A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
December 29
P.S. I Love You could have been
awesome if it had maintained the pace of the first half-hour or so;
yo-yoing between raucous laughter and heart-breaking sadness so
fast it was hard to keep up, and some wickedly good dialogue,
especially Lisa Kudrow wandering around the wake chatting guys up
(the punchline of that particular gag was excellent), and Harry
Connick Jr. (brilliantly cast against type as the unshaven
socially-inept is-he-or-isn't-he love interest) saying the most
inappropriate things for every occasion. Unfortunately, it came
off the rails in a few places, and I really thought that William
(Jeffrey Dean Morgan) was both poorly cast and far too smooth a
character, although the perception of smoothness may well have
been a side-effect of the casting. On the whole, a good movie, but
not as good as it could have been. Oh, and bring a tissue. Or
maybe a box of 'em.
December 26
FINALLY figured out how to make CVS run in anonymous mode under
Apple's launchd, with a chroot - which is the bit that
all those tutorials out there seem to be missing. The key is that
in order to support the inetCompatibility option, you need to
include the launchproxy program in your chroot
environment. With that in place, it all works exactly as it
should.
December 25
Merry Christmas and all that. Wound up my day with a rewatching
of Pi which really is an excellent piece of
work.
December 22
Well, that was entertaining: my phone crashed while I was on a
call, and instead of doing its usual trick of power-cycling back
into operating mode, it kept crashing a few more times before
coming back. Thank you Motorola's quality control department for
that fine user experience.
Added bonus crap software: it got stuck sending a text
message. Sheesh.
Another in the series of "Why did I want to rent this
again?" movies: Flashbacks of a Fool. It
seems to be lacking that most essential of movie components, an
actual plot. As best I can tell, it's supposed to be a sort of
regretful-flashback movie (hah, cunningly the word
"flashback" is even in the title!) but really it's sort
of "intro; childhood sequences; coda" with no real sense
of parallels, narrative, lessons learned, or whatever else you'd
expect to find in such a movie. On the whole I think you can
safely skip this one.
December 21
Watched the second half of Gone With The Wind (we
cheered when Rhett delivered that line), and the first
half of The Longest Day (who
made up this Christmas schedule? "I know, let's put a grim
wartime movie set in the middle of the year on during
Christmas!") before driving across the country. I've been
travelling, you see.
December 20
So I think the pitch for Mojave Moon went like
this: "There's this scene, see, with Angelina Jolie in a
shower, topless." "SOLD!" "don't you want to
hear the rest?" "nah, you can just make it up as you go
along". An utterly bizarre movie which despite being part of
the Daily Mail's Rom-Com collection appears to have neither Rom
nor Com, and is pretty much a complete stinker. Although
admittedly I did giggle a few times.
December 18
Glengarry Glen Ross: lots
of swearing, and a hell of a cast. Worth a look, although be
warned that it's all about the dialogue as the action and
characters don't really go anywhere.
December 17
Closing the Ring: the schmaltz
goes up to 11 on this one. And the paddywhackery is way
overdone. Not a bad story, but totally overcooked in those two
respects.
Shivers is another one of the movies
Ruadhrí loaned me, and I think the critic who ripped
Cronenberg for this one with an article about how taxpayers had
funded it (via the Canadian Film Board or some such) was right to
rip it, but not on account of its gratuitious nudity, typically
Cronenbergesque gooey F/X, or the fairly poorly shot violence: no,
just because it's crap. Well worth missing.
And the second-last from Ruadhrí's pile: 12 Angry Men, an excellent piece
of work that would have been made just that little bit better if
Lee Cobb hadn't spent so much time being MR. ANGRY DAD. Definitely
worth watching, despite this.
December 16
Continuing to shuffle things around: the ext3 partition on the
external drive is now a HFS+ partition, and the Cube has been
shuffling bits from the DOS partition to the HFS+ partition
overnight. As soon as that's done, I'll reformat the DOS partition
as HFS+ as well, and that should conclude the
partition-shuffling.
Also discovered I'd left my CVS setup incomplete; that's now
mostly fixed, although I still haven't restored the anon-CVS stuff
- I spent an hour or so last week trying to determine what
libraries I needed in order to set up a working chroot
environment, got it working, then went off and did something else
instead of actually enabling the thing. I have a vague idea that I
wanted to see about making a proper launchctl file for
the CVS server, and possibly bundling the whole thing up in a Fink package.
Powered up the old webserver to see about diagnosing the crashes
it's been having; it consistently crashed on kernel load! So now
it's running Memtestx86+ to see if there's anything amiss with the
RAM.
John Carpenter's '80s classic The Thing was on the box, so I took a
break from the comic stylings of Messrs. Fry and Laurie for some
old-school schlocky horror. I believe I last saw this particular
movie in the mid-to-late eighties; it's aged pretty well, even the
rather gruesome F/X.
December 15
Woo, shiny new Mac software updates. Time to bounce the
server...
December 14
Ruadhrí loaned me the entire collection of Jeeves and Wooster; while it
occasionally tends towards the sort of cringe-inducing humour that
I really don't care for, it's generally pretty good, the theme
music is excellent, and the funniest thing is seeing
"Dr. House" playing an upper-class English
twit. Definitely worth a look, although given that it's several
seasons over several discs I suspect I'll be a while watching it
yet.
December 11
Chromophobia: how can a movie go
on for over two hours, and still leave loose ends? It's an
ensemble piece, not unlike Crash, but nowhere near as
engaging. It's not particularly bad, per se, just overly
long and didn't interest me a whole lot. Oh, plus I didn't really
like the "WE'RE TELEGRAPHING SOMETHING HERE... HA HA FOOLED
YOU!" trope that occurred more than once.
December 9
Well, the Cube is a little stressed, but it's running; I think
the main problem is actually lack of RAM, since it's only got
320MB. Maybe I'll upgrade it for Christmas or something.
Be Kind Rewind: the premise is a
simple one, and Jack Black isn't one of my favourite actors, but
the third act of this movie really won me over - particularly the
final screening, even though it was telegraphed pretty well in
advance. A nice little bit of schmaltz, as long as you can put up
with Black doing his usual over-the-top routine.
December 8
My stunt iTunes abuse appears to be working, at least in as much
as that dropping the XML file into the new server, deliberately
trashing the binary file, and then firing up iTunes seems - so far
- to have not caused any major explosions or outbreaks of
flame. Once it's finished doing its gapless playback analysis, I
get to see if it's preserved track ratings and play counts, which
appear in the XML file and so should be retained.
Of course, then I'll discover that the Cube doesn't actually have
enough muscle for iTunes, a website, a mailserver...
December 7
So, the Cube is now sitting tidily (more or less) inside the
cupboard where I used keep the old server. It may yet move from
there; the only noise the Cube makes is disk activity, and the
wooden base of the cupboard creates a resonance that amplifies
that quite a bit. I'm currently attempting to migrate my iTunes
library to the Cube, doing which without losing play counts and
track ratings is a needlessly awkward experience - why does iTunes
provide an export option, but no import option?
Other amusement: the display's USB port apparently provides enough
juice to run a keyboard, mouse and outboard hard drive, but not
enough to run a keyboard, mouse and iPod. I'll try plugging the
keyboard and mouse into one of the other USB connectors when the
current round of iTunes silliness completes, and see if the
display USB port is any better then. Oh, and the other USB
connectors are apparently USB 1.1, which means iTunes tells me I
really should use a better connection. Of course, there's a pair
of firewire ports on the base of the Cube...
December 6
Before The Devil
Knows You're Dead: not bad, but could definitely have been
tightened up in places, such as the first scene inside the
drug-dealer's apartment. I figure there's a taut 90-minute
thriller hiding inside this movie; instead it's taut in some
places and drags in others. Still, as I said, not
bad.
The opening shot of the guy in the pool at the start of Sunset Boulevard triggered a
memory of some sort, and I was intermittently bothered by what it
was for the entire movie - had I seen this before, or at least
started watching it? Did someone else do a perfect copy of the
scene? Eventually, about 10 minutes before the end, it struck me:
When Brendan Met Trudy opens with Brendan face down on the street,
in the rain, with a voiceover and a similar bit of
dialogue. Anyway, Boulevard is an excellent piece of work for the
most part, although for some reason I didn't buy Holden's
speech to Betty at the end - it seemed out of character, and I
couldn't really tell, much like the Bogie movie last weekend, if
he was being serious or not. Do watch this movie, though: it's the
origin of the "All right, Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my
closeup" line, so you should catch that if nothing
else.
Amores Perros: love's a
bitch. That's just a translation of the title, as opposed to a
comment on the movie. It's quite the piece: pretty visceral in
places (enough so that I was cringing for bits of it in empathy
with a character's pain), some fantastic music, and a complex
time-shifted plot that I'm still not entirely clear I got straight
in my head. Worth a look, but not exactly for the
squeamish.
December 3
Neglected to add Key Largo to the list of movies
watched over the weekend. Wonderful stuff, although just a little
hammy in places. And I couldn't figure out if Bogie was supposed
to be faking disaffection or genuinely felt it.
December 1
Well, that's bizarre. Since I took load off the crashy
server, it's become even more crashy. Anyway, you're now
reading this (hopefully) off the Cube, because the crashiness has
gotten overwhelmingly stupid.