2007-09-03

Recent movies

I like seeing movies. I don't always blog about them, but sometimes they're just too good to ignore them in the long run. Here's a recap of some of the movies I saw recently:

  • The Core: Somebody broke the earth, and now we have to blow nukes in the earth's core to fix it. Over the top. Silly. Switch brain off, and it's still not entertaining. Probably might be if you're extremely drunk, but I wasn't at the time.
  • De Tweeling: Two twin girls get separated at age 7 (or so) when their parents die, and now they grow up at opposite sides of World War II. When they meet near the end of the war, the differences between their lifes seem unsurmountable, but they manage to overcome them decades later, when one of them is about to die. Chilling movie that really, really gets to you, without overdoing it. A real recommendation if I ever need one.
  • Shackles: a teacher with a violent history gets to work in a prison school and tries to get these violent kids enthousiastic for poetry. Interesting camera work, but the tempo of the movie is too slow, and I think they slightly overdid it on the poetry—which, IMO, isn't remotely as good as the director seems to think.
  • De Hel van Tanger: About two bus drivers who end up in a Moroccan prison for allegedly attempting to smuggle drugs. Loosely based on real events. Wasn't what I expected from it, but still not too bad.

    • That's it for now.

    Posted
    at

    On the usefulness of 'at'

    I've had this laptop for about three years now, with its installation dating from about 2.5 years ago.

    Today, because of a very silly reason, I need to use my laptop as alarm clock. So I did at 08:00, and entered a command to run a media player which will then play some random files in my home directory.

    The at command returned this to me:

    job 1 at Tue Sep  4 08:00:00 2007

    That is how useful at is to me.

    Posted
    heritage lottery

    EMIRATES HERITAGE LOTTERY

    Some spam was sent to a Debian list with that subject (sorry, no link, that would increase the pagerank). I guess spammers are now trying to combine two strategies in one: I have 1.000.000.000.000.000.000 US$ that I want to get off, but I can't possibly do so without getting into trouble. Therefore, I declare that you have won the LOTTERY!!!1! Now please claim your prize, and help me out of my problems. Thank you.

    Whether it'll work is another matter, of course.

    Posted
    2.9.7

    NBD 2.9.7

    Earlier today, I release NBD 2.9.7, containing a few fixes for segfaulting bugs, and some new features: one by Mike Snitzer to implement support for better handling of dead connections (which has been requested by a number of users for eons); one by myself to allow for running shell script snippets at connect/disconnect time, which should be helpful for the LTSP people (they now have an inetd-based wrapper written in shell, which seems like such a waste).

    Source can be found on sourceforge.net, packages have been uploaded to Debian and are even installed by now; these also fix some outstanding packaging-related bugs. Enjoy!

    Posted
    pauly site

    Live!

    My brother and me, we've been maintaining the website for the Jozef Pauly Ensemble since a few years. I'd written some stuff in PHP so that a few things could be automated, but it wasn't much more than a glorified SSI setup, with a random picture at the home page, a calendar page that would automatically strike out past events, and some semi-homebrewn language negotiation support based on my accept-to-gettext.inc file that I wrote a few years ago (and which apparently has become quite popular in the mean time—even with the bug in that it requires you to set a charset, which is totally unnecessary).

    I had tried to set it up so that people could easily modify the site: everything was stored in subversion, and I made people use TortoiseSVN to make a checkout, explaining them how to safely use it, and providing a bunch of page templates, but that was still too difficult.

    Over the past year, I've been off and on working on replacing the whole setup with something based on Drupal, and today we've gone live. It's nothing too spectacular—just the default theme with some non-default colors and a few extra non-default modules—but at least I won't be the bottleneck for doing updates anymore; and stuff which used to run separately (forum, guest book, a few other things) are now nicely integrated into the main site.

    Isn't that nice.

    Posted