I haven’t been keeping track much on movies lately, but apparently, the film adaptation of the Watchmen (March 6, 2009 release date) has just wrapped and the first still from the film has been released. Zack Snyder is directing, so it’s not really surprising that it looks great – very evocative of the original comic. Now the question, I suppose is whether it’ll be a good filmic adaptation (for those that haven’t read Watchmen, it’s probably one of the best graphic novels ever published and is well worth your time)…

(Anyone think that WB having official movie preproduction blogs is awesome? I didn’t notice when they started doing that… It’s running on MT3. Also, they have an official Flickr stream too!)

Update: I tracked down and read all three major versions of the Watchmen scripts online: the horrible Hamm version, the much lauded Hayter version, and a draft of the Tse revision (based off the Hayter script) that Snyder is shooting with. Although it’s been much maligned in online reviews, I think the Tse revision actually made a lot of improvements to Hayter’s – it’s better paced, a lot of clunky dialogue and devices are dropped, and overall it gets the tone of the Watchmen a lot better, while keeping Hayter’s main accomplishment – a core structure that is both faithful to the original story and that also works as a filmic narrative. If you want to read a good summary of the different versions (spoilers of course), there’s a good comparison @ io9. I threw in my 2 cents on the main thing I didn’t like about the Tse draft.

A couple days ago, I had the pleasure of encountering this error on YouTube:

Now, the reasons for capping favorites are manifold, but primarily, I suspect to limit gaming/vote inflation on the top favorites leaderboards. That being said, the method of capping (flat cap @ 500) seems like one of the worst ways to do it. Abusers who wish to game the system can simply create new accounts, and an increasing number of good active users will start hitting these limits.

My account, for example, was created in January 21, 2006. That’s about 750 days ago as of today. So a 500-favorite cap means that I’ve favorited an average of 0.67 vids a day. The 1,686 video view count seems low to me, but if we go w/ that, it’s about 30% favorite ratio. I use favorites to mark things I like and want to find again, so that’s probably fairly representative, if not completely accurate.

Since the flat-cap is broken, these numbers point to easy ways to fix things…

• You could actually have a much lower ‘base’ cap (200?) and then add a number based on account age (5/day) — the actual numbers are arbitrary and would depend on analysis of the user activity
• You could add additional complexity like favorite/view %s to flag for abuse or for use in the next scenario
• Alternatively, you could approach this differently by separating the external use case of favorites (leaderboards) with the internal (bookmarking) by simply stopping to count a favorite against a the scoreboard of a video after a certain daily limit. This might introduce complexity the counts are generated, but may overall be a better solution if fake account creation for gaming is a problem.

Lastly, the alternative currently available for users that have run into the cap is to add/move videos into playlists (200 video limit). Unfortunately, adding videos to a playlist is a couple extra clicks vs favoriting, and also the favorite/playlist editing interface is quite clunky for managing hundreds of videos:

• 500 videos, 10 checkboxes/pg = 50 pages
• There is no “move” action, so you have to use a pulldown to “copy” and then click a button to “remove” (you need to reselect all the videos each time! – I mean seriously, which one of you guys thought that was a good idea?)
• There is no “check all” option, meaning you have to manually check each video
• The checkboxes don’t have labels, meaning you can’t just click the row, but you need to hunt and peck for the tiny checkbox
• There is no write API so you can automate this (although a GM script is conceivable, ie for check all or labels

In any case, YouTube favoriting: FAIL!

Update: I started up a simple GM script that would start fixing some of the UI issues w/ the Favorite editing UI. I did the easy ones, allowing a check/uncheck all button and row-clicked selection. The next steps would be to create an AJAX function to copy/remove as a move option and then maybe some sort of AJAX loading function that could allow a user to work on say 20-50 videos at a time.

One of the things that I’ve been meaning to do this year is to start blogging again. I have plans for doing a big revamp, but it’s already a month in, so I thought it might be better to put something up rather than waiting for things to sprung fully formed.

The first step is to probably actually show the new posts on the site again (for those reading just the feed, feel free to swing by the home page to take a look). I’m also trying to include my friendfeed on the sidebar. I’m not sure if that’ll be my longterm solution, but it seems like showing my aggregated content/attention will play at least some role in whatever comes next for this site…

Like many who saw Barack Obama speak at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I remember what a powerful breath of fresh air that was. And I remember thinking “he’s going to be President one day.”

Honestly, I didn’t expect that day would come quite so soon, but over the past couple months, as I began following the campaign more closely and learning more about him, I have become convinced that not only is Obama the best and most qualified candidate running for President, but that his message of change is substantively unique and is a potentially transformative opportunity for our political system and our country as a whole. That in short is why I’ll be voting for Barack Obama tomorrow, and hopefully, on November 2nd.

Inspiration & Participation – Let there be no doubt, Obama can speechify. But I’d also suggest that those that dismiss his speeches as just “pretty words” aren’t paying close enough attention to what he’s saying. His message after all, is one that calls for participation and service in the names of the larger civic and communal ideals that has been at the heart of America’s historical traditions (or at least aspirations). His call for change is primarily about changing ourselves, and it resonates. It appeals to the best in us instead of the worst.

Obama offers an alternative dialogue to the politics of fear and divisiveness that has dominated for far too long. He points out that the challenges we face as a nation are enormous, but the problem isn’t lack of policies, resources, or potential solutions, but rather the lack of political will. That will be the largest task for our next President, and I believe that Obama’s abilities and approach will have the best chance of success.

Policies – Last week I attended Lawrence Lessig’s last lecture on Free Culture and his first thoughts on tackling government corruption. While on most issues, Obama and Clinton are fairly similar, on this point (and on many other issues related to technology, innovation, and openness) Obama is far ahead of the curve – the only one that has made open governance a central plank of his technology platform. His commitment to (and understanding of the importance of!) network neutrality, open data, and patent reform are reassuring. Having a constitutional law scholar as President might not be a bad deal either. (see for example Obama’s answers for The Boston Globe’s candidate Q&A on executive power)

• Obama’s policies are detailed in full on his website
• Watching his talk at Google was the first that opened my eyes about him as a seriously capable candidate. (here’s just the Q&A, which is by far the most interesting part)
• Obama meets the SF Chronicle editorial board – this is also a good video to see how he thinks and responds to a wide variety of questions
• Okay, maybe some other policy differences, most tellingly, philosophical differences, not so much in the issues but in the causes and best strategy to solve them

Well, this is starting to get seriously long, so I’ll cut this off and list some interesting things I’ve come across. To summarize though, the more I’ve learned, the more I like him…

• Wikipedia: Barack Obama – as you expect, it’s rather comprehensive, including the coverage of his early years as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer, and his time in the state legislature
• Chicago Reader: What Makes Obama Run? – this in-depth writeup from 1995 speaks a lot about the things he’s done. When he talks about civic duty, he knows form first-hand experience.
• CBS News: Obama Has Varied Experience
  

  “Nobody else running for president has jumped off the career track for three or four years to help people,” said Jerry Kellman, who first hired Obama as a community organizer.

• New Yorker: The Choice – This even-handed feature gives a lot of insight into the differences in philosophy between Obama and Clinton
• The Atlantic: Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters – Andrew Sullivan’s feature argues convincingly on why Obama would represent a strong, potentially transformational, generational change in our political dialogue
• I know that not everyone has the time, but especially over the past few weeks as I’ve really immersed myself, I’ve found surprisingly engaging and insightful nuggets (among the vast amount of gravel) on in the comments/discussion of sites like Metafilter, Washington Monthly, and others. At some point, it might be interesting to gather some of the more compelling/informative points…

Lastly, some endorsements I’ve found to be interesting:

• Lawrence Lessig called it back in November. What’s especially interesting is the comments and how negative they were (no one thought Barack could win, but Larry knew differently). He posted also post a 20 minute video presentation today (where he argues very convincingly on why Obama is the best choice for our future, see also the transcript).
• danah actually says a lot of the things I originally wanted to, but you know, I guess I managed to type a lot either way.
• Randall Munroe, the guy behind xkcd talks a lot about why open governance matters.
• Scott Rosenberg talks about the foreign policy implications as well as how he’s bringing in young voters and changing things up.
• Katha Pollitt: Why I’m Supporting Barack Obama – a feminist perspective. I particularly like how she talks about moving past the 50+/-1% politics that we’ve been trapped in for the past decade and a half.
• It’s a funny thing when both MoveOn and arch-conservatives are endorsing Obama.

Hey, did you really make it to the end of the page?

will.i.am and Jesse Dylan got inspired by Obama’s New Hampshire speech, and put it to music and made an independent video (see them talk about it here)

Here it is in some other formats:

• 640×480 FLV (27M) pulled from yeswecansong.com
• 640×480 VP6 AVI (69M) (from the Pirate Bay) – presumably it’s also pulled from a Flash file (hence the codec) but it has a different watermark. The two high-res videos are about the same quality
• MP3 of the song (4.1M) – I extracted this w/ flv2mp3

Hard to believe, but I’ve had these video files lying around on my hard drive for over two years. In October 2005 I visited Ryan Gantz in his hometown of Plymouth, MA, and after spotting a Halloween decoration at a local CVS, we did some filming while Ryan gave me a tour.

Boston Bones (Complete) from lhl on Vimeo.

To see it in full 720p, check it out on Vimeo.

55.4% of the votes. The man sure can turn a phrase.

And as we leave this state with a new wind at our backs, and take this journey across the country we love with the message we’ve carried from the plains of Iowa to the hills of New Hampshire; from the Nevada desert to the South Carolina coast; the same message we had when we were up and when we were down – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope; and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people in three simple words:

Yes. We. Can.

At the end of last year I picked up a new server that had more RAM and HD space. It took me a while to make sure it was running stably and even longer to finally get around to moving everything over, but I think I’m mostly done now. Things that took the longest:

• Mail – it took me forever to set up my old virtual mail setup (a Courier/Postfix system on MySQL). I didn’t want to go through all of that for my new server. At first I tried DBMail, but failed to get that working and ended up w/ Dovecot. It still took a while to get TLS and SASL all set up and delivering to my Maildirs. I’m still amazed by how there isn’t a simple package/config that will simply setup everything in a way that just works.
• Java – I run Confluence as my personal wiki, and let me tell you, Java sucks. It took a bit of noodling to get everything working mostly because the built in Tomcat was dying (some MBean business) and the standalone didn’t have AJP set up. Anyway, you could say that I’m not a fan.

Hopefully I everything’s working and I have all my files. I’ll be kicking off the old server in a few days.