"City of Ember" Critique

"City of Ember" Critique


(for those of you who know me, this may bear a few similarities to my rant about Fallout 3)

First, full disclosure: If there's a book, I haven't read it and apologize in advance to the author.  This is about the movie.

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200+ years went by... and the city, apparently, stagnated...

Over 200 years and nobody built a new light-bulb?  No tunnels were dug?  No mining occurred?  Nothing?  Really??

As near as I can figure, the City of Ember was put together at the very last minute on a shoestring budget, and into it they crammed the least-motivated least intelligent dregs of society.  It wasn't mankind's hope for the future, I suspect it was more like "well, just in case all the other plans fail, maybe these people will survive or something."

A damn cruise ship is better equipped for survival then the City of Ember was!!  No machine-shops to make replacement parts? Really??  No light-source fabrication?  No circuit-board construction?  No computers?  You must be kidding.  And the food... apparently a couple green-houses and tons of canned goods.

They had answering machines--which required programmed microprocessors (which means a fictional setting of at least 1960AD or later).  Manufacturing microprocessors--even primitive ones--isn't hugely difficult if you have the right equipment.  A few computing devices would have aided them immensely, but no, none of that.

Things which might have aided the city: The ability to make pipes, perhaps?  A bare minimum of equipment for the mining, refining, smelting, and machining the rocks around the cave into usable things.  Supplies for doing chemistry things--the right metals and chemicals and you can make circuit boards, gears, valves, wiring, tons of things any post-industrial age society could find millions of uses for... but no.

In 200 years any industrious people would have secured, cleared and lit a large nearby cave (or three) and produced a bountiful garden which more than met all the food needs of the populace.  (Though, given the planning, I'd bet they didn't have any plant seeds which weren't brought in by accident.)  They had apparently one or two potato-growing greenhouses.  Good thing somebody thought to bring a raw potato with them, else the city's inhabitants would likely have starved to death 150 years earlier.

ONE generator.  A single hydroelectric generator--with no capacitive in-line power retention is supposed to run the city for 200 years.  Nobody thought it would be good to give the citizens the plans/parts to construct additional generators along the river which flows under/thru the city?

And worse yet--they decided to maintain the a few of the worst ills of society for some stupid reason in the ill-conceived shoe-string budget survival city: money (why?), and a large standing army of "security" thugs who apparently exist to break things and intimidate the populace.  And worse, inefficient bureaucratic nonsense.  It feels like perhaps the City of Ember served the same purpose as the "second space-ship" in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy--you know, the one that was full of middlemen and phone polishers.

Anyhow, those thugs should have been mining new tunnels, refining minerals, making new lights with which to grow out the humans' underground demesne, damming the river for the additional newly-constructed hydroelectric power plants, helping mulch waste biological material for the gardens... really, anything other than breaking things and intimidating the populace.

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So yeah, I guess that's about it.  Lots of time and people, and nothing accomplished aside from squeezing out an bare existence--well at least they managed to make yarn in a variety of bright colors.

Advice for future developers:

Soon, I'll occupy a shiny new office. It's been a learning experience.

When moving from one office building to another, moving a computer & backup hard-drive containing your docs & code-base is far easier than moving dead-tree copies of same.

To pacify programmers' rebellions, it's best to hold off moving the computers until you have internet setup and the facilities cabled and ready to go.

Linux-fu!

Anybody know a master of embedded Linux who might spare some sympathy troubleshooting for a poor Linux acolyte who might be a little out of his depth?

(I mean me--the acolyte, not the master.)

Just because I've successfully built one product based on embedded Linux, my boss expects me to kinda be able to whip them out now--but my level of mastery is far from awesome.  I'm still coming to grips with many of the whizzy bits, not yet having time to learn the snazze-bangs!

If you're reading this, please think some good thoughts into the past (like pictures, every photo of you is a picture of you in the past) and hopefully the combined psychic energy of my eventual cult-like following after I die a beloved artist/dictator/liberator/inventor/other will sway the tide of this battle.

Respect.

Spring Fever

Spent the weekend teaching my brother about media servers and how he didn't need to ruin discs by having them where his younglings can get to them...

For those of you who are Windows Lüzers, tversity is a good place to get started.

(Tuesday) PHP blues...

(Wednesday) Decided to give Sabayon Linux a shot. Rediscovered my enjoyment of MC Chris' music today...

(Thursday) Got a grasp on php session stuff...

(Friday) Just work, early day due to spring fever.

Weekend Anime: "Aquarion" A rather cute giant-robot battling epic ancient evil anime which is also all about threesomes.

Regex funinations!

(Monday) Turns out, if you're coding up a little bash script in busy box, the regular expressions enclosed with '[ ]' and the one prefaced with 'expr' are evaluated in slightly different ways.

'expr' seems to be the more comprehensive of the two.

(Tuesday)  Spent the day putting out 'your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency for me' type fires.  I'd have rather said "tough, deal with it" but then somebody'd just shitty it up, and that dog don't hunt.

And then there was birthday cake (not my birthday) and the day got better.

(Wednesday) Kinda looking forward to the new X-Com reboot (I was a HUGE fan of the original), as well as the next SimCity.

Saw the "new" Windows 8--it looks like the ripped off the interface Ubuntu as been developing and using for a year or so... Poor windows suckers, paying money for 2nd rate copy-cat software with free bugs & security holes! Don't they know they can have a secure operating system for free?

Pro tip: You can run a web script from the command line. If your script isn't working right, try this and you'll generally get an idea of why it isn't working right.

(Thursday) As usual, Internet Explorer has to be the one that doesn't work.  Apparently it's iffy about sending its $HTTP_REFERRER for some stupid reason.

Hmm, have to scrap my entire 'lite security' setup because of IE.  Looking into "HTTP Authentication"

(Friday) Finished the anime "El Cazador de la Bruja" last night. Gave it 3 of 5.

Phone Shenanigans...
My HTC Amaze (awesome Android phone) had some glitch reset near the end of last week.  Afterwards, it was running hot and burning thru the battery in almost no time flat. Worried, almost panicked, the solution came to me in the middle of the night; turn it off. Take out the battery, let it cool, turn it back on.

And, that did it! My phone is once again acting like itself.

(Monday)  Still working on server-side cgi scripting for embedded Linux. Fun/tough stuff.

(Tuesday) Ugh! There's tons to know in order to master bash scripts...

If you're making a cgi script and some commands are working (like cat &  ls) and others aren't (like 'wc') try adding the full path to the non-working command (/usr/bin/wc) and if that fixes it, it means you need to modify the CGIPath in your boa.conf file. (And then restart your boa webserver)

(Wednesday) Exciting news! The 'Raspberry Pi' $35 Linux computer began shipping today! www.raspberrypi.org/

(Thursday) Today I learned there are a few marked differences between the busybox "bash" and the normal Linux bash. Namely: functions in bash scripts.  In busybox, it's a no-go.

(Friday) Came & went...

This weekend's anime: Orphen (3.5 of 5) & 'Oh! Edo Rocket' (4.5 of 5).

President's Day!
Grrr. I dislike useless holidays--the kind where the bus isn't running normally but I do not get the day off work. Had to walk 3 miles to get there. (Monday)

Learned I can do cgi scripts in my embedded Linux devices as simply as throwing in a bash script! Happy I discovered this, wish I'd figured it out sooner. (Tuesday)

Bash scripts cannot handle non-integer math... (Wednesday)

Late getting to work. _sigh_

Pro-tip: If you've used buildroot to assemble a Linux OS for your embedded device and need to cross-compile some c code to run on said device, you can use:

/path/to/buildroot/output/hosrt/usr/bin/arm-linux-gcc

I spent literally 3 days (on & off) trying to find that particular bit of info.  You're welcome.

Was super excited to see the tekkit (modded minecraft) server pack is up! I've installed a test-server on my rig and once it's ready will be trying to move my players to it...

Hey, when coding in C, if some function that should be in there isn't working, check you're included headers.  And then, check again.
(Thursday)

Didn't get home till near midnight last night--stupid bus system.  Today, arrived late. Feels like I have a hot knife in my left temple... _sigh_  Hoping for a good weekend.
(Friday)