Update
Only one month since my last update, maybe there is hope for me yet…
Last Sunday we saw Star Wars ROTS, booking out a “gold class” with a bunch of our friends. It was a little weird seeing closure on a series of movies that captivated me when I was five years old. I went in with pretty low expectations after the last two movies and so I wasn’t disappointed - there was quite a bit to like about the movie. Lucas’ (or his art department’s) ability to conceive stunning vistas has come of age - the city images were simply amazing, as was the wonderful sequence in the lava mine (to pick two examples out of many). Unfortunately the film suffered greatly from Lucas’ desire to ram as much narrative into the film as he could and, worse, from his inability to convince. This latter point is the most annoying - Lucas had source material of Shakespearean power: how a good man turns evil, how a democracy becomes a dictatorship and he failed to wield it properly. Vader’s moment of conversion in particular was utterly unbelievable, despite its being repeatedly telegraphed throughout the first half of the film. He did a better job with the corruption of the democracy (and the direct pot shots at the current US administration were rather amusing). Despite its flaws, I enjoyed it as a satisfactory conclusion to the series and as an visually spectacular action film and I’ll probably go see it again at the cinema (if I can someone to come with me). 7/10. PS. I was deeply, deeply disappointed by Lucas’ failure to play the John William’s excellent “Imperial March” score (you know, the Darth Vader theme) when Vader had his helmet first placed on - the score seemed to be musically hinting at it and it never came… WTF were you thinking there?
My hacking efforts of late have been restricted to polishing the connection multiplexing features in OpenSSH. I aim to have the openssh-4.2 release’s achieve feature parity between multiplexed and “vanilla” connections. Practically this means hooking up an escape filter (e.g. “~.”) and making X11 and agent forwarding work for multiplexed slave connections. As usual, implementing something that works is pretty easy, but figuring out sane and usable semantics and working within the constraints of the SSH protocol is annoying (why is there no way to relate X11 and agent requests back to their parent channel?).
BTW, I’m still riding my bike to work when I can. I have been pretty slack at it lately, because we have finally had some rain (yay!), but I lack wet weather riding gear. Excuses, excuses…