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.

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.

I have recently added a patch to irssi-text to fix #274201 (Displays incorrect Chinese characters on input bar). As I don't use Big5 myself, I can not properly test the patches. I would appriciate it if anyone that does use Big5 can install http://www.davidpashley.com/debian/irssi-text/irssi-text_0.8.9-6_i386.deb and let me know if it works for them.

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

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.

FFS, how many people must die, before America introduces gun control laws.

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.

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

I shall not be eating thai at the World's End tonight now. :( That is all.

I shall be eating thai at the World's End tonight. That is all.