Cyde Weys Musings

I recently read the well-known post-modernist novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon, and I noticed a number of surprising similarities between it and the well-known Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995). In fact, there are so many similarities between the two, both thematically, stylistically, and plot-wise, that I am forced to conclude that Hideaki Anno, the writer and director of Evangelion, must have read Gravity’s Rainbow and drew upon it specifically for inspiration in creating his series. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any discussion of the similarities between these two works, hence the need for this post.

I’ll assume a familiarity with Evangelion for the remainder of this post (which allows me to focus on summarizing and explaining Gravity’s Rainbow). There are some spoilers for Gravity’s Rainbow below if you haven’t read it yet, but the novel is so meandering and expansive that it’s not possible to ruin it.

I’ll examine the thematic similarities first. Gravity’s Rainbow runs from the beginning of World War II, through V-E Day, and through the occupation of Germany by the Allied forces. The first part of the novel, which takes place in England during the German bombing and rocket campaign, takes place under a heavy siege mentality. V-2 rockets are falling often, at random, and killing lots of civilians. There are many scenes that take place deep within bunkers, or have military personnel travelling to the scene of the latest rocket strike to investigate the effects. This whole section of the novel feels very similar to the overall mood in Tokyo-3 as Japan is besieged by one attacking Angel after another, right down to the missions being ordered from within the safety of a bunker.

Gravity’s Rainbow is suffused throughout with the paranormal, the occult, the bizarre, and many different references to psychology (especially that of Sigmund Freud). Pynchon is every bit as obsessed with psychology as Hideaki Anno, to the point where if you couldn’t handle the original last two episodes of Evangelion, you probably won’t enjoy the similar parts of Gravity’s Rainbow either, as there is an equal amount of psycho-analytical musing in it. Both works examine military hierarchies and point out some of the inherent absurdities in them. Gravity’s Rainbow especially focuses on jargon-heavy, acronym-laced, secret military, espionage, and industrial research organizations, and the interplay and conflict between them — exactly like Evangelion.

Gravity’s Rainbow is also laced throughout with sexuality and sexual deviance, which is another theme that Evangelion explores quite thoroughly. A pervading sense of paranoia is present throughout the text. It has a large amount of technological detail in it, verging towards technobabble on many occasions, same as Evangelion. It even has one particularly memorable scene in which a boy is plugged into a harness made out of Imipolex G, an erectile plastic polymer (you can’t make this stuff up) that interfaces directly with the boy’s neural network. This harness is then put inside a V-2 rocket and launched with the boy as the unwitting cargo (not as pilot). Shades of Shinji being plugged into an Evangelion and then losing control of it, anyone?

But the most convincing case of Evangelion’s inspiration from Gravity’s Rainbow can be made by looking directly at some examples from the text of the novel. I’ll present three passages that were so startlingly similar to Evangelion that I set the book aside in amazement long enough to take notes, wondering how nobody had ever caught this before (or, at least, if they did, why they didn’t post their findings online). All page numbers I’ll be using are from the original 760-page edition of Gravity’s Rainbow.

First, we’ll start with a passage from page 151, in which a Royal Air Force bomber squadron is attacking the German town of Lübeck.

It’s a dangerous game Cherrycoke’s playing here. Often he thinks the sheer
volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out
. . . she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and
the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes.
He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really.
She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen
nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself.
It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that’s vanishingly
small: he has to admire it, even if he can’t accept her glassy wastes, her appeals
to a day not of wrath but of final indifference. . . . Any more than she can accept
the truth he knows about himself. He does receive emanations, impressions . . .
the cry inside the stone . . . excremental kisses stitched unseen across the yoke of
an old shirt. . . a betrayal, an informer whose guilt will sicken one day to throat
cancer, chiming like daylight through the fourchettes and quirks of a tattered
Italian glove . . . Basher St. Blaise’s angel, miles beyond designating, rising over
Lübeck that Palm Sunday with the poison-green domes underneath its feet, an
obsessive crossflow of red tiles rushing up and down a thousand peaked roofs
as the bombers banked and dived, the Baltic already lost in a pall of incendiary
smoke behind, here was the Angel: ice crystals swept hissing away from the back
edges of wings perilously deep, opening as they were moved into new white
abyss. . . . For half a minute radio silence broke apart. The traffic being:

St. Biaise: Freakshow Two, did you see that, over.

Wingman: This is Freakshow Two—affirmative.

St. Biaise: Good.

No one else on the mission seemed to’ve had radio communication. After
the raid, St. Biaise checked over the equipment of those who got back to base
and found nothing wrong: all the crystals on frequency, the power supplies
rippleless as could be expected—but others remembered how, for the few
moments the visitation lasted, even static vanished from the earphones. Some
may have heard a high singing, like wind among masts, shrouds, bedspring or
dish antennas of winter fleets down in the dockyards . . . but only Basher and
his wingman saw it, droning across in front of the fiery leagues of face, the eyes,
which went towering for miles, shifting to follow their flight, the irises red as
embers fairing through yellow to white, as they jettisoned all their bombs in no
particular pattern, the fussy Norden device, sweat drops in the air all around its
rolling eyepiece, bewildered at their unannounced need to climb, to give up a
strike at earth for a strike at heaven . . . .

Group Captain St. Biaise did not include an account of this angel in his official
debriefing, the W.A.A.E officer who interrogated him being known around the
base as the worst sort of literal-minded dragon (she had reported Blowitt to
psychiatric for his rainbowed Valkyrie over Peenemünde, and Creepham for
the bright blue gremlins scattering like spiders off of his Typhoon’s wings
and falling gently to the woods of The Hague in little parachutes of the same
color). But damn it, this was not a cloud. Unofficially, in the fortnight between
the fire-raising at Lübeck and Hitler‘s order for “terror attacks of a retaliatory
nature”—meaning the V-weapons—word of the Angel got around. Although
the Group Captain seemed reluctant, Ronald Cher-rycoke was allowed to probe
certain objects along on the flight. Thus the Angel was revealed.

The similarities to Evangelion here are obvious. The bomber squadron runs into an apparition in the sky, while all radio contact goes dead. This apparition is even known as the Lübeck Angel.

Next, we have a small fanciful vignette from page 674:

Onward to rescue the Radiant Hour, which has been abstracted from the day’s
24 by colleagues of the Father, for sinister reasons of their own. Travel here gets
complicated—a system of buildings that move, by right angles, along the grooves
of the Raketen-Stadt’s street-grid. You can also raise or lower the building itself,
a dozen floors per second, to desired heights or levels underground, like a
submarine skipper with his periscope—although certain paths aren’t available to
you. They are available to others, but not to you. Chess. Your objective is not the
King—there is no King—but momentary targets such as the Radiant Hour.

Notice that the city of Raketen-Stadt as being described here is pretty much identical to Tokyo-3, in which the skyscrapers are above-ground during the day, but are lowered underground into the Geo-Dome at night or when the city is under attack from Angels.

And finally, from page 753 near the very end of the novel:

The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w., was invented by Fritz Lang
in 1929 for the Ufa film Die Frau im Mond. He put it into the launch scene to
heighten the suspense. “It is another of my damned ‘touches,’ “ Fritz Lang said.

“At the Creation,” explains Kabbalist spokesman Steve Edelman, “God
sent out a pulse of energy into the void. It presently branched and sorted into
ten distinct spheres or aspects, corresponding to the numbers 1-10. These are
known as the Sephiroth. To return to God, the soul must negotiate each of the
Sephiroth, from ten back to one. Armed with magic and faith, Kabbalists have
set out to conquer the Sephiroth. Many Kabbalist secrets have to do with making
the trip successfully.

“Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of Life. It
is also the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22 paths. Each path
corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also to one of the cards called
‘Major Arcana’ in the Tarot. So although the Rocket countdown appears to be
serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at
once, together, in parallel.

“Some Sephiroth are active or masculine, others passive or feminine. But the
Tree itself is a unity, rooted exactly at the Bodenplatte. It is the axis of a particular
Earth, a new dispensation, brought into being by the Great Firing.”

“But but with a new axis, a newly spinning Earth,” it occurs to the visitor,
“what happens to astrology?”

“The signs change, idiot,” snaps Edelman, reaching for his family-size jar of
Thorazine. He has become such a habitual user of this tran-quilizing drug that
his complexion has deepened to an alarming slate-purple. It makes him an oddity
on the street here, where everybody else walks around suntanned, and red-eyed
from one irritant or another. Edelman’s children, mischievous little devils, have
lately taken to slipping wafer capacitors from junked transistor radios into Pop’s
Thorazine jar. To his inattentive eye there was hardly any difference: so, for a
while, Edelman thought he must be developing a tolerance, and that the Abyss
had crept intolerably close, only an accident away—a siren in the street, a jet
plane rumbling in a holding pattern— but luckily his wife discovered the prank
in time, and now, before he swallows, he is careful to scrutinize each Thorazine
for leads, mu’s, numbering.

“Here—” hefting a fat Xeroxed sheaf, “the Ephemeris. Based on the new
rotation.”

“You mean someone’s actually found the Bodenplatte? The Pole?”

“The delta-t itself. It wasn’t made public, naturally. The ‘Kaisers-bart
Expedition’ found it.”

A pseudonym, evidently. Everyone knows the Kaiser has no beard.

This illustrates many thematic similarities with Evangelion, including references to the Kabbala, the Tree of Life, mythological angels, the occult, cataclysmic events, and even a search for The Pole (ahem, Second Impact). And note that it takes place in the context of a long-winded, jargon-heavy discussion between military figures. If you animated this passage it would fit right into an episode of Evangelion.

I believe that the similarities between Gravity’s Rainbow and Evangelion (which came out two decades later) have been established beyond a reasonable doubt. I wouldn’t go so far as to use the word “steal”, but in my mind, Evangelion directly owes a lot of its feel and setting to Pynchon’s work. As a consequence of this, if you’re an Evangelion fan, you owe it to yourself to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Not only is it a good novel in its own right, but by reading and understanding some of the inspiration behind Evangelion, you’ll get a better understanding of Evangelion itself.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here — over a year, anyway, which might as well be a decade in Interwebs time. The funny thing is that this blog gets more views now than it ever did before. That’s right, the Google searches leading to the backlog of old content have continued to drive traffic in ever increasing numbers even though nothing new has been posted in awhile. As a result of that, the AdSense ads on this site continue to support the cost of server hosting; hence why the site is still around even though I haven’t written anything new in awhile. Now I’m not making any money off it, but it’s always nice to have access to a co-hosted GNU/Linux server running somewhere (especially when said access is free).

One wonders what traffic on this site might be like now if I had kept updating it regularly, but whatever. I used that time for other things. Like reading!

I’ve been working my way through Modern Library’s Top 100 English Novels of the 20th Century. I’ve also been taking many a detour through other classic American novels that didn’t make the board’s list (To Kill A Mockingbird anyone?) and that I never got a chance to read in high school or college.

Most recently I read John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I’m going to have to go back and read a bunch more of his books (the only other one I think I’ve ever read was The Grapes of Wrath, back in high school). I really enjoy him as an author, especially the little textural vignettes that have nothing to do with the main story. Unbelievably, one of my friends recently cited these interesting interruptions as a reason why they didn’t like Steinbeck. Crazy talk.

Also, Ernest Hemingway has been very enjoyable. I really appreciate what he’s able to convey using such few words. I know I can write that simply, but my icebergs wouldn’t have anything below the surface of the waves.

Remember a long time ago when the web was free of spam? I’m not talking about email, which has had spam problems for awhile, I’m talking about the web. Nowadays, the web is festering with link-crawling spambots. Anyone with a blog, Twitter account, or heck, even a webpage with a simple submit form with some text fields on it, knows this. There’s not much that can be done about it besides spam-detection heuristic algorithms and CAPTCHAs.

Well, I just recently found some code that I wrote way back in 2002 that displays a blissfully unaware naïvité of what was to come. That code was part of my website Fyre’s Domain, which I have since put an archived copy of online. I had just been learning Perl CGI and I wanted to write a simple guestbook/comments form that readers could use to give me feedback without having to use a mailto: link. This was in the era before blogging software was commonplace — what I was running was a home-brew blog, but before the word “blog” was even invented. I basically copied the format from one of the first chat rooms I ever used, Paddynet, way back in 1995 or so. The “chat room” consisted of an HTML form that would dump unvalidated input (including HTML tags) into a chat buffer displayed on the page that would display the last 30 or so messages.

Paddynet was around long before spambots, but my site was started right when they began appearing in the wild, and the code proceeded to run for another 7 years until I just shut it off.

You can probably guess what happened.

The only reason I even re-discovered this code is because I happened to notice it was getting an unusual number of hits in my web analytics software. And those hits were anything but benign. My poor naïve Perl CGI comments submission form has accumulated 26 MB worth of text over the years, all of it spam. And since I figure it may be interesting to someone to see exactly what seven years of web spam looks like, you can download it for yourself (a text file thankfully compressed down to just 1.8 MB). If anyone finds any interesting trends in popular spam topics over the years in there, do let me know.

So those are the dangers of trusting user input on the web these days. Revel in the blissful simplicity of the following code, which was all it took to implement a comment submission system back in the day. Nowadays you couldn’t get away with anything even close to it. As my data proves, you’ll be eaten alive by spambots.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI qw(:standard);

print header;
print start_html('Leave Comments on Fyre'),
	h1('Leave Comments on Fyre'),
	start_form,
	"<i>Note, all fields are optional, but empty comments will be ignored.</i><br>",
	"Name: ", textfield(-name=>'name',-default=>''),
	"E-mail: ", textfield(-name=>'e-mail',-default=>''),
	"Your Comments: <br>", textarea(-name=>'Comments',-rows=>10,-columns=>50,-default=>''),
	'<br>',
	submit('Submit'), reset,
	end_form,
	p,
	hr;

if (param() && param('name') ne '' && param('Comments') ne '') {
	$date = `date '+%H:%M %m/%d/%Y'`;

	print '<i>Your comment has been posted.</i><hr><br>';
	@foo = "\n\n" . '<br><b>' . param('name') . '</b> ' . "\n" .
	'<u>' . param('e-mail') . '</u> ' . "\n" . '<i>' . $date . '</i>' .
	"\n" . '<table><tr><td width = "100%">' . param('Comments') .
	'</td></tr></table><hr>';
	push @foo, `cat mk.txt`;
	open CFILE, ">mk.txt" or die "Failed to open comments file!";
	print CFILE @foo;
	close CFILE;
}

@foo = `cat mk.txt`; print @foo;

print 'This program is open source, and released under the GPL by Ben McIlwain, 2002.  See
the source <a href = "mk_script.txt">here</a>.';
print end_html;

Today, an anti-semitic terrorist attacked the Holocaust Memorial in Washington D.C. (I’ve been there, and yes, one visit is enough for a lifetime). Last week, an anti-abortion terrorist assassinated a doctor.

Why is the media so afraid to use the word “terrorist” to accurately describe right-wingers engaged in the act of terrorism? Is it that whites can’t be terrorists? Only Arabs?

Until we call it what it actually is, we can’t address it properly.

And since right-wingers were so keen on using water-boarding against terrorists, do you think they’d mind if we tortured these home-grown right-wing terrorists?

Almost a year ago, I bought a cute little desktop from Dell with the intent of using it as a GNU/Linux desktop alongside my existing Windows desktop. Its name is Vertumnus. But things don’t always turn out as planned. I quickly started using Vertumnus as my exclusive desktop PC, booting the Windows machine only to play games. Eventually I reformatted the Windows computer and the only applications I’ve reinstalled have been games, so it’s pretty much reduced to a gaming appliance at this point, like an XBOX360 but better.

The only problem is that when I originally bought Vertumnus, I didn’t have all of this in mind, and so I bought it rather under spec. I would’ve been better off just buying a better computer from the get-go. As a result, I’ve had to do quite a few upgrades over the past year to get it to meet my needs. From the very beginning I added more RAM and another hard drive. Then it joined a Stand Alone Complex. Then I added another hard drive. From the outside it still looked the same, but a lot of the interior was upgraded. Now even that is no longer true.

Yesterday, I spent two hours (and another $160) redoing the computer even further. The case was too cramped and was preventing further upgrades. So I moved the computer into a new case, the Enermax Chakra. It’s appreciably bigger than the previous Dell case. It’s also a lot more flexible on the inside in terms of which parts will fit into it. Why the Chakra? I only had two criteria, but the Chakra was pretty much the only case that met both of them: 1) It had to have a 250mm fan, but 2) No LEDs. Both criteria come from my computer living in my bedroom: it has to be silent (hence a big, slow-spinning fan) and it has to be dark, so that I can sleep!

Since the case didn’t come with any fans besides the huge 250mm one, I purchased two of the quietest 120mm fans in existence, the Scythe Gentle Typhoon. Again, my criteria were the same: Quiet and no LEDs. The Gentle Typhoons best met those. I also had to get a new power supply, because the 250 Watt one from Dell isn’t able to accommodate the video card I was about to put in. So I went with the Corsair 550W PSU. It was the power supply that best met my criteria: High efficiency (85%!), quiet (a big 120mm fan), and no LEDs. And it’s more than enough to power the video card that I put in, a hand-me-down GeForce 8800 GTS. Yes, that’s right, I finally got tired of the inferior performance of the Intel integrated graphics card. Now I can actually play modern 3D games in GNU/Linux.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, while transitioning all of the parts from one case to another, the CPU fan developed a faulty bearing which makes it obnoxiously loud. So the first thing I hear upon starting up my supposed-to-be-silent computer is a loud whirring fan noise. Rather than giving up my dreams of a silent computer, I ordered a replacement CPU fan/heatsink, the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. Why that one? I already have one in my Windows computer and it cools really well. Plus it’s quiet. It hasn’t arrived yet, but it’s going into Vertumnus as soon as it does.

The new GeForce 8800 GTS is so large that it covers up one of the SATA ports on the Dell motherboard (and another one is rendered inaccessible to all but right-angle SATA connectors). Since I have three SATA hard drives and one SATA DVD-R drive, that’s a problem. The DVD drive is currently unplugged, but I’ll swap it out for an IDE DVD-R drive from my Windows desktop soon — thankfully, the video card doesn’t block the IDE port.

Once all of this is done, the only original parts that will remain in Vertumnus from the original purchase will be the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 processor, 2 1 GB sticks of DDR2 RAM, the motherboard, and one 500 GB hard drive. And that’s after less than one year. Clearly, I tried saving too much money by buying a system far below my ultimate desired specifications, then wasted a bit more than those savings on upgrades. And I can’t even say the upgrades are done. At some point I’m going to need another hard drive, but since I’m all out of SATA ports, I’ll either have to get an add-in card or replace the motherboard. The original RAM that Dell shipped was pretty slow, and can easily (and cheaply) be replaced with something better. And the processor is looking slightly anemic. A nice quad-core processor would be fun to play around with …

Long story short, in another year, it’s quite possible that the only component remaining from my original purchase will be the 500 GB hard drive and a SATA cable or two. I guess I learned my lesson. Don’t try to save too much money on a computer if, at heart, you’re really just a techie who demands performance.

Those of you following me on Twitter may have noticed that all of my tweets come from Identica. I started off with Twitter but I quickly switched over to Identica as soon as I learned about it. Identica, if you haven’t heard of it before, uses the same micro-blogging concept as Twitter (and in fact is compatible with it), but has several improvements. I recommend Identica, and if you aren’t using it yet, check out these reasons as to why you should.

There are several practical reasons you should use Identica:

• All of your data is exportable on Identica, including your entire corpus of tweets. Twitter does not provide this functionality. Should you want to migrate away from Twitter down the road (for any variety of as-of-yet-unforseen reasons), you are unable to do so, but you are able to migrate away from Identica at any point easily. And since Identica uses the Free Software Laconica software, you can even install Laconica on your own web host and import all of your data there, where you can have complete control over it.
• Identica has a powerful groups feature that allows people to collectively subscribe and see all tweets sent to a group (this is what the exclamation syntax you may have seen in tweets is about). Groups are a powerful way to build communities and have multi-party discussions, but Twitter does not have them.
• You don’t have to quit Twitter. My Identica account is linked to my Twitter account, so every message that I send to Identica automatically appears on Twitter. Posting to Identica+Twitter takes the same amount of effort as posting to Twitter alone, except it is seen by more people.
• Identica lets you see things from other people’s perspective. I’ll use me as an example. You can see my entire tweet stream, which includes messages from all users and groups I’m following. This should give you a great idea of the kinds of things I’m interested in. And you can see all of the replies to me, which makes it a lot easier to track and understand conversations. Note that all of this is public information and is accessible on Twitter through trickier ways (in the first case, looking at the list of a person’s followers and combining all their tweets in chronological order; in the second case, by searching for “@username” on the search subdomain), so you aren’t giving up any of your privacy. Identica simply makes these features a lot easier to use.
• Some people you may end up finding and wanting to talk with don’t use Twitter at all; they’re only on Identica. Get on Identica and link it to Twitter and you can talk to everyone on both services. Just use Twitter, however, and you’re left out in the cold with regards to anyone who only uses Identica.

And there is one important ethical reason you should use Identica:

• Identica is Free (as in freedom, not merely cost). Because it follows the Free software ethos, it respects your rights and maximizes your freedom to control your data as you see fit, including the ability to move all of your data elsewhere if necessary. Twitter does not respect these freedoms.

A couple years ago, when I was more active on Wikipedia than I am now, I was trying to prove a point by compiling a list of all of the risque images on Wikipedia (link obviously NSFW). I don’t quite remember what that point is anymore, but the list remains. It has even survived a deletion attempt or two. I stopped maintaining it a long time ago, but for whatever reason, others picked it up and continued adding more pictures in my stead. I haven’t thought of it in awhile.

So imagine my surprise when I learn that that silly page has made Australia’s secret national Internet censorship blacklist. I don’t understand the justification here — all of these images are hosted on Wikimedia servers, after all — but I have to laugh when I imagine some Australian apparatchik opening a report on this page, viewing it, making the determination that it’s not safe for Australian eyes, and adding it to the list without further thought, mate.

Australians, please take back control of your country.

In my recent fiddling around with Twitter I came across the Twitter API, which is surprisingly feature-complete. Since programming is one of my hobbies (as well as my occupation), I inevitably started fooling around with it and have already come up with something useful. I’m posting it here, so if you need to do the same thing that I am, you won’t have to reinvent the wheel.

One common thing that people do on Twitter is they follow everyone that follows them. This is good for social networking (or just bald self-promotion), as inbound links to your Twitter page show in the followers list of everyone that you’re following. You’d think Twitter itself would have a way to do this, but alas, it does not. So what I wanted to do is use a program to automatically follow everyone following me instead of having to manually follow each person.

Other sites that interface with Twitter will do it for you (such as TweetLater), but I’m not interested in signing up for another service, and I’m especially not interested in giving out my Twitter login credentials to anyone else. So I needed software that ran locally. A Google search turned up an auto-follow script written in Perl, but the download link requires registration with yet another site. I didn’t want to do that so I decided to program it for myself, which ended up being surprisingly simple.

My Auto-Follow script is written in Python. I decided to use Python because of the excellent Python Twitter library. It provides an all-Python interface to the Twitter API. You’ll need to download and install Python-Twitter (and its dependency, python-simplejson, if you don’t have it already; sudo apt-get install python-simplejson does the trick on Ubuntu GNU/Linux). Just follow the instructions on the Python-Twitter page; it’s really simple.

Now, create a new Python script named auto_follow.py and copy the following code into it:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#(c) 2009 Ben McIlwain, released under the terms of the GNU GPL v3.
import twitter
from sets import Set

username = 'your_username'
password = 'your_password'
api = twitter.Api(username=username, password=password)

following = api.GetFriends()
friendNames = Set()
for friend in following:
    friendNames.add(friend.screen_name)

followers = api.GetFollowers()
for follower in followers:
    if (not follower.screen_name in friendNames):
        api.CreateFriendship(follower.screen_name)

Yes, it really is that simple. I’d comment it, but what’s the point? I can summarize its operation in one sentence: It gets all of your friends and all of your followers, and then finds every follower that isn’t a friend and makes them a friend. Just make sure to edit the script to give it your actual username and password so that it can sign in.

Run the script and you will now be following all of your followers. Pretty simple, right? But you probably don’t want to have to keep running this program manually. Also, I’ve heard rumors that the Twitter API limits you to following 70 users per hour (as an anti-spam measure, I’m guessing), so if you have more than 70 followers you’re not following, you won’t be able to do it all at once. Luckily, there’s a solution for both problems: add the script as an hourly cronjob. This will keep who you follow synced with your followers over time, and if you have a large deficit in who you follow at the start (lucky bastard), it’ll slowly chip away at it each hour until they do get in sync. In Ubuntu GNU/Linux, adding the following line to a text file in /etc/cron.d/ (as root) should do it:

0 * * * * username python /path/to/auto_follow.py >/dev/null 2>&1

This will run the auto_follow script at the top of each hour. You’ll need to set the username to the user account you want the job to run under — your own user account is fine — and set the path to wherever you saved the auto_follow script. Depending on your GNU/Linux distribution and which cron scheduler you have installed, you may not need the username field, and this line might go in a different file (such as /etc/crontab). Refer to your distro’s documentation for more information.

So that’s it. That’s all it takes to automatically auto-follow everyone who’s following you — a dozen or so lines of Python, one crontab entry, and one excellent library and API. Enjoy.

I’m doing some research on Unicode and compression algorithms right now for a side-project I’m working on, and I came across a highly ranked Google search result for a UTF-8 munging code snippet that is so idiotic I couldn’t let it pass without comment. If this post helps even one person who would’ve otherwise followed the linked advice, it is worth it.

First, some background. UTF-8 is a character encoding format that can pretty much handle any character under the Sun, from the English alphabet to Japanese kanji to obscure extinct languages. It even includes thousands of esoteric symbols used in smaller fields of study that you’ve probably never even heard of before. But the nice thing about UTF-8 is that it is variable-length. Standard ASCII characters (including everything on a standard English keyboard) only take one byte to represent. All of the common characters from other widely used languages typically take just two bytes to encode. It’s only the really obscure characters that require more than two bytes.

So now you see why the linked “solution” is so stupid. This guy says he is “designing a little client/server binary message format” and wants “a simple and quick way to encode strings”. Well, duh — use UTF-8, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It’s simple, quick, and already implemented in any programming language you can think of, so it requires no additional coding. There are all sorts of dumb ways to unnecessarily reinvent the wheel in sotware engineering, but trying to come up with your own character encoding is particularly idiotic. It’s really tricky to get right because there are so many corner cases you’ll never even know existed until they cause your application to break. The Unicode Consortium exists for a reason — what they do is hard.

This guy even confesses that his expected input will probably not contain Unicode characters that are longer than 2 bytes. So there is no justification at all for what he does next — he creates a mangled version of UTF-8 that turns all Unicode characters 3 bytes and longer into question marks, instead of just leaving them as is. So instead of allowing a rare character to take an additional byte or two, it gets mangled. And to accomplish this, he has to create his own custom encoding solution that is an intentionally broken version of UTF-8. That’s the worst part — he’s wasting time creating completely unnecessary code, that will need to be maintained, that will need to be debugged — and for what?

Of course, none of the people responding to his thread point out that what he is trying to do is stupid. They just smile and hand him some rope.

I’m up in Parsippany, New Jersey at the moment on business travel. That in itself wouldn’t be anything special, except that the eastern seaboard was just rocked by a huge snowstorm. I had to leave a day early to ensure that I made it here for an important meeting Monday morning, only for that meeting to be canceled while I was en route and incommunicado. To add insult to injury, none of the client employees I work with even showed up for work today, and my car died at the hotel this morning so I walked to the client site in the falling snow. And just for some added excitement, I had to run to escape the torrent from an oncoming snowplow at one point.

The drive up here was no picnic either. About an hour in it started raining, then quickly turned to snow. Thankfully none of it started sticking to the road until I arrived at the hotel four hours and many wrong turns later (not the best time to try a new route). I saw a surprising number of other vehicles driving in the snowstorm without lights on, including one semi-trailer which kept on disappearing and re-emerging from the mist of snow in a terrifying fashion. Even my high beams didn’t provide nearly enough illumination to see the road ahead of me. This was made worse by the constant glow of headlights shining over the jersey barrier from vehicles in the opposite direction, like some dividing line across the horizon, which lit up the entire sky from about six feet above the road on up. The road was thus made darker and less see-able by contrast.

The only thing that hasn’t sucked about this trip so far is ham radio. Sunday night is an excellent time to work the ham bands, which is what I spent my whole commute doing. Repeater contacts have become passé for me these days because they are so easy; at any random point along the I-95 corridor, you can hear at least a couple simultaneous conversations on various nearby repeaters. As such, I focus mostly on making simplex (direct) contacts, which at least provides somewhat of a challenge, especially while operating mobile. I was mostly using the national calling frequency on 2 meters, which is 146.520 MHz, though I did talk to one man on another simplex frequency while idly scanning the band.

I made more simplex contacts during this trip than I ever have before. At one point I was talking with two to three people simultaneously, a feat I’ve never experienced outside of pre-arranged simplex nets while operating stationary. I had some pretty long conversations with stationary operators, as well as some shorter conversations with other mobile operators (as mobiles tend to be a lot more limited in terms of antenna size, elevation, and to a lesser extent, transmitting power).

But the neatest point in the trip was when I briefly became the best ham radio station in the whole area.

I had been talking with a stationary operator for around fifteen minutes. The signal went from bad to good to bad as I-95 took me closer and then farther from his position. His signal was never stronger than S-5 (S-meters give a measure of signal strength from 1 to 9, on a logarithmic scale). About ten minutes after we said our good-byes and he faded into the radio-frequency mist, I arrived at the foot of the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

All of a sudden, the stationary operator I had been talking to earlier came in again. And his signal strength just kept getting better and better. We excitedly traded signal reports in a rapid-fire series of transmissions, remarking on how much the signal quality of the other was improving by the second. My S-meter kept on climbing until it pegged at S-9, still 50 feet shy from the apex of the bridge. The other operator’s signal was full-quieting, meaning that his signal was so strong that not only could I hear him perfectly, even the lulls between the words of his transmission were perfectly silent (because his carrier was so strong that it overwhelmed the ambient radio-frequency noise).

Then as I reached the apex of the bridge, some 200 feet in elevation above the ground and quite the enviable radio location, something really cool happened.

I was able to make contact with my previous contact, much further distant than even the current contact that had just gotten back in range. And in between the gaps in our conversation, I heard a multitude of other voices rising above the static, a chorus of conversations on the calling frequency many miles distant in all directions on the compass rose. So many things were being said at once that I couldn’t make sense of any individual transmission. I could only hear it all as a collective murmur. All of these people out there, each holding separate conversations — and unlike any of them, I could hear it all at once.

As I crested the apex of the bridge, the signal strength from my primary contact rapidly faded back down the S-meter, and with one last hurried transmission, we said good-bye. Then he, along with everyone else, was lost to the static, and I was alone again.