Tuesdak
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.