If you only know the musical, you may know that the student rebels meet at the “ABC Café.” The café is actually called the Café Musain, and they are officially the Society of the Friends of the ABC (ostensibly promoting children’s education), because in French, “ABC” sounds like “abaissé” — the underdog.

In the novel, the band of students really are individual characters — not just Enjolras the Leader, Grantaire the Drunk, Marius the Lovestruck and a bunch of indistinguishable backup students.

Enjolras is logic, utterly focused on justice to the exclusion of everything else.

Combeferre is philosophy, broad-minded, scientifically curious, in tune with the world and its people.

Enjolras and Jean Prouvaire are both rich, only children.

Feuilly, “Being an orphan he had adopted mankind as his parents.” He’s particularly incensed by and obsessed with the First Partition of Poland, finding one way or another to blame it for all of the modern world’s political ills.

Courfeyrac is described as Felix Tholomyès (Fantine’s ex-boyfriend) if he’d been “a decent young man.” Pander vs paladin.

Bahorel is “a creature of good intentions” but “a born agitator: that is to say, he enjoyed nothing more than a quarrel except a rebellion, and nothing more than a rebellion, except a revolution.” He hates lawyers despite going to law school. Or at least being enrolled in it. He’s not in the stage musical, or at least not mentioned by name, though he is credited in the movie.

Lesgles’ family name was officially changed to L’Aigle by Louis XVIII (being a law student, this makes him a legal eagle — the pun isn’t pointed out, so I don’t know if it works in French too or if it’s a coincidence), though his friends call him Bossuet. He’s known for being unlucky.

Joly is a medical student and a hypochondriac (but I repeat myself).

Grantaire is a hipster (before hipsters were uncool). He’s skeptical of everything, has a wide knowledge of Paris, and “lived in irony.” Always drunk, womanizing, dismissive of everything. He was probably into rebellion back in the day, but now everyone’s into it. Even so, he loves Enjolras and insists on following the group around. (Enjolras is not impressed.)

Marius gets involved by accident: L’Aigle answered roll call for him on a whim in class one day (and was himself dropped from the rolls as a result). He spots Marius’ cab a few days later (as he’s moving out), recognizes the name on his luggage, and strikes up a conversation. Courfeyrac recommends the hotel where he’s staying, and a few days later invites him to a meeting.

Marius mostly listens for a while, but it’s a huge change from the royalist salons he went to with his grandfather. Nothing is sacred, and they discuss a wide range of ideas.

One night, Grantaire rambles about how everything sucks while everyone else is involved in their own conversations: playwriting, dating advice, mythology, politics. Courfeyrac argues against half-measures, saying “Rights must be whole or they are nothing.”

Whoa — don’t disparage Napoleon in front of Marius.

Marius: Corsica made France great. Enjolras: “France did not need Corsica to make her great. She is great because she is France.”

Marius goes on a tear about Napoleon. What could possibly be greater than to follow such a man? Combeferre replies: “To be free.”

Feeling out of place, Marius stops going. Having no income, he sells his few possessions, leaves the hotel, and, too proud to accept charity from his grandfather, declines the allowance that his aunt tries to send him.

Pages covered: 555-583. Image by Jeanniot from an unidentified edition of Les Misérables, via this fantastic illustration gallery. If you want to follow only this series, you can do so at ReReadingLesMis.tumblr.com or Follow @ReadingLesMis.

This post is part of the thread: Re-Reading Les Mis – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

The post Reading Les Mis Part 15: Get to Know Your ABCs appeared first on K-Squared Ramblings.

I tested it by deliberately hitting a non-existent page, and was dismayed to find that Apache logged the hit as 200 (OK).

Crap! a WordPress update must have broken 404 handling! How long had this been going on? I’d better manually insert a header in the 404 page!

That seemed to work, as far as Chrome’s Developer Tools and curl -I were concerned. I didn’t have time to follow up on the logs right away, so I checked back later…and the logs still showed 200 OK, not 404.

WTF?

It turned out that, when served through WordPress, Apache was sending a 404 code to the browser but logging a 200.

Probably a plugin, right?

Not so. I installed a fresh copy of WordPress on a test site and discovered something interesting: 404 codes were logged correctly when using the default /?p=123 permalink structure, but if I changed it to anything readable like /yyyy/title or even /title, the problem recurred.

A little more investigation: I skipped WordPress entirely and just hit a PHP page that served up a 404. When I hit it directly, it logged correctly. But when I used WordPress’ mod_rewrite rules to send a hit to that page, it logged a 200.

So clearly, it was something about mod_rewrite. I don’t run my own Apache server these days (my department at work is mainly a Windows shop), but I was pretty sure it didn’t work that way back when I did.

So I did some testing of different configurations at home and on my webhost. Direct hits always logged the correct status, but with a rewrite rule, here’s what I found:

FastCGI & CGI on DreamHost show 200/404.
mod_php on home box shows 404/404.
mod_php on DreamHost shows… 200/404.

At this point I figured there was no point setting up a CGI or FastCGI-based PHP environment on my home box, because it was clearly something about Dreamhost’s Apache configuration.

It does log correctly if you use ErrorDocument directive to point 404 to a PHP script. But IMO that’s abusing the error handler mechanism to do something it wasn’t meant for. (Not that I haven’t done it myself, but only on older IIS servers where ISAPI Rewrite and URL Rewrite weren’t available.)

I’ve added a custom logging snippet to my WordPress 404 page. There are other ways I can capture the data, but that seemed like the least overhead for now.

The post Weird 404 logging error with PHP and mod_rewrite on DreamHost appeared first on K-Squared Ramblings.

• Scheherazade
• Directorate
• Chautauqua
• Slashdot (yes, really!)
• Affiliate
• Showstopper
• Qualifier

The post Curse Thee, Auto-Correct! appeared first on K-Squared Ramblings.

Killing time with my Android phone felt a bit weird. If I hadn’t needed to stay close to the Genius Bar I could have at least browsed the gadgets and played with an iPad or a newer laptop with a Retina display, or something. There’s only so long you can spend looking at boxes of headphones and cases for devices you don’t own. I briefly considered reading the new Flash comic book I’d picked up earlier in the day, but thought to myself, “Nah, I bet this isn’t supported here.”

Then I saw this on the wall:

Well then, I guess it’s supported after all!

The post Apple: Supported After All appeared first on K-Squared Ramblings.

After meeting Gavroche, we’re told that we will learn about Marius Pontmercy. As it happens, though, we’re instead introduced to Monsieur Gillenormand, an old upper-middle-class man of 90. He’s one of those people who are interesting because of their age, and “peculiar because whereas they were once like everyone else they are now like no one else.”

Still in perfect health, he has two emotional states: happy/mocking, and furious. He loves to tell story of how he escaped the Revolution with his head intact, but for once Hugo doesn’t relate the tale to the reader. He hates the Revolution, the Republic and the Empire, and he hates that his son-in-law fought for Napoleon.

Marius’ aunt is so prude that she’s haunted by the memory that a man once saw her garter.

“Anyone walking through the little town of Vernon in those days, and crossing the beautiful stone bridge which, let us hope, will soon be replaced by some hideous construction of cables and girders…”

Georges Pontmercy’s distinguished military career includes one battle alongside Victor Hugo’s uncle. For someone who doesn’t like to speak of himself, he sure sneaks in a lot of references to “the present writer.”

Upon Marius’ mother’s death, Gillenormand demands custody from his father under threat of disinheriting the boy. He agrees, but every few months visits Paris to sneakily steal a glimpse of his son. Both Marius and Cosette are given up by a single parent for their own good.

M. Gillenormand is part of a salon of mostly returned aristocrats, described as being in their 25th year of adolescence. This is the only real experience of the outside world that young Marius gets.

Ultraism (n): To be so vehemently for something as to be in fact against it.

Nice. After years of intercepting his letters and telling Marius that his father is a no-good brigand, M. Gillenormand finally tells him to go see him…on his deathbed. Marius arrives too late. He’s unmoved, however, having believed himself abandoned rather than surrendered.

Not long afterward he has a chance meeting with one of his father’s friends who remarked on his surreptitious visits, and Marius realizes (1) he’s been lied to, and (2) he’s been wholly unfair to his father. He starts researching, and changes his opinions not only of his father, but of Napoleon and politics in general. Because he was so sheltered and shown only the negative side, he ends up being the more strongly for his father, the Republic, the and the Empire. It’s the zeal of the convert. “What was right seems wrong, and what was wrong seems right.”

Nowadays you might call him radicalized.

“Théodule [Marius' cousin] grinned the grin of a pickpocket commended for honesty.”

They finally fall out when Gillenormand finds out that Marius has been visiting his father’s grave and not just sneaking out to see some girl. Next, in Part 15, Marius gets to know some ABCs. Students, that is.

Pages covered: 512-554. If you want to follow only this series, you can do so at ReReadingLesMis.tumblr.com or Follow @ReadingLesMis.

This post is part of the thread: Re-Reading Les Mis – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

The post Reading Les Mis Part 14: Meeting Marius appeared first on K-Squared Ramblings.

I’m a bit late to the Shakespeare love floating around online today, but I did track down a few pictures from a 1999 trip to London. I had a few days at the end of a tour to wander around, and having just graduated with a drama degree, I had to visit the reconstructed Globe Theatre. I mean, seriously: Shakespeare.

I also stopped by the Criterion Theatre, where the RSC was presenting — no, the other RSC: The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s “Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).

One of these days I’ll track down the negatives and get a better scan.

The post Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre appeared first on K-Squared Ramblings.

Now that Valjean and Cosette are safely established at the convent, we move on to “Part Three: Marius” and jump ahead several years.

Of course, we don’t start with Marius. Just as “Part One: Fantine” opened with the Bishop and “Part Two: Cosette” opened with the Battle of Waterloo, this section starts with street urchins. Marius isn’t even one of them.

Paris has the best street urchins, or at least they did back in the good old days. Victor Hugo presents a fascinating, idealized description of the typical Paris urchin, then goes on to present the urchin as a microcosm of Paris, which he sees as a microcosm of — and the center of — the world. Let’s just say this won’t be the last time Hugo expounds on the wonders of Paris.

Harpers Ferry and John Brown are mentioned in a list of leaders and movements inspired by the revolutionary spirit of Paris. I remember reading that the novel was popular among Confederate soldiers (sometimes known as Lee’s Miserables), but the rare references to the US fall into two categories: historical “Yay revolution!” or contemporary “Boo slavery!”

There’s a lot of talk about the transition between city and country, in-between places that are both but neither (briefly discussed in other chapters). That’s something I’m not super-familiar with, having grown up in southern California in the 1980s. The sprawling suburbs stopped abruptly at a big industrial farm (most of which is gone now), and if we went hiking or camping, we drove from solid city to solid country, and skipped right past the transitional areas.

Anyway, after a while we get a brief introduction to Gavroche, mostly relying on the description of the standard urchin. He occasionally visits his family, who don’t really care for or about him… in the same dreary Paris tenement where Valjean first hid out with Cosette. The family name is given as Jondrette, but there are a few hints to suggest who they really are. (I find it interesting that in the musical, Gavroche re-introduces the Thénardiers after the time jump, given that in the book he’s part of the family, if only by birth.)

Adding to the coincidences: Their next door neighbor is a penniless student named Marius, whom we’re told will be the next subject of concern. Except that he isn’t. The next chapter is about Marius’ grandfather.

Pages covered: 495-511. Image of Gavroche “after an original by Émile Bayard,” from an unidentified edition of Les Misérables, via this fantastic illustration gallery. If you want to follow only this series, you can do so at ReReadingLesMis.tumblr.com or Follow @ReadingLesMis.

This post is part of the thread: Re-Reading Les Mis – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

The post Reading Les Mis Part 13: Paris Has the Best Street Urchins appeared first on K-Squared Ramblings.

WonderCon 2013 returned to Anaheim after last year’s experiment, and the event felt more solid this year. As much as I hope they’ll be able to return to San Francisco, they’ve shown that they can put on a really good convention in Anaheim as well.

The Anaheim Venue

Since last year, the Anaheim Convention Center has replaced a long driveway between hotels with an extended pedestrian area, with fountains at either end. This turned out to be fantastic for the convention, because it gave people a place to hang out, visit, hold photo shoots, and more. This was also where five food trucks set up shop to handle the lunch rush, which added not just supply but more variety. Compare to San Diego, where most exits from the convention center make you cross a driveway, a major street, and two sets of railroad tracks, one for freight and one for the trolley, before you get to any sort of open space, and even that has been co-opted by off-site events.

Another difference from San Diego: The sections of the main hall are separated by permanent walls, including the food courts…and as I discovered on Friday, an atrium. That atrium was a bit of a shock the first time I walked into it, because it gave me an overwhelming sense of deja vu, like I’d just walked out of WonderCon 2013 and into WorldCon 1996. I could swear it’s left over from before the major remodeling they did in the late 1990s.

The separation wasn’t as much of a problem as I’d expected, though, as they were able to divide up the halls thematically. Hall A was mostly dealers, while the larger Hall B featured exhibits, publishers, artists and so forth. The only issue was the presence of an ice cream stand in the bottleneck, which wasn’t a problem in itself so much as it encouraged you to buy ice cream on the way to the dealer’s area.

Check-In

I was pleasantly surprised that they allowed me to pick up Katie’s Saturday badge along with both of my own badges on Friday morning. San Diego has gotten very strict about badge pick-up, and even a few years ago at WonderCon, if you had multiple 1-day badges you had to pick them up each day.

Around WonderCon

Like last year, I went solo on Friday and we both went on Saturday. This time, though, we didn’t come back Sunday with our two-year-old, now that we know there isn’t really much of anything aimed at kids that young.

Unlike last year, Friday didn’t feel light at all. In fact, I went by to check on the line for exclusives at the Graphitti booth and every time I checked on Friday, it was halfway down the hall or longer. (By Saturday afternoon, though, the line was gone and they hadn’t run out.) Neither day even approached SDCC-level panic-inducing crowding, though, which I very much appreciated.

Speaking of the Graphitti line, you can see it in the background of this shot of people playing the Injustice: Gods Among us demo at the DC Comics booth.

Neither of us bought much this year, though I was tempted to pick up another volume of Absolute Sandman. And I find it hilarious that Pop Funko actually has a Ned Stark figure. My first thought (terrible, I know): Does the head come off?

I did, however, check out some old Silver Age Flash comics. I’m more of a reader than a collector (I collect so that I can re-read), and I picked up the early stories in the Flash Archives reprints, and the not-quite-so-early stories in the cheapest, most beat-up copies that were still readable. But there’s still something about holding a well-preserved copy of a landmark issue.

I also tried to catch Flash co-writer Brian Buccellato, but he wasn’t at his table when I went by.

I didn’t notice any particular theme overwhelming the costumes, though I’ve noticed Captain America and Iron Man have become a lot more popular over the last few years. Disney Princesses, and riffs on the characters, also seem to be popular at all the Anaheim cons I’ve been to — location, I’m sure. My favorite variation was the pair dressed as Jedi Rapunzel and Poca-Han-tas.

There were some incredible Game of Thrones cosplayers (not surprising, given the Season 3 premiere was coming up on Sunday), including the guy on the right who actually looks like the actor who plays Littlefinger.

About a half hour into the first day of the con, my camera broke. I’m still not sure what went wrong, but it refused to focus or turn off. I was eventually able to reset it, but it would consistently focus way too close unless I forced it into another mode. Oddly enough, setting it to “take a picture of my food” mode worked best for scenic shots. Odder still, the problem cleared up the next day.

That meant that I used my phone’s camera a lot more than usual on Friday, which in turn meant more photos on Instagram. It also meant more battery drain, especially with the two panels I live-tweeted. Fortunately, I’d just changed a lot of settings to cut down on battery use, and the phone actually lasted longer than it used to on a typical workday. Score!

Panels

For the most part, they seemed to have matched room sizes to audiences fairly well (at least for the events I tried to go to). I only really had trouble getting into one panel, and I had arrived late for that anyway.

I listened to a discussion on keeping iconic characters fresh, which The Beat reports on better than I could. Several items stood out for me:

• J.M. DeMatteis remarked that he didn’t think there were stale characters, only stale interpretations.
• Mark Waid pointed out that 20 years ago no one would have thought that Green Arrow would have his own successful TV show.
• Some elements are only iconic because of their weight of history – ex. Superman’s trunks, the name “Spider-Man,” etc. If someone were to create those characters now, people would think they were silly, and you’d have an uphill battle to sell them.

On that last note, I remember thinking the same thing about the title “The Empire Strikes Back” when “The Phantom Menace” was announced and everyone was complaining about the title. Really, the only good Star Wars episode titles are “Return of the Jedi” and “Revenge of the Sith.”

We were both looking forward to the Animaniacs 20th Anniversary (I feel old now) event Saturday evening. Sadly, it was canceled. Worse, this wasn’t communicated to the staff at the room door. Katie heard a rumor of its cancellation (she was wearing an Animaniacs T-shirt, and someone figured she might know), so we went to the door, and it wasn’t on the room schedule…but usually, cancellations are printed and marked as canceled. We asked, and were told, no, it’s just been postponed. So we came back later, and found out no, it was canceled.

OK bye.

Katie attended some of the more serious discussions on Saturday, including one on women in media and body image (where she got to commiserate with Adrianne Curry on having size 11 feet), and one on LGBT subtext. I went to a panel on storytelling across different media, which was sort of serious, but also the special “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll” edition of Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics slideshow, and I passed up the Superman Unbound screening to see…

Zombie Law!

Then there was the panel hosted by the authors of Law and the Multiverse and Broadcast Thought about the legal side of a zombie apocalypse. Think about it: Are zombies technically alive or dead? If they’re alive, they’re humans suffering from a mentally-impairing disease. If they’re dead, we have laws about treatment of human remains.

It culminated in a mock trial. It was the sanity phase of a murder trial in which the killer had been a (curable) zombie at the time the police discovered the body, but who had been lucid a few hours earlier…and had motive for murder. It all came down to whether the defendant had become a zombie before or after the killing, and thus whether he was in his right mind and could be held responsible for his actions, or not guilty by reason of insanity. The audience voted not guilty, though they pointed out in a real trial the jury would have to be unanimous.

One of the panelists (I think it was Vasilis Pozios) remarked, “You guys just sat through a mock trial about zombies with real doctors and lawyers. You have serious geek cred.”

Parking Pandemonium

Parking was a problem again, and while I never had to park as far out as the stadium (Garden Walk is at least within walking distance), I was infuriated by the poor signage on Saturday. After spending an excruciatingly long time waiting to turn right onto Harbor, I was confronted with a sign saying to make a U-turn and then turn back onto Katella going the same way I’d been going before. I could have saved 10 minutes or more of waiting in traffic by just going straight through.

A friend of mine thought it odd that WonderCon should have so much trouble with parking when it’s smaller than Anime Expo, which he told me used to take up the entire convention center and still managed with just the local parking structure. I did some digging, and it turns out that while AX used more floor space, attendance was comparable or lower when they were in Anaheim. AX pulled in 40,000 people in 2006, the last year they were here, up from 33K the year before. I can’t find WonderCon estimates for this year or last, but they had 39K in 2010 and more in 2011. Of course, those were both in San Francisco. Maybe anime fans carpool more? Or parking availability has changed since 2006?

Either way, if parking melts down at 40K, imagine the nightmare of parking Comic-Con International’s 140K+ attendees. I suppose it won’t be quite so bad — I’d bet a higher percentage of people at CCI are traveling from out of town, which means they’ll be parked in hotel lots or coming from the airport by shuttle or taxi.

WonderCon ran the weekend of March 29-31, 2013. I attended by myself on Friday and we both went on Saturday. Check out the rest of my photos from WonderCon at Flickr.

The post A Weekend at WonderCon 2013 in Anaheim appeared first on K-Squared Ramblings.

Previously: Valjean and Cosette fled Javert and landed in a convent garden. Then we learned all about the convent’s history.

Fauchelevent turns out to be a former legal clerk. Then he took a cart to the knee.

He figures he can come up with a cover story for Jean Valjean and Cosette to stay, but the hard part is sneaking them out again so they can be seen coming through the front door. Cosette can fit in a basket, but Valjean?

Having established himself as indispensable but harmless over the last two years, playing dumb while observing everything, Fauchelevent rambles to the prioress about how he’s getting old, the garden’s so big, and could he maybe trouble them to let his brother come to assist him? Oh, and he has a granddaughter who might attend the school, and who knows, one day she might choose to join their order?

One of the nuns has just died, her final wishes to be buried in the vaults beneath the convent. Of course, city regulations require the dead to be buried in an off-site cemetery, which means they’ll be sending the coffin out without a body. Hmmm…

The nun, upset at the city’s usurpation of a spiritual matter, goes on a rant about secular vs religious authority, and even Hugo remarks that she’s going on a tear.

Fauchelevent comes to Valjean with two problems: getting Valjean out, and getting the empty coffin out. If only he had another body to put in it…. Shrewd as he is, the idea of smuggling Valjean out in the coffin doesn’t occur to him. It literally is inconceivable. To Jean Valjean, on the other hand, an ex-convict with three escapes behind him, it’s easy to contemplate. He’s seen worse.

Even long-winded Victor Hugo knows if you describe a plan in detail, you don’t need to portray the execution of it until the point where it goes off the rails. In this case, the grave digger Fauchelevent had planned to get drunk so he could sneak Valjean out of the coffin turns out to be dead. The new guy? Teetotaler.

Hugo is actually having fun with the quirks of this new gravedigger, who is a failed writer but still works as a scribe for illiterate clients. Love letters by day, graves by night. As Valjean gets buried alive, the scene above the grave is actually comic.

By the time Fauchelevent chases the new guy off and gets down to open the coffin, Valjean has fainted. Fauvent is convinced Valjean has suffocated, and laments at length about this cruel trick of fate. Then Valjean opens his eyes. Commence freaking out.

As the new assistant gardener, Valjean compares the nuns’ life in the convent with the prison life he knew — oddly similar, but on one hand voluntary austerity and deprivation leading to greater virtue and on the other hand enforced, leading to hatred, and finds himself moved to humility.

That wraps up Part Two: Cosette. Next up is the jump forward in time to 1832.

Pages covered: 451-491. Image of the grave situation by de Neuville from an unidentified edition of Les Misérables, via this fantastic illustration gallery. If you want to follow only this series, you can do so at ReReadingLesMis.tumblr.com. Next up: The urchins of Paris. Follow @ReadingLesMis

This post is part of the thread: Re-Reading Les Mis – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

The post Reading Les Mis Part 12: Buried Alive! appeared first on K-Squared Ramblings.

Wait, “Pumkin” seeds? No, I don’t want that!

(I’ve recently become acquainted with Pumkin because some of their educational videos are included with Zoodles, the “kid mode” app I use to keep my two-year-old son from tapping on ads to see what they do and buying downloadable content while using the tablet.)

The post “Pumkin” Seeds appeared first on K-Squared Ramblings.