On the topic of Star Wars...

Take the quiz: "What Star Wars Character Are You?"

Anakin Skywalker
Watch out for your temper...it could get you into trouble the way it did Anakin. You have enormous potential to be a great Jedi, but stress has made the dark side seem that much more inviting...

Okay, first things first. I know some people are waiting for e-mail from me. I'll catch up ASAP. So no, I've not forgotten about you :)

The upgrade to OpenBSD 3.7 was pretty smooth and was the reason for last weekend's outage, in case you were wondering. Well, it's OpenBSD so little, if any, surprises are expected. Some of the new functionality is pretty nice, and so is the use of gcc 3.x instead of the aging 2.95 series. I pgdump'ed all the database information before the update just in case but, in the end, it wasn't needed, and quite soon I had the server back on track, modulo a minor problem with postfix, which required some tweaking in the config files for the transition from the 2.0 series to 2.2 to work correctly. Another reason why I was looking forward to upgrading to 3.7 is that SVN is now in the ports collection. I really wanted to give svn another try, and this time I can say that it's gotten good enough to replace p4. The first step was converting the p4 repo to svn. I tried using the dest::svk option in VCP but it segfaulted, so I converted the repo to CVS and then used the cvs2svn conversion tool. Worked like a charm. In case you're interested, this is what did it for me...


#!/bin/sh
for module in `p4 have | awk -F/ '{print $4}'|sort -u`
do vcp "p4:(scienide)@perforce:1666://depot/"$module"/..." "cvs:/pub/devel/cvs:"$module
done
cd /pub/devel/cvs && find . -name CVSROOT -exec rm -rf {} \;
cvs2svn --dump-only --dumpfile=/pub/tmp/cvsdump /pub/devel/cvs
ssh mindfields svnadmin load /storage3/devel/svn < /pub/tmp/cvsdump
svn checkout svn+ssh://mindfields.energyhq.es.eu.org/storage3/devel/svn/trunk svn


Pretty straightforward, right? So, things I like in svn and I things I like in p4:

• P4 enforces permissions on files, so a quick ls will tell me what file(s) I'm currently working on.
• svn version numbers are repository wide, which has an interesting side effect. Let's see an example:


flynn@scienide% svn --verbose log -r 216
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r216 | flynn | 2005-05-30 13:07:08 +0200 (Mon, 30 May 2005) | 1 line
Changed paths:
M /trunk/gtk-send-pr/gtk-send-pr.h
M /trunk/gtk-send-pr/gtk_ui.c
M /trunk/gtk-send-pr/main.c


Use a linked list for files
------------------------------------------------------------------------
flynn@scienide% grep Id gtk-send-pr.h gtk_ui.c main.c
gtk-send-pr.h: $Id: gtk-send-pr.h 216 2005-05-30 11:07:08Z flynn $
gtk_ui.c: $Id: gtk_ui.c 216 2005-05-30 11:07:08Z flynn $
main.c: $Id: main.c 216 2005-05-30 11:07:08Z flynn $


Note how those 3 files have the same revision and how svn log tells me what I did in change 216 and which files it affected.

My main concern about svn was its speed, or the lack of. This seems to have been addressed in the recent releases and, coupled with the FSFS backend, makes a formidable SCM. So what I'm doing now is keep developing on the p4 repo and then copy and commit those same changes to the svn one. Once I feel confident enough with svn newer development will take place on the svn repo. I have to figure out a way to run a chrooted svnweb system, although Trac looks even more interesting (thanks wac for pointing it out), and probably worth giving a go.

And now, let's talk a bit about Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. I know a lot has been said about it, so if you've had enough already you might skip the rest of the entry. I'll try not to spoil the movie for those who have not seen it yet. And on that topic, if you plan to watch it later when it comes out on DVD, this is a definitely movie worth watching on the big screen, even if you're not that big a Star Wars fan. After having read some posts on /. and IMDB I get the impression that some people think Star Wars is sci-fi. I don't think that's the case, at all. In my opinion, Star Wars is just fantasy set on space.

2001: A Space Odyssey is sci-fi, Star Wars is not. Another thing I find funny is how some people bash the movie's cheesy love scenes and acting, somehow forgetting that the acting in IV, V and VI wasn't that great either. I've recently watched the old trilogy and, while Alec Guiness' work was pretty good, I wouldn't say Mark Hamill's performance was Oscar material. Not that it matters! Because Star Wars was never about that. Star Wars is about (back then) cutting edge effects, battle scenes and a very interesting story. I found The Phantom Menace to be way worse than the old trilogy, and Attack of the Clones to be almost on par and, to be honest, my expectations for Revenge of the Sith were pretty high, and I'm glad to say that George Lucas has met my expectations.

ILM have reached perfection. I've been follwing their work since Young Sherlock Holmes and, milestone after milestone, these people have set the gold standard of what can be achieved with CGI. In EP3 the rendering is perfect, plain and simple. No flaws, no bad textures or lights, no easily spotted fake-looking characters. The attention paid to detail is incredible. My only complain is that the floors on the Jedi Temple look like they were made of plastic, but that's it. Water, fire, clouds, stone, metal. You name it, the ILM people have perfected it. What can be said about the score. Simply amazing. Very very moving music, like always. Some songs really got stuck in my head. Excellent soundtrack. As for the rest, yes the love scenes are cheesy (it's a Lucas film) and the dialogue is not so good but, as I've said before, who cares? The battle scenes are grandiose, and so are the lightsaber duels. And Vader's transformation, wow. There are a lot of references to the other movies, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

I realize how easy it is to get passionate about Star Wars. This movie gives you a completely different perspective of Darth Vader, Palpatine and the Jedi Order. I felt so bad for Anakin, what he went through and what his motives were. You can never watch the classic trilogy with the same eyes again after EP3. Vader had been the epitome of evil for so long, and now I feel sorry for him. He's just a poor kid who tried to save the ones he loved and was deceived and manipulated by that Emperor guy. The way the Jedi handled the issue, specially Obi-Wan, was a bit disappointing. I'd venture to say that they were as guilty as others of the fall of the republic. I've read just the first chapter of the novel and it goes into much more detail (not surprising) and makes a very nice read after having watched the movie. Of course, these words are coming from a Star Wars fan, so my comments are pretty biased. If you know what to expect EP3 is, in yours truly opinion, on par with The Empire Strikes Back, my personal favourite. Both are dark, sad and very moving films.

On a different note, did Hollywood run out of ideas once more? We saw trailers for remakes of The Pink Panther (with Beyoncé Knowles, WTF?), The War of the Worlds and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. I wonder when they'll star making remakes of remakes :)

Oh, and for those of you looking forward to watching a sci-fi movie, I've been suggested Serenity. The trailer surely looks promising. We'll see. And now, back to answering e-mail :)

It's not a secret that I love heist movies, so I had to watch After the Sunset. For what it's worth, this is not the first time Pierce Brosnan plays the role of a thief. He already did that in The Thomas Crown Affair. The movie itself is pretty enjoyable, although I found Woody Harrelson's character a bit annoying at times, but perhaps that was the intention. Salma Hayek was a bit too 1 dimensional. I'd rather have had less boobs and more character development. How did Max and Lola meet? How long have they been in business? How was the first Napoleon Diamond stolen? There are some pretty funny moments, while others are a bit obnoxious, but all things considered I enjoyed the movie a lot. Some songs from the soundtrack are pretty catchy, I have too take a look at them. And the sets are simply fantastic, makes you want to be there. Something I've always liked about these movies is how the empathy with the thief is built as we get to know him and the police is always the bad guy, which is kind of ironic because the former is the one breaking the law, albeit in a very sophisticated and, why not, romantic kind of way. My fave heist movie is still Ocean's Eleven, but I'm sure I'll get this one on DVD once it comes out here.

I remember the first time I listened to Metallica. It was in 1991, and the song was "The Four Horsemen". It's been a while since then, but I still listen to those albums. As some of you know, I love music, most genres except rap and hip hop, so heavy metal/thrash metal is not an exception. There are some moments when you want to relax with some classical or pop, and there are moments when you need something more powerful and energy filled, and does Metallica fill that niche. I never really got into Load and Reload, and those two plus the S&M album are the only records missing in my collection. When I heard they were working on a new album I had some mixed feelings. My opinion about St. Anger? It's damn good. Sure it's not like their old work, but it's good material, I like it. Some people find the distorted snare sound annoying, I love it.

I was curious about Some Kind of Monster, the documentary that supposedly sheds some light about Metallica's past and future, so I gave it a go. Hetfield going into rehab and the ego problems weren't that surprising, but that scene with Dave Mustaine surely was. I had always considered Dave to be a tough guy. Watching him break into tears was really something I wasn't expecting.I understand his feelings, but come on, it's not like Megadeth was a flop. I have 4 of their records and they rule in their own style. I recently listened to their The system has failed and it still has the same Megadeth sound, which I like. Yes, Back in the day has that Iron Maiden-esque sound, but the rest sounds like Countdown to Extinction. We could play the what if game all day long, but the fact is that Dave's departure from Metallica gave us some great albums from the successful Megadeth guys. I hope he'll get over it, it's been more than 20 years already, after all.

The other interesting topic is Lars. The guy made an ass of himself with the Napster thing a few years ago, but the part where he is selling his art collection and making several million dollars in the process finally convinced me that he has little, if any, resemblance of what he once was. The irony of this is in Garage, Inc's booklet, let me quote page 4 for a second:

"When Lars first came to the States, he had all these singles with devils and pentagrams and rough-looking guys with leather jackers on the covers: Motörhead, Diamond Head, Witchfynde, Sweet Savage, Tygers of Pang Tang. I would stay over at his place for days at a time, making tapes of his records and sleeping on the carpet."

Can you taste the irony? Lars seems to be more worried about his art collection and arguing with others than about making good music, that's the perception I have after watching him in the documentary. And maybe that was the reason why Jason Newsted left. Rob Trujillo looks pretty impressive, though, so perhaps the change was for the better after all.

I admire the guys for the work they've done over the years. In my opinion, Ride the Lightning is their best work and one of the greatest metal albums ever made. You know it's some good music when you can listen to it 20 years after it was recorded and still enjoy it like the first day.

On a final note I found it funny to see the use of Pro Tools (it was Pro Tools, right?) for the mastering and recording of St. Anger. I had this mental image of the group jamming and recording the stuff almost live. Definitely a documentary worth watching if you like the group.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events featuring Jim Carrey, Emily Browning, Liam Aiken and more is a movie that had been on my have to watch list for a while, and I'm glad I finally did. Some of the sets are fantastic, specially Aunt Josephine's house. I haven't read the books, so I wasn't sure about what to expect, but I'd say that, as a movie, it's pretty good. Over the years Jim Carrey has gone from someone I could barely tolerate, remember his Ace Ventura days, to an actor whose work I look forward to watching, specially since The Truman Show. The kids' acting was very good IMHO, but the sets are the real show. The colours, the textures, almost Tim Burton-esque. Excellent in that aspect. Lemony Snicket's voice sounded familiar, and I later checked on IMDB that it was indeed Jude Law's as I had suspected. Highly recommended.

The reason why I've been quiet the last days is because I've restarted my operating system project, as a complement to my recently restarted journaling filesystem project. So a better part of the weekend has been spent cleaning up old code I hadn't touched since 2001. The obligatory screenshot is here. Since qemu supports not only x86, but amd64, sparc and ppc, it's going to be easier to go for multiplatform support since day 1. According to the FreeBSD Status Report Jan-Mar 2005, Scott Long is working on a journal layer on top of FFS. It will be interesting to check his work, but I still believe that a completely new design is needed, ergo I'll keep working on my filesystem.

Andrew Tridgell finally released his BitKeeper-Compatible Tool. So, Larry, is this what all the fuzz was about? Cry me a river, pal. As little as my opinion might matter, I'm 100% with Tridge and I think both Linus and Larry owe him an apology. Not that it's going to happen. But, overall, I think it's a good thing that this has happened. Why? Because 1) The Linux devs are going to use an open source tool to manage their code, which makes sense since, whether they like it or not, Linux is the poster child of open source, and 2) Because this will hopefully make people realize that Linus Torvalds is just a human being, and as such makes mistakes from time to time. I think he made some unfortunate comments and it's still to be seen how all of this will affect the kernel development process. Not that I care that much, but I like to follow what goes on on high profile projects.

Adapted from this, let me introduce you the concept of the Computer Muggle:

"Computer Muggles" are Windows users in the parlance of the Computing World. Computer Muggles are for the most part oblivious to the entire society of UNIX people which exists alongside their own. Part of the reason for this is that Muggles simply don't believe that UNIX exists, which means they find non-UNIX reasons for the things that happen to them [1]. Another part of the reason is that the Ministry of Geeks works very hard to keep the Computer Muggles in the dark.

And my personal favourite:

"Many Geekettes and Geeks look upon Computer Muggles kindly, but some see Computer Muggles as nothing but a nuisance and a bother."

Oh, that was meant to be humorous if it wasn't blatantly obvious.

As I've been doing for some weeks now, I've selected another set for tomorrow's commute: Greg Benz - Old School Prog Mix 93-97.

In other news, it seems that Buffy Boy is back in full swing, a few more days of rest and observation and the little rascal will be back to his normal schedule. Good to read some good news for a change.

As reported here, Star Wars : Revelations is out. The torrent is pretty fast. I haven't had the time yet to watch it, but the 5 minutes I've seen look very promising. In other Star Wars news, StarWars.com has unveiled three TV spots for STAR WARS: EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH!. Please please, George, don't make this one suck :)

The new OpenBSD song is out! And it's pretty good actually. In fact, all the songs released so far have been pretty nice. Download them in case you haven't done so already. In true Theo fashion, a flamewar about the t-shirt sizes has been started on the OpenBSD-misc mailing list soon after the announcement. Some people never change :)

Oh, btw, those of you using RSS readers, point your programs here. Thanks.