djm's scribble

I have been very lazy in updating this thing. It is really quite appalling, because it only takes a few minutes to write something. In late June I travelled to Calgary, Canada for the annual OpenBSD Hackathon. There I met many of the people I have only known by the email addresses for the last 5 or so years and saw some of the most beautiful scenery of my life, during quite a difficult hike around Lake Louise. During the hackathon, I got a bit of work done on OpenSSH (now released in openssh-3.9), but I spent too much time fighting jetlag from the ~24 hour journey from Melboure (the return leg wasn’t nearly so bad).

Sadly, I returned to find that my paternal uncle, Don, had passed away after his struggle with cancer. He went peacefully with his wife and daugther at his side, which is as much as one could ask for. Don was an intelligent and sensitive man, with a strong sense of social justice. I wish I had taken the time to get to know him better before he got sick - in retrospect we had much in common. Because Don was something of a serial guest in the newspapers’ letters section, I thought that it would be fitting to honour his passing with one of my own. I’m sure he would have liked it.

The Melbourne International Film Festival was on last month. The program was a good deal better this year than the last couple, with a strong showing of the New Asian Cinema that I love. Due to my disorganisation and procrastination, I only got to see two films, but a few of the others that I want to see are heading for theatrical release anyway.

The first of these films was Silmido (this link is to the IMDB page which is pretty content-free, but more intelligible than the Korean or Japanese advertising pages, both of which require horrid Flash™). Silmido was based on a true story of a South Korean incident, where an assassination attempt by a North Korean commando squad provoked the government to return the favour, by assembling a squad of death-row inmates. The movie follows their brutal training on the eponymous island of Silmido, their betrayal by the government (who belatedly realised that death squads are frowned upon in the democratic world) and the havoc that unfolds when they escape. The story was told using a mix of styles: prison movie, war movie, political thriller and Peking opera slapstick. The film reflected upon the redemption of the prisoners, most of whom embraced the second chance offered to them. I won’t risk spoiling the film by describing their betrayal and the consequences, because I recommend that you see it for yourself. I am still wondering about some misogynist undertones that I couldn’t quite figure out: the only two depictions of women were as Mother and Rape Victim. The only thing that was slightly awry was the soundtrack, which was a bit too “Pirates of the Caribbean” for a little too long - it worked during the amazing action sequences, but not so well at other moments. Despite this, a great film: 8.5/10.

The other film that I saw was Nine Souls a sort of Japenese existential road-movie. It had a really good soundtrack, but was a little slow in parts (and a little long). It follows a gang of Nine prison escapees as they seek first a stash of counterfeit money, but ultimately atonement or release for their crimes. I still haven’t figured all of its symbology out to my satisfaction. 8/10. (I’m not doing this film justice with this short blurb, I’ll try to update it later when I have more time).

The images of torture from the US and British prisons in Iraq are terrifying. Beyond the awful degradation and torture they depict, and the shame and anger they must induce in the Arab world, they represent a shocking Western Democracy’s hypocrisy. How can we pretend to stand on the high moral ground when we (our governments, whether we voted for them or not) condone and perpetuate such things? Those, typically right-wing commentators, who seek to draw some sort of moral equivalence between the prison atrocities and the hideous murder of Nick Berg miss the point - Al Qaeda doesn’t pretend to be a moral organisation.

Beyond the symbolic dimension, the practical ramifications of this are equally scary. The US senator Diane Feinstein sums it up perfectly, “If somebody wanted to plan a clash of civilisations, this is how they’d do it.” (Maureen Dowd, How to plan a clash of civilisations, The Age 14-05-2004). The highly sexual nature (almost S&M) of the “softening up” techniques used on the prisoners will be optimally offensive to the Muslim world and will therefore act as a perfect catalyst for another round of radicalisation and recruitment to extremist groups.

The US, British and Australian governments have succeeded in turning the “War on terror” from a fight with an unhinged organisation into an ideological battle with a movement. Every ham-fisted attempt to stomp on local manifestations of this movement infect more with its nihilistic ideology. All my hubristic hopes that the 21st century would be more enlightened and less blood soaked than the 20th are fading rapidly. I simply do not see a tenable way out of this - even without politicians using terror for short-term political capital, every attack will further polarise the general public (hmm, this sounds familiar.)

I have just finished watching Fulltime Killer, the Hong Kong action movie starring the ubiquitous Andy Lau (who has appears to have a flash game, which I can’t play because I don’t use flash). This is easily the best Hong Kong action movie that I have seen since my favourite Hard Boiled. It covers all the familiar themes in such movies: sexual tension, romance, woman as pawn, woman as killer, struggle between cop and assassin, rivalry between killers, betrayal and the Final Showdown. I don’t care whether the film is subservient to the genre, because it was so classily executed (pun!). 9/10.

The Melbourne winter is well and truely upon us and my desire to do any outdoor activity is pretty much gone. Instead I have been occupying myself closer to the indoor heater. I’m reading Gary Chartrand’s Introductory Graph Theory, which I can say is one of the best pieces of written mathematical pedagogy I have come across.

I have also been hacking OpenBSD a bit more, fixing a bunch of OpenSSH bugs and adding PF table support to the new BGP daemon, so it can be used to distribute real-time spam blacklists. I’m thinking of writing a paper on this for AUUG2004, if I get time.

Last night we watched Kill Bill Volume 1 (finally). Perhaps I swalloed too much hype, but I wasn’t terribly impressed. It was a good film, but it was somewhat let down by its overdone sound effects and its hagiographic treatment of Uma Therman. Still, 8/10 isn’t bad.

Quote of the week goes to Rich: “Heidegger was a Nazi writing in Ancient Greek because it was the language of the great philosophers; he was such a tosser.”

You know when you have been slack in updating your weblog when your wife starts sending you reminders. The last few months seemed relatively uneventful, but upon reflection they have been quite busy. The last 24 hours have been pretty terrible, with the atrocity in Spain and, closer to home, my uncle in law being hospitalised with serious burns from a farm accident. With typical grim hospital humor, we ran into some of our friends at the reception, needing attention for a seriously bruised foot.

These same friends were married just over one month ago. It was a very flash wedding and we continued the party by occupying the bridal hotel suite until about 6am.

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.

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).

Life
My madly busy life continues apace. Fortunately my wife has finished school for the year, so at least one of us will be calm. Some friends of ours have bought a house near us, so I’m looking forward to them moving in.

Movies
Re-watched Matrix Reloaded last week. That movie really was saved by the car chase sequence. Much better was Le Cercle Rouge, a very classy 1970 crime movie starring Alain Delon. It touches a number of sub-genres - betrayal, mob, heist, chase without becoming captive to any of them. It includes the best burgulary scene I have seen in a film, a sub-genre which has been done untold violence in recent years. On top of this cool script and crafted mis en scene is a very classy and subtle Jazz score.