Monthly Archives: March 2005

Donnie Dark – Director’s Cut

Finally got around to watching the director’s cut of Donnie Darko.
Overall I think it is an improvement on the theatrical release,
especially with the addition of the pages from the Philosophy of Time
Travel interspersed throughout the film. It makes it a little easier to
understand what is going on and the film feels more like it makes sense.

Two changes bothered me though. One was the changed graphics as time
is reversed and the montage during the party. They reminded me a little
bit too much of Robocop and Terminator. The other thing, which, for me,
really let the film down was the changing of music from Echo and the
Bunnymen – The Killing Moon to INXS – Never Tear Us Apart in the opening
scenes. I’ve blogged
previously about how I really enjoyed the opening
scenes to this film and I just didn’t feel that INXS gave the scene the
same magical quality that the original did. It is a shame, because it
let down what was otherwise a really good Director’s Cut.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Warning: Spoilers

Just finished watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again. I
never really agreed with the ending of the film when I watched it at the
cinema. Something about it didn’t quite sit right with me. The last
10-15 minutes felt a little bit tacked on and didn’t quite fit with the
rest of the film. I don’t know if this is because I wanted it to end
differently. I always felt that they shouldn’t have found out that they
erased each other. I think they should have just fallen in love with
each other without knowing that they had already fallen in and out of
love with each other before. I think at the time I felt as if they had
rewritten the ending after initial screenings

Having seen it a second time, I think I have changed my mind and
think that the ending works a lot better than I thought initially. They
decide that they want to be with each other even though they know that
they are likely to find massive faults with each other in the
future.

irssi-text-0.8.9-3

Finally managed to get my ipv6 transport working and gain access to a IA64 box running Debian (well
Ubuntu, but close enough) to debug the FTBFS on itanium (Thanks Thom). Turns out that
the Ubuntu package didn’t build either and after several aborted
attempts to play around with the static specifier, I noticed
that debian/rules special-cased not using -O2 on
ia64. Removed that and it now compiles on both at least i386 and
ia64. Hopefully my sponsor will build on powerpc and alpha for me
too. 

irssi-text (0.8.9-3) unstable; urgency=medium

  * Fix linker errors on IA64 by building with -O2 on that platform too.
  * Upload with medium urgency to get the previous fixes into sarge

 -- David Pashley <david@davidpashley.com>  Sat, 19 Mar 2005 17:43:07 +0000

I also spent an hour or two this morning tracking down a bug when using a turkish locale. It
turned out that the perl plugin was taking the name of the different chat
networks (e.g. IRC, SILC) and lowercasing all but the first character using
g_strdown() to give the name of the perl module
(Irssi::Silc). The problem was that g_strdown() uses the
current locale to do the lowercasing and in turkish, the lower case of I is not
i. A quick change to use the newer g_ascii_strdown() and irssi now
starts in a turkish locale. 

--- irssi-text-0.8.9.orig/src/perl/perl-common.c
+++ irssi-text-0.8.9/src/perl/perl-common.c
@@ -565,8 +565,8 @@
        chat_type = chat_protocol_lookup(rec->name);
        g_return_if_fail(chat_type >= 0);

-       name = g_strdup(rec->name);
-       g_strdown(name+1);
+       name = g_ascii_strdown(rec->name,-1);
+       *name = *(rec->name);

        /* window items: channel, query */
        type = module_get_uniq_id_str("WINDOW ITEM TYPE", "CHANNEL");

I have asked the submitter to check this bug and will upload once 0.8.9-3 is
in sarge. I also need to send this patch upstream. In the meantime if you use a
turkish locale, can you test out the package available at http://www.davidpashley.com/debian/irssi-text/ 

irssi-text (0.8.9-4) unstable; urgency=low

  * Correctly lower case chat protocols using g_ascii_strdown() rather than
    using the deprecated g_strdown() (Closes: #232628)

 -- David Pashley <david@davidpashley.com>  Wed, 23 Mar 2005 08:29:32 +0000

Reading Tickets

Thank you for your order MR PASHLEY

You have booked 4 weekend (age restrictions apply) tickets for
READING FESTIVAL 2005 at
Richfield Avenue in Reading on 26TH-29TH
AUGUST. Doors open at 11:30, show starts at 12:00

Your card will be charged £532.95
Please note - this charge will appear on your statement as EVENT TICKETS

Who wants to touch me. I said who wants to fucking touch me.

Spring is here

Today is the first day this year where I’ve walked out my door and
thought “What a lovely day. Spring is officially here.” The sun was
shining and and it was pleasantly not cold. Lunch was spent eating a
lovely thai style chicken ciabatta from Redeli sitting on the beach. Was
warm enough in the sun to sit without wearing a jacket. This was why
I moved to Brighton.

Half an hour after returning to the office, it rained.

New irssi-text package

Finally got round to updating irssi-text packaging and fixing a few
bugs that would be nice to get into sarge if I can. You can find a
copy on my
website. Currently in need of a sponsor, hint hint. 

 irssi-text (0.8.9-2) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * Upload medium as it would be useful to get the irssi-common and perl fixes
     into sarge.
   * Conflict with irssi-common (Closes: #263320)
   * Update to Standards-Version 3.6.1
   * Update to building against libglib2.0
   * Fix the menu file quoting
   * Depend on autotools-dev and update config.{status,guess} automatically
     (Closes: #296989)
   * Recompile against libperl5.8 (5.8.4) (Closes: #248020, #224930, #247104)

Update: Steve
McIntyre has sponsored an upload of i386, powerpc and alpha for
me