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.

When I was in high school I was one of the most popular guys. Oh wait, I wasn't! I was that shy and introverted guy. Now that I look back I wonder how quick people were to attach labels to others. So what do the geeks do? Join a geeky community. Enter the Free software communities, namely the FreeBSD users. Here you won't be judged by how cool you are (or think you are), your looks, or the amount of girls you get to sleep with. You'll be solely judged by the quality of your work. This is the place where your skills can make a difference, and where Joe Sixpack who was cool in high school would be considered a useless pariah. Why am I writing this, you may ask. Because a recent post by Brett Glass has reminded me how these communities work: The Meritocracy. It has somehow brought memories of how things used to be back then and how things work in the open source world today. I don't want to single Brett out, but he's a prime example of what you should not do. I've already told him, but I'll repeat it here: Wishful thinking will get you nowhere in the free software world. If you want something to happen you'll either have to do it yourself or shut up. Cue in the classic "Send patches or shut up". Brett has been using FreeBSD for years and somehow has failed to (or refuses to) grok this very simple concept. How does this connect with the high school story? I've seen this very interesting link in Lauri's weblog and I have to admit that sometimes it's very easy to give in to the dark side when dealing with these muggles of the computing world. And I'm as guilty as the next geek, but I have the impression that some people deserve it anyway :)

I've discovered today that PHP's mail() function doesn't like chroot, so I've installed mini_sendmail and voila!, another satisfied customer. Drupal's mail delivery is working fine now. You know, you can never be too paranoid about security.

The installation is pretty easy, and I'm glad Drupal supports PostgreSQL out of the box without extra hacks. All I had to do was create a new database and import the template, that's all. So far it seems very flexible, specially the blocks concept which I already love :)

On the other hand, Drupal seems to be fully dynamic, which can cause higher loads on the server, although this is a very low traffic site and a throttle mode can be enabled. One of the features I like about Movable Type is that it lets you publish and rebuild your site so you can have most pages rendered and served statically. I'll have to investigate if such a thing is possible with Drupal.

As I mentioned early I had been pondering giving Drupal a try, since Wordpress' fiasco made me hesitate about it and William Carrel seems to think the same since he has abandoned his pgsql porting project. So here's the first entry. I will allow registered users for those of you who know me and will probably start an alternative weblog (you'll be notified) with more personal stuff. I have to migrate the old MT entries in case this one works fine and finally becomes the definitive blog software for my site.