Dr. Dobb's | The Devil Wears Dockers

The Devil Wears Dockers

It's Saturday night at the movies for DDJ editors.

August 03, 2006
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/the-devil-wears-dockers/191800186

The problem with movies these days, other than they're overpriced and uniformly bad, is that they sometimes hit a little too close to home. Take, for instance, The Devil Wears Prada, a portrait of an editor-in-chief as hell on heels.

Just so we're clear on this—Dr. Dobb's Journal is not a fashion magazine. Not only have I never carried a Prada handbag, I'd never heard of such things until this movie. I did go to Prada's web site (http://www.prada.com) after the fact and found it, well, strange.

Editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, has been described as everything from fearsome and sadistic to dreaded and terrifying. I'll give her that, at least from the opening scenes when she sweeps into the office, leaving snivling sycophants in her wake. That's the way it is around here too, except that when I sweep into Dr. Dobb's World Headquarters, no one seems to notice. No snivels, no tears. Just an occasional "Ah, who are you?" Okay, maybe I do need to come into the office more often.

Of course, who expects realism in movies? Certainly not the producers of Firewall, a film starring Harrison Ford as the computer security chief of a bank being robbed (http://firewallmovie.warnerbros.com/). Putting aside oddities such as car drivers and passengers inexplicably switching places from one scene to another, or radios saying it is morning when the sun is setting behind the Seattle skyline, I particularly liked Ford's disassembling a fax machine, taping the laser scanner to a computer monitor, capturing screenfuls of data as it flashes by, and downloading it to an iPod. Wow! And I can't wait for an O'Reilly book on Fax Hacks! And the "firewall"? Sorry, didn't happen, wasn't there. Still, the movie got one part right—Seattle sure has a lot of rain.

When it comes down to it, my kind of movie is more along the lines of Napolean Dynamite, the story of an otherwise lost teenager who helps his high-school friend become class president ("Vote for Pedro") while coping with a bunch of lunies at home (http://www2.foxsearchlight .com/napoleondynamite/). So maybe I have more in common with the Napolean Dynamite character than Harrison Ford, or certainly Meryl Streep. And apparently I'm not alone, as Anson Parker (http://phasetwo.org/) recently discovered.

For reasons of his own, Anson has been creating a Mac OS X scoreboard widget (http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/) for grand slam tennis tournaments. The AJAX-based widget connects to the official tournament web server and pulls down publicly accessible XML files containing next day's schedule of play and results for all completed games. He continues:

As I was in the process of putting together a widget for this year's Wimbledon tounament, I was dismayed to find IBM had revised their back-end and as a result the XML files I had been using for the past 12 months were no longer available. Close to giving the lucrative field of free widget development away, I decided to take one last look a IBM's new Flash-based results viewer [www.wimbledon.org/ en_GB/ibmrealtime/scoreboard.html] to see if these files had simply been relocated to another directory.

What I found instead was reference to a single XML file, the contents of which looked like this:
 <j>
 <h>1151675689|M|15|300$/h>
 <m>.|A(0{?y01/3z4xy0|?|B|L-Kfpkxey^tom
 5638BHQ{y9|G.Ak`he&5'|_pl_464:UO>
 {z7{G@C?D=yDACAFA{/z-z./2
 </m>
    ...
    </j>
Now, I'm no cryptography expert, but this was obviously encrypted data. And from the look of it, barely encrypted. Digging a little deeper through the Flash applet I found the intriguing quote, spoken by Napoleon Dynamite's grandma, in response to his complaints about running out of steak, 'Knock it off, Napoleon! Just make yourself a dang quesa-dilluh!', along with the simple encryption and decryption methods written in Flash's scripting language, ActionScript.

As an added bonus, after running this data through a parser available in one [of] the JavaScript files on wimbledon.org, it was apparent this data was much more current than the feeds available at previous events. In fact, this data is only delayed by a minute or two and updated every 60 seconds. The current Wimbledon 2006 widget, using this font of live data, can be downloaded [phasetwo.org/ post/wimbledon_2006_widget.html].

Now doesn't that sound like a lot more fun than parading around in Prada heels or robbing banks?

Jonathan Erickson

Editor-in-Chief

[email protected]