djm's scribble

Computers
Cool, my little Soekris Net4501 boxes arrived today. With these, I’ll be able to eliminate a few more noisy computers from my home and do some interesting hacking. I have had a chance to do a little more hacking lately - a nice hack to add memory buffer log support to OpenBSD syslogd (like Cisco buffered logging), improving pfflowd ahead of new releases soon, acquainting mysqlf with the kernel side of the BSD network stack and a trickle of OpenSSH work.

Movies - Lantana
Saw Lantana with my wife. Ouch - this movie is fairly depressing, despite the ray-of-hope it presents at the very end. Excellent story and good acting, though the denouement was a little unsatisfying (I suspect this was intentional). 8/10

Movies - Matrix Revolutions
I saw this on the big screen last night. Being prepared by a number of bad reviews, I was pleasantly surprised - it wasn’t _that_ bad, and was certainly better than the second installment. I largely agree with this analysis of why the sequels failed to live up to the promise of the original film. By discarding the centrality of the Matrix from the sequels, the writers denied themselves a very fertile milieu. Some of the Animatrix shorts focussed on this subject and, consequently, were the most interesting (excepting the vastly more imaginative “Matriculated” short). At least Matrix Revolutions didn’t have as many annoying speeches (not quite true, the speeches were more annoying, but *much* shorter). The final fight between Neo and Smith was agonisingly predictable in both execution and resolution. The ending was particularly lame, with the obligatory “in” for further sequels. Some of the fight scenes were reasonably tense, but the interspersed dialog really detracted from the mood. 6.5/10 - mainly for the funny Hellfire club scene.

I am exhausted, both physically and mentally after spending the weekend doing hard labour (ripping up concrete, digging up clay soil) and a fair bit of coding (OpenSSH patches and memory buffer support for syslogd). Fortunately tomorrow is a public holiday. The garden is slowly taking shape - I have pulled up a 1/2 meter strip of concrete up the side of our driveway and excavated to around 30cm for its 6m length. We’ll backfill this with topsoil and manure (which I have just discovered can be delivered premixed) and plant some top-rooted trees and ground cover plants. The back yard is coming along too, all the garden beds are now edged with either bricks or rough-hewn bluestone, manured and mulched with pea-straw. We should get round to planting next weekend (finally).