the corner office

Things are getting boring around here but now that I've started a trend of documenting what movies I've watched, I have to keep at it.

White Squall on Saturday night. Not bad, except for the end which got all Dead Poets Society. I love the idea of sailing, but I'm not big on the idea of drowning. I think I'd stick with sea-going on big ocean liners that are less likely to sink. On average, y'know.

Paula and Lee came by to watch Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on Sunday. The HP movies are great, I love the Tom Brown's School Days meets every child's dreams of magic vibe. The story was a little incoherent towards the end though. Will there be a fourth HP to tie things up neatly? Will Daniel Radcliffe, the lead actor, be married with kids by then? Is he already?

Oh, and re-watched the Witches of Eastwick tonight. Oldie but a goodie.

Felt like a DVD so we hired Spiderman II this afternoon. Ronwen got bored rather quickly but I enjoyed it muchly. Thank dog they didn't leave the romance thing dangling again. Romantic tension is a tough thing to manage. It adds to the story but leave it too long and you get everyone losing interest and saying "fer chrissakes, get over yourselves and shag already!" I felt that way at the end of Spidey 1. This movie also had a good set-up for Spidey III.

(The Rabobi thing is a South African reference. In the early 80s, when the SABC first started airing African language TV, the Spiderman cartoon series was dubbed into Zulu, and "Spiderman" was translated into "Rabobi" - and us whitey kids would watch "Rabobi" but have no clue what was happening dialogue-wise. Now, every time I hear the Spiderman song, I start humming "Rabobi! Rabobi! Blah blah blah blah Rabobi!")

It might say something about me but I'm a sucker for movies about crotchety old men. Nobody's Fool was on telly last night (I saw it on the big screen years ago as well). I'm also a sucker for movies set in snow-ridden towns in the middle of nowhere. Excellent and touching movie.

(Oddly, Nobody's Fool was on eTV a week ago, and SABC3 last night. Can't these people schedule things better?)

A big news item yesterday was the huge blow-up this week at the British Department of Work and Pensions (via Abiola Lapite and Ed Brill). After touring the news sites it seems that what was meant to be a limited upgrade of a few Windows PCs ended up flattening up to 80% of the 80,000 PC's across the department's network. That's quite an embarassment for Microsoft, especially since many news articles have mentioned that there's a certain uh, unhappiness with MS in their involvement in all of this.

Would a network of 80,000 Linux boxes be any easier to maintain and safely upgrade? I'm not quite sure if that's the right question. Maintaining 80,000 PCs is a major undertaking, irrespective of operating system. I mean, with those sorts of numbers, you've certainly got to have some very smart software keeping machines up to date, and it sounds like perhaps Windows 2000 and XP don't have smart enough software. Do average Linux distros have smarter software?

Equally importantly though, you've got to have some very clearly-thought out, very paranoid and risk-averse and very well-tested policies and procedures to control upgrades and software changes. It sounds to me like the DWP simply didn't have those in place.

... you're in for a BIG frigging surprise. There's a story on CNN about a hunter who offed 5 other hunters and wounded three others, presumably over a fight over a deer stand. Hardcore.

Quoth one of the hunters:

"When you're hunting, you don't expect somebody to try to shoot you and murder you," Wagner said. "You have no idea who is coming up to you."

Dripping with irony, wot?

Waaaay back in 1989 or so, at the height of my cycling days, I borrowed a video tape from our local cycle shop owner, containing the 1988 or 9 Milk Race through Britain, recorded off of MNET at the time. I still have the tape, although it's a Betamax tape and I've no way of getting to the contents. At the very end of this tape, was the first 5 minutes of "The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu." Peter Sellers as the 168 year old Dr Fu Manchu, playing the pipe organ at his birthday, and his elixir vitae getting wasted by a servant whose arm catches fire. Ever since, I've wanted to watch the rest of that movie.

Finally, it was on eTV tonight. Sad to say, the movie didn't quite meet the expectations that had been lingering for the last 15 years. Some delightfully obscure Peter Sellers stuff, but by no means brilliant, and the ending was an outright disappointment. I am glad I finally got to see it though!

I figgered I should see what the Eclipse Rich Client Platform malarkey is all about, and so I've taken some time this weekend to work through Ed Burnette's tutorials on creating a simple RCP application. The rush of seeing a blank window pop up on screen and all that. I must admit, I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but after making my way through a few chapters of the Official Eclipse FAQ (great content, utterly shite obfuscatary presentation), things hold a hint of a chance of making sense.

I always wondered what the big deal was with the "Eclipse way." You have this horrendously complicated IDE that does a zillion things, and my first impression when I started using it was that people had just kept slapping features on it like layers on a mud hut. Not so. The underlying Eclipse architecture is actually quite intriguing. A very simple core really just acts as a control centre and bootstrapper for more advanced chunks of functionality. The ultimate in extensibility. It's like software Lego on a grand scale. Clearly a lot of thinking has gone into the platform - certainly a lot more than I'd originally imagined.

Reading through explanations of how it hinges together, I can see why people are excited about the possibilities.

There's been some noise in the papers and blogland about the UK's dogged march to nanny-statism, where everything from smoking, drinking, fatty foods and nookie is being regulated and controlled.

I don't agree with the idea of nanny-statism, but I also think that compared to the horrible stuff we as South Africans have to live with, I could quite easily come to terms with the idea of living in a country where the government's greatest problems are chubby people who drink and smoke too much, and where people's greatest problems are trains running late.

Sounds like Utopia to me!

Via Andrew Sullivan, who asks "Does Jesus try to get away or something?"

The mind boggles, and publically speculating just what you get to do in a PS2 version of Passion of the Christ would probably cost me even more readers and a few friends besides. It's fertile ground, though.

Perhaps I'm safe for now... I can't help but suspect it's a hoax. I can find no other reference to the PS2-isation of The Passion (aka "Watching a dude get tortured, abused and nailed to a cross and left to die, and then getting his guts sliced open to make sure he's dead", aka "The movie many family-value loving Christians took their kids to see. Repeatedly."), and this page would suggest that if a PS2 version of Blood'n'Guts'n'Jesus is really coming out, then truth really would be stranger (and sadder) than fiction.

Update: hoax. That's what you get for surfing the web at 2 in the morning.

I realised that people including most Sefricans might not know the source of the Klunt reference in my earlier post, so I figured I may as well share it:

A: 'Thus nufe fillum's got Stief Makween innit. Jew larkkim?'
B: 'Yers. Klunt Eastwards eggshi mah fafe-rit, bit Stief's orso kwart narse.'

... from the old but excellent "Ah Big Yaws. A Guard to Sow Theffricun Innglissh" by Rawbone Malong (aka Robin Malan). And if you or your parental units happen to own an older copy of this tome on how our fogies spoke, then hang on to it. Dealers are flogging them for 129 dollars at Amazon.com. Crazy!