Nice job, guys. The lack of stipple portraits of Sommer is admittedly dispiriting, but otherwise it seems pretty alright.

Some questions have been raised about my and Amanda’s recent Iron Man advocacy. Allow me to offer a slightly more nuanced case than I did last night:

1. First, as the Nabob points out, there’s the Robert Downey Jr. factor. Consider the recent awesomeness of comic book movies. Now consider that the title of Greatest Living Superhero Actor is currently held by either Wesley Snipes or Christopher Reeve, depending on your personal taste and how carefully you read the criteria for winning the aforementioned title.
   
   
   Robert Downey Jr. has the sort of genuine charisma that can only be learned by having to repeatedly explain to strangers why they just found you sleeping in their house. It comes through in his performances. In the preview his delivery of the script’s lame jokes actually makes them seem sort of funny! Ask yourself: what if Sir Laurence Olivier had been cast in a role involving repulsor beams? What would cinema look like today? My guess: explodier.
2. Although I didn’t think it was as great as certain other people did, Transformers did usher in a major new cinematic innovation: the “how does the protagonist fare against U.S. military hardware?” scene. It should soon take its place next to “mistaken identity”, “Rocky-style training montage”, “going on two dates at once”, and the two or three other dramatic conventions that screenwriters have at their disposal. In the preview, Iron Man, like, totally dusts some fighter jets, and you can tell the pilots are all “Maaan” but also have to admit that it was pretty sweet. I agree with those pilots, but my enthusiasm is unchecked by professional considerations.
3. Finally, the preview implies that the movie retells the Iron Man origin story more or less faithfully. Even though Iron Man is a second-string superhero, most nerds are well-acquainted with and attached to his origin story. This is because all subsequent Iron Man stories have kind of sucked, prompting the creators to revisit the origin story on a regular basis.
   
   
   I don’t think that deviation from the canon would have much of an effect on my enjoyment of the movie. But hearing nerds whine about it for the next eight months would have an effect on my enjoyment of the internet. So thanks in advance for sticking to the source text, Mr. Favreau.

HOLY FUCK IRONMAN

(I don’t even really like Iron Man comics)

I finally made it to a meeting. In brief: loquacious audience members ignorant of the limits of technology; presenters that were, if anything, too aware of them. But the disconnected dynamic was partly the fault of the space, which — despite providing a “WONDERS OF SCIENCE” banner above the podium — didn’t prove to be a particularly great setting.

Still, there were some interesting projects, I got pointed toward some interesting things, and I’ll be going back.

…now that Charles is gone. He’s spending the week celebrating Darren and Emilie’s love over in Belgium, a country about which I know disappointingly few hilarious stereotypes. The happy couple is getting married in a castle, and apparently Charles has been drafted into the ceremony. I believe he’ll be operating the portcullis.

His departure has left the house with too few people and too many options: I can’t decide what to make filthy first. Last night’s unexpected bout of burrito-making caprice left some promising food spills around the kitchen, but I ultimately decided that was an unambitious way to begin and cleaned them up. For now I’ve settled for leaving a pile of sweaty gym clothes on the couch — but this is merely the foundation for the work to come.

My apologies, internet. I was being a pretty good blogger for a while there, but this week’s looking rough. I’d desperately like to write a convoluted apologia on behalf of Bear Grylls, or explain how a pigeon almost killed me, or emphatically agree that dragons are awesome. But for now all that will have to wait. Instead, please accept some bulleted items of a technical nature.

• Item the first! I received my SuperCard in the mail at long last. I’ll explain the nefarious things it allows me to do with my gameboy later. For now, suffice it to say that the marginal cost of an experience point just plummeted.
• Tim’s recently had a few great posts about the First Sale Doctrine and whether software companies can bind you to contractual terms by printing them on a tiny sheet of paper that you throw out, unread, with the rest of the packaging for Office 2007. His latest is particularly interesting — in it he responds to a criticism involving open source software and its own reliance on software licenses. I think Tim’s second point in response is on the money: the use of compiled software is very different from the use of source code.
  
  
  Besides, there’s no real reason why a more explicit contractual agreement couldn’t be imposed on the distribution of open source code. Tim has noted that Microsoft could make you sign a contract to buy Windows, too, but doesn’t because it would end up costing them money (and make consumers more aware of the terms of the agreements).
  
  
  But the vast majority of open source developers know about the licenses associated with their hobby, even if they can’t explain the differences between the GPL, BSD, Apache, Mozilla and LGPL licenses off the top of their heads. I don’t think too many lines of code would be lost by requiring some sort of deliberate acknowledgment of a project’s license prior to downloading its source.
  
  
  But this may all be irrelevant. I’m no lawyer, but my general impression is that the exchange of money can significantly alter a legal landscape — it certainly does in other areas of intellectual property law. I’m not sure whether that works for or against open source evangelists in this case, but I think it’s plausible to say that they may occupy a different legal position than that of commercial software vendors.
• Also at Tech Liberation, Adam Thierer writes about wifi piggybacking. I already left a lengthy comment there, so if you want to hear my ruminations on the subject you can follow the link. But more practically, I wanted to say that it’s really, really easy to set up a connection-sharing arrangement. I recently installed the custom DD-WRT firmware on Emily’s router and set it to repeat Scooter’s signal (he’d okayed the project at the beginning of the summer). Aside from some router-specific difficulties that won’t be relevant for anyone following the directions below, it worked like a charm.
  
  
  So if you can get a willing neighbor’s faint signal by the window and nowhere else, you might want to think about buying a router to handle the window-sitting for you. It’s pretty simple to do:
  
  
  1. Go to this page and figure out what the cheapest compatible router is, then buy it. Plan on spending about $50.
  2. Follow these instructions, which will guide you through downloading and installing the DD-WRT firmware onto your router. To set up the router as a repeater you’ll need to use the v24 release of the firmware, which is still considered beta-quality.
  3. Use these directions to configure your newly-powerful router into a wireless repeater. It even works with encrypted networks! Well, provided that you have the password. Still, it’s incredibly useful and seems to be quite speedy and stable based on my admittedly not-quite-rigorous testing.
• Finally, an interesting but almost certainly specious argument stating that Comcast’s specific anti-Bittorrent measures may be illegal.