Older blog entries for davidw (starting at number 181)

27 Dec 2003 (updated 27 Dec 2003 at 01:49 UTC) »
Alert: the movie Dogville is a stinker. Normally I wouldn't take the time to write this down, but this one's bad. Bad bad. Bad in the sense that adjectives like abominable, horrendous, atrocious, horrible, putrid, and vile roll off the tongue and are unsatisfying as a means for comunicating the awfulness of this film. Perhaps something more vulgar like "steaming pile of horse shit" begins to do it justice, but I wouldn't want to offend the horse shit with the comparison.

First of all, it's not really a film, it's more of a play. Or at least the set is a stage with some chalk lines drawn on it. Apparently by not having anything in the way of props, the viewer is supposed to focus on the characters. I would have settled by not having the film itself so that I could focus on doing something more pleasant with my life, like poking my eyes with hot needles. I wasn't expecting Lord of the Rings as far as scenery, but this film left me not only using my imagination to fill in the details, but using it to try and imagine myself doing something less painful and boring.

At least with a play, I could have watched it on my own terms, but instead, the director treats the viewer to a hurky-jerky-nauseavision style that makes even home handycam shots look like quality work.

Needless to say, being an "artsy" film, it drags on for over two hours, despite this version being cut down by the director from the original. It's divided into an introduction and 9 chapters that go by so slowly that it brought back memories of the clock ticking by at an impossibly slow rate in some hated class in school where seconds turn into minutes and minutes to hours. Only I paid to have this gem inflicted on me.

Apparently, the story, which is about a woman pursued by gangsters who hides out in a small colorado town which at first treats her well and subsequently heaps abuse on her (much like the director abuses the audience), is supposed to be about american foreign policy. No, I'm not kidding. I don't really see the relationship either, any more than watching a drunk man pee on a dumpster is a fascinating commentary on contemporary water rights politics in western canada. In any case, the film also deals with the cruelty of mankind, although midway through the film, you realize that the victim is not Nicole Kidman's character, but you, the viewer.

Conclusion: I have had more fun trying to get slivers out from under my fingernails. About as thought-provoking as the town crazy's shouting match with a light pole.

SCO:

I have started contacting their distributors/resellers/etc in my area, to offer them help transitioning to Linux, and explaining why that's in their best interests - SCO is focused on lawsuits, not their products, which are outdated in any case. I figure it might be good for them, because they get an escape hatch from the SCO train wreck, and good for me, because if I work things right, I will gain some new clients, and get access to new people and businesses.

14 Jun 2003 (updated 14 Jun 2003 at 19:27 UTC) »

Since I never really get much feedback about my journal here, I decided to just concentrate on writing about living in Italy, which seems to be what most people find interesting anyway.

So, "The Padova Chronicles" are available here: http://www.dedasys.com/padovachronicles/

Hope you like it.

29 May 2003 (updated 29 May 2003 at 14:53 UTC) »

This definitely falls in the category of a wonderful surprise. I was frustrated because going to the European Tcl/Tk conference was looking really difficult, and I wanted to go meet the guys there... Infact, it hasn't worked, out, but out of the blue came another opportunity to go speak here:

Jornadas de Informática Universidade do Minho

Cool! So I'm really looking forward to going to Portugal - it looks like a fascinating place to visit. It would be nice to have more time and visit some friends in Spain too, but Ilenia and I hope to do that for a real vacation in September or October.

Having a bit of a nasty problem with Rivet, Tcl, Apache, signals and threads. Not quite sure what to make of it so far, but it promises to be a nasty one:-/

I have an API thought out for a new input layer that will let Rivet handle CGI apps with little or no rewrite - hopefully I'll get some time soon!

Looks like I won't be going to Germany for the European Tcl/Tk conference, which is unfortunate. On the other hand, there is a slim chance I might go to Portugal for another conference.

Scary: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/030527/168/4763y.html

The dollar continues to drop. There is an interesting article in the Economist about John Snow's lack of experience contributing to something that could go to far if it's not checked, unfortunately it's not linkable. The implication is that I need to get some European clients quick:-/

24 May 2003 (updated 24 May 2003 at 19:58 UTC) »

Interesting article in The Economist about Sun's Linux strategy Microsoft, and the SCO lawsuit, amongst other things:

http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1795930

Worked on the Apache Tcl web pages (still not updated). Wish I were better with graphic design type stuff. Wish more people would help out.

Thinking about adding an ncgi compatibility layer to Rivet.

The European Tcl/TK User Meeting is just a week away! I think I am going to try and go, but it's going to be a last-minute decision.

The "Linux - is it read for the Enterprise?" meeting in Vicenza went well. I was there to represent the 'community'. It was very interesting hearing the various people from Oracle, IBM (and also Redhat and Suse) make their case. I got a laugh out of the crowd when I mentioned that 5 years ago, we wouldn't have dreamed of a room full of people with suits and ties so intent on learning more about free software. It really is impressive how far "we" have come. There were a bunch of important (in the sense that they control a lot of money) people there - the CTO of Benetton, plus several from important banks in the area.

The question is no longer "should we run Linux?", but "can we run our most important, mission critical systems on Linux?". And the answer is, depending on the circumstances, beginning to be "yes".

I watched the taped stage of the Giro yesterday! Brilliant! Simoni won alone, but didn't take as much time as expected out of his rivals. Pantani took 5th place, after fighting the whole way up the mountain... it's great to see him back in form.

In the past few years, drug scandals aside, the Giro has been head and shoulders above the Tour. It has more interesting stages from start to finish. Where the Tour starts out with dead flat sprinter stages for the first week, where nothing happens, the Giro already throws some small hills at the riders to get things warmed up and generate interest. The stages like Faenza (there was one last year too, IIRC) are also really fun to watch, because the mountains are just big enough to break things up if the riders try hard, but not like the high mountain stages where only the strongest survive. Think Liege-Bastogne-Liege. Also, the race for the Maglia Rosa is much more interesting than at the Tour, with more lead changes, and a seemingly more open playing field. Anyone remember the stage last year where Cadel Evans was in pink, and completely fell apart up the last climb, projecting, of all people, Savoldelli into the lead?

Tying it back in, I think that cycling is a great sport for geeks - plenty of gadgets to fiddle with, but it also is a good contrast from sitting around indoors behind a screen. It's great to get outside under whatever the weather brings.

19 May 2003 (updated 19 May 2003 at 16:11 UTC) »

I'll be going to an 'Enterprise Linux' round table on Thursday. Anyone have any particularly good 'ammo' links? I already have a couple of things lined up that I'd like to say, but fresh reading might inspire more. Emailing me directly would be appreciated.

Committed 'multiplexer' to tcllib. Surprisingly enough, it does one-to-many comunication over sockets...

Legs are starting to feel a bit better, but good form will be a long time coming. Watching the Giro just about every day while I work on the laptop:-)

Simply incredible... The Tour de France organizers have chosen not to invite Mario Cipollini's team this year, again, in favor of some lame second-tier French team. This is a man who is the reigning world champion, has won 42 stages, as of his victory today, at the Giro d'Italia (a record!), the Milano-San Remo classic, Gand Wevelgem (apologies for my spelling) and numerous other races. Two thumbs down for Jean Marie LeBlanc.

The new tcllib is out. I'm proud to have a few chunks of code of my own in there:-)

Picked up Rivet again. I did a neat trick for sessions - in the server init script, I launch a tcl daemon that acts as an IPC system, which seems to work quite well.

I'm having a nasty problem though, and I have a feeling that it won't have an easy answer. When Rivet - linked against a threaded Tcl 8.4 - is loaded, I am not able to CTRL-C out of apache -X (i.e. non daemon mode). I'm pretty sure it's got something to do with threads and signals interacting badly, but it's proving difficult to even narrow the problem down. I managed to repeatedly crash gdb yesterday (I sent in a bug report).

12 May 2003 (updated 12 May 2003 at 07:13 UTC) »

It's poppy season in Italy. They usually grown in corn fields, when the corn is just coming up. The visual effect of the bright red flowers amongst the blue-green corn is stunningly beautiful, and is something I love about this season. Google has some good images: http://images.google.com/images?q=papaveri&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search

I am uploading tkcon to Debian today. tclreadline could use some work, but I just don't think I should go chasing after another project. As a consequence, it will probably rot:-(

Went to webb.it Friday and Saturday. It was fun to see old acquaintances. On the other hand, Debian's stand was more of a collection of people with laptops rather than anything organized to present itself to the public at large, which was unfortunate. In any case, I had a good time.

The Giro d'Italia has started! It's so cool to watch it on TV. I hope to start training more seriously myself soon. I have a lot of weight to lose:-/

172 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!