Daniel Stutzbach

Website Facelift

My new website/blog is GO! And automatically mirrored to LiveJournal.

Alisa and I caught Pixar's Up three nights ago. What a great film! Possibly Pixar's best film to date, and that's saying a lot. It opened the Cannes Film Festival this year and received an 8-minute standing ovation, Roger Ebert gave it four stars, etc.

Up is one of those films where the marketing for the film didn't really match the actual movie (another such film is the excellent Zero Effect). The trailers made Up look like a campy adventure movie, but the truth is that the trailers showed only the campiest parts of the film and little else. While there certainly is adventure and campiness, Up is also sentimental, sad, sweet, and even romantic.

I can't puzzle out how kids would react to Up. Perhaps the deeper aspects of the film go over their heads, and for them it really is just a campy adventure film.

Bring tissues.

Historical stock data

Is there someplace I can download historical stock data in a machine-friendly format?

I want to test the following hypothesis: investing in 10 stocks chosen randomly from the S&P 500 Index has a similar return to the S&P 500 Index as a whole.

I'm interested in long-term effects, so one quote per stock per year would be sufficient. Some kind of server that I could programmatically query for the closing price of a ticker symbol on a certain date would be awesome.

Disney investing in Hulu

Last week I saw several headlines similar to this one: What Disney-Hulu Means for Apple

Seeing as Steve Jobs sits on the Disney's Board of Directors and is the largest single Disney shareholder, I don't see Disney as a likely direct competitor for Apple. Jobs owns 7% of Disney, way more than Michael Eisner (1.7%) or Roy E. Disney (1%).

Dear Lazy Web

Where can I buy a 2.5mm x .45 bolt, 25mm long, without having to pay $9 shipping?

(hint: not in my local hardware store)

Speaker repair?

Anyone know anything about speaker repair?

I've got a pair of speaker cabinets that my parents gave me when they invested in a modern 7.1 speaker system. Recently the woofer in one of the cabinets stopped producing sound. After disassembling the cabinet, I was able to determine that the woofer has a short (0 ohms).

Googling around for parts, I've discovered that it's a valuable vintage set (Sansui SP-1700s), which means that:

It may actually be worth the trouble of repairing, and
Spare parts are not available

Code Editors

Why do we still use fixed-width fonts for editing code?

HeapDict

I just made a new Python module called HeapDict that implements a heap, including the decrease-key operation that's conspicuously missing from the Python standard library's heapq.

64-bit machine

Anyone have a 64-bit machine with gcc and Python that I can have a shell account on? I'm trying to debug a blist crash on 64-bit systems, but it's a little tricky without being able to reproduce the problem.

Watchmen

Alisa and I just saw Watchmen. Loved it. Easily the best book-to-movie translation I've seen, though others will undoubtedly disagree. They even slightly altered the ending and made it *better*. It's also visually beautiful.

People expecting a traditional superhero action movie will be disappointed. It's more of a drama full of Byronic heroes.

We caught it as a matinee at the Studio Movie Cafe. I had to laugh when Laurie's mom offers her a margarita and she replies "Mom! It's two in the afternoon!" because I was, well, sipping a margarita at two in the afternoon.