djm's scribble

Another two-month weblog hole yawns behind me, offering testament to my ongoing inability to keep this thing regularly updated. Much of this period has seen my wife and I madly preparing for the maul that is Xmas and New Year’s. In addition to the usual crush of family gatherings, with concomitant eating and drinking to excess we decided that we should host a New Year’s Party. This naturally required some massive garden upgrades and a massive cleanup. My wife did most of the cleanup during her week off and we both slaved in the garden during every free moment. My father in-law also donated his time, effort and wisdom to install as spiffy drip-watering system, which will minimise our water use and provide our plants a reasonable chance of living out the summer. After much pain and a fair bit of money spent, our garden looks very nice indeed. For two people who used to refer to the line of dying pot plants near the front door as “death row”, it is very strange to have a living garden.

Our other big domestic news was the purchase of a fine dishwasher. Between this piece of essential technology and our agreed marital issue resolution technique, married life has never been better.

Unfortunately I have had to work through the so-called holiday season, taking only the public holidays off. This is just as well, as I haven’t accrued any annual leave in my new job yet, and I would prefer the money to the time off right now. Still, the weather has been so nice and hot…

Despite being so busy, I have managed to get my syslogd hack into OpenBSD - the change isn’t huge, but fiddling with something as ubiquitous and essential as syslogd shouldn’t be done lightly. The version that ended up being committed was a lot cleaner than my early hacks, thanks the urging of deraadt@. The culture of review that the OpenBSD project has built is very impressive. The output from such a review process is IMO superior (in quality and dependability) to other open-source models and all of the commercial practices that I have been exposed to, because it assures personal accountability, pooling of wisdom and careful inspection of changes. It would be expensive to replicate this in a commercial environment, where the temptation is always going to be to get the new code in the tree and polish it in situ (which probably won’t happen).

I have seen a bunch of movies since I last wrote, so I’ll be brief: John Q - Frustrating film about the apparently terrible state of public health-care in the USA. It was annoying because of its simplistic and one-sided treatment of the issue and its use of the characters as simple marionettes to spout its ideology, with about as much literary subtlety as Ayn Rand. It probably would have been far, far worse if I wasn’t sympathetic to the viewpoint. 6/10.

Russian Ark - Technically amazing film dramatising the last few hundred years of Russian history in a single 180-minute shot. Almost all of the historical references passed me (in my ignorance) by, but based on the fact that I noticed their presence, I suspect that they were really obvious. Demanding, but worth it. 8/10.

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King - an excessively long and morally troubling film. Dropping Christopher Lee was a mistake, he was an excellent villain - which the film lacked (Sauron not being tangible enough). The pacing of the film was poor, with many scenes lasting too long. The ending was exceptionally slow and painful, giving me enough time to realise that I had established no empathy for the characters at all. This was not surprising, as Tolkien never really got inside their heads enough to illuminate their motivations - Jackson did a little better, but not enough. Nowhere was this more apparent than the depiction of the good vs evil forces, who were utterly two dimensional: the evil did evil deeds because they were evil, no motivation or justification required. I suppose this simple, tautological moral clarity fits these times perfectly. The lofty production values were seriously let down by the obviously plastic elf and hobbit ears - more in line with what I’d expect to see at a Star Trek convention than as multi-million dollar blockbuster. On the other hand it was visually gorgeous, further attesting to the increasing maturity of digital cinema. Reflecting on the trilogy, The first film was easily the best, due to its good story-telling. The second film was the worst, with the boring and drawn-out battle scene ruining the narrative. This last film was an acceptable, but not stellar conclusion. 7/10.