A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
October 30
The Other Boleyn
Girl kinda lost me at about the half-way point where Henry VIII
is portrayed as being completely beholden to Anne Boleyn in the
face of a split with Rome, etc. (however true it may or
may not have been, here it's presented in a pretty heavy-handed
fashion) - in other words, not really a movie I'd
recommend.
October 28
Resting after yesterday's silliness. Created a quick hack to
grab Perl modules from CPAN and generate a bare-bones Fink info file for
them.
October 27
Ran the Dublin Marathon today. Well, ran, walked, limped,
etc. Go me!
October 26
I think I'd have much preferred it if Sweeney
Todd wasn't a musical; I know it's based on Sondehiem's musical
rather than the penny-dreadful classic, but still. I would've
thought there's enough meat (ha!) in the story to make a non-musical
version. Good enough, I guess, but really the whole musical end of
it kinda spoiled it for me. About halfway through I started
looking up the story on Wikipedia, checking IMDB trivia,
etc.
October 25
The Bucket List is the sort of
movie that writes itself - there're no surprises (well, one small
one, maybe, when the identity of the mountain climber at the start
of the movie is revealed) and it's probably the sort of thing that
Freeman and Nicholson could do in their sleep, but it's not bad
for all that. I think Hawks might have been a better movie along
the same lines, but it's been a long time since I've seen that, so
I could be imagining it.
October 23
The Cube is now running a version of this website inside my
little home network; I've encountered a few issues related to the
fact that everything is a version or so older than I've been using
- Apache 1.3 instead of Apache 2, a correspondingly older
mod_perl, and so forth - but I don't quite feel like running amok
and upgrading those just yet. There've been a few more niggling
problems related to the differences between Linux and MacOS, such
as how to make sure the Fink Perl extensions
directory is included in the default Perl include path. Still,
it's looking promising. Once the webserver's working adequately,
I'll revisit a Fink
package for SpamAssassin, since I'll need that for my mail
server... the upside of all this gratuitous nerdery
should be that I can replace the multiple humming fans in
the corner with a single box that just makes occasional disk
noises.
October 20
Spent more time than it'd have taken to do by hand fiddling with
some code to tell me how much tax I owe on share grants made last
year. This is typical nerd behaviour, obviously. And the typical
caveat of "but this means it'll be much faster/easier next
year" doesn't apply because I pretty much stopped fiddling
with the code once I got the (rather scary) number I need to put
on the relevant form. Which, you know, is online so if I were
sufficiently dedicated I could automate all this
stuff... also it's kinda neat that I was randomly running various
shell and Perl commands in a couple of windows without realising I
was switching between MacOS 10.5, MacOS 10.4, Fedora Core 6 and
Red Hat Linux 7.3.
October 19
Spent random bits of the day attempting to get the Cube set up
to operate as my web server. Also watched The Matrix on a whim; it's still a
good movie, even after almost 10 years.
October 18
I'm going to have to read Pizzeria Kamikaze
again, because I've no idea how it compares to Wristcutters: A Love
Story. It's a funny and romantic movie, and surprisingly
lighthearted given that all the characters are de facto
suicide victims. Tom Waits is as usual on top form, and the
running gag about the black hole underneath the car seat was
excellent, too. Worth a look, although I'm not sure I like it
enough to buy it.
October 16
Feast of Love is a very uneven
piece of work. For the most part, it's just an average
slice-of-life sort of movie, but there are occasional moments that
are deeply poignant, or funny, or romantic. It's a shame there's
not more quality to the movie, because I really did enjoy the good
bits. Also of note: the Oscar-winning song from Once makes an
appearance, as does Jeff Buckley's rendition of
Hallelujah.
And since my comment on Jumper the other night was pretty oblique:
it's hard to expand on it without giving away bits of the
plot. The premise is good, although not without flaws: our hero
can teleport. At some point you find out that (a) there's a bunch
of people who aren't happy about this - homicidally so - and (b)
there's a bunch of other people who can teleport. Add love
interest, and you've more-or-less got the story. Except someone
decided to introduce a Buddy late in the movie, and then not
really use him for anything. And the love interest bit is handled
really poorly where the hero is doing the I Have A Secret That I
Can't Tell You routine; she's basically a cardboard character, a
prop for a few scenes and the excuse for the grande finale. I
think the fact that it's again an uneven movie (because parts of
it are quite a lot of fun) plus the whole Suddenly A Buddy Arrives
bit is what makes it seem like a far longer movie than it actually
is.
October 15
Evidently Fedora Core 6 is finally so far out of support that it's no
longer on the Fedora website. Since August 28th, in fact, although
I'm pretty sure yum was working more recently than that. Gah. I
really should get around to updating that one server... mainly I'm
annoyed that I can't seem to find a legacy repo to connect to -
all Red Hat's EOL Linux releases are avaialble on
archive.download.redhat.com, for example. Fedora appears to get no
such service, alas.
All that aside, I'm somewhat disappointed to discover that even
after redoing the XMLTV code using XML::Twig to do progressive
non-memory-hogging parsing, it's no faster than before - it takes
9 seconds to parse about 480k of XML data on the box I serve this
data from. The Mac does it in under a second. I think I'll need to
try this out on the Cube, which I've been considering using as a
server since I got it.
October 14
Dependency Hell: redemption obtained. For those not keeping
score, the reason I drew attention to the aforementioned Hell is
that it's a frequently-cited (and generally false) argument
against using RPM, generally
supported by fans of Debian's
deb/apt packaging system. Guess what Fink uses?
Got briefly distracted with trying to bundle SpamAssassin into
Fink, then went back to what I had intended, which was to fiddle
with the TV listings stuff now that I've got an up-to-date XMLTV
installation.
October 13
Gah, the Fink
prepackaged XMLTV stuff is for an older build of Perl. As,
incidentally, is the Fink prepackaged Perl/Growl
interface. In trying to fix this I wandered into what the
RPM-haters refer to as Dependency Hell...
October 12
Spent some time fiddling around with the toy I use to generate
TV listings for myself - basically it turns someone else's website
into an XMLTV file
which I then feed to another Perl script to generate various views
of the listings. My version of the XMLTV Perl bundle is a
little out of date and I really need to figure out how to cleanly
wrap it up as part of, say, Fink so that I don't wind
up with arbitrary binaries scattered all over my poor Mac. I still
can't believe there isn't a proper integrated package management
system. I think Linux has me spoiled in that respect.
Hah. As soon as I start reading up on how to built a fink package,
I stumble across a note that Fink does have xmltv bundled
already. What's not stated is that you have to be running the
unstable tree to get it.
October 11
Jumper wasn't as bad as I'd been told,
but it was definitely in need of some polish. For some reason it
feels a lot longer than it actually is, too. I suspect this could
have been a far better movie with just a little more
effort.
October 9
Cashback is your typical "boy
loves girl, boy loses girl, boy develops insomnia and the ability
to freeze time" story. Ok, maybe not so typical. But it is
absolutely fantastic. It's funny, it's witty, it's sexy, it's
clever, it's gorgeously shot and equally beautifully
scored. The only jarring part is the oddly-placed "sinister
strings" moment where it's revealed that Boy isn't the only
one who can do the time-freezing thing, but the hinted-at darkness
doesn't really develop and it just winds up being a bit daft. Cut
that bit, though, and this is just 100% excellent. I sense a
shopping spree in my near future.
October 6
It's described as a musical, but Once is more like an extended music video
with interstitial conversations. It's a fantastic piece of work; I
was initially a bit skeptical - since it seemed to be more a
showcase for Glen Hansard - but about fifteen minutes in when
Markéta Irglová starts in on the harmonies while
they're in the music shop, I just got completely lost in the
movie. Trying to pick out the locations was fun, too - part of it
was filmed not far from where I live (along the Vico Road),
although it looks like they flipped the shot for reasons I can't
fathom - perhaps the director felt that he wanted both Bray Head
in the background and a driving left-to-right shot. The
studio sequence was just perfect; the disinterested engineer who
starts paying attention as the song picks up, the assorted
silliness in the montage, the trip out to what looks like the
beach on North Bull island... I suspect I may wind up buying
this. Definitely worth seeing, even if you don't like
musicals!
October 5
If there's such a thing as an anti-action movie, Garage stands a good chance of being a
defining example of the genre. It's extremely well made for what
it is, but it didn't particularly appeal to my desire to see
things explode while some invincible lead character cracks
wise... someone on IMDb referred to this as a tragicomedy, I'd say
it's more of a tragedy with an extremely light sprinkling of
comedy, most of which revolves around the naivety of the lead
character. Hard to recommend this movie based on my usual
criteria, but it's certainly an interesting - and accurate - slice
of Irish rural life.
October 2
Bad Company was on the box. Seen it
before, kinda liked it, and yes, it definitely holds up to a
second viewing. Not good enough to buy, but certainly plenty
fun.
October 1
Ratatouille was a whole lot of
fun. Good story, good gags, animation as beautiful as you'd expect
from Pixar - so good that it doesn't get in the way of the
story. Well worth a look.
Robin Hood: Men in
Tights has been on Sky 1 repeatedly for the last week or more;
it's fairly typical Mel Brooks fare: none the worse for that, but
not earth-shattering stuff. Worth a look if you've nothing better
to do.