Diana Prince faces off against two new formidable foes and reunites with an old love in the hotly anticipated first trailer for Wonder Woman 1984, with Gal Gadot reprising her titular role. Director Patty Jenkins unveiled the trailer today at Comic Con Experience (CCXP) in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Inspired by the comic book heroine created by William Moulton Marston in the 1940s for DC Comics, Wonder Woman made her big-screen debut in the DCEU with 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, followed by 2017’s Justice League. The first fell short of box office expectations; the second bombed outright. So when Jenkins took on Wonder Woman’s origin story, she deliberately departed from the grim humorlessness and dark sensibility of those earlier films, bringing a brighter energy and wit to her tale, along with the usual action. That vision paid off: Wonder Woman went on to gross $821 million worldwide and earned critical raves, making it the most successful of the DCEU films thus far.

Jenkins first broached the possibility of a sequel shortly after the first film’s release in June 2017, and principal photography began a year later. It has been described as a standalone film rather than a direct sequel, “in the same way that Indiana Jones or [James] Bond are, instead of one continuous story that requires many installments.” (That standalone strategy worked well for Warner Bros’  2019 box office smash Joker, which became the first R-rated film to gross over $1 billion worldwide.)

This second film is set almost seventy years after the original film. “In this movie we find [Diana] in 1984 and [she] is quite lonely — she’s lost her friends and doing what she needs to do,” Gadot said at CCXP. “She’s helping mankind and saving them until something crazy happens to her.”

This being the 1980s, Diana is operating in a Cold War scenario, taking on Pedro Pascal’s villainous Maxwell Lord, a shrewd and powerful businessman. Kristen Wiig also co-stars as Barbara Ann Minerva, a British archaeologist in the comic books who becomes Wonder Woman’s arch-nemesis Cheetah. Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright reprise their roles as Diana’s mother, Hippolyta, and aunt, Antiope, respectively, in flashbacks to Diana’s Amazonian upbringing on Themyscira.

As New Order’s “Blue Monday” plays in the background, we see Diana having some heart-to-heart girl talk with Wiig’s Minerva about long-lost loves and a glimpse of an old photograph of Steve Trevor. “My life hasn’t been what you probably think it has,” Diana tells Barbara. “We all have our struggles.” Then trouble breaks out at a local supermall, and Diana intervenes to restore order. Inside the mall there are walls of TVs that just happen to be showing Maxwell Lord giving a motivational pitch. “Life is good but it can be better,” he says. “All you need is to want it. Think about finally having everything you always wanted.”

Lord has had various incarnations in the comics, including one where he had supernatural powers of persuasion. It’s unclear from the trailer what, if any, powers he displays in this film, but there are hints he might play some role in the miraculous reappearance of Steve while Diana is attending a gala. We see Diana and Steve’s emotional reunion, and then a shot of Lord declaring he will now take what he wants in return.

The rest of the trailer is a series of action shots as Diana and Steve work together once again to thwart whatever evil plan is threatening the day—including flashbacks to a young Diana competing in an Amazonian tournament, and a glorious shot of Diana’s iconic golden armor. But we don’t get to see Wiig in full Cheetah mode, which is a shame.

Wonder Woman 1984 hits theaters June 5, 2020. If it’s as successful as its predecessor, we can probably expect a third Wonder Woman film. Jenkins told the Hollywood Reporter earlier this year she has already mapped out the plot for a third installment, in a more contemporary setting.

Listing image by YouTube/Warner Bros

Brian Ascher is a partner at Venrock, where he invests broadly across enterprise and fintech and serves on the boards of several companies, including Personal Capital, 6Sense, Socrates AI, Dynamic Signal, Retail Solutions, SmartBiz Loans, and Inrix.

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Laravel and MySQL 8: Fixing MySQL Server Has Gone Away Error

If you’ve tried to upgrade your Laravel applications to use MySQL 8, you might have run into the following error that left you scratching your head:

SQLSTATE[HY000] [2006] MySQL server has gone away 

The php.net manual has an outdated (but still relevant explanation):

When running a PHP version before 7.1.16, or PHP 7.2 before 7.2.4, set MySQL 8 Server’s default password plugin to mysql_native_password or else you will see errors similar to The server requested authentication method unknown to the client [caching_sha2_password] even when caching_sha2_password is not used.

This is because MySQL 8 defaults to caching_sha2_password, a plugin that is not recognized by the older PHP (mysqlnd) releases. Instead, change it by setting default_authentication_plugin=mysql_native_password in my.cnf. The caching_sha2_password plugin will be supported in a future PHP release. In the meantime, the mysql_xdevapi extension does support it.

We should expect a future version of PHP to have support for caching_sha2_password authentication. However, in the meantime, you can fix it quickly with the following changes:

First, we need to find the paths MySQL will look for a configuration file. We can find out by running mysql --help. The command prints out a lot of info, but you’re looking for something like the following:

mysql --help ... Default options are read from the following files in the given order: /etc/my.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf /usr/local/etc/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf 

Take the paths from your command output and adapt the following with the paths you get from mysql --help:

ls -la \ /etc/my.cnf \ /etc/mysql/my.cnf \ /usr/local/etc/my.cnf \ ~/.my.cnf ls: /etc/my.cnf: No such file or directory ls: /etc/mysql/my.cnf: No such file or directory -rw-r--r-- 1 paul staff 61 Dec 5 19:40 /Users/paul/.my.cnf -rw-r--r-- 1 paul admin 113 Oct 28 2017 /usr/local/etc/my.cnf 

I like to manage the file from ~/.my.cnf, but unless you’ve previously done that, you’ll probably have to create the file if you want to manage configuration from that path.

I suggest you use the ~/.my.cnf path, but whatever path you determine you need to add the following:

[mysqld] default_authentication_plugin=mysql_native_password 

If you’re using Homebrew and you want to update the /usr/local/etc/my.cnf file, add the following at the end of the file under [mysqld]:

# Default Homebrew MySQL server config [mysqld] # Only allow connections from localhost bind-address = 127.0.0.1 default_authentication_plugin=mysql_native_password 

Last, you need to restart MySQL using whatever method is appropriate for your system. If you’re using Homebrew on a Mac, you can run brew services:

brew services restart mysql 

If you’re using Docker, here’s an example Docker Compose configuration to get MySQL 8 working with Laravel and other PHP projects:

services: # ... mysql: image: mysql:8.0 # PDO Doesn't support MySQL 8 caching_sha2_password Authentication # @see https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/upgrading-from-previous-series.html#upgrade-caching-sha2-password command: --default-authentication-plugin=mysql_native_password ports: - 13306:3306 volumes: - mysql:/var/lib/mysql environment: MYSQL_DATABASE: my_database MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root volumes: mysql: driver: "local" 

With that change in place, you should be able to connect to MySQL 8 from PHP applications!

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Filed in: News

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I’ve been following the New Zealand firearm “buyback” with some amusement as I ran estimates on the compliance rate based on NZ Police turn-in reports and NZ government guesstimates of the number of affected firearms. (It’s a measly 16.5% as of November 24.)

News of the “buyback” privacy breach has added extra humor value. Sorry, Kiwi gun owners who were complying; I’m sure you weren’t laughing.

But privacy issues aside, I am. And not merely at the gross incompetence displayed. I’m encouraged by the additional proof of non-compliance.

Government estimates of the number of newly banned firearms range from an early 173,000 to, finally, 240,000. I’ve been rolling with the final 240K figure.

At the end of November, 21,655 people had been paid for 36,045 firearms. That works out to an average 1.66 firearms per person.

Reports have it that people turning their firearms had to pre-register online through the breached web site. A total of 38,000 people registered and now have their personal and financial data endangered.

There are only 17 days left in the amnesty period, so you’d expect that pretty much everyone who had any intention of complying would have registered by now.

Only 38,000. Let’s assume that the 1:1.66 ratio holds true. That would account for 63,080 firearms or 26.3% compliance.

I had been projecting 19.8% assuming no sudden, last-minute rush, and turn-in rates holding steady. But I also figured some folks would get cold feet in the final weeks and decide to turn in their property, especially registered Cat-E “military-style semiautomatic” owners since the government does know who they are (but 60% of even those aren’t complying yet).

I had speculated that the New Zealand government would stop reporting turn-in numbers out of sheer embarrassment. Then they’d dust off early lowball estimates and simply declare the amnesty a success.

Now this breach fiasco just gives them a better opportunity to do so.