the corner office

I've never written a Gnome app before, but I might need to soon for varsity (it's either that or Visual Studio on Windows, 'nuff said). I stumbled across a document titled Overview of the Gnome Platform, which seems to be nice and up to date, and details the various bits and pieces that make up 'Gnome'. Even for normal Gnome users, it's useful to be able understand what the various components do and how they fit together.

I came pretty close to draining the Gentoo rice paddy this evening. I've been a devout user for nearly 2 years, but it's been getting a bit much recently. It was a great learning experience in the beginning, but the marginal satisfaction return on the new things I'm learning is getting a little slim these days. The final catalyst for my near-treason was this month's upgrade, though. It was hard-masked hell trying to get various bits and pieces lined up so I could keep using Java 5. Then when I finally got that sorted out, I got to see the download list, and I need to haul down nearly 400 megs of source code. It'll take ages to download, blowing my ADSL cap in the process, and the compiling will take even longer.

Some of my colleagues have been having fun with Ubuntu, and it looks really impressive. That, combined with the long-standing recommendations of people whose judgement I respect, and its general popularity and support, means it's been looking mighty attractive recently. That, and Mark Shuttleworth is Sefrican, and must be Adoringly Supported.

Then I started digging around, and learned that AMD64 support in Ubuntu ain't too great for 32 bit apps. I decided that Gentoo may have its faults, but having to jump through hoops to run 32 bit code isn't one of them. If the laptop thing happens (still procrastinating), it's likely to be an Intel machine, and I'll try Ubuntu on that. Until then, I'll stick with Gentoo, despite its quirks.

I'm about 100 megs into the downloads...

You might not expect it, but Muammar Gaddafi has a website (via Commentary, where Laurence highlights some loco world cup talk from the man.)

Oddly, I was listening to the Dead Kennedys in the car today, and chuckled (as I always do) at this line by the Secretary of War in Kinky Sex Makes The World Go Round:

Libya? El Salvador? How 'bout Northern Ireland? Or a 'moderately repressive regime' in South America? We'll just cook up a good Soviet threat story in the Middle East - we need that oil... We had Libya all ready to go and Colonel Khadafy's hit squad didn't even show up. I tell ya... That man is unreliable.

And there's me quietly tootling along the N1 every day, trying to keep a safe following distance. This BBC article discusses train surfing, a new fad amongst young South African train commuters:

The most dangerous is train surfing proper, standing on top and dodging bridges and high-power cables.

Then there's a trick that involves swinging out of a door as the train travels through a tunnel and running along the sides.

The mildest, and most common, move involves jumping off the train as it begins moving, and jumping back on board again.

...

Lebohang Motsamai, a strapping young man with hair braided tightly, describes another move, known as "gravul" from the gravel on the tracks: "I get under the train, when it is in motion, and kick the stones, kin, kin, I play with my legs."

Surrounded by a clutch of admirers, he says he plays these games to impress girls. "Because when I do this, they are going to love me. They are going to say, eish, this boy is clever."

Kids do stupid things all the time, but that's just crazy.

It's spelled Hear! Hear!

Not Here! Here!

More. It's understandable that it's more commonly heard than read, and therefore commonly misspelled, but this wrongness must stop. If I help one person to spell this correctly, this post will not have been in vain.

A number of blogs I follow have mentioned the WinFS is dead story (no links; if you haven't read about it yet, I think it's quite likely that as soon as the IT news sites get into the new week, you're going to).

I feel sorry for the people behind WinFS, because I have no doubt that the WinFS project was finally scuppered by marketing and business pressures pulling everything in all the wrong directions, and if the smart techies behind it had been free to do their thing, some pretty awesome stuff would eventually have surfaced.

Some Googling prompted by last post, unearthed some odd stuff.

First, Franklin W Dixon, author of the Hardy Boys books, was just a pen name for a crowd of authors known as the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Details here. I didn't know that. I feel strangely cheated.

Second, searching Amazon for Little Nicholas books, I came across a German translation: Der Kleine Nick Und Seine Band. There's a certain Teutonic charm to that title but I can't quite articulate why. It reminded me of an old South African TV series, and shock of all bloomin' horrors, you can now actually buy Trompie en die Boksombende on DVD. In fact, if you click around from here, SABC has a few old chestnuts available: Haas Das se Nuuskas, Heidi, Liewe Heksie... even Shaka Zulu. I suspect that none of these will have aged too well.

The nostalgia trip just doesn't stop. In primary school, I loved the Little Nicholas books, especially the illustrations. Unlike the Enid Blytons and Hardy Boys and Willard Prices and other popular children's books, nobody else seemed to know about Little Nicholas (despite being written by one of the dudes behind Asterix), and they always felt like something of a secret treasure to me. Every few years I remember the series and post a mental reminder that one day I need to get hold of the books, and re-read them. Then I forget about it for a few more years.

Tonight I stumbled across a mention at Crooked Timber, cue oh-wooow-maaaan moment. After a search, it turns out that in addition to the original collection, Goscinny's daughter recently found another 80 stories which had never been published. These were rolled into a new 600-page book, doesn't look like there's an English translation (yet?)

Either way... new mental note duly filed. Next revisit around 2011.

Continuing with the theme of movies I haven't seen since I was a kid, today I watched The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. The movie has been etched in my brain as 'cool' since the days of Betamax, but I couldn't really remember anything about it. The only scenes I could remember were Eli Wallach insulting Clint Eastwood in the desert and the dead soldiers in the trenches. So I wasn't quite sure whether my enthusiasm would survive re-watching the movie.

No chance. Awesome movie. Enthusiasm restored, with a new-found appreciation I couldn't quite have mustered in primary school. I won't try to get all high school English on it, but the movie is just a stylistic, gritty, panoramic, and hugely entertaining masterpiece.

I'd actually been building up to buying this on DVD for a while now. It seems that Sergio Leone's 3 'Dollars' spaghetti westerns have all been restored, spruced up and re-released - TGTBATU now includes additional footage which had been cut from the original US version, and the running time is almost 3 hours. The local Look & Listen has had the one-disk featureless version of this re-release for a few months, and every time I see the DVD I gave it a gawk. I've never gotten it though, because I'm always partial to the the 'special edition' versions with all the goodies on 'em. Today I was in another DVD shop, and they had the 2-disc special edition, which has commentaries, and heaps of documentaries, interviews and the like. So I bought it in a snap. Given how chuffed I am after getting this, methinks the other Man With No Name movies will be following soon.

In an article on SGI (via Linux Today):

Server, storage, and visualization vendor Silicon Graphics Inc's chairman and CEO, Dennis McKenna, said in an interview with Computer Business Review that its filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early May should be seen as a "positive event".

"Before the Chapter 11 there was a high level of uncertainty around SGI," said McKenna.

No, the next line was not "... but now everybody knows we're stuffed.".

Instead, he continues with "Customers were saying that we could have the best strategy but how were we going to deal with all of this debt?" Personally, I'd be more worried about the state of the business models that led them to that debt. The man has a point kinda sorta, but the spin rather detracts from it.

Another line which may be portentous:

McKenna said the company is looking to raise additional money either from enforcing some of its numerous patents, or from divestitures.

That patent thing sounds rather casual, but you have to wonder. Deciding that cashing in on some IP was the best way to 'restore profitability' didn't turn out too well for these dudes.