This is my new laptop. It is extremely nifty. Linux details – Networking is perfect (wired and wireless). The latest NVIDIA driver makes the graphics 3d accelerated, but I lose the console. Solaris wired networking was easy – I added the PCI identifier to the bge entries (14e4,1600) and it just worked (mind you I’m getting spurious SSH failures – could be networking related). The graphics don’t work – the NV driver doesn’t support the card (too new/too old Solaris Express). I’ve downloaded the latest drivers from the nvidia site and am just seeing how things work.
It’s a really fast computer – scarily so. I can play all my games at full panel native resolution (1920×1200) and it simply rocks. The dual core means that broken programs don’t take me down (they tend to be badly written single threaded applications). I think it may be time for an evil laugh!
Freakshow is up for an eagle award
‘Freak Show‘ is up for an Eagle Award. Rob is one of the two main people in Sub City, which is without doubt the best comic book store in Dublin.
Vote please!, make us proud.
Silent Hill – Popcorn movie
I went to see Silent Hill a few nights ago after signing up for an evening course. It feels like a game – lots of scary slashing nightmare/reality interleaving pieces. The monsters seem like something that walked straight out of an H.R. Giger print – somewhat scary, but at the same time really smooth and slithery.
Overall not the best movie, but worth seeing. The end is what you should have in a horror movie.
102 movies, how many have you seen?
Film critic Jim Emerson recently compiled a list of 102 movies that you should see before you can consider yourself movie literate:
…they [are] the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”
Like another blogger, I decided to replicate the list, and mark with an asterisk the movies I’ve seen:
* 2001: A Space Odyssey
The 400 Blows
* 8 1/2
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
* Alien
* All About Eve
* Annie Hall
* Apocalypse Now
* Bambi
The Battleship Potemkin
The Best Years of Our Lives
* The Big Red One
The Bicycle Thief
* The Big Sleep
* Blade Runner
* Blowup
* Blue Velvet
* Bonnie and Clyde
Breathless
* Bringing Up Baby
* Carrie
* Casablanca
Un Chien Andalou
Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
* Chinatown
* Citizen Kane
* A Clockwork Orange
* The Crying Game
* The Day the Earth Stood Still
* Days of Heaven
* Dirty Harry
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
* Do the Right Thing
La Dolce Vita
* Double Indemnity
* Dr. Strangelove
Duck Soup
* E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial
* Easy Rider
* The Empire Strikes Back
* The Exorcist
* Fargo
* Fight Club
* Frankenstein
* The General
* The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II
* Gone With the Wind
* GoodFellas
* The Graduate
* Halloween
* A Hard Day’s Night
Intolerance
It’s a Gift
* It’s a Wonderful Life
* Jaws
The Lady Eve
* Lawrence of Arabia
* M
* Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior
* The Maltese Falcon
* The Manchurian Candidate
* Metropolis
* Modern Times
* Monty Python and the Holy Grail
* Nashville
The Night of the Hunter
* Night of the Living Dead
* North by Northwest
* Nosferatu
* On the Waterfront
* Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Persona
Pink Flamingos
* Psycho
* Pulp Fiction
Rashomon (guilt, I should have seen this)
* Rear Window
* Rebel Without a Cause
* Red River
Repulsion
The Rules of the Game
* Scarface
The Scarlet Empress
* Schindler’s List
* The Searchers
* The Seven Samurai
* Singin’ in the Rain
* Some Like It Hot
A Star Is Born
* A Streetcar Named Desire
Sunset Boulevard
* Taxi Driver
* The Third Man
Tokyo Story
* Touch of Evil
* The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Trouble in Paradise
* Vertigo
* West Side Story
* The Wild Bunch
* The Wizard of Oz
I’ve seen 76 of them, which I consider quite reasonable. Some may question the list, but it seems to contain the essence of good movies.
When it comes to security a handwaving answer is not enough
This is one of my biggest bugbears when it comes to getting information from someone about the security facilities that are in a system. They comment that the system is secure wave, wave, there’s no chance of somebody defeating the security wave, wave, no-one would try to break in wave wave. It’s silly to assume that because you’re dealing with money that nobody would be interested in your system.
I suspect that paypal have had to deal with substantial issues in their tenure as the de-facto e-money system on the internet; Mind you I think that Second Life, with their exchangable Lindens are some form of competition to this (not serious yet).
A statement such as ‘this is secure’ needs to be backed up with proof.
When you perform secure internet transactions the communications take place over an encrypted channel. These security measures are built into the web browser. When a website tries to communicate with you it hands over a digital certificate that says ‘this site is www.foo.com’ and ‘this authority’ assert that I am who I claim to be. Several checks are made. 1. is the site www.foo.com? 2. is the authority ‘this authority’ an authority that is trusted by the browser? 3. Is the certificate ‘in date’? If all is found to be in order then the assertion that the site is ‘www.foo.com’ is to some degree established. That’s it, the only thing you know at that point is that the website is called ‘www.foo.com’.
If you’re trying to go to ‘www.f00.com’ then you’re in a bit of trouble here, though!
More thoughts later, I need to get some lunch.
Dell announce another shiny laptop…
Finally – seems a laptop that has everything I need for now. Dual core, Fast GPU (by all accounts kick ass), large screen. Now where’s the bluetooth 🙂
The GPU is Linux compatible (but seeing as ATI released a new driver last week, that point is moot). they’re still doing the €300 for a memory doubling, and while about 10 minutes ago I thought I could buy faster memory for about 1/2 that, I’ve just been proved wrong by the crucial website – it’s cheaper from Dell at the moment.
Poor Mr. B
Looks like he got hit with an issue in User Profiles Enhancements for WS2003/XP, namely that the local guest account is deleted on logoff when the computer is part of a domain (it used to always be deleted). Was the laptop part of a domain? Can he recover those lost files? The likelehood is that he logged back in again as the guest user, scribbling enough information back onto the hard drive to lose the files forever.
I laughed, I cried, I really should write one…
Bruce Schneier, who has written several very good books on the topic of security has announced the Movie-Plot Threat Contest, entries due by the end of April 2006, it’s purpose is to have people come up with the most unlikely, yet plausible, terrorist attack scenario they can.
Dermot, are you listening? You should try it. But not if you are too busy organising the wedding.
The postal service gets my two thumbs up
I’ve been fighting with my development environment. At least the music of the band ‘The Postal Service’ hasn’t sent me insane. It feels like a combination of 80’s arcade game music with 80’s pop music – but it’s the good kind of synth-classic, fast; non-new romantic kinda-dance, kinda-fun, but still with a core of old-style ‘I like this, I enjoy this, “I’m not tired of this” feel.
The Postal Service – them be good and fun.
If you like a synth-dance-80’s this is what the pet shop boys should be if they kept up with life then you will like the postal service.
Depends, really
Some people think that make is a terrible piece of software. Honestly, it is just awful for modern projects with large numbers of dependencies. Header file dependencies become a problem. There are options to auto-insert the dependencies on header files into the makefile. Subdirectories are a problem – isolating certain code in directories is tricky. You can use the VPATH feature to provide a certain level of automatic path traversal without over-complicating the makefiles, and for trickier features you have the :sh= [svr] or $(shell …) [gnu] options to pass the work off to the shell or a script. Still the best thing about make is that it completely evaluates the dependency graph for targets; explicitly forbidding loops (or self reference).
Then we come to software releases, and their dependencies. You can’t install X without Y. you can’t remove X without remving Y. Removing X will break Y therefore you can only remove X and Y together. Good idea. Difficult on customers, though. They want an ‘add/remove programs’ option which installs and uninstalls all the needed components. I recently bought Sin Episodes from steam. It auto-installed Sin 1/Sin Multiplayer. I wanted to uninstall Sin 1/Sin Multiplayer. You can’t Sin 1 depends on Sin Multiplayer. Sin Multiplayer depends on Sin 1. Perfect cyclic dependency preventing you from uninstalling. Uninstalling means going in and deleting the .gcf file. Ah well, that’s life, I suppose.