Old movies with songs in them

Do you remember any of the old classic movies like South Pacific, My Fair Lady and West Side Story? You may not be old enough to remember them, and if that's the case and you're in the US you probably will never see them because American TV very rarely shows movies that are more than about ten or fifteen years old.

One reason for this is probably that a lot of those old movies were musicals - and who wants to see a movie where the lead characters break into a song every ten minutes? Of course, there's a reason why they made so many musicals in those days; a lot of movies were adaptations of big stage productions that were, of course, musicals. Somehow the people that wrote (and still write) stage plays think the audiences want songs breaking up the action every few minutes.

For some reason movie writers also seemed to think that films for children also had to be musicals. It's as if they really thought that kids went to see a movie for the songs. I remember seeing Doctor Dolittle - the original movie with Rex Harrison as the Doctor, not the Eddie Murphy remake - when I was about seven (give or take a couple of years), and even then I was inwardly groaning every time they started singing. "Get on with the damn story", was what I was thinking. The fact that Rex Harrison couldn't sing and basically said the words in time to the music, so that he became "Doctor D, the sixties rap star", didn't help. Mary Poppins was no better, because of Dick van Dyke's horrible idea of what a Cockney accent was supposed to sound like.

I can't remember when the musical movies died. I guess the middle to late sixties must have been about the time - I don't really remember any musicals made during or after the seventies.

That includes movies that are adaptations of sources that do have songs. I'm glad to see that - thank goodness - Peter Jackson had the good sense to limit the singing in the Lord of the Rings films. The books (yes, it seems that there are still some people on the planet that don't know that the films are based on books that were written over half a century ago) had songs in them. In the movies Aragorn sings one short song and Pippin another (neither with the help of an invisible orchestra to back them) and none of the others made it into the movie. (By the way: thank you, Peter Jackson, for losing the entire Tom Bombadil sub-plot. I think having Tom dancing through the woods singing would have been a bit too much, even for those of us that already knew and loved the books.)

Basically, adults don't like musicals and kids don't either, which is probably why they don't make the things any more. This has to be a good thing. Can you imagine some recent movies if they'd been made as musicals? The Terminator with Arnie singing "I'll be back", and Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton singing the touching duet "Come with me if you want to live"? Or even more recently, Vin Diesel belting out "Are you afraid of the dark?" in a musical version of The Chronicles of Riddick?

So, a couple of messages to any film makers who happen to stumble over this blog. First, watch where you're treading. Second, and more importantly: No More Musicals, Ever. Ok?

A Spam Doctor writes...

Twice this week I've been asked about what the industry is doing to fight spam. Since this is something that plagues all of us I thought I'd write a short article to answer that question. Among other things, if I get asked a third time I can just say, "read my blog". I've tried to keep this in simple terms so some of the descriptions are simplified.

How email works

Email is moved around the Internet by special servers called SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) servers. They are also called MTAs (for Mail Transfer Agents), MDAs (Mail Delivery Agents) or simply Mail Relays. As far as anyone but an email system administrator is concerned, all these names are equivalent (and even for an email admin, the distinctions are subtle).

Let's say you write a mail to your friend Albert, whose email address is albert@example.com. When you click the "send" button, your email client program (Outlook Express, Thunderbird or whichever you happen to use) makes a connection to an MTA belonging to your ISP, and sends the mail to it. The information it sends contains your address (called the "From" address), the recipient address (Albert's email address, in this case), the body of the mail, any attachment files you added, and some other control information.

Now the ISP's MTA makes a connection to an MTA belonging to example.com, and sends the exact same information on. That MTA looks at the recipient address and sees that the mail is for the correct domain, and at that point it locates Albert's mailbox file and dumps the mail into it. When Albert reads his mail he sees that the message came from you because it has your email address as the From address.

How do the spammers exploit the email infrastructure?

The problem is that the MTAs take the From addresses that they get in mail as gospel truth. That means that I could make a direct connection to my ISP's MTA and create a mail using your email address as the From address. The person who receives the mail would think it came from you.

Spammers use this trick to label mail with bogus From addresses. Because the ISPs have no way to check that the mail really did originate where it says it did, they have to rely on filtering and other techniques to try to figure out which mails are spam. Every time the anti-spam propeller-heads come up with a better filter, it's not long before the spammers figure out a way to fool it, so it's an arms race with no end in sight.

What measures are being taken?

The industry is trying to fix the problem by coming up with ways for the MTAs to verify that each mail they receive came from the domain it claims in the From address. There are basically two approaches:

The simplest way is for every domain on the Internet to provide a public list of the IP addresses of all of its MTAs. When an MTA receives a mail it can identify the IP address of the system that sent it, then look up the list of valid IPs for the domain in the From address. If the connection came from an IP address that's in the list for the claimed domain, it passes the test. This method is called SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and is being used by AOL and others. There is a similar mechanism called SenderID, but for various reasons that I won't go into here this doesn't seem to be gaining much support at the moment and it's likely to be abandoned.

Another way is more complex but more reliable and secure. In this system each mail has a special label called a Digital Signature attached to it by the sending ISP's MTA. At the receiving end the signature can be checked, and if it checks out it proves that the mail came from the domain claimed in the From address. Without going into too much detail, the signature uses encryption to make sure that it could only have been created by the domain that claims to have sent it. This system is called DomainKeys and is being used by Yahoo!, Google, Earthlink and others.

How does this help?

If you can check a mail and verify the sender then two things are possible. If the checks fail, you know that the mail didn't come from where it claims to have originated. That mail can be put into a "suspect" mail folder, for example.

If the mail does check out, that still doesn't prove that it's not spam - there's nothing to stop a spammer setting up an IP list and/or signature software like the "legitimate" ISPs. But it does make it possible for your and my ISPs to build and share "reputation databases" containing lists of domains that are known to be regular spammers (and also domains that are known to be "good"). When your ISP gets a verified mail from a known spammer domain, they can mark the mail as probable spam so you can decide whether to even open it before you delete it.

As time goes by more ISPs and large-volume mail producers will implement these measures. The spammers that follow suit by providing verification data with their mail will have that mail marked as spam by the time it gets to your in-box. And the ones that don't will have their mail marked as suspect, since the sender can't be verified.

When will this happen?

It's already happening. AOL's servers are checking for SPF information today, and it won't be long before they start insisting on verification data. MSN and Hotmail aren't far behind. Yahoo! checks incoming mail for DomainKeys signatures right now and will be adding features to their web mail client to allow users to decide what to do with unverified mail sometime during the next three months. Google and Earthlink will be doing the same. It's very likely that all the major ISPs and most, if not all, of the smaller ones will have deployed the necessary software by the end of this year.

Is there anything you need to do?

For the time being, no - your ISP will be taking care of the details by making the necessary changes and upgrades to their servers. You won't need to change your email client and for the most part you won't even be aware of the shift - until you realize one day that the volume of spam you get is nothing like what it used to be.

Later it may become possible for your client software to provide a digital signature using a key that is uniquely yours. If and when that happens it will be possible for a receiving ISP to verify that the mail came, not just from your domain, but specifically from you. At that time you may need to think about upgrading your email software, but it's not at all likely that it will make writing and sending mail any different from the way you do it today.

© Pete Ford, 2005

New header image

I'm gradually shaping my blog page from the generic look to something more personal. The new header background is part of the facelift.

I've been a space nut since I was a kid. I was a child of the space race age; I was just barely in high school in Broadstairs (Kent, England) when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the moon. It was an exciting time.

Now we have exciting times again, even though robots are doing the exploring this time around. Since the moonshot era we've been to Mars and Venus, and just this last week landed a robot on Titan. There's a real feeling that among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn we may find life. Exciting times indeed.

Hence the new image with the space theme. The red starry background is from a photo of the North America nebula (named for the shape), the yellow object is Io and the brown one is Ganymede. At top left there is a fragment of the Orion nebula.

Please help me find a place in Canada

If you're in Canada, please help me find a job

I'm dead serious. Kate and I are both tired of being stuck in Dallas and having done some looking around we've decided that we'd like to move to Vancouver if we possibly can.

My resume is available if anyone would like to see it, but the short form is that I've been a software developer since 1979. Most of the time since, I've worked in C on embedded, real-time and turnkey systems. The last few years I've been a Java developer pretty much exclusively, doing a lot of client/server work and (because I work on an Email Services team) a lot of work involving JavaMail and SMTP. There's a lot more to it than that, though.

I'd appreciate hearing from anyone in the Vancouver area who knows about any open positions that might suit. I have a g-mail account you can use to contact me. Thanks in advance, people.

To boldly go where human hand has never set foot

The Huygens probe has landed successfully on Titan - the furthest touchdown from Earth for any man-made object. No word yet on the pictures it was supposed to take on its way down through the atmosphere, or what kind of surface it hit.

Note that this is a "landing", in contrast to the "drop from a great height and smash yourself to bits" approach of the Ranger Moon probes in the 60's, or way the Venus probes dunked themselves in high-pressure, superheated acid. That's not to say they weren't successful; Ranger was designed to take photos on its way to becoming a permanent - if somewhat dissipated - feature of the lunar landscape, and the Venus probes were designed knowing that the weather there makes a Texas summer look like the inside of a freezer with the door shut.

Anyway Space.com are updating their Huygens page as news comes in. Check it out here.

Update: The Space.com site above hasn't been updated since this morning. Try the Spaceflight Now Mission Status Center instead.

Today has sucked...

...but it's not gonna get me down, as the song goes. It seems, after reading a bunch of other blogs, that the occasional "today stunk" blog-a-gram is mandatory. Well, for me today is that day. Today at work nothing went right.

That all changed when I got home. I zipped out to Sam's to get a couple of their own-brand deluxe 16" pizzas, which Kate pepped up with extra mozzarella, mushrooms, pepperoni, onions, green peppers and olives and a pizza sauce made up from some cheap canned spaghetti sauce. The result was awesome.

Then to top that off I just won 100 credits from BlogExplosion. Brilliant! I'm posting for the pure and simple reason that after such a rotten awful day at work I now feel really good and I feel like saying so. That's all :)

I'm not making this up

Dave Barry has decided to quit writing his regular column in the Miami Herald for a while. I read Dave's column every Monday so I'm going to miss this. You can read his "last word" about it here. (You may need to register to read this, so that the paper can use your email address to send you offers that you don't want. I may have mentioned that I almost always use a fake address to register with newspapers. Not that I'm suggesting you should do the same, you understand. Right?)

Dave, if by some one-in-a-million chance you happen by and read this: I hope at some time you decide to resume your regular column. But whatever you do, I'm sure that many others will join me in thanking you for all the laughs, and wishing you the best of luck.

White Trash N Stuff

After posting the following as a comment to Pete's post,

"Are you sure it was only 26%? LOL... Just kidding dear. I refuse to call you Bubba and If yer gonna start leavin' damn junky cars all over the yard, make sure you don't block the view of the garbage dump gates. You know how Gramma likes to sit on Sunday and watch the cars goin' in. It's a family avent. You know this.

LOL... Just helping with your redneck image honey."

I felt compelled to go take the white trash test myself. The following is the result.

I AM 8% WHITE TRASH! I, my friend, have class. I am so not white trash. . I am more than likely Democrat, and my place is neat, and there is a good chance I may never drink wine from a box. Take the WHITE TRASH test at Fuali.com

It seems odd to have an English redneck as a husband. Ohhh I can see it coming, that one's gonna get me into loads of trouble. But people that know me know that trouble is my middle name.

Instead of Bubba, could I call Pete "Beaufort" or maybe "Beauregard"? Something like that? This just keeps gettin' worse. I hope he doesn't retaliate for all the teasing by peeing in my morning tea or anything like that. I'll stop before I do myself in. Or before he does.

Pseudoscience and trash

Pseudoscience

Florida State University is planning on spending nine million dollars a year on a Chiropractic School. This is what happens when the people who manage something as important as an educational institution have little or no relevant education themselves. Two of the nobel laureates there are rightly opposing the move, saying that it will damage the university's academic reputation. Parody maps of the FSU campus have appeared showing a Bigfoot Institute, a School of Astrology and a Crop Circle laboratory.

I'll be watching what happens with this. FSU could find itself on the growing list of places (including Dayton, TN and recently Dover, PA) from where any employment applications we receive are summarily shredded.

26%

While blogsurfing I've come across a bunch of blogs with links to various tests. I tried not to bother with them but in the end I had to have a go, just for fun. The result:

I AM 26% WHITE TRASH! The white trash in my blood will not keep me from becoming a doctor or a lawyer, but it will keep me from a good haircut and any sort of fashion sense. Take the WHITE TRASH test at Fuali.com

In an effort to make 100% I'm thinking of buying a few old rusty car bodies, washing machines and so on to scatter round the front yard. Then I need a F250 truck, and I think I'll change my name to "Bubba", join the NRA and start extolling the virtues of the Bush administration. That ought to about do it.