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To my mind Andrew Sullivan is one of the greatest minds alive today. His intellectual curiosity and pursuit of enlightenment is both refreshing and awe inspiring. Producing nearly 300 blogs a week Andrew has been blogging since 2000. Following this gruesome blogging schedule Andrew has carved out a name for himself as one of the world's leading bloggers, regularly featuring on some of the most authoritative top blogs lists – including that of Time Magazine.
In an article by the Harvard Magazine, this question was posed of him: 'World's Best Blogger?'
The Balliol College, Oxford alumni formerly produced blog content for the Atlantic magazine and the Daily Beast. The latter of which he recently left to start up his own subscription blog called the Dish which you can access here. Justin Green of the Daily Beast recently asked the question that I and others often ask: "What makes Andrew Sullivan's blog so compelling?"
That audio clip provides some suggestions, reading his blog also gives you an idea of why he is so powerful. But to my mind to understand why he is so good, it's necessary to understand exactly why he blogs in the first place. In 2008 Andrew answered that question when he penned an article entitled, 'Why I Blog'. You can read the original article on Atlantic Magazine here and you can also read the note in full below:
[Preface: For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that's enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.]THE WORD blog is a conflation of two words: Web and log. It contains in its four letters a concise and accurate self-description: it is a log of thoughts and writing posted publicly on the World Wide Web. In the monosyllabic vernacular of the Internet, Web log soon became the word blog.This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in.A ship's log owes its name to a small wooden board, often weighted with lead, that was for centuries attached to a line and thrown over the stern. The weight of the log would keep it in the same place in the water, like a provisional anchor, while the ship moved away. By measuring the length of line used up in a set period of time, mariners could calculate the speed of their journey (the rope itself was marked by equidistant "knots" for easy measurement). As a ship's voyage progressed, the course came to be marked down in a book that was called a log.In journeys at sea that took place before radio or radar or satellites or sonar, these logs were an indispensable source for recording what actually happened. They helped navigators surmise where they were and how far they had traveled and how much longer they had to stay at sea. They provided accountability to a ship's owners and traders. They were designed to be as immune to faking as possible. Away from land, there was usually no reliable corroboration of events apart from the crew's own account in the middle of an expanse of blue and gray and green; and in long journeys, memories always blur and facts disperse. A log provided as accurate an account as could be gleaned in real time.As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did.Anyone who has blogged his thoughts for an extended time will recognize this world. We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges. We blog now—as news reaches us, as facts emerge. This is partly true for all journalism, which is, as its etymology suggests, daily writing, always subject to subsequent revision. And a good columnist will adjust position and judgment and even political loyalty over time, depending on events. But a blog is not so much daily writing as hourly writing. And with that level of timeliness, the provisionality of every word is even more pressing—and the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that much greater.No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger's are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.You end up writing about yourself, since you are a relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and facts of the exterior world. And in this sense, the historic form closest to blogs is the diary. But with this difference: a diary is almost always a private matter. Its raw honesty, its dedication to marking life as it happens and remembering life as it was, makes it a terrestrial log. A few diaries are meant to be read by others, of course, just as correspondence could be—but usually posthumously, or as a way to compile facts for a more considered autobiographical rendering. But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.I remember first grappling with what to put on my blog. It was the spring of 2000 and, like many a freelance writer at the time, I had some vague notion that I needed to have a presence "online." I had no clear idea of what to do, but a friend who ran a Web-design company offered to create a site for me, and, since I was technologically clueless, he also agreed to post various essays and columns as I wrote them. Before too long, this became a chore for him, and he called me one day to say he'd found an online platform that was so simple I could henceforth post all my writing myself. The platform was called Blogger.As I used it to post columns or links to books or old essays, it occurred to me that I could also post new writing—writing that could even be exclusive to the blog. But what? Like any new form, blogging did not start from nothing. It evolved from various journalistic traditions. In my case, I drew on my mainstream-media experience to navigate the virgin sea. I had a few early inspirations: the old Notebook section of The New Republic, a magazine that, under the editorial guidance of Michael Kinsley, had introduced a more English style of crisp, short commentary into what had been a more high-minded genre of American opinion writing. The New Republic had also pioneered a Diarist feature on the last page, which was designed to be a more personal, essayistic, first-person form of journalism. Mixing the two genres, I did what I had been trained to do—and improvised.I'd previously written online as well, contributing to a listserv for gay writers and helping Kinsley initiate a more discursive form of online writing for Slate, the first magazine published exclusively on the Web. As soon as I began writing this way, I realized that the online form rewarded a colloquial, unfinished tone. In one of my early Kinsley-guided experiments, he urged me not to think too hard before writing. So I wrote as I'd write an e-mail—with only a mite more circumspection. This is hazardous, of course, as anyone who has ever clicked Send in a fit of anger or hurt will testify. But blogging requires an embrace of such hazards, a willingness to fall off the trapeze rather than fail to make the leap.From the first few days of using the form, I was hooked. The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the alternative meant. I'd edited a weekly print magazine, The New Republic, for five years, and written countless columns and essays for a variety of traditional outlets. And in all this, I'd often chafed, as most writers do, at the endless delays, revisions, office politics, editorial fights, and last-minute cuts for space that dead-tree publishing entails. Blogging—even to an audience of a few hundred in the early days—was intoxicatingly free in comparison. Like taking a narcotic.It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor's nod, or enduring a publisher's incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you'd find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.Alas, as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was immediately replaced by insurrection from below. Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague.Again, it's hard to overrate how different this is. Writers can be sensitive, vain souls, requiring gentle nurturing from editors, and oddly susceptible to the blows delivered by reviewers. They survive, for the most part, but the thinness of their skins is legendary. Moreover, before the blogosphere, reporters and columnists were largely shielded from this kind of direct hazing. Yes, letters to the editor would arrive in due course and subscriptions would be canceled. But reporters and columnists tended to operate in a relative sanctuary, answerable mainly to their editors, not readers. For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I'd gotten blowback from pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.And so blogging found its own answer to the defensive counterblast from the journalistic establishment. To the charges of inaccuracy and unprofessionalism, bloggers could point to the fierce, immediate scrutiny of their readers. Unlike newspapers, which would eventually publish corrections in a box of printed spinach far from the original error, bloggers had to walk the walk of self-correction in the same space and in the same format as the original screwup. The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness. Of course, a blogger could ignore an error or simply refuse to acknowledge mistakes. But if he persisted, he would be razzed by competitors and assailed by commenters and abandoned by readers. In an era when the traditional media found itself beset by scandals as disparate as Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Dan Rather, bloggers survived the first assault on their worth. In time, in fact, the high standards expected of well-trafficked bloggers spilled over into greater accountability, transparency, and punctiliousness among the media powers that were. Even New York Times columnists were forced to admit when they had been wrong.The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy. No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise online. On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as thousand-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more. And, as Matt Drudge told me when I sought advice from the master in 2001, the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it's a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.But the superficiality masked considerable depth—greater depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. The reason was a single technological innovation: the hyperlink. An old-school columnist can write 800 brilliant words analyzing or commenting on, say, a new think-tank report or scientific survey. But in reading it on paper, you have to take the columnist's presentation of the material on faith, or be convinced by a brief quotation (which can always be misleading out of context). Online, a hyperlink to the original source transforms the experience. Yes, a few sentences of bloggy spin may not be as satisfying as a full column, but the ability to read the primary material instantly—in as careful or shallow a fashion as you choose—can add much greater context than anything on paper. Even a blogger's chosen pull quote, unlike a columnist's, can be effortlessly checked against the original. Now this innovation, pre-dating blogs but popularized by them, is increasingly central to mainstream journalism.A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.A writer fully aware of and at ease with the provisionality of his own work is nothing new. For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that suggest the imperfection of human thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the humbling, chastening passage of time. If you compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference between a skeptic's spirit translated into writing and a spirit that seeks to bring some finality to the argument. Perhaps the greatest single piece of Christian apologetics, Pascal's Pensées, is a series of meandering, short, and incomplete stabs at arguments, observations, insights. Their lack of finish is what makes them so compelling—arguably more compelling than a polished treatise by Aquinas.Or take the brilliant polemics of Karl Kraus, the publisher of and main writer for Die Fackel, who delighted in constantly twitting authority with slashing aphorisms and rapid-fire bursts of invective. Kraus had something rare in his day: the financial wherewithal to self-publish. It gave him a fearlessness that is now available to anyone who can afford a computer and an Internet connection.But perhaps the quintessential blogger avant la lettre was Montaigne. His essays were published in three major editions, each one longer and more complex than the previous. A passionate skeptic, Montaigne amended, added to, and amplified the essays for each edition, making them three-dimensional through time. In the best modern translations, each essay is annotated, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, by small letters (A, B, and C) for each major edition, helping the reader see how each rewrite added to or subverted, emphasized or ironized, the version before. Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. Montaigne, for good measure, also peppered his essays with myriads of what bloggers would call external links. His own thoughts are strewn with and complicated by the aphorisms and anecdotes of others. Scholars of the sources note that many of these "money quotes" were deliberately taken out of context, adding layers of irony to writing that was already saturated in empirical doubt.To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm's length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger's view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.That atmosphere will inevitably be formed by the blogger's personality. The blogosphere may, in fact, be the least veiled of any forum in which a writer dares to express himself. Even the most careful and self-aware blogger will reveal more about himself than he wants to in a few unguarded sentences and publish them before he has the sense to hit Delete. The wise panic that can paralyze a writer—the fear that he will be exposed, undone, humiliated—is not available to a blogger. You can't have blogger's block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it's hard. And that's what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality. The faux intimacy of the Web experience, the closeness of the e-mail and the instant message, seeps through. You feel as if you know bloggers as they go through their lives, experience the same things you are experiencing, and share the moment. When readers of my blog bump into me in person, they invariably address me as Andrew. Print readers don't do that. It's Mr. Sullivan to them.On my blog, my readers and I experienced 9/11 together, in real time. I can look back and see not just how I responded to the event, but how I responded to it at 3:47 that afternoon. And at 9:46 that night. There is a vividness to this immediacy that cannot be rivaled by print. The same goes for the 2000 recount, the Iraq War, the revelations of Abu Ghraib, the death of John Paul II, or any of the other history-making events of the past decade. There is simply no way to write about them in real time without revealing a huge amount about yourself. And the intimate bond this creates with readers is unlike the bond that the The Times, say, develops with its readers through the same events. Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human—whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.These friends, moreover, are an integral part of the blog itself—sources of solace, company, provocation, hurt, and correction. If I were to do an inventory of the material that appears on my blog, I'd estimate that a good third of it is reader-generated, and a good third of my time is spent absorbing readers' views, comments, and tips. Readers tell me of breaking stories, new perspectives, and counterarguments to prevailing assumptions. And this is what blogging, in turn, does to reporting. The traditional method involves a journalist searching for key sources, nurturing them, and sequestering them from his rivals. A blogger splashes gamely into a subject and dares the sources to come to him.Some of this material—e-mails from soldiers on the front lines, from scientists explaining new research, from dissident Washington writers too scared to say what they think in their own partisan redoubts—might never have seen the light of day before the blogosphere. And some of it, of course, is dubious stuff. Bloggers can be spun and misled as easily as traditional writers—and the rigorous source assessment that good reporters do can't be done by e-mail. But you'd be surprised by what comes unsolicited into the in-box, and how helpful it often is.Not all of it is mere information. Much of it is also opinion and scholarship, a knowledge base that exceeds the research department of any newspaper. A good blog is your own private Wikipedia. Indeed, the most pleasant surprise of blogging has been the number of people working in law or government or academia or rearing kids at home who have real literary talent and real knowledge, and who had no outlet—until now. There is a distinction here, of course, between the edited use of e-mailed sources by a careful blogger and the often mercurial cacophony on an unmediated comments section. But the truth is out there—and the miracle of e-mail allows it to come to you.Fellow bloggers are always expanding this knowledge base. Eight years ago, the blogosphere felt like a handful of individual cranks fighting with one another. Today, it feels like a universe of cranks, with vast, pulsating readerships, fighting with one another. To the neophyte reader, or blogger, it can seem overwhelming. But there is a connection between the intimacy of the early years and the industry it has become today. And the connection is human individuality.The pioneers of online journalism—Slate and Salon—are still very popular, and successful. But the more memorable stars of the Internet—even within those two sites—are all personally branded. Daily Kos, for example, is written by hundreds of bloggers, and amended by thousands of commenters. But it is named after Markos Moulitsas, who started it, and his own prose still provides a backbone to the front-page blog. The biggest news-aggregator site in the world, the Drudge Report, is named after its founder, Matt Drudge, who somehow conveys a unified sensibility through his selection of links, images, and stories. The vast, expanding universe of The Huffington Post still finds some semblance of coherence in the Cambridge-Greek twang of Arianna; the entire world of online celebrity gossip circles the drain of Perez Hilton; and the investigative journalism, reviewing, and commentary of Talking Points Memo is still tied together by the tone of Josh Marshall. EvenSlate is unimaginable without Mickey Kaus's voice.What endures is a human brand. Readers have encountered this phenomenon before—I.F. Stone's Weekly comes to mind—but not to this extent. It stems, I think, from the conversational style that blogging rewards. What you want in a conversationalist is as much character as authority. And if you think of blogging as more like talk radio or cable news than opinion magazines or daily newspapers, then this personalized emphasis is less surprising. People have a voice for radio and a face for television. For blogging, they have a sensibility.But writing in this new form is a collective enterprise as much as it is an individual one—and the connections between bloggers are as important as the content on the blogs. The links not only drive conversation, they drive readers. The more you link, the more others will link to you, and the more traffic and readers you will get. The zero-sum game of old media—in which Time benefits from Newsweek's decline and vice versa—becomes win-win. It's great for Time to be linked to by Newsweek and the other way round. One of the most prized statistics in the blogosphere is therefore not the total number of readers or page views, but the "authority" you get by being linked to by other blogs. It's an indication of how central you are to the online conversation of humankind.The reason this open-source market of thinking and writing has such potential is that the always adjusting and evolving collective mind can rapidly filter out bad arguments and bad ideas. The flip side, of course, is that bloggers are also human beings. Reason is not the only fuel in the tank. In a world where no distinction is made between good traffic and bad traffic, and where emotion often rules, some will always raise their voice to dominate the conversation; others will pander shamelessly to their readers' prejudices; others will start online brawls for the fun of it. Sensationalism, dirt, and the ease of formulaic talking points always beckon. You can disappear into the partisan blogosphere and never stumble onto a site you disagree with.But linkage mitigates this. A Democratic blog will, for example, be forced to link to Republican ones, if only to attack and mock. And it's in the interests of both camps to generate shared traffic. This encourages polarized slugfests. But online, at least you see both sides. Reading The Nation or National Review before the Internet existed allowed for more cocooning than the wide-open online sluice gates do now. If there's more incivility, there's also more fluidity. Rudeness, in any case, isn't the worst thing that can happen to a blogger. Being ignored is. Perhaps the nastiest thing one can do to a fellow blogger is to rip him apart and fail to provide a link.A successful blog therefore has to balance itself between a writer's own take on the world and others. Some bloggers collect, or "aggregate," other bloggers' posts with dozens of quick links and minimalist opinion topspin: Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit does this for the right-of-center; Duncan Black at Eschaton does it for the left. Others are more eclectic, or aggregate links in a particular niche, or cater to a settled and knowledgeable reader base. A "blogroll" is an indicator of whom you respect enough to keep in your galaxy. For many years, I kept my reading and linking habits to a relatively small coterie of fellow political bloggers. In today's blogosphere, to do this is to embrace marginality. I've since added links to religious blogs and literary ones and scientific ones and just plain weird ones. As the blogosphere has expanded beyond anyone's capacity to absorb it, I've needed an assistant and interns to scour the Web for links and stories and photographs to respond to and think about. It's a difficult balance, between your own interests and obsessions, and the knowledge, insight, and wit of others—but an immensely rich one. There are times, in fact, when a blogger feels less like a writer than an online disc jockey, mixing samples of tunes and generating new melodies through mashups while also making his own music. He is both artist and producer—and the beat always goes on.If all this sounds postmodern, that's because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective. A traditional writer is valued by readers precisely because they trust him to have thought long and hard about a subject, given it time to evolve in his head, and composed a piece of writing that is worth their time to read at length and to ponder. Bloggers don't do this and cannot do this—and that limits them far more than it does traditional long-form writing.A blogger will air a variety of thoughts or facts on any subject in no particular order other than that dictated by the passing of time. A writer will instead use time, synthesizing these thoughts, ordering them, weighing which points count more than others, seeing how his views evolved in the writing process itself, and responding to an editor's perusal of a draft or two. The result is almost always more measured, more satisfying, and more enduring than a blizzard of posts. The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, blogging's gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding.The points of this essay, for example, have appeared in shards and fragments on my blog for years. But being forced to order them in my head and think about them for a longer stretch has helped me understand them better, and perhaps express them more clearly. Each week, after a few hundred posts, I also write an actual newspaper column. It invariably turns out to be more considered, balanced, and evenhanded than the blog. But the blog will always inform and enrich the column, and often serve as a kind of free-form, free-associative research. And an essay like this will spawn discussion best handled on a blog. The conversation, in other words, is the point, and the different idioms used by the conversationalists all contribute something of value to it. And so, if the defenders of the old media once viscerally regarded blogging as some kind of threat, they are starting to see it more as a portal, and a spur.There is, after all, something simply irreplaceable about reading a piece of writing at length on paper, in a chair or on a couch or in bed. To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn't replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed. To listen to jazz as one would listen to an aria is to miss the point. Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television's dominance, had seemed on the wane.Words, of all sorts, have never seemed so now.
Also see:
Video: "Your Brain on Blog"
Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder discuss the narcotic appeal of blogging and the occupational hazards of thinking quickly.
Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder discuss the narcotic appeal of blogging and the occupational hazards of thinking quickly.


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I saw Interstellar. You should too. There is a lot of potential in the movie. From the perspective of someone creating a movie, I'm super interested in some of the choices made in this one.
I walked out of the theater thinking that the movie would have been an incredible 8 hour HBO show. As a three hour movie, I thought there was a ton of movie cut out that I wasn't seeing. Parts of it felt super rushed. I felt like I wasn't given enough to connect with most of the characters. The question I have is: With the goal of creating bigger stories with epic stakes, is the maximum acceptable length of three hours enough to fully develop a story?
Yo Ben Affleck's brother, why did you punch that dude from That 70's Show in the face? He's just trying to help your kid out. Maybe if we spent more time with him, I could get a sense of his point of view. It was presented like melodrama. There probably wasn't enough time to include that part of the story at all. So could the role of Casey Affleck been taken out completely without sacrificing the message of the movie? Probably.
If you think about the reverse of taking a very successful and rich story told in 8+ hours on TV, and try to stuff it into 2-3 hours of movie, the problem becomes clear. There is no way to develop the characters as well. If there are many characters, it is clear that a choice must be made about which specific characters to follow. Furthermore, some characters should probably be eliminated. I'm curious if Interstellar could have benefited from the removal of some characters to spend more precious time on the characters that matter.
In the first sequence of scenes, they are in their natural world, on Earth. It's mostly like normal earth but there are dust storms and crops are dying. Dad spots a drone with his kids and they hack it and take control of it. That was nice. The reference to the moon landing being a hoax was really well done, cute, and funny. But then we learn that in his dead wife's room, books are falling out of the bookshelf. His daughter thinks it's a ghost trying to communicate in code, however never thinks that it's the ghost of her mother? Why not? After a dust storm, there is undeniable proof that something supernatural is going on. Dust has formed in lines of Morse code. What caused this? Not a ghost. Gravity. Wait what? How could they arrive at that? It's a moment of magic in a movie. It's awkward, but I'm going with it. What does it mean? It's coordinates. Wait. From the perspective of an engineer who knows some thing about codes and GPS coordinates, there are some technical problems with that. There would be many more lines on ground. But whatever, I'm going with it.
They arrive at NASA (Sign says NORAD) which is only a drive away. Matthew is tazed. He is being interrogated by a vending machine. They are really concerned how he found the facility. No one finds that facility. No one. Not even god. Except for the people that drive there to go to work everyday. It is very important that he tell them exactly how he got there. After fumbling around, his daughter says "Gravity!" Everyone's eyes light up. That's the same word from earlier! Like the secret password to a club, it sort of makes no sense, but they are granted access.
After some exposition, Michael Caine is all like "Yo - this Earth is straight up fucked. We need you, the best pilot at NASA to go find a new home on the other side of a wormhole." Matthew McConaughey is all like "But I have kids!" Michael Caine responds, "Yeah, you'll get older, but you age pretty well. You can come back when you're done and even though theres still a gravity thing I haven't figured out, I will figure it out before you get back. I promise. Do humanity a solid, alright?" McConaughey, "Alright, alright, alright."
He rushes home to break the news that he's going to space for some indefinite amount of time. His son seems indifferent, but his daughter is really not having it. In the same way a dad tells his daughter she can't have a pony, he's all like, "Deal with it." She's all like, "I HATE YOU. Just go!" He's all like, "Cool that was pretty easy." He drives off. She runs out of the house "NOOOO. I was JK about the just go part!!! BUT I STILL HATE YOU!"
Next scene: they are flying out into space.
While I was watching the movie, I was thinking that whole first part could have been reduced to a montage, with key scenes only for set up of the call to action. After seeing the whole movie, I think the whole first part was actually not long enough. I think they should have doubled down on the father daughter relationship. The struggle of whether or not to go should have had more feels. Build the bond, present dilemma and tear it apart. 2 characters could have been removed: his son, and the dad from Third Rock from the Sun. They have no purpose later in the movie. More time could be focused on that bond. Furthermore, when decides to go up into space, his daughter could be taken care of by Michael Caine, which you know he's good at from those Batman movies, and which ends up happening anyways.
In space: Matthew is all like, "It was hard leaving my kids because there wasn't enough time to show it in the previous scenes. Hey, must be hard leaving your Dad behind." Catwoman is all like, "Meh, fuck h'm. AND I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT PERSONAL STUFF." Audience is like, "Got it, you're unlikeable. But maybe you'll be redeemed later?" Nope.
Oh great. The vending machine is on this trip too. He was a robodick earlier, but now his job is to tell dad jokes. He looks like 3 lego pieces, but he speaks just like a regular human, whose voice is so similar to the somewhat generic space crew that it's unclear who is talking when he speaks.
Right before cryosleep, Matthew asks the vending machine if Catwoman is in love with some doctor we never heard of before. Vending machine doesn't gossip. Unless you set him to. Dang. Matthew is into Catwoman? Nope. She is in love with a guy on another planet and therefore they can not go to that planet. What? It doesn't matter now... or later.
Astronaut #3 explains a wormhole to Matthew because when they first told him the plan, he obviously faked knowing what it meant. He is only familiar with flat circles.
They have to go to the first planet. Because the planet moves almost the speed of light, time on that planet is way slower than on Earth. You age way slower on that planet than on Earth where Matthew gets older but the girls stay the same age. So if you spend too much time there, everyone you know will be dead by the time you get back. They go and of course they leave the black guy. He's also not even on the first page of 15 actors on the IMDB page.
Time is of the essence. In and out. No funny business. Unfortunately, the planet is filled with water. But there is data on the planet, and they need that data. What are those mountains? Like everyone else, I've seen the trailer, no surprise, we already knew those aren't mountains. It's a wave. Better hurry up. But Catwoman isn't leaving without the data. Even though if she dies, that totally wouldn't make any sense either way. But she gets the data in the knick of time. Wait. Wasn't there 3 astronauts and now theres only 2? Yeah, one got washed away. It's a good thing it was the guy with no previous speaking parts but who is also listed 3rd on the cast list on IMDB? Anyways.. They didn't need that character.
Time on that planet was a little longer than expected. That setback cost them 23 years. When they get back, David, the astronaut #3 left behind is 23 years older. He's bald now. He says "I gave up hope you were ever coming back, but hey, I'm chill about it." What?? This guy is living in solitary prison (sleeping most of the time, but still) for 23 years and everyone is like, "Sucks to be you. Next mission." I really think that he could have been one of the more interesting characters in movie. No family, half his adult life as an engineer, the other half sleeping and solitary. Does he have regrets? Does he have insight on moving forward? I guess not. But anyways, time to check the video messages!
Whoa. You already know this, but Matthew's son turns into Casey Affleck, who turns into bearded Casey Affleck. This is incredibly exciting considering he is the next Batman's brother. He probably gets to see Batman before anyone else. But the sad reveal is that Matthew's daughter doesn't want to send video messages because she is really mad still. So mad that she is working with Michael Caine to solve some gravity problem so that her father can come back, and she can really let him have it. It's a pretty elaborate grudge. But as tenacious grudgeholder, I respect that level of dedication. She finally sends him a message on her birthday saying that they are the same age and yet, he is still not back, which I think is pretty powerful. I think there is more that could have been done with that.
Time for the second planet. Too bad we ran out of time and fuel. We can only pick 1. Instead of rock paper scissoring, which is the norm in the scientific community, Matthew reveals Catwoman's love for unseen Dr. Whatshisface to 23 year older astronaut #3 thusly cockblocking the planet Catwoman wants to go to.
Off to the other planet. Hey this looks promising, except for frozen clouds. There is an outpost. There is a cryosleep guy ziplocked fresh. Who is it? FUCKING MATT DAMON. Fucking Matt Damon says, "YOU GUYS CAN NEVER KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE ALONE FOR YEARS." And then Astronaut #3 from behind says, "Actually, I do." And then everyone else ignores him - for like, the rest of the movie. Fucking Matt Damon continues, "Bros, glad you came. This planet is super awesome. It has all the things we need." - Even though the music says otherwise - "Hey let's go for a walk just you and me." Matthew Mcconaughey is cool with that. He could use the exercise. Just as they look out onto the beautiful frozen vista, Fucking Matt Damon says, "There can be only one Matt on this planet." Fucking Matt Damon cracks open other Matt's helmet like a total dickhole. Other Matt radios in with his last dying breath: "FUCKING MATT DAMON cracked my shit and he's lying about the whole planet, and theres no life here for real. So yeah. I'm going to need you to pick me up. And quick. Because I'm almost dead." But instead of saying all that, he just says AMONIA and he says the rest with his eyes, because thats how good of an actor Matthew Mcconaughey is. Catwoman picks up Matthew right before he dies, and she gets to give him an awesome I told you so look, but chooses not to because that would be too easy. Vending machine was out making love with the other vending machine and had to scissor fly back to the ship. I really want to know how that works. They fly away and let out a collective, "FUCK YOU MATT DAMON!"
Then there's a part where Matt Damon is jettisoned into space because everyone knows that is the only way you can kill a Bourne.
Fuck. Catwoman was right. You have to believe in love. She was right. Matthew was wrong. Matthew won't admit to that because then she will have another opportunity to give him an awesome I told you so look.
You've got mail. "Catwoman, your dad is dead, and a liar. DAD, YOU KNEW I WAS GOING TO WORK ON THE GRAVITY EQUATION MY WHOLE LIFE AND YOU KNEW IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE, DIDN'T YOU?" Matthew puzzled, "What is she talking about?" Astronaut #3, "Actually I know what shes talking about." Matthew, "Didn't you used to be white?" Astronaut #3, "I've been on this mission the whole time, you dick. Anyways, the only way you can solve the equation is by going into the black hole. Everybody knows that." Matthew says, "Cool - I'm going to send the vending machine into the black hole." Vending machine is like, "!!?!?!?"
Let's go home. C-ya robojerkface.
But wait, Matthew Mcconaughey is going into the black hole too! Why? Who knows? Catwoman is all like "NOOOO! BUT I GUESS WE NEVER GOT ALONG ANYWAYSSSSS...."
Insert pretty awesome sequence of going through the hole with some really nice sound design. He ends up in this pretty cool room in the 5th dimension. Visually, it's pretty fucking rad. I haven't seen anything like it before. It looks like a videogame glitch. He is on the other side of the book case. It was him all along. But the real major reveal is that through the whole movie, you thought Matthew Mcconaughey hated vending machine, but he actually was secretly in love with him, and wanted to spend an eternity in the abyss with him. Slow clap.
Matthew quickly realizes that because vending machine has the data to solve the gravity formula, all he has to do is translate the data into binary and send it through the watch that was set up in the first sequence. It's connected by entanglement. They never say it in the movie, but it's a real thing. Knowing about data systems, sending the gravity data over binary one clock twitch at a time will probably only take 1000 lifetimes. I spent the next three minutes thinking about how she would know the format of the data. What about error correction? What is the format of the checksum? How would she know!? For all the work they did to make sure the science was correct, they seemed to be completely fine about overlooking computer science. But you know, I'm going with it. If anyone can solve a problem it's the girl from Zero Dark Thirty.
She solves it in a montage, because that is how you solve stuff in a movie. History is altered. A white flash happens. He is transported into the future.
Matthew asks, "Where am I?" Doctor #1, "You're in Cooperstation.", Matthew says, "Nice of you to name this place after my movie name." Doctor #2 rolls her eyes. Doctor #1, "Hey buddy. Slow your roll. Did you solve a near impossible gravity equation in a montage? No. You just ventured to 2 chaotic planets, almost got murdered, and went into a black hole like a maniac. Shut the fuck up. It's named after your daughter. But I have 2 special treats for you!"
Uninterested in hearing his story, Doctor #1 takes Matthew to a creepy wax museum replica of his house, revealing who all the old people talking are. Old people. Talking about the way things used to be. Thats it.
Matthew's daughter is still alive, but she's mad old. When she heard that Matthew was alive, she got on the next spacetrain. She's in a hospital bed surrounded by her family. Matthew walks in. She starts crying. People in the audience start crying. She hasn't seen him in like 80 years. He hasn't seen her in like 10 or so. She says, "No one should watch their child die. So go." At this point the girl behind me is bawling. Yeah, I know its a bad cliche - but not so bad you should cry about it. So the theme of this movie is to believe in love, but she doesn't care to hear his story? Catch up? Meanwhile, his entire family is in the room and he wants to talk to them but all they want to do is ask him questions about True Detective. Time to blow this joint. Let's steal a spacecar and go to the last possible planet to inhabit because no one thought of that while you were gone.
Some notes
The space ships, stations, suits were really well done. The wear was nice and believable.
The sound design was very nice.
The photography was good.
I would love to see the shooting script and what was cut.
I'm really curious how the movie would feel if the following changes were made: These characters were removed: Son, Father-in-law, Astronaut #4. Expand on father daughter relationship. Make the departure much harder. Lighten tech exposition. Don't receive messages from Earth at all. Matt Damon's plan is found out in person and we get to see gut wrenching reactions from the characters. Verbal conflict. When near the black hole, Cooper notices his wristwatch hand moving, causing him to later make the leap to go in the black hole. In the black hole, it is shown for the first time his daughter aging as he goes through time. He transfers the data. She figures it out. Flash white. Back to moment where his daughter tells him not to go. Cut to black.
Casting reconsideration: Winona Ryder or Rashida Jones or Kerry Washington instead of Anne Hathaway. In case of Kerry Washington, Forest Whitaker or James Earl Jones instead of Michael Caine. Willem Dafoe or Javier Bardem instead of Matt Damon.
What did you think?
Hi! My name is Charles Forman. I love to make stuff I dream up. A while back, I founded a videogame company called OMGPOP that developed Draw Something, that sold to Zynga. Remember that? No? It's ok. I also co-founded Picturelife, a great place to store and organize all your private photos. I am originally from Chicago, and I've lived in Tokyo, Seoul, and New York City. I am currently living in NYC and I'm working on developing a movie. I love getting email, and I'd love to get an email from you!I'd love to send you an email update when I write a new article once every couple months.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
For security reasons, we always recommend that you use a password manager like 1Password or LastPass to generate, store, and enter strong passwords in your Web browser. We hope you've been doing that because iOS 12 has a fabulous new feature that lets you enter passwords from third-party password managers in addition to iCloud Keychain. It makes logging in to Web sites—and iOS apps!—vastly easier than before.
Set Up AutoFill
To begin, you need to enable the feature. Go to Settings > Passwords & Accounts > AutoFill Passwords. Tap the AutoFill Passwords switch to turn the feature on, and select your password manager in the list below.
Two notes. First, the iOS app for your password manager must be installed for it to appear in the list. Second, although you can also allow iCloud Keychain to fill passwords, it's not worth the extra confusion unless you have a lot of passwords stored only in iCloud Keychain.
Log In to a Web Site in Safari
Now it's time to try the feature. Navigate to a Web site where you need to log in, and for which your password manager has stored your credentials. Then follow these steps:
- Tap in the username or password field.
- iOS 12 consults your password manager, and if it finds a username/password pair that matches the domain of the site, it displays the username for the site in a blue button or in the QuickType bar above the keyboard. Tap it, and unlock the password manager using your password, Touch ID, or Face ID. iOS fills in your credentials.
- Tap to continue the login process.
If you have multiple accounts for the same site, you may see several of them in the QuickType bar, but if the one you want doesn't appear, or if none appear, tap the key icon to see all available passwords. If none are right even still, tap the name of your password manager at the bottom of the list to open and search it manually.
Log In to an App
The process of logging in to an app is often similar to logging in to a Web site, as with the Dropbox and Netflix apps, but iOS 12 doesn't know how to match every app with an associated account in your password manager. For an app that iOS 12 can't identify, like the Pixabay app, follow these steps instead:
- Tap in the username or password field.
- In the QuickType bar, tap the key icon to open your password manager.
- If necessary, unlock it with your password, Touch ID, or Face ID.
- Search in the password manager for the associated account.
- Tap the account to autofill it in the app's login fields.
Password Manager Limitations
As welcome as iOS 12's new support for password managers is, it's lacking in two important ways:
- The autofill integration is limited to usernames and passwords, so if a site requires an additional field for login, you'll have to enter that information manually. Similarly, it won't enter credit card numbers or other information the password manager can autofill when used on a Mac.
- The password manager can't automatically create new accounts or generate new passwords, as all password managers can do on the Mac. You can do both manually, but the process is so clumsy that it may be easier to wait and do it on a Mac later, or use an easily typed password temporarily until you can change it to something stronger on your Mac later.
Despite these annoyances, iOS 12's support for third-party password managers is a huge step forward for anyone who wants quick access to the same login credentials on an iPhone or iPad.
Social Media: For those who rely on a password manager like 1Password or LastPass, iOS 12's new support for third-party password managers makes it easier to log in to Web sites in Safari and iOS apps. Here's how:


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Reference Question of the Week – 8/18/13
August 24th, 2013 Brian HerzogBack in library school, I remember distinctly being told that patent searches are one of the most difficult types of reference questions, because usually you're trying to find out if something isn't there. However, this patent search was difficult for a different reason.
I think I've mentioned before that one of my hobbies is metal detecting, which I share with my brothers. One of them emailed me this photo of something he had found, saying it was a chunk of metal about the size and shape of an ear with "PAT 154071" stamped in it, and asking if I could help figure out what it came from.
He had already done some online research and had a couple potential patent dates, but wasn't really sure. I love knowing right off the bat the best resource to check, so when I got this message I just typed in http://www.uspto.gov and clicked on "search for patents." The US Patent and Trademark Office has a full-text search, which is great, but since I was looking for a specific patent number, I just went to the Number Search, typed in 154071, and... that's when the problems started.
The first screen to come up said that this patent, dated August 11, 1874, wasn't available in full text, so it would have to be viewed as a scanned image. Which is fine, except viewing the image just prompted me to update my Quicktime plugin.
I tried going through the steps to update it, but I could not get the update to download from the Quicktime website. I tried this on a few different computers at my house and in the library, but all of them (all Windows computers) had the same issue. Next I tried searching for "can't download quicktime" and found someone with the same problem and an alternate link on the Apple website. This time the update did download and seemed to install, but I still couldn't view the image on the PTO website - and still got prompted to update Quicktime.
Frustrated, I went to my last resort: I used one of the library's Apple computers. I got a weird plugin update message too, but the image did display:
Actually, the PTO website said there were two images associated with this patent, but the other one was clearly for a different invention (and different patent number).
So, pretty cool, especially because of all the problems I had getting it. I couldn't tell from the drawing where the piece my brother found came from, but it was still worth the effort.
Since the patent drawing listed names, I thought I'd expand my search online and see what else I could find. I tried various combinations of the names of the inventors and "combined folding chairs and benches," but didn't have any luck.
So, I just tried searching for "patent 154,071," and boy did I get a surprise. The first result was for Google Patents, conveniently displaying the image that I had tried for two days (and had to use a Mac!) to view. I didn't know patent searches were a Google offering, but I suppose all public domain information is probably assimilated by now.
I am disappointed that the Google search was more productive than using the Patent Office's own website, and that they'd use a tool that relies on a problematic plugin.
But since I was at Google, I tried a few few things and found this entry in the Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, page 214:


text:
Alex Pettyfer, Dianna Agron, Callam McAuliffe, Timothy Olyphant and Teresa Palmer.
Directed by: D.J. Caruso
Extraordinary teen John Smith (Pettyfer) is a fugitive on the run from ruthless enemies sent to destroy him. Changing his identity, moving from town to town with his guardian Henri (Olyphant), John is always the new kid with no ties to his past. In the small Ohio town he now calls home, John encounters unexpected, life-changing events-his first love (Agron), powerful new abilities and a connection to the others who share his incredible destiny. Walt Disney PicturesReview:
Stepping inside the cinema I knew nothing about the premise on which this movie is based upon. My knowledge could be encapsulated into four throwaway facts: 1) Alex Pettyfer is pretty, 2) Dianna Agron is the least talented singer on Glee (but probably the most act-capable), 3) DJ Caruso directed Suburbia, which I quite liked and 4) the book in which this film is based was written via James Frey's writing sweat shop.
My expectations were low. Not just low, Twilight and Sex and the City 2 low. I left the theatre surprised. Not JJ Abrams' Star Trek surprised but pleasantly surprised. The story isn't anything new - outsider falls in love with a girl who is anything but the ordinary she pretends to be. Outsider has an epic responsibility and finds that anything is possible with the support of friends. End scene. I Am Number Four is in a nutshell a terribly bland premise with blue hand lights.
And yet, unlike many other paranormal bent teen movies/books this cast can act. Pettyfer wrings all the emotional beats out of a pretty ordinary screenplay but can't ever lift it out of mediocrity. Agron is rowing hard in the same boat and also has to struggle with her arty girl character's propensity for hats. The chemistry only ever truly sparks when there is snoggage - otherwise it doesn't necessarily ring true. Callan McAuliffe does a credible job at both the American accent and finding some nuance in the sidekick role. Teresa Palmer brandishes her Australian accent and ass-kickery to fulfill the role of unexpected hot blond girl. Timothy Olyphant phones in the role with his grimaces and quirky eyebrows but still eats his co-stars up with room to spare.
The effects are passable. The stunts are impressive. Nothing can really be said other than the evil jock could not have been more cliched if they had tried. It does its job well. It crafts a tolerable story with a likeable cast and a certain visual panache.
Buy / Rent / Ignore
**If you like the idea of PSnark being a place to view YA film reviews tell me. I've been flirting with the idea as I will no longer be posting book reviews.


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John Deubert's AcrobatiX: Advanced Text Search in Acrobat X
- So, What Is It Exactly?
- How Do I Use this Marvel?
- Search Parameters
- The Good Stuff: Multi-File Searching
- So, When Should You Use This?
In my off hours, I write a periodical called the Acumen Journal; each issue is built around a pair of lengthy articles, one of them on advanced Acrobat use. I've been doing this for more than a decade, now, so I've accumulated quite a number of these issues. Surprisingly, I find they are very good references for me, as well as for my customers; my tiny brain is always losing track of useful bits of Acrobat lore that I have to look up among the 60-some-odd copies of the Journal.
I value efficiency (or, to put it another way, I'm lazy); if I need a reminder on, say, how to create calculated form fields, I do not want to scan the list of Acrobat articles by eye. My tool of preference in such cases is Acrobat's long-standing Advanced Search feature. There are moments in my life when I absolutely love this component of Acrobat; other times, I'm merely fond of it. It's always among my favorites, though.
Let's look at it in detail.
So, What Is It Exactly?
Advanced Search is an extended version of the standard, useful-but-boring Find Text command (Command/Control-F). It does a mass hunt for the text you want (the "target" text), returning a list of all the instances of that text ("hits") in your PDF file; it presents those instances in a convenient, clickable list. This is nearly always better than using the standard Find, which steps you through instances of the target text one…instance…at…a…time (Figure 1).
Figure 1 The Acrobat Find command works just like everyone else's Find command; it steps you through each instance of the target text one at a time. Ennui generally sets in after the 87th click of the tiny right-arrow button.
But that's not what makes Advanced Search indispensable. What's really nifty, what elevates Advanced Search to where-have-you-been-all-my-life status, is the fact that it can search for your target text in a collection of PDF files: all PDF files on your disk, in a particular folder, etc.
This is what I use to search my Journal library; if I'm looking for information on calculated form fields, Advanced Search will give me a clickable list of all instances of, say, "Calculate" in all the documents in my folder of back issues (Figure 2).
Figure 2 Advanced Search searches one or more files for your target text, presenting you with a list of all the instances it found.
Acrobat's multi-file Search is one of those "I don't need it all the time, but when I do need it, I really need it" features.


text:
This post brought to you by Bealls. All opinions are 100% mine.
It's back-to-school season. The number of days left spent poolside are numbered. The sun is slowly losing it's heat, and the stores are stocking shelves full of pencils, colorful notebooks and folders and crayons as far as the eye can see. In addition to supplies, the kids have likely been growing over the summer. Pants that once fit well now look as though a flood is headed their way. Shoes that graced their feet just two short months ago have become tight and uncomfortable after a summer's worth of sandals and sun.
Inevitably, a trip to the store is in order. As we head to the store to stock up for the kids we generally focus on essentials: t-shirts, socks, jeans and other items that can be layered once it gets colder. Start by for deals in the sale and clearance sections on summer items, searching for t-shirts and shorts that can be paired with long-sleeve undershirts and worn for the first two months of school. Once the weather truly starts to turn cold, the back-to-school items will all be on clearance to make room for holiday wear, and you can jump on those sales.
Back-2-School at Bealls has all you need for the back-to-school season, from uniforms to trendy styles for boys and girls. You'll have all your back-to-school shopping done in no time.
One lucky Deal Seeking Mom winner will receive a $250 gift card to Bealls Florida (can be used online too)!
To enter, tell me how you would spend $250 on back-to-school shopping at Bealls.
If you are reading this in your email or feed reader, please CLICK HERE to visit the original blog post to enter. Email entries will not be counted.
Methods of entry:
Leave a comment. What would you purchase with $250 at Bealls Florida?
Prize: (1) $250 Bealls Florida gift card
This giveaway ends at 11:59 p.m. ET on Sunday, 8/14 and is open to all U.S. residents 18 years or older. At the end of the Contest Period one entrant will be selected by the Sponsor from the eligible pool of entries. Read the complete contest rules. Good luck!
While you're in a contest entering mood, don't forget to check out the Giveaway Gathering for a variety of contests being hosted on Deal Seeking Mom readers' blogs!


text:
Want alternative classes for Mums and Bubs in Beaumaris?
Babyfitter is your go-to team if you want alternative classes for mums and bubs in Beaumaris. Babyfitter was developed by a group of women who saw a need for a more personalised service for parents who are ready to prioritise their health & wellbeing (OK, we'll admit it – your children are an equal priority for us too!).
We understand that gym crèches and mums & bubs classes aren't quite the right fit for everyone, so we've created a team of Personal Trainers & Experienced Nannies who will come directly to you at a time that works for you. Plus, it's all arranged through a very simple booking process.
Our Trainer's goal is to prioritise the adults in your family, and most importantly… YOU! They're there to get to know you and to help you achieve the health and fitness goals that you just haven't been able to get to yet. Our trainers are experienced in pregnancy and post-natal care, plus our workouts are specially modified to suit you and what you enjoy – this could be Pilates-style personal training, boxing for beginners, high intensity training… We're ready for you!
Our Babysitter's focus is your child's safety, followed by their happiness. Our sitters are experienced working with children and have First Aid qualifications. Plus, you'll have the same sitter each week, so you won't need to reintroduce them each time they arrive. Once they've developed a friendship with your child, we hope your kids look forward to us arriving each week! You'll also have the opportunity to brief the sitter prior to your first session so they know what to expect when they arrive.
Babyfitter's founder Victoria Wall has 3 nieces & nephews who she loves dearly! Vic is a qualified personal trainer who has been training her sisters on a regular basis. She's worked with them pre-pregnancy, through to when the children were born (when they welcomed mothers group friends to the workouts) right up until today when the children are reaching primary school age (they also now train with the husbands).
While she LOVES seeing them on a weekly basis, she wanted her sisters to be able to focus on their health and wellbeing the way they deserved to, giving each workout 100% without any distractions. Enter… Babyfitter!
Ready to book your session? Click Here


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Laravel provides a powerful filesystem abstraction thanks to the wonderful Flysystem PHP package by Frank de Jonge. The Laravel Flysystem integration provides simple to use drivers for working with local filesystems, Amazon S3, and Rackspace Cloud Storage. Even better, it's amazingly simple to switch between these storage options as the API remains the same for each system.
The filesystem configuration file is located at config/filesystems.php
. Within this file you may configure all of your "disks". Each disk represents a particular storage driver and storage location. Example configurations for each supported driver are included in the configuration file. So, modify the configuration to reflect your storage preferences and credentials.
Of course, you may configure as many disks as you like, and may even have multiple disks that use the same driver.
The Public Disk
The public
disk is intended for files that are going to be publicly accessible. By default, the public
disk uses the local
driver and stores these files in storage/app/public
. To make them accessible from the web, you should create a symbolic link from public/storage
to storage/app/public
. This convention will keep your publicly accessible files in one directory that can be easily shared across deployments when using zero down-time deployment systems like Envoyer.
To create the symbolic link, you may use the storage:link
Artisan command:
php artisan storage:link
Of course, once a file has been stored and the symbolic link has been created, you can create a URL to the files using the asset
echo asset('storage/file.txt');
The Local Driver
When using the local
driver, all file operations are relative to the root
directory defined in your configuration file. By default, this value is set to the storage/app
directory. Therefore, the following method would store a file in storage/app/file.txt
Storage::disk('local')->put('file.txt', 'Contents');
Driver Prerequisites
Composer Packages
Before using the S3 or Rackspace drivers, you will need to install the appropriate package via Composer:
- Amazon S3:
league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3 ~1.0
- Rackspace:
league/flysystem-rackspace ~1.0
S3 Driver Configuration
The S3 driver configuration information is located in your config/filesystems.php
configuration file. This file contains an example configuration array for an S3 driver. You are free to modify this array with your own S3 configuration and credentials. For convenience, these environment variables match the naming convention used by the AWS CLI.
FTP Driver Configuration
Laravel's Flysystem integrations works great with FTP; however, a sample configuration is not included with the framework's default filesystems.php
configuration file. If you need to configure a FTP filesystem, you may use the example configuration below:
'ftp' => [
'driver' => 'ftp',
'host' => 'ftp.example.com',
'username' => 'your-username',
'password' => 'your-password',
// Optional FTP Settings...
// 'port' => 21,
// 'root' => '',
// 'passive' => true,
// 'ssl' => true,
// 'timeout' => 30,
Rackspace Driver Configuration
Laravel's Flysystem integrations works great with Rackspace; however, a sample configuration is not included with the framework's default filesystems.php
configuration file. If you need to configure a Rackspace filesystem, you may use the example configuration below:
'rackspace' => [
'driver' => 'rackspace',
'username' => 'your-username',
'key' => 'your-key',
'container' => 'your-container',
'endpoint' => 'https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0/',
'region' => 'IAD',
'url_type' => 'publicURL',
Obtaining Disk Instances
The Storage
facade may be used to interact with any of your configured disks. For example, you may use the put
method on the facade to store an avatar on the default disk. If you call methods on the Storage
facade without first calling the disk
method, the method call will automatically be passed to the default disk:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
Storage::put('avatars/1', $fileContents);
If your applications interacts with multiple disks, you may use the disk
method on the Storage
facade to work with files on a particular disk:
Storage::disk('s3')->put('avatars/1', $fileContents);
Retrieving Files
The get
method may be used to retrieve the contents of a file. The raw string contents of the file will be returned by the method. Remember, all file paths should be specified relative to the "root" location configured for the disk:
$contents = Storage::get('file.jpg');
The exists
method may be used to determine if a file exists on the disk:
$exists = Storage::disk('s3')->exists('file.jpg');
File URLs
You may use the url
method to get the URL for the given file. If you are using the local
driver, this will typically just prepend /storage
to the given path and return a relative URL to the file. If you are using the s3
or rackspace
driver, the fully qualified remote URL will be returned:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
$url = Storage::url('file1.jpg');
Remember, if you are using thelocal
driver, all files that should be publicly accessible should be placed in thestorage/app/public
directory. Furthermore, you should create a symbolic link atpublic/storage
which points to thestorage/app/public
Temporary URLs
For files stored using the s3
or rackspace
driver, you may create a temporary URL to a given file using the temporaryUrl
method. This methods accepts a path and a DateTime
instance specifying when the URL should expire:
$url = Storage::temporaryUrl(
'file1.jpg', now()->addMinutes(5)
Local URL Host Customization
If you would like to pre-define the host for files stored on a disk using the local
driver, you may add a url
option to the disk's configuration array:
'public' => [
'driver' => 'local',
'root' => storage_path('app/public'),
'url' => env('APP_URL').'/storage',
'visibility' => 'public',
File Metadata
In addition to reading and writing files, Laravel can also provide information about the files themselves. For example, the size
method may be used to get the size of the file in bytes:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
$size = Storage::size('file1.jpg');
The lastModified
method returns the UNIX timestamp of the last time the file was modified:
$time = Storage::lastModified('file1.jpg');
Storing Files
The put
method may be used to store raw file contents on a disk. You may also pass a PHP resource
to the put
method, which will use Flysystem's underlying stream support. Using streams is greatly recommended when dealing with large files:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
Storage::put('file.jpg', $contents);
Storage::put('file.jpg', $resource);
Automatic Streaming
If you would like Laravel to automatically manage streaming a given file to your storage location, you may use the putFile
or putFileAs
method. This method accepts either a Illuminate\Http\File
or Illuminate\Http\UploadedFile
instance and will automatically stream the file to your desired location:
use Illuminate\Http\File;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
// Automatically generate a unique ID for file name...
Storage::putFile('photos', new File('/path/to/photo'));
// Manually specify a file name...
Storage::putFileAs('photos', new File('/path/to/photo'), 'photo.jpg');
There are a few important things to note about the putFile
method. Note that we only specified a directory name, not a file name. By default, the putFile
method will generate a unique ID to serve as the file name. The path to the file will be returned by the putFile
method so you can store the path, including the generated file name, in your database.
The putFile
and putFileAs
methods also accept an argument to specify the "visibility" of the stored file. This is particularly useful if you are storing the file on a cloud disk such as S3 and would like the file to be publicly accessible:
Storage::putFile('photos', new File('/path/to/photo'), 'public');
Prepending & Appending To Files
The prepend
and append
methods allow you to write to the beginning or end of a file:
Storage::prepend('file.log', 'Prepended Text');
Storage::append('file.log', 'Appended Text');
Copying & Moving Files
The copy
method may be used to copy an existing file to a new location on the disk, while the move
method may be used to rename or move an existing file to a new location:
Storage::copy('old/file1.jpg', 'new/file1.jpg');
Storage::move('old/file1.jpg', 'new/file1.jpg');
File Uploads
In web applications, one of the most common use-cases for storing files is storing user uploaded files such as profile pictures, photos, and documents. Laravel makes it very easy to store uploaded files using the store
method on an uploaded file instance. Call the store
method with the path at which you wish to store the uploaded file:
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;
class UserAvatarController extends Controller
* Update the avatar for the user.
* @param Request $request
* @return Response
public function update(Request $request)
$path = $request->file('avatar')->store('avatars');
return $path;
There are a few important things to note about this example. Note that we only specified a directory name, not a file name. By default, the store
method will generate a unique ID to serve as the file name. The path to the file will be returned by the store
method so you can store the path, including the generated file name, in your database.
You may also call the putFile
method on the Storage
facade to perform the same file manipulation as the example above:
$path = Storage::putFile('avatars', $request->file('avatar'));
Specifying A File Name
If you would not like a file name to be automatically assigned to your stored file, you may use the storeAs
method, which receives the path, the file name, and the (optional) disk as its arguments:
$path = $request->file('avatar')->storeAs(
'avatars', $request->user()->id
Of course, you may also use the putFileAs
method on the Storage
facade, which will perform the same file manipulation as the example above:
$path = Storage::putFileAs(
'avatars', $request->file('avatar'), $request->user()->id
Specifying A Disk
By default, this method will use your default disk. If you would like to specify another disk, pass the disk name as the second argument to the store
$path = $request->file('avatar')->store(
'avatars/'.$request->user()->id, 's3'
File Visibility
In Laravel's Flysystem integration, "visibility" is an abstraction of file permissions across multiple platforms. Files may either be declared public
or private
. When a file is declared public
, you are indicating that the file should generally be accessible to others. For example, when using the S3 driver, you may retrieve URLs for public
You can set the visibility when setting the file via the put
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
Storage::put('file.jpg', $contents, 'public');
If the file has already been stored, its visibility can be retrieved and set via the getVisibility
and setVisibility
$visibility = Storage::getVisibility('file.jpg');
Storage::setVisibility('file.jpg', 'public')
Deleting Files
The delete
method accepts a single filename or an array of files to remove from the disk:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
Storage::delete(['file1.jpg', 'file2.jpg']);
If necessary, you may specify the disk that the file should be deleted from:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
Get All Files Within A Directory
The files
method returns an array of all of the files in a given directory. If you would like to retrieve a list of all files within a given directory including all sub-directories, you may use the allFiles
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
$files = Storage::files($directory);
$files = Storage::allFiles($directory);
Get All Directories Within A Directory
The directories
method returns an array of all the directories within a given directory. Additionally, you may use the allDirectories
method to get a list of all directories within a given directory and all of its sub-directories:
$directories = Storage::directories($directory);
// Recursive...
$directories = Storage::allDirectories($directory);
Create A Directory
The makeDirectory
method will create the given directory, including any needed sub-directories:
Delete A Directory
Finally, the deleteDirectory
may be used to remove a directory and all of its files:
Custom Filesystems
Laravel's Flysystem integration provides drivers for several "drivers" out of the box; however, Flysystem is not limited to these and has adapters for many other storage systems. You can create a custom driver if you want to use one of these additional adapters in your Laravel application.
In order to set up the custom filesystem you will need a Flysystem adapter. Let's add a community maintained Dropbox adapter to our project:
composer require spatie/flysystem-dropbox
Next, you should create a service provider such as DropboxServiceProvider
. In the provider's boot
method, you may use the Storage
facade's extend
method to define the custom driver:
namespace App\Providers;
use Storage;
use League\Flysystem\Filesystem;
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
use Spatie\Dropbox\Client as DropboxClient;
use Spatie\FlysystemDropbox\DropboxAdapter;
class DropboxServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
* Perform post-registration booting of services.
* @return void
public function boot()
Storage::extend('dropbox', function ($app, $config) {
$client = new DropboxClient(
return new Filesystem(new DropboxAdapter($client));
* Register bindings in the container.
* @return void
public function register()
The first argument of the extend
method is the name of the driver and the second is a Closure that receives the $app
and $config
variables. The resolver Closure must return an instance of League\Flysystem\Filesystem
. The $config
variable contains the values defined in config/filesystems.php
for the specified disk.
Once you have created the service provider to register the extension, you may use the dropbox
driver in your config/filesystems.php
configuration file.


text:
- Overview
- Getting Started
- Support for K8s Installers
- Deploying on Kind
- Deploying on Minikube
- Configuration
Cloud Deployment
- Antrea Network Policy
- Antctl
- Architecture
- Traffic Encryption (Ipsec / WireGuard)
- Securing Control Plane
- Security considerations
- Troubleshooting
- OS-specific Known Issues
- OVS Pipeline
- Feature Gates
- Antrea Proxy
- Network Flow Visibility
- Traceflow Guide
- NoEncap and Hybrid Traffic Modes
- Egress Guide
- NodePortLocal Guide
- Antrea IPAM Guide
- Exposing Services of type LoadBalancer
- Versioning
- Antrea API Groups
- Antrea API Reference
Developer Guide
Project Information
Antrea Versioning
Table of Contents
- Versioning scheme
- Release cycle
- Antrea upgrade and supported version skew
- Supported K8s versions
- Deprecation policies
- Introducing new API resources
Versioning scheme
Antrea versions are expressed as x.y.z
, where x
is the major version, y
the minor version, and z
is the patch version, following
Semantic Versioning
Minor releases and patch releases
Unlike minor releases, patch releases should not contain miscellaneous feature additions or improvements. No incompatibilities should ever be introduced between patch versions of the same minor version. API groups / versions must not be introduced or removed as part of patch releases.
Patch releases are intended for important bug fixes to recent minor versions, such as addressing security vulnerabilities, fixes to problems preventing Antrea from being deployed & used successfully by a significant number of users, severe problems with no workaround, and blockers for products (including commercial products) which rely on Antrea.
When it comes to dependencies, the following rules are observed between patch versions of the same Antrea minor versions:
- the same minor OVS version should be used
- the same minor version should be used for all Go dependencies, unless updating to a new minor / major version is required for an important bug fix
- for Antrea Docker images shipped as part of a patch release, the same version must be used for the base Operating System (Linux distribution / Windows server), unless an update is required to fix a critical bug. If important updates are available for a given Operating System version (e.g. which address security vulnerabilities), they should be included in Antrea patch releases.
Feature stability
For every Antrea minor release, the stability level of supported features may be
updated (from Alpha
to Beta
or from Beta
to GA
). Refer to the the
CHANGELOG for information about feature stability level for each release. For
features controlled by a feature gate, this information is also present in a
more structured way in
Release cycle
New Antrea minor releases are currently shipped every 6 to 8 weeks. This fast release cadence enables us to ship new features quickly and frequently. It may change in the future. Compared to deploying the top-of-tree of the Antrea main branch, using a released version should provide more stability guarantees:
- despite our CI pipelines, some bugs can sneak into the branch and be fixed shortly after
- merge conflicts can break the top-of-tree temporarily
- some CI jobs are run periodically and not for every pull request before merge; as much as possible we run the entire test suite for each release candidate
Antrea maintains release branches for the two most recent minor releases
(e.g. the release-0.10
and release-0.11
branches are maintained until Antrea
0.12 is released). As part of this maintenance process, patch versions are
released as frequently as needed, following these
guidelines. With the current release
cadence, this means that each minor release receives approximately 3 months of
patch support. This may seem short, but was done on purpose to encourage users
to upgrade Antrea often and avoid potential incompatibility issues. In the
future, we may reduce our release cadence for minor releases and simultaneously
increase the support window for each release.
Antrea upgrade and supported version skew
Our goal is to support "graceful" upgrades for Antrea. By "graceful", we notably mean that there should be no significant disruption to data-plane connectivity nor to policy enforcement, beyond the necessary disruption incurred by the restart of individual components:
- during the Antrea Controller restart, new policies will not be processed. Because the Controller also runs the validation webhook for Antrea-native policies, an attempt to create an Antrea-native policy resource before the restart is complete may return an error.
- during an Antrea Agent restart, the Node's data-plane will be impacted: new connections to & from the Node will not be possible, and existing connections may break.
In particular, it should be possible to upgrade Antrea without compromising enforcement of existing network policies for both new and existing Pods.
In order to achieve this, the different Antrea components need to support version skew.
- Antrea Controller: must be upgraded first
- Antrea Agent: must not be newer than the Antrea Controller, and may be up to 4 minor versions older
- Antctl: must not be newer than the Antrea Controller, and may be up to 4 minor versions older
The supported version skew means that we only recommend Antrea upgrades to a new release up to 4 minor versions newer. For example, a cluster using 0.10 can be upgraded to one of 0.11, 0.12, 0.13 or 0.14, but we discourage direct upgrades to 0.15 and beyond. With the current release cadence, this provides a 6-month window of compatibility. If we reduce our release cadence in the future, we may revisit this policy as well.
When directly applying a newer Antrea YAML manifest, as provided for each release, there is no guarantee that the Antrea Controller will be upgraded first. In practice, the Controller would be upgraded simultaneously with the first Agent(s) to be upgraded by the rolling update of the Agent DaemonSet. This may create some transient issues and compromise the "graceful" upgrade. For upgrade scenarios, we therefore recommend that you "split-up" the manifest to ensure that the Controller is upgraded first.
Supported K8s versions
Each Antrea minor release should support maintained K8s releases at the time of release (3 up to K8s 1.19, 4 after that). For example, at the time that Antrea 0.10 was released, the latest K8s version was 1.19; as a result we guarantee that 0.10 supports at least 1.19, 1.18 and 1.17 (in practice it also supports K8s 1.16).
In addition, we strive to support the K8s versions used by default in cloud-managed K8s services ( EKS, AKS and GKE regular channel).
Deprecation policies
Prometheus metrics deprecation policy
Antrea follows a similar policy as Kubernetes for metrics deprecation.
Alpha metrics have no stability guarantees; as such they can be modified or deleted at any time.
Stable metrics are guaranteed to not change; specifically, stability means:
- the metric itself will not be renamed
- the type of metric will not be modified
Eventually, even a stable metric can be deleted. In this case, the metric must be marked as deprecated first and the metric must stay deprecated for at least one minor release. The CHANGELOG must announce both metric deprecations and metric deletions.
Before deprecation:
# HELP some_counter this counts things
# TYPE some_counter counter
some_counter 0
After deprecation:
# HELP some_counter (Deprecated since 0.10.0) this counts things
# TYPE some_counter counter
some_counter 0
In the future, we may introduce the same concept of hidden metric as K8s, as an additional part of the metric lifecyle.
APIs deprecation policy
The Antrea APIs are built using K8s (they are a combination of CustomResourceDefinitions and aggregation layer APIServices) and we follow the same versioning scheme as the K8s APIs and the same deprecation policy.
Other than the most recent API versions in each track, older API versions must be supported after their announced deprecation for a duration of no less than:
- GA: 12 months
- Beta: 9 months
- Alpha: N/A (can be removed immediately)
This also applies to the controlplane
API. In particular, introduction and
removal of new versions for this API must respect the
"graceful" upgrade
guarantee. The controlplane
(which is exposed using the aggregation layer) is often referred to as an
"internal" API as it is used by the Antrea components to communicate with each
other, and is usually not consummed by end users, e.g. cluster admins. However,
this API may also be used for integration with other software, which is why we
abide to the same deprecation policy as for other more "user-facing" APIs
(e.g. Antrea-native policy CRDs).
K8s has a moratorium on the removal of API object versions that have been persisted to storage. At the moment, none of Antrea APIServices (which use the aggregation layer) persist objects to storage. So the only objects we need to worry about are CustomResources, which are persisted by the K8s apiserver. For them, we adopt the following rules:
- Alpha API versions may be removed at any time.
- The
field must be used for CRDs to indicate that a particular version of the resource has been deprecated. - Beta and GA API versions must be supported after deprecation for the respective durations stipulated above before they can be removed.
- For deprecated Beta and GA API versions, a conversion webhook must be provided along with each Antrea release, until the API version is removed altogether.
Introducing new API resources
Introducing new CRDs
Starting with Antrea v1.0, all Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) for Antrea are
defined in the same API group, crd.antrea.io
, and all CRDs in this group are
versioned individually. For example, at the time of writing this (v1.3 release
timeframe), the Antrea CRDs include:
- etc.
Notice how 2 versions of ClusterGroup
are supported: the one in
was introduced in v1.0, and is being deprecated as it
was replaced by the one in crd.antrea.io/v1alpha3
, introduced in v1.1.
When introducing a new version of a CRD, the API deprecation policy should be followed.
When introducing a CRD, the following rule should be followed in order to avoid
potential dependency cyles (and thus import cycles in Go): if the CRD depends on
other object types spread across potentially different versions of
, the CRD should be defined in a group version greater or equal
to all of these versions. For example, if we want to introduce a new CRD which
depends on types v1alpha1.X
and v1alpha2.Y
, it needs to go into v1alpha2
or a more recent version of crd.antrea.io
. As a rule it should probably go
into v1alpha2
unless it is closely related to other CRDs in a later version,
in which case it can be defined alongside these CRDs, in order to avoid user
If a new CRD does not have dependencies and is not closely related to an
existing CRD, it will typically be defined in v1alpha1
. In some rare cases, a
CRD can be defined in v1beta1
directly if there is enough confidence in the
stability of the API.


text:
I hope you enjoy your time here. We're generally a pretty accepting community of nice people, but bear in mind that like all internet forums, ours comes with a set of rules and guidelines that we expect you to stick to. If you don't stick to the rules, you're doing more than annoying the moderators; you're also doing things that most people really don't like seeing. Not all rules come with the same penalties, which is why they're sorted into the following three helpful categories: Mandatory, Minor, and Guidelines. These rules generally also apply to our other online presences, such as the Official ZDoom Discord and the IRC channel on Espernet.
Note that, in the interest of preventing spammers, your first post will need to be approved by a moderator before it will be visible on the forum. If you haven't had your post approved in a while, contact one of us. More information can be found in this announcement thread.
But before we get into the main rules, let's go over a special section:
Spoiler: Not Safe For Work/18+ Content Rules
Spoiler: Mandatory Community Rules - These absolutely will get you warned or banned.
Spoiler: Minor Community Rules - These may result in warnings, but only rarely bans.
Spoiler: General Community Guidelines - It's rare to get official warnings for these, but please mind your manners.Rules and hints regarding images, project thumbnails, and Youtube videos have been moved to their own topic.
I know it's confusing, but due to some disagreements with Wikia, there are TWO Doom Wikis. The old one that we used to use was located at Wikia, and is probably the one you're going to see in Google search results, but this is the wrong one. The real Doom Wiki - the one that is still being updated by the community - is located at http://doomwiki.org. The old Wikia wiki only continues to exist because Wikia management refuses to let us remove it. When linking to the Doom Wiki, make sure to use the correct link. If you see any links to the OLD Doom Wiki, let a moderator know and we can edit the post to correct the link.
If you have suggestions for rules to be added, send them in. Happy Posting, and feel free to contact me or any other staff member with any questions.
Staff of the ZDoom Forums
- Rachael - Currently in charge of the website, taking over for Randi.
- Graf Zahl - In charge of organizing development, head of the GZDoom and Raze projects.
- wildweasel - Forum Administrator. Contact if you need advanced maintenance done to a forum account.
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- Randi - Our Benefactor, creator and founder of ZDoom itself, we would not be here otherwise.
- cutmanmike
- Bio Hazard
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text:
Dundas BI is business intelligence (BI) and data visualization software that includes customizable dashboards, reporting and visual data analytics. According to the vendor, their solution is the most flexible BI platform, with seamless integration into the user's business applications, allowing them to deliver real-time visual access and analytics for their data, information and results for better decisions and faster insights.
Show Unsupported Features
Dundas BI Features
BI Platform features
- Administration via Web Interface
- Live Connection to External Data
- Snapshot of External Data
- In-memory data model
- OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
- ROLAP (SQL-layer querying)
- Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
- Data warehouse / dictionary layer
- ETL Capability
- ETL Scheduler
Supported Data Sources Features
Data sources that can be consumed by the application.
- MS Excel Workbooks
- Text Files (CSV, etc)
- Oracle
- MS SQL Server
- Postgres
- MySQL
- Cloudera Hadoop
- Hortonworks Hadoop
- EMC Greenplum
- HP Vertica
- ParAccel
- SAP Hana
- Teradata
- Sage 500
- Salesforce
- Google Analytics
BI Standard Reporting Features
Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.
- Pixel Perfect reports
- Customizable dashboards
- Report Formatting Templates
Ad-hoc Reporting Features
Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.
- Drill-down analysis
- Formatting capabilities
- Predictive modeling
- Integration with R or other statistical packages
- Report sharing and collaboration
Report Output and Scheduling Features
Ability to schedule and manager report output.
- Publish to Web
- Publish to PDF
- Output Raw Supporting Data
- Report Versioning
- Report Delivery Scheduling
Data Discovery and Visualization Features
Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for pattern and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- Predictive Analytics
- Integration with R or other statistical packages
Access Control and Security Features
Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.
- Multi-User Support (named login)
- Role-Based Security Model
- Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- Report-Level Access Control
- Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
- Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
Mobile Capabilities Features
Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
- Responsive Design for Web Access
- Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Additional Features
- Customizable Data Visualizations, Dashboards and Reporting
- Visual Interactive Data Analytics
- Browser-based, single, unified experience across all data sources and all devices
- Embeddable BI with seamless integration
- One Flexible Platform


text:
Trauma Surgeon Lucy Kornblith, M.D. Recipient of (EAST) Trauma Research Scholarship
Trauma Surgeon Lucy Kornblith, M.D. has been awarded the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma (EAST) Trauma Research Scholarship to study post-injury platelet biology. Dr. Kornblith is a graduate of the UCSF General Surgery Residency Program and subsequently completed fellowships in Surgical Critical Care and Trauma Surgery, and Trauma and Emergency Care at UCSF. She will be joining the UCSF General Surgery Faculty August 1, 2018 and will be based at Zuckerberg San Francisco General.
Dr. Kornblith described how this award is advancing her career aspirations as an academic surgeon in the field of trauma:
My ultimate career goal is to become an independently funded trauma surgeon-scientist. The EAST Research Scholarship gives me the opportunity to perform critical preliminary investigations toward identifying the mechanistic role of platelets and platelet-endothelial interactions in trauma-induced coagulopathy. In an atmosphere of scarce funding opportunities, this scholarship will allow me to build a scientific foundation upon which I can study post-injury platelet biology to ultimately reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with post-injury hemorrhage through novel platelet-based therapies.
Dr. Lucy Zumwinkle Kornblith: Recipient of the 2018 EAST Trauma Research Scholarship (Official Announcement)