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December 9, 2004
Linux on "Alias"
I was recently introduced to the TV show "Alias" by a friend who owns all the previous seasons on DVD. I've been working through them for the past several weeks and was watching season 2, episode 11 tonight when I caught a glimpse of a computer desktop in the episode. Such scenes are not unusual because it is a TV series about spies and involves lots of "hacking". What caught my eye was a very familiar window manager: KDE. Several shots of the desktop were shown throughout the episode in scenes involving Marshall, the tech genius of the show. See the episode guide for more info on the plot.
The desktop shown is a relatively standard, default configuration of KDE. At one point the character holding Marshall captive notices a hole in the firewall and is convinced that Marshall is trying to communicate with the outside world so that he can be rescued. Marshall explains the breech by saying he was simply downloading an mp3 from Audiogalaxy. He plays the song (Sammy Hagar's "Serious Juju") and the viewer is treated to a quick shot of the song playing on Linux's most popular music player: XMMS.
Eventually Marshall builds the Echelon program but when his captor runs the file (shown as an icon on the left portion of the desktop), an official looking screen comes up and then Pong begins playing. Turns out that Marshall had been bluffing to buy time, at which point Sydney (Jennifer Garner) crashes in at just the right moment, thereby saving him from execution.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the only other previous appearance by KDE (that I know of) was on "24" last year.
Posted on December 9, 2004 at 9:26 PM
Comments
Alias is a great show, just wait until it comes back this spring, stronger than ever.
Posted by: nobody at December 14, 2004 12:28 AM
Alias totally rocks! It is my absolute favorite show! Another show that was using Open Source software was "House" it is on Fox. As the show was ending they showed a screen with OpenOffice.org open! I hope to see more!
Posted by: Andy Melton at April 4, 2005 11:45 PM
In one of the episodes near the one mentioned above, there were a couple of IP addrs. mentioned on the show. I don't think they were in the 192.168.* range: I don't remember them but they didn't strike me as obviously 'fake.'
I am certain someone has tried to figure out if the addrs. are real computers, and if the show has set up some funny servers somewhere on those addrs. I can't find info about them easily on google, though (I'm having trouble coming up with good search terms: typing 'ip address' and 'alias' into google gives me real technical articles, not stuff about the spy show).
Anyone know where I can find a fan site with the info?
Cheers,
Josh.
Posted by: Josh DuBois at April 26, 2005 6:47 PM
At least one of the ip-addresses used is obviously fake. At the moment I don't remember exactly what it was, but I noticed that the third part of the ip-address had a value over 255, which it can't have (at least for a normal (IPv4)) ip-address.
Posted by: Oblivion at July 16, 2005 9:54 AM