Month: April 2011

The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others is a German-language movie about East Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall. The movie focuses on three individuals: Georg, an author who is initially devoted to the state, but eventually finds that the state is a dead end, Christa his actress girlfriend, and the Stasi policeman, Gerd, who is sent to bug Georg’s apartment. The movie received an academy award and deserves it. The plot is emotionally intense and well played.

This is a psychological movie. There aren’t any fabulous chase scenes or shootouts. In fact, the movie is about a single word, freedom. It asks the question, “How much is state safety worth compared to the freedom of living one’s life as one sees fit?” The movie answers the question by showing Georg risking his life to write articles for the West that show the state’s policies for what they are—the evil desires of a few corrupt individuals. It also shows Christa committing suicide and Gerd giving up a comfy position, all to protect Georg from the state. Both come to believe in what Georg is doing and are willing to die to obtain their freedom from extreme repression.

I can honestly say that I stayed focused throughout the movie because it has a lot to say, the actors do their jobs well. Actually, it has a lot to say to Americans who think that giving the state more power to make them safe is a good idea. Every time our government allows yet another freedom robbing bill to pass, I know we’re taking yet another step toward the sort of repression this movie presents.

Some people will find the scenes of torture during the movie hard to deal with. No, there aren’t any incidents of waterboarding or other physical cruelty. All of the torture depicted is of the psychological variety. I’m sure the actual torture techniques were far worse. Still, the way in which the torture is presented will almost certainly offend some people.

There are a few minor nits with this movie. The movie is in German, so I needed to watch with subtitles on, which isn’t a problem for me. However, some of the subtitles flashed by so fast that I had to go back and replay them in order to keep up with the movie. I also found a few of the scene transitions a little hard to follow. There was at least one scene where I lost track of where the actors are. It turned out that they were in Georg’s apartment—I had thought at first they might be somewhere else.

Overall, this is an excellent movie—well worth the time I invested viewing it. I don’t know that this is something I would watch very often and I’d have to be in the right mood to watch it again, but I did think that it’s worth at least one viewing and it has quite a lot to say. This is a movie of high social value and not very long on entertainment. It’s a thought provoking movie that more people should watch if for no other reason than to consider just how bad things could become if we don’t safeguard our freedoms.

 

Delimiters and Batch Files

The example on page 402 of Windows Command-Line Administration Instant Reference produces the correct result. You see the result of passing various bits of information between two batch files. However, as someone wrote to me recently, the output from the Batch2.BAT file isn’t the result you might expect. Instead of showing the entire %PATH% environment variable, you see just the first part of this environment variable as shown here.

BatchFile01

The reason you only see C:\Program as the environment variable output is the fact that %PATH% contains delimiters. There are a number of characters that the command prompt uses as delimiters, separators between elements in a single string. My testing shows that the space, tab, and semi-colon are three characters that always act as delimiters within a batch file. Of course, delimiters are extremely useful when you want to use one string to hold multiple elements for processing, but they can also cause interesting results, such as in this case where only part of the %PATH% environment variable appears in the output.

Of course, you’re probably asking how to obtain the entire environment variable as output. A simple change to Batch1.BAT makes this possible as shown here.

@ECHO OFF
Call Batch2.BAT
Call Batch2.BAT Passed %1 "%PATH%"
ECHO In Batch 1
GOTO :EOF
ECHO Goodbye

Notice that %PATH% now appears within double quotes. This change tells the command processor not to process the information within the %PATH% environment variable as separate entities. With this change you see the following output.

BatchFile02

Now you’re seeing the entire environment variable in the output. It’s important to note this difference in processing strategies when creating batch files of your own. What other batch file quirks have you encountered. Let me know at [email protected].

Weather Forecaster’s April Fool’s Joke

Normally I won’t post twice in one day unless something really exciting happens. However, I just couldn’t let this event go by without comment. The radio announcers were all laughing heartily this morning about the supposed near miss of snow in the Madison area as they talked with the weather forecaster. Little did they know that the promise of rain, rather than snow, was just a huge April fool’s joke on everyone. Naturally, everyone learned about the joke not long after. Here’s the view outside my window:

Snow

Yep, that looks like rain all right . Those really big lumpy bits of something isn’t dust on the camera lens either; it’s really big snow flakes. I’m sure the snow won’t stick around all that long this time of year and you’ll notice that it’s barely sticking to the pavement (so I won’t have to shovel), still, we made sure to call the radio station and let them know, “’tain’t funny McGee!”

As one woman at the local coffee shop stated, “It’s Wisconsin, what do you expect?” I guess that sums things up nicely. Whether you’re knee deep in snow or enjoying spring flowers, have a great day .

 

Fall Damage Revealed in Spring

Each fall we till the garden up and plant winter rye. It’s amazing stuff because it sprouts in fall and survives the winter months to continue growing in spring! There are a number of reasons for planting winter rye:

  • The ground cover holds the soil in place and reduces erosion.
  • It fixes nitrogen all winter long and acts as “green manure” when we till it in later in the spring.
  • Having something planted in the garden shades out the weeds, so we aren’t fighting the weeds as much.
  • Winter rye drinks up the excess moisture, so we can get into the garden earlier (without sinking up to our knees in mud).

There are probably other reasons for growing winter rye, but these four are the reasons we take time to plant it. Unfortunately, we had an early frost this last fall. So, the winter rye sprouted, but didn’t have time to establish itself before the frost hit. As a result, unknown to us, the winter rye died. So our garden is unprotected this spring and I’m already seeing evidence of erosion as shown here.

Erosion

There isn’t any time to plant more winter rye now. So, we’ll control the erosion in another way, by placing hay bails on the downward side of the garden slope. Using the hay bails will slow the water flow and at least keep the soil in the garden. Of course, the point is that nature doesn’t always cooperate with our plans, so it’s important to have a Plan B (the hay bails in this case).

The hay won’t go to waste. Later this spring, when everything is planted, we’ll use the hay to mulch the garden. Mulching reduces the need to water and keeps weeds under control, but more on that later. So, what do you do to control erosion and keep weeds under control in your garden? Let me know at [email protected].