lives in which we're the good guy making good things happen.

  Bonus: everyone referred to Takashi Shimura's character as "Kacho", deepening my belief that Game Center CX is a workplace satire in the vein of Ikiru.

• Wreck-it Ralph (2012): I'm not sure who gave Disney the idea that it's okay to use other people's intellectual property in their movies, but it gives good results. Wreck-it Ralph is a by-the-numbers Disney narrative, but the fact that it's a movie about arcade games and their by-the-numbers narratives leaves quite a bit of room for subversion and criticism, in service of the larger goal of feel-good entertainment. As with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, I thought the original characters were a lot more interesting than the famous cameos, to the extent that I continually wished the famous cameos would butt out and let the original characters get on with it.

  (The worst cameo was Sonic the Hedgehog's infodumpy PSA near the beginning. Awful! But! What if it was a sly reference to those dumb PSAs at the end of the old Sonic cartoons? Does an obscure reference deserve respect even when deployed as a cheesy infodump? OH THE DILEMMA)

  The museum showed this in 3D, and I was apprehensive about the extra D. I can report that it neither caused me headaches nor made me want to see all movies in 3D from this point on.

• 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967): The French New Wave eludes me again. There's one great scene in this, in which the conspiratorially-whispering narrator (Godard himself) deconstructs the subject-object distinction to the extent that he loses the ability to make directorial decisions, and lets the camera linger on some trees for a while. There's a few other good bits, and lots of Ballardian imagery. Makes me want to watch Alphaville even more. But... eh. Eh, I say!

Thu Apr 18 2013 13:05 In Search of the Beautiful Soup Double-Dippers: Recently I noticed that certain IPs were using distribute or setuptools to download the Beautiful Soup tarball multiple times in a row. For one thing, I'm not sure why distribute and setuptools are downloading Beautiful Soup from crummy.com instead of using PyPI, especially since PyPI registers almost 150k downloads of the latest BS4--why are some people using PyPI and not others?

If anyone knows how to convince everyone to use PyPI, I'd appreciate the knowledge. But it's not a big deal right now, and it gives me some visibility into how people are using Beautiful Soup. Visibility which I will share with you.

Yesterday, the 17th, the Beautiful Soup 4.1.3 tarball was downloaded 2223 times. It is by far the most popular thing on crummy.com. The second most popular thing is the Beautiful Soup 3.2.1 tarball, which was downloaded 381 times. The vast majority of the downloads were from installation scripts: distribute or setuptools.

1516 distinct IP addresses were responsible for the 2223 downloads of 4.1.3. I wrote a script to find out how many IP addresses downloaded Beautiful Soup more than once. The results:

Downloads from a single IP	Number of times this happened
55	1
35	1
15	1
13	1
11	1
5	2
4	12
3	43
2	453
1	1001

Naturally my attention was drawn to the outliers at the top of the table. I investigated them individually. The IP address responsible for 55 downloads is a software company of the sort that might be deploying to a bunch of computers behind a proxy. The 35 is an individual on a cable modem who, judging from their other traces on the Internet, is deploying to a bunch of computers using Puppet. The 15, the 13, and the 11 are all from Travis CI, a continuous integration service.

One of the two 5s was an Amazon EC2 instance. Five of the twelve 4s were Amazon EC2 instances. Thirty-seven of the forty-three 3s were Amazon EC2 instances. And 395 of the 453 double-dippers were Amazon EC2 instances. Something's clearly going on with EC2. (There was also one download from within Amazon corporate, among other BigCo downloaders.)

I hypothesized that the overall majority of duplicate requests are from Amazon EC2 instances being wiped and redeployed. To test this hypothesis I went through all the double-dippers and calculated the time between the first request and the second. My results are in this scatter plot. Each point on the plot represents an IP address that downloaded Beautiful Soup twice yesterday.

For EC2 instances, the median time between requests is 11 hours and 45 minutes. So EC2 instances are being automatically redeployed twice a day. For non-EC2 instances, the median time between requests is 51 minutes, and the modal time is about zero. Those people set up a dev environment, discover that something doesn't work, and try it again from scratch.

Sat Apr 27 2013 17:08 Board Game Dadaist Improvements: I've finally relented to Adam's demands and made some improvements to the Board Game Dadaist RSS feed. He broke his kneecap recently and I figured this would be a good way to cheer him up. Every game that shows up in the feed now has a permalink (here's "Plue"), and that page has a very basic link for posting your find to Twitter.