
The girl with the ANSI tattoo - ocirion
http://oracle-wtf.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/girl-with-ansi-tattoo.html
======
wpietri
Please nobody let Hollywood see this blog.

Somebody's going to say, "Man, we went to all that trouble to make it look
realistic. But it doesn't work. Fuck it. Bring back the guy who did the
interfaces for Jurassic Park. And the guy who writes Wesley Crusher's dialog."

\---

Update: I love that my comment mocking excess nitpicking now has triggered
triple-redundant nitpicking.

~~~
pyre

      > interfaces for Jurassic Park
    

Replace Jurassic Park with "Operation Swordfish" or "Hackers," and you might
be on to something. Especially since the Jurassic Park interface was a real
program that actually existed.

~~~
adorton
Hackers is funny, but I watched it recently and was surprised at the realistic
touches. In one scene, a character is showing off his "hacking" books - which
included the dragon book, and a Unix book I believe is real.

~~~
blhack
THANK YOU

This movie gets so much completely unnecessary hatred. Yeah, it's a joke, but
there is plenty of little nods to "real" culture in there. To me it has always
been pretty obvious that it was supposed to be silly, but that the people
making it knew what they were doing.

I'm pretty sure most of the books from that scene were actually real books.

~~~
mindcrime
I'd have to watch it again to be 100% sure, but - going from memory - I
believe every single book mentioned in that scene was real. Certainly the
"pink shirt book" (IBM Guide to PCs) is real, as is the Dragon book (compiler
theory) and the "Rainbow books".

~~~
taejo
The pink-shirt book is not the IBM Guide to PCs, but "The Peter Norton
Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC". Incidentally, the _blue_ -shirt book
("Peter Norton's DOS Guide") was the book that turned me into a computer nerd
:)

~~~
mindcrime
_The pink-shirt book is not the IBM Guide to PCs, but "The Peter Norton
Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC"._

Right, that's the one I was thinking about. It definitely stands out because
of the pink shirt on the cover. So they got the exact title wrong (or I just
mis-remembered what they called it in the movie), but still... that scene was
fairly accurate for a hollywood movie involving computers. :-)

------
sophacles
I really don't understand why people need to nitpick stuff like this. I mean,
it's a movie -- the point is to tell a story not impart technical knowledge.
Yeah, the query someone came up with on the fly isn't perfect, we get it, but
in reality, this happens at the sql command line all the freaking time, it's a
one-off, who cares? And yeah, the returned results are a bit incorrect for the
query, but given that a bunch of freeze frame work had to be done to determine
this, it seems like a pointless nitpick. Why not instead applaud the film-
makers for actually using shockingly (for hollywood) real stuff.

Like I said, the point of movies is to tell a story. Sometimes this means
glossing over bits, getting details wrong, or even presenting things out of
order, because the important part is he plot. We all do this when we tell
stories, it's human nature. We want to convey how
awesome/important/sad/happy/whatever a moment was, and to do that we need to
properly contextualize the emotion and key bits, not every detail. When the
makers of a fictional story try to get largely unimportant details right, they
are showing dedication to craft, not asking for technical advice.

Maybe it's because I'm ramping my team up for demo season, where I have to
remind them and the researchers they work with that the grant reviewers
haven't spend the last 6 months thinking real hard about the problem, and
aren't as expert in the sub-field/topics as we are (they are pretty smart
competent people, but they gave us money to do the work because presumably we
know more about it than they do...). To do a demo and to make a movie are very
similar. You need to convey the importance of the work, without making bogus
claims (in demos about research, in movies its about plot breaking), and
convey the context in which it can be understood. Sometimes this means leaving
out or glossing over really cool technical stuff, because it doesn't actually
matter to the bigger picture. Sometimes it means saying "this part is
simulated with these assumptions because we don't know yet, or it still needs
more reseach, but if true, it shows our point nicely". Sometimes it means
showing things happen at 10x or .1x real time, because that is how you tell
the story. It isn't lying or being stupid, it is getting points across.

Well anyway, that turned into a rant. TL;DR - Detail are not the point of
movies, they are just a vehicle to help the point, we should applaud careful
attention to them, not nitpick.

~~~
mibbitier
Thing is, if you're "good" at something, and a movie gets it wrong, it can
ruin the movie for you.

My pet hate is people playing the piano, but playing the wrong notes (While
the soundtrack is playing something different).

~~~
nhebb
Exactly. My pet peeve is military depictions in movies. I can't recall a movie
that's gotten even the basics right. I may be nitpicking, but it does detract
from the viewing experience.

~~~
myko
Black Hawk Down, Jarhead come to mind as modern examples of basically correct
(though the behavior of some of the Delta force in BHD is overly exaggerated).

~~~
nhebb
> Black Hawk Down

Yeah, that was a good movie, but Ridley Scott is so much better than most
Hollywood directors that it's not a fair comparison. (Never saw Jarhead)

------
JamisonM
> Shocked moviegoers will have been left wondering > why a genius-level hacker
> would outer-join to the > Victims and Keywords tables only to use literal-
> text > filter predicates that defeat the outer joins, > whether MySQL has a
> LIKE operator, and why none > of the victims' initials are 'R L'.

For the record since you never see the entire query so it is likely that the
SQL is not as wrong as the author suggests. There is an extensive use of ORs
in the query so the conditions that are said to defeat the outer joins are not
mandatory and the 'R' and 'L' checks are clearly not required to pass. I think
it is pretty good representation of how you might build up query from scratch,
piling up conditions in OR clauses to finally get what you want. Yes, provided
the table that starts with V is aliased as v the v.SEX condition does defeat
the outer join, but that might be exactly the sort of thing you would stick in
after you had already established a working FROM clause and not bother
changing the outer to an inner. Solving the case was after all by definition a
one-off.

I enjoyed this article because it points out an occasion where a movie really
did try to get it right. Someone who knows something about databases had to
have made those screens up.

------
nthitz
In the original Swedish version she did it with MongoDB!

~~~
rubyrescue
the original swedish version would have been Erlang/OTP running mnesia.

~~~
strictfp
MySql also has swedish roots!

------
klez
I'm happy that, finally, people are not shoving 'movie-os' in computer scenes
anymore.

The first time I saw real stuff in movies was in Antitrust, then in Tron:
Legacy and finally here.

~~~
jeffool
The Social Network was good about it. Someone online actually reedited the
scene where he was grabbing images from frat sites and edited in scenes from
other films, like Hacker's "virtual skyscrapers", and suddenly it was like a
real Hollywood film again!

~~~
ralfd
We recognize when movies dumb computer stuff down, but the truth is they do it
always!

Imagine sitting beside a big horse nerd and every time a horse is on the
screen and makes this typical horse noise they would comment "the horse didn't
make the sound" or white walkers are killing the night watch behind the wall
and "this horse is not really frightened but relaxed and listens curiously" or
every time there is a mighty black Frisian horse in a movie, which believe me
hey are a lot!, they would comment how wrong and stupid it is that
Zorro/Prince of Persia/the Spartans are riding Frisians.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I have a friend who is a competitive target shooter, and he's always
complaining that the shell casings are the wrong size during shootouts.

Of course now he's got me doing it too...

~~~
scott_s
Movies always abuse the gun-cocking sound, and/or have characters cock (or
pump, for shotguns) the guns at inappropriate times because it looks cool.

~~~
drblast
Or the "click, click" empty revolver sound on a semi-automatic pistol. This
pretty much only happens if you're evil though.

The slide just never seems to lock back like it should unless the hero has two
guns that need to be thrown on the ground before he/she walks forward
defiantly and grabs two MORE guns.

------
g-garron
It was totally bad to perform image leeching. The site
<http://www.williamrobertson.net/>

Where the image are hosted, is now off-line, because of this.

You can use imgur, minus, or even blogspot itself instead.

~~~
socksy
That site appears to be the author's own site...

------
klez
Maybe I'm missing something, but why should it have been oracle SQL?

~~~
flyosity
It's an Oracle-focused database blog so it was probably a reference to what
his articles are usually about. (Just a guess.)

------
wonnage
Heh, tried to share this on Facebook and got a "blogspot.co.uk is spam"
warning.

------
shiven
Wow! Only on HN could one expect people picking apart SQL from movie
screenshots and then discussing the minutiae of that code! Not that I have any
problem with it. However, it surprises me no end how inward-looking, tech-
navel-gazing, nerd-o-maniac this can appear to an outsider looking this way
:-)

~~~
idleloops
Oh surely that's what they'd expect.

------
dude_abides
I loved how matter-of-factly he says

 _Naturally I couldn't help stitching a few screenshots together in Photoshop_

------
waterlesscloud
I tried to share this on my Facebook timeline (I have a lot of movie geek
friends and computer geek friends), but I was not allowed to since it comes
from an "overly spammy site".

First time I've seen that...

------
mikecane
Let me just say that after seeing the original Swedish movie and then reading
the book, I was crushed to learn there was no hacker tool called "asphyxia" in
the book.

~~~
jlgreco
There is in the English translation of The Girl Who Played With Fire.

~~~
mikecane
Oh! I haven't gotten that far yet. Thanks for the tip.

------
kayoone
this guy worked on the TRON command line/vfx stuff <http://jtnimoy.net/?q=178>

Really amazing!

------
strictfp
>Shocked moviegoers will have been left wondering why a genius-level hacker
would outer-join to the Victims and Keywords tables

Mysql defaults to inner join. See
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4418776/what-is-the-
defau...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4418776/what-is-the-default-
mysql-join-standalone-inner-or)

------
callmeed
On a related note, I asked about fake UIs/OSs on quora a while back:
[http://www.quora.com/Why-do-movies-and-TV-shows-often-
show-f...](http://www.quora.com/Why-do-movies-and-TV-shows-often-show-fake-
operating-systems-and-software-interfaces)

------
jyap
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo also uses OpenOffice which I thought was cool:
<https://twitter.com/jyap/status/181908341675663362/photo/1>

------
luminaobscura
they constructed a relevant sql query. that is more than enough for that
scene. compare with this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU>

------
mbyrne
You're all wrong. It's pretty clear they had to obfuscate what she really
wrote so no one could use it to "hack into the mainframe," on advice from
their lawyers to avoid liability.

------
Jun8
I think they've done a _pretty_ good job, compared tp the general level of
hacketry and math prtrayals on film. This is up there with Trinity's login
using a ssh vulnarabilty.

------
sodafountan
"The Social Network" did hacking scenes quite well too. I'd recommend seeing
that movie for anyone who's interested in doing a start up.

------
zacharydanger
Weirder still how the prompt clearly reads "mysql>" for Oracle.

~~~
zemo
...did you read the article? They clearly state that it's MySQL. The blog
itself is called Oracle WTF.

~~~
zacharydanger
My mistake.

------
idleloops
Great article.

My pet peeves in shows/movies, are normally around the fact that it takes more
than a few seconds to do anything useful on a computer. And yet on film even
idiots seem to command their gadgetry with aplomb.

They should show failed password attempts. Computer lock ups. Anti-virus
software blocking any meaningful use of the computer. Frustration of users as
they are prevented from booting due to system updates etc.

I'm also not a fan of fake search engines - and video streams that appear in
flawless hi-def!

I wish computers were omitted entirely sometimes - they are pointless props,
and just age the movie. Couldn't they just say - 'I searched for blah'?

It's not like I'm loosing sleep over it though. I would rather TV wasn't such
an insult to the imagination (I can - and enjoy - filling in the gaps myself.)

~~~
bitwize
One movie I saw get this right is _Office Space_ , where Peter's computer has
to do 69 different things before finally quitting.

True, it exits from a Mac-like GUI to a DOS prompt, but I loved the depiction
of office software as finicky, time-consuming, and frustrating.

------
Morg
For people using mysql, that kind of query _really_ isn't such _bad_ SQL at
all.

~~~
sp332
_Shocked moviegoers will have been left wondering why a genius-level hacker
would outer-join to the Victims and Keywords tables only to use literal-text
filter predicates that defeat the outer joins_

Any excuse for this? :)

~~~
HarrisonFisk
The MySQL optimizer will actually notice and remove the outer join aspect
automatically. So I have often done this out of pure laziness if I start with
an outer join, but really end up needing an inner join.

------
forg
The Swedish police use or at least used MySQL as database solution.

------
tubbo
Is there a reason why none of the images work?

~~~
adeelk
“Bandwidth Limit Exceeded”

~~~
williamr2019
Umm, sorry about that, wasn't expecting to be ycombinatored :) Fixed now.

------
sodelate
i have been always curious about hacking with modern computers,movies just did
a little to let more people know that

------
Akram
The author could have done something useful instead of this.

~~~
koide
Likewise. At least I cracked a huge grin reading it, especially at this golden
paragraph: "Immediately moviegoers will notice that this can't be Oracle SQL -
obviously the AS keyword is not valid for table aliases. In fact as we pull
back for a thrilling query results listing we see the mysql prompt and
giveaway use [dbname] connect syntax and over-elaborate box drawing."

