New movies this weekend!

This is a great weekend for movies.

Kung Fu Panda: Jack Black, Jackie Chan, the female half of Bradjelina, Dustin Hoffman, Lucy Liu, James Hong: what a cast! They're also showing it in Imax, which we don't have in the area. Looks like it's going to be lots of fun. Granted, you don't get to see Jackie Chan acting, but it should still be good. Trailer


You Don't Mess With The Zohan: Adam Sandler as an Israeli Commando who fakes his own death to become a hair stylist in NYC. What's not to love?! Apparently he trained with a Navy SEAL for four months to prep for this film. Trailer


CJ7: Stephen Chow's new film (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer). It released in Hong Kong back in January, and apparently opened here in March. It opens in one tiny little theater here tomorrow, I'm hoping to see it. It's his version of ET or Lilo & Stitch. The trailer that I saw for it was great! Trailer

Oh, and Chow is working on Kung Fu Hustle 2. Though I am normally very apprehensive when people start doing sequels, I have great faith that Chow can make one as good as, if not better than, the original.


Russ has an Apollo run Friday evening, maybe we can catch one of the first two Friday late and CJ7 on a weekend afternoon.

Computer researchers have come up with a pretty effective anti-worm tool

Basically, it watches your network to see how many scans any given computer is performing. If it crosses a threshold, the network cuts it out. Worms perform lots of scans, looking for vulnerable computers, so by watching this behavior, infected computers can be identified, isolated, and cleaned.

I like the concept, it could be very useful. But the counter-stroke for worm authors is to slow down how much they're scanning. The same concept is applied to distributed denial of service attacks. If your company web site normally gets 200 hits a day and suddenly gets 10,000 a minute, you know you're getting DOS'd. But if that number goes up to 500 an hour, you might not notice it, but still it'll be eating up your bandwidth.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/28433

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/04/2213216

This is really cool: reusable nanowires that absorb oil, not water

This is the kind of tech that I really like. The article says that you can lay it on top of water for days, pick it up, and it's dry. It also has application for water purification.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oil-paper-0530.html

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/31/1221205