Sometimes I joke that I do web development to support my railfanning habit. It’s not entirely true, but it’s always pleasant when the two intersect.

I’m a Trains subscriber. Trains is a monthly publication which serves both those who actually work in the railroad industry and enthusiasts (railfans) like me. Beyond the monthly print publication (which I get electronically, but never mind), Trains publishes a daily news feed called News Wire. There’s lots of good information here on the various comings and goings in the industry, though US-centric.

I use Zotero to index information for research projects–mostly railroading, but other topics as well. There’s an extension for Chrome, Zotero Connector, which lets you import web content directly into Zotero, saving a lot of manual entry. Many publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post are natively supported. When one isn’t, Zotero makes a best guess based on page structure and metadata. How well that works depends on how well-formed the page here.

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I’ve been building a CI/deployment stack with GitLab CI, Docker, and Capistrano. I’m hoping to give a talk on this in the near future, but I wanted to add a brief note on a problem I solved using SSH agent forwarding in Docker in case anyone else runs into it.

In brief, I have code flowing like this:

1. Push from local development environment to GitLab
2. GitLab CI spins up a Docker container running Capistrano
3. Capistrano deploys code to my staging environment via SSH

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Today at WordCamp Lancaster Ryan Duff gave a talk on “Choosing WordPress Themes And Plugins: A Guide To Making Good Decisions.” It jogged my mind about an incident on the WordPress.org plugins database I observed last year. This incident, though minor, illustrates the significant limitations with that place.

Two years ago–to the day–I called the WordPress.org plugins database a swamp and I stand by that. Ryan noted that there’s no canonical right way to select plugins and themes. You have to mitigate risk as much as possible. That means you have to look at a plugin in the round. WordPress.org gives you some tools for that: ratings, reviews, installation base, support forums. You can evaluate the social credit of the developer. You can review the code yourself, if you’re so inclined and have the technical background.

Here at Lafayette we use a plugin called Category Posts Widget. It’s pretty simple: it creates a widget which will display recent posts from a given category. Its original author released version 3.3 in August 2011 and then never updated it again. We’d been running it since 2010 or earlier. If we’d stumbled on it 2013 we’d have seen it was outdated and passed, but if a plugin keeps working you never really notice it’s been abandoned unless you have a regular review process (which we don’t).

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Code-Checker is a tool distributed by Moodle HQ which lets you validate code against core coding standards. You install it as a local plugin in a development environment and run it against specified files. It then spits out all kinds of nit-picky errors:

• #76: ····page\_heading();·?>

• This comment is 67% valid code; is this commented out code?

• Inline comments must start with a capital letter, digit or 3-dots sequence

• Inline comments must end in full-stops, exclamation marks, or question marks

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This summer we have our student worker building out a set of Behat tests for our WordPress environment. We’ve started with smoke tests. For example, on www.lafayette.edu we’re looking at the following:

• Are there news items? If so, do the links to those items work?
• Are there calendar events? If so, do the links to the events works?
• Does the “Offices & Resources” drop-down function? Do the links in that drop-down work?

That’s a short list of tests but it covers a lot of ground:

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I first saw Monkey Hustle at the 2004 B-Fest and I enjoyed more than any other blaxploitation film I’ve seen since, there or elsewhere. It holds a 4.8 on IMDb as of writing and was panned on its release. I’m here to tell you that it’s a good film and the critics be damned.

In a nutshell, Monkey Hustle is about various characters in a Chicago neighborhood, their interactions, and the looming threat of a new expressway (tapping in to the freeway revolts of the 1960s and 1970s). Monkey Hustle’s detractors argue that the plot, such as it is, doesn’t hang together and that most of the scenes don’t relate to each other and make little sense. This is all nonsense. What we’ve got here is a film loaded with subtext, with characters who don’t know they’re in a movie and don’t feel a need to explain themselves.

Look at Daddy Fox (Yaphet Kotto) and Goldie (Rudy Ray Moore). No one tells the audience that, though rivals, they go way back and that Fox has some kind of claim over Goldie. We get that from their interactions. In the climax of the film Fox and Goldie use their connections to divert the neighborhood-threatening expressway. A lesser film would have told us some pointless story about how Goldie saved the alderman’s life (alluded to) or how the alderman owed Fox some favor. In the Monkey Hustle, it’s sufficient that they exercised their influence. Look at the melancholy expression on Goldie’s face at the block party–it cost him something to make this happen.

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I need to say a few words about the late Andy Sidaris (note the spelling–no relation to David Sedaris). Sidaris forged a successful career in television, including 25 years with ABC’s Wide World of Sports, before striking out on his own in his mid-50s to write, produce and direct a series of B-grade action movies which today are known collectively as the Triple-Bs (“Bullets, Bombs, and Babes”). All of his films followed a basic formula; Hard Ticket to Hawaii was the second of the series and probably the best of the lot.

Your typical Sidaris flick has a couple female heroines (usually former Playboy playmates), some over-the-top baddies with mullets, and a bunch of cool-if-unnecessary gadgets. Sidaris loves him some gadgets. This flick features a large, remote-controlled helicopter that is somehow integral to the plot. Why? Probably because Sidaris either owned it or knew someone who did. Lots of stuff in this movie (like the cross-dressing assassin) has the feel of “hey, I know a guy who can do x“). Oh, and it’s all set in Hawaii, probably because Hawaii’s a nice place to be when you’re indulging yourself.

The plot, such as it is, involves a smuggling ring operating in the Hawaiian islands and the efforts by agents of an unnamed government agency to thwart them. You don’t watch a for the plot but rather for the absurdities contained within. The fight scene below, whose entire conception is absurd yet delightful. The subplot involving a toxic snake, of which I dare not reveal more. The ludicrous subplot involving Sidaris playing a version of himself producing a football show. The random martial arts stuff, since it’s an '80s movie and they do that. The sublimely banal, badly-written dialogue. The cheerfully gratuitous nudity.

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I’ve referred to Dark Side of the Moon in several previous reviews, so it’s probably time it got its own. Let’s state the important things upfront: it’s a lesser rip-off of Alien, it’s 85 minutes but feels longer, and I’d pay real money to see the crowd reaction to it at B-Fest.

In a nutshell, in turns out that Satan has set up shop on the far side of the Moon, and is terrorizing ships which wander into an ill-defined corridor between the Earth and the Moon which corresponds to the Bermuda Triangle. There’s an involved, badly written, inappropriately scored scene involving the film’s hero and numerology which explains all this, to the mounting horror of cast and audience alike.

That out of the way, the film has a reasonable B-movie pedigree. Robert Sampson (Robot Jox, Re-Animator) plays the ship’s pilot. John Diehl (Stargate) is…some crewmember. Never doped out what he does. The great Joe Turkel (Blade Runner, The Shining) plays the computer operator/engineer.  The model work is better than expected. Possessed members of the crew have evil green eyes, which is overused but effective at times (especially Turkel). Even the ship’s “Mother” (Alien) rip-off, an android named Lesli, is an interesting take on the concept if underdeveloped.

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Following on from the screening of Creature, tonight’s selection provoked an argument five minutes in about who the hell selected it, and why. Liz having confessed to the deed, we moved on to speculating whether the entrails on-screen were real or especially good creature effects. Taking note of the quality of the entrails and the filming location (Spain) we decided they were real.

This is the first film by Deran Sarafian, who’s now chiefly known for his work on House, M.D. He’s come a long way. I learn from the credits that it was adapted from an original screenplay titled “Massacre at R.V. Park.” Aside from the lead characters (three American college students), everyone appears to be Spanish. Twenty minutes in as we watch a chicken meet its fate execution-style we suspect it was shot in Spain solely to get around American regulations. That or a tax dodge.

Anyway, what we’ve got here is a Spanish rip-off of The Andromeda Strain, but with an actual monster. On first glance this is a winning formula: enliven a portentous American film with additional action sequences and (one assumes) cheap exploitation. That’s what the Italians would have done. Instead the whole thing is weighed down by a badly-acted, badly-written subplot (main plot?) involving the three American students, including Lynn-Holly Johnson (as seen as James Bond’s spurned teenage love interest in For Your Eyes Only, another cringe-worthy performance). The other two are interchangeable brotards.

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It took two tries for Liz and me to watch this, according to Netflix. We don’t remember it; we definitely didn’t finish it. I don’t know why she wants to watch it; I’m just fascinated to see Klaus Kinski in a film not directed by Werner Herzog. The only other actor I recognize is Lyman Ward, one of those actors who just screams '80s (you saw him as Ferris Bueller’s dad). The director, William Malone, is new to me. This was his first feature; most of his later work is in television.

I’d like to welcome our readers to yet another Alien rip-off. I’ll give this one odds against Dark Side of the Moon; to cover the spread it needs something better than Satanic Joe Turkel. Doesn’t sound like much but it’s a standard. In this film the planet is Titan and the MacGuffin is some kind of cylinder that apparently has bad stuff in it. In a wrinkle, there are two greedy mining companies instead of one. There’s also a character who’s either an android or the ultimate frosty female security officer.

The opening effects work rips off 2001 and then doubles down by ripping off Blade Runner’s soundtrack. Some of the foley sound is ripped off from Star Wars. Why a freighter landing sounds like an X-wing is anyone’s guess. After a few shots in space we’re on Titan and into what I assume is a cinematographer’s nightmare: dark shadows, flashing lights, ground fog, and indistinct corners. For all I know this was a shot in the basement of Pardee Hall with the lights out (now there’s a plot). This is such a cheat and it drives me nuts. Aliens, which came out a year later, managed dark shooting while still showing stuff on screen. LV-426 was a brooding, menacing locale. This just looks cheap.

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