September to January is traditionally when the low-brow summer movies are put aside and the more-interesting flicks start to show up. Of course, it’s also when the middle-brow Oscar-bait starts to appear, but those are usually easy to avoid: just look for trailers with middle-aged UK actors, cellos on the soundtrack, and the words “from critically-acclaimed director Paul Haggis”.

To be totally honest, I don’t even go to the theatre all that much these days (God bless DVDs), but these are ten movies I will probably go see this fall.

3:10 to Yuma. Sept 7. Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in a chatty western drama remake of an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel? Sign me up!
Eastern Promises. Sept 14. Cronenberg. It looks like it might be awesome.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Sept 21. Sounds promising, looks beautiful. Shot in Manitoba. I’m there.
The Darjeeling Limited. Sept 29/Oct 5. Dude, it’s Wes Anderson.
Funny Games. Oct 26. Michael Haneke remakes his own, extremely brutal and shocking home-invasion thriller. I have no idea what to think of this, but the original made me feel sick and angry. In a good way.
No Country for Old Men. Nov 9. Hopefully, I don’t have to explain why the new Coen brothers western crime movie is on this list.
Be Kind Rewind. Dec 21. Michel Gondry! And Jack Black!
There Will Be Blood. Dec 26. P T Anderson-directed movie about early 20th-century oil barons.
Synecdoche, New York. TBA. Charlie Kaufman’s directoral debut.
Paranoid Park. TBA. Gus Van Sant is pretty hit-and-miss, but this movie about a group of skateboarders who may or may not be involved in the death of a security guard has been getting some good buzz.

And some others I’ll be keeping my eye on:

The Brave One. Sept 14.
Into the Wild. Sept 21.
Lust, Caution. Sept 28.
My Kid Could Paint That. Oct 5.
Margot at the Wedding. Oct 19.
30 Days of Night. Oct 19.
American Gangster. Nov 2.
Southland Tales. Nov 9.
The Kite Runner. Dec 2.
Sweeney Todd. Dec 21.
Persepolis. Dec 25.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Dec.

Zombies of Davie Street, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Despite a bit of makeup-melting rain, Vancouver Zombie Walk 2007 was a moaning, groaning, maggoty good time. Hundreds of zombies descended on the West End, trying to devour tourists’ brains, and swarming more than a few buses.

The first zombie walk will always hold a special place in my heart for its novelty and sheer random enthusiasm, but the walk seems to be growing every year, and the sight of an army of zombies lurching down Robson Street was truly a beautiful, wonderful thing to behold.

update (aug27): I’ve uploaded a bunch of pictures to Flickr. You can see my photoset, or everybody’s Zombie Walk 2007 pics!

So I just found out that not only was our poster a finalist at the SIGGRAPH Student Research Competition, but we actually won FIRST PLACE! Which comes with a plaque and some cash! See what happens when you go to the awards ceremony at the wrong time and then get annoyed and leave because you assume you didn’t win anyway and there’s free booze somewhere else?

This is a really great (and really surprising!) award! SIGGRAPH is one of the most prestigious conferences in computer science, so winning the student research competition is quite an honour. And not one I ever expected to receive: to be honest, I was plenty pleased just to learn we made it to the finals. I never for a minute expected to win. And even though as first author and presenter, I get my name on the award, it belongs just as much to my co-authors Abhijeet Ghosh and Nando de Freitas.

(And yes, I’m aware how cliche that last paragraph sounds. There you have it.)

The prize money will get the three of us one fine, fine dinner at Tojo’s.

I posted about this before, but Vancouver Zombie Walk 2007 is now fast approaching! This Saturday, the 25th, at the Vancouver Art Gallery. 3PM.

I’m on this like maggots on an low-budget Italian zombie. It may well be the most awesome thing to hit Vancouver since Zombie Walk 2006.

Damned. You are newly dead. Perhaps by my bite or by something more natural — maybe something airborne. The how is not so much as important as the why. What matters is that YOU have been chosen. You are one of ours. One of us. The awakening sleep. The living dead. Vancouver zombies, I call upon you to unite. And to walk.

Birthed from the underground, our movement is slowly stumbling forward. Each year our numbers double and hundreds more Vancouverites fall in our wake. They are paying attention now, and they fear us. Aberrations — they call us freaks. Famished, we seek not fame, just brains. We are oh so hungry.

Damned! We are unorganized. We are organic. And yet, this summer we stand as one. On August 25th we will limp forward, mobilized as a solid rambling mob. In our torn clothing and with blood spilling from our open wounds we will take Vancouver’s West End by surprise. From the Vancouver Art Gallery we will march.

Spread the word, however you like. Bring your zombie friends.

On Saturday, August 25th we feed.

Links:

• Facebook event listing.
• Many, many pictures and videos of past Vancouver Zombie Walks. (Study for makeup and costume ideas!)
• Zombie makeup how-to! Everything you need to know in one two-minute video.
• More zombie makeup tips!

Why sure, anonymous Russian commentor! Here’s my password right here!

Assuming the idea is to harvest valuable passwords from the hopelessly naive, and not something more subtle, it’s an interesting economics problem. Spamming (or in this case, phishing so crude that is looks like spam) works on the assumption that even if only one person in ten thousand ever buys your product, you can make a thousand sales if you send to ten million people. So why not ask a million bloggers for their passwords? Maybe a few will slip up and give you good information.

Whoever wrote the script to send this spam might also consider writing letters to every billionaire on Earth asking for a thousand dollars on the assumption one of them is sure to say yes. After all, there are plenty of billionaires, none of them will miss a thousand dollars, and maybe one will be in an indulgent mood, or senile.

The appeal to such an approach comes from an intuitive or actual appreciation of the fact that [tex]P(\mathtt{totalrejection}) = P(\mathtt{individualrejection})^N[/tex]. That is, if there’s a 90% probability of being rejected on one request, if you ask twice, there’s only an 81% probability that both requests will be rejected. Ask ten times and there’s only a 35% chance all ten will reject. By the time you ask 50 times, and there’s only a 0.5% chance you will get 50 rejections. If the cost of making a request is very low and the benefit of even a single acceptance is high, [tex]P(\mathtt{individualrejection})[/tex] can be very high indeed. This is the probabilistic mechanism which makes spam profitable.

So can that work for spamming a million bloggers to ask for passwords? Or a thousand wealthy people asking for money? Maybe, but it’s different from simple spam advertising. If you’re selling, say, Viagra through an online pharmacy, there’s no cost to you until you also receive the benefit: the customer goes to your automated web site, pays via credit card, and only then do you step in to package and deliver the goods. Here, Anonymous Russian Hacker has to undergo cost without any guarantee of benefit. If I send him a password, he has to visit the site, log in, and look for something worthwhile. And since I know this, it makes trying to lure the hacker into a honeypot much more attractive, making it more likely that that cost will have to be undertaken without increasing the (marginal) probability of benefit.

The Brochus, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

The Brochu brothers get Simpsonized! All my brothers and I did ourselves as Simpsons, and I used my mad photoshop skills to put us into the same picture! Seamless.

Left to right: Eric, Lee, Tyson, Luc.

California Trainscape 2, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Remember a couple weeks back when I said that The Darjeeling Limited and No Country for Old Men are my two most-anticipated upcoming films? Sure, we all do. This is number three, Michel Gondry’s upcoming movie about a video store clerk (Jack Black) who accidentally erases the store’s inventory with his magnetic head and has to remake classic movies like Ghostbusters and Robocop.

• link

Woah, I totally missed this while I was at SIGGRAPH. A huge, awesome interview with Joss Whedon on The AV Club, talking about Wonder Woman, Goners, The Office, life, art and the universe.

At the risk of sounding like the fan-boy I am, there are few people in this world I admire as much as this man. Not only is he responsible for Firefly, Buffy and Angel, three of the very best series to ever appear on TV (and Serenity, one of the best Science Fiction films EVAHR), but in interviews and commentaries he always comes across as funny, gracious and extremely smart. Just a class act all around.

I’ve contemplated getting a “WWJWD” tattoo, but that might just be taking it too far. I’ll settle for one day naming my children after Joss Whedon characters.