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Cate Blanchett in I’m Not ThereThe best thing about I’m Not There is Cate Blanchett. Otherwise, the new Dylan movie is a big bore.

By using six different actors and settings to portray Dylan, INT gets across its message just fine – that Dylan has refused, all of his life, to be pigeon-holed, though the world has tried its darndest to do just that. But it’s so heavy-handed. Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home reveals the same idea much more naturally.

In fact, many scenes of INT are simply redone NDH scenes, with names changed and interviews paraphrased. I kept on doing double-takes as I realized “this Alice character is Joan Baez, but Joan Baez was more interesting,” etc.

Cate Blanchett is the only one of the six Dylans who emanates (or is allowed to emanate?) that palpable ruthless, poetic intelligence that, for me, embodies Dylan’s charisma. But Dylan does it even better.

So save yourself a long expensive snore in the theater – wait and rent it, and fast forward to Blanchett’s scenes. Better yet, rent No Direction Home.

(Oh, and get a friend to lend you the soundtrack for I’m Not There, since it’s quite enjoyable.)

Anyone willing to defend I’m Not There and lambast my boorish ignorance? Let the flames begin!

Old Jessibird site retired

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If anyone cares, I took down the old handcoded site at jessibird.org. If you browse to jessibird.org now you will arrive at jessibird.net (the current Jessibird blog).

The old site was mainly for my own use, anyway; it had my favorite links and rss feeds, which took some serious coding gymnastics to display. But that was part of the point – seeing what I could do. I learned basic PHP and had a very primitive sort of WordPress-like template system (no database, though, just text files) for publishing and editing my recipes.

Screenshot of old Jessibird site

The Story About Ping

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PingMy favorite book review ever. Why? Well I read this book to scads of preschoolers over the course of fifteen years, and then I took some networking courses at Cabrillo College…you figure it out. Reprinted verbatim, sans permission, from Amazon.

The Story about Ping (Reading Railroad Books) (Paperback)
by Marjorie Flack (Author), Kurt Wiese (Illustrator)

Amazon.com says: The tale of a little duck alone on the Yangtze River, The Story About Ping is a sweet and funny book with wonderfully rich and colorful illustrations. On a day like any other, Ping sets off from the boat he calls home with his comically large family in search of “pleasant things to eat.” On this particular day, he is accidentally left behind when the boat leaves. Undaunted, the little duck heads out onto the Yangtze in search of his family, only to find new friends and adventures–and a bit of peril–around every bend.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8,602 of 8,876 people found the following review helpful:

Amazon stars Ping! I love that duck!, January 25, 2000

Reviewer: John E. Fracisco from El Segundo

PING! The magic duck!

Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix‘s most venerable networking utilities. Even more stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were finalized.

The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).

The title character — er, packet, is called Ping. Ping meanders around the river before being received by another host (another boat). He spends a brief time on the other boat, but eventually returns to his original host machine (the wise-eyed boat) somewhat the worse for wear.

If you need a good, high-level overview of the ping utility, this is the book. I can’t recommend it for most managers, as the technical aspects may be too overwhelming and the basic concepts too daunting.

Problems With This Book

As good as it is, The Story About Ping is not without its faults. There is no index, and though the ping(8) man pages cover the command line options well enough, some review of them seems to be in order. Likewise, in a book solely about Ping, I would have expected a more detailed overview of the ICMP packet structure.

But even with these problems, The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens’ Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante’s seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API (“Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight — Nothing whatever I discerned therein.”), without shaking their head with deep understanding. But I digress.