Three Movies

Three great movies in three days. On Friday we rented “Bridge on the River Kwai”, a 1957 war movie with almost no bullets – a very psychological, unusual plot. We expected it to be good but weren’t prepared for just how good it would be. Alec Guinness as the corporal of a group of British POWs in a Japanese-run internment camp in Ceylon, who turn their defeat into psychological victory by building this amazing bridge. Won’t spoil the ending, but it’s pretty gripping. Beautifully shot.

Last night went out with Amy, Chris T, and Mike to see Terry Zwigoff (Crumb)’s “Ghost World”, which is quite easily the best movie to come out this summer. One of the only movies about teen angst and disconnection that’s really worth watching. Intensely sardonic. Anyone who spent much of their lives so steeped in hip, ironic detachment that they lost contact with the real world (like Amy and me) will relate to this. Very witty, but also poignant. And fun. The “Zen Guerilla” is a hoot.

I was really excited about this movie because I used to read a lot of Daniel Clowe’s comics when I lived in Boston – Eightball and Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, and they used to have brief Ghost World segments in them. What was amazing was how true this movie was to the comic. I mean, little details that got carried across with total accuracy, like her batgirl mask, and the stuffed weasel enwrapped by snake at Buscemi’s garage sale. We came home and dug out all those comics and read all the old Ghost World episodes together and were just amazed at how perfectly the movie captured the comic.

After Mike and Chris left, we watched Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm”, about the swirling lostness and discontent of families in the 70s. A very unusual vantage point on family life. What was nice was how most movies set in the 70s play up all kinds of 70s retro stereotypes about decor and fashion; this one didn’t at all. Instead it focused on how weird that decade was in terms of coming down from the revolutionary zeal of the 60s into something that was trying to be normal but was actually pretty f*cked up. Somehow the director managed to make insignificant details really portend larger things. Got kind of boring towards the end though, or at least I thought so (Amy didn’t).. kind of spiralled down into tedium.

Refreshing to take in some quality movies in the midst of the summer void.

Talking about Ghost World later, I realized something about myself: How I’m perfectly prepared to consume trash movies and trash TV on a fairly regular basis. As long as I know I’m sitting down to consume trash, I don’t mind. It’s just a relax and enjoy kind of thing. But I don’t feel the same way at all about music. I have no patience for bad music, feel that world is overflowing with the stuff, get annoyed and frustrated that 90% of the world seems content to consume bad music, and sometimes want to cry that there seems no way out. “Give ’em a Big Mac and a pair of Nikes and they’re happy” said Steve Buscemi’s character. Exactly. Anyway, I wonder what it is that makes me able to swallow bad movies and just shrug my shoulders, but to get so wound up and angry/sad about the state of music these days. Seems kind of paradoxical.

The Joy of Linux

I’m reading this book The Joy of Linux by Michael Hall and Brian Proffitt. Pretty interesting read, and quite funny in places, but the arrogance and blindness of the authors is astounding to me as well. They use words like “elegant” to describe Linux, and talk about how cohesive the Linux community is. What a joke. They never even mention BeOS once in the whole book, even in the context of “fighting the good fight” etc.

Anyway, it’s nice to read a book about computing culture by otherwise very good writers rather than the usual technical manual type of book.

Hardcover only right now though – I’d say it’s not worth the price of admission unless they do a soft cover.

Apache and BeTips

BeTips is now running Apache, rather than Robin Hood. Forget about Xitami. Have done a bunch of benchmarking, and Xitami is slow as molasses compared to Apache and RH. Maybe Xitami does well on single-threaded platforms, but on a dual-proc BeOS machine, it’s all about multithreading, and single-threaded just doesn’t cut it.

Learning a lot by learning to configure Apache. I’ve never had the opportunity to do it before. Not difficult, just brand new territory for me. Enjoying the changeover. Now have everything working but SSI, and that seems to be an acknowledged problem. We’ll lick it.

Have been using Microsoft’s Web Application Stress Tool for the benchmarking. Pretty sophisticated. Did an 8-hour run against Apache last night, requesting alternating HTML and CGI pages as fast as possible. Did nearly half a million overnight. Would have been a lot more, but running through the slow pcmcia network card in my laptop, and my CGI pages do a lot of work. Apache also comes with ab, so I can do stress testing on the local BeOS machine without having the network in the way — huge difference.

Out of Words

Memory:

My grandfather had a very husky, slow, quiet voice. When I was very young I took this to mean that he was running out of words – I thought he had used up his lifetime supply. I thought I had to be very careful because I didn’t want to run out of words too. I went through a period where I didn’t say much, because I was trying to be careful and not run out.

White Boy Dreadlock

What I don’t understand is why most of the posts here are complaining about people who are critical of white dreads, when none of the posts here are critical of white dreads! And in fact, the original post that started this discussion (which I wrote) does not criticize white dreads. So… uh… is there like, a persecution syndrome happening here?

Xitami

Cool – Rob Judd just compiled the Xitami web server for BeOS, so I’m running betips on xitami rather than RobinHood now. RH is great, but there are some things it doesn’t do, like output standard Apache log format. Xitami does, so I’ll finally be able to parse my traffic logs with analog.

I’ve also wanted to see whether frequent server stoppages are a result of BONE or RH. Wanted to test with Apache, but was never able to get Apache to compile under BONE. Anyway, this test is going very well so far. Spent a couple hours configuring last night and all is good.

Already reported one bug last night, and Judd sent me a new binary by this morning with the problem fixed. Wow – a responsive developer!

The BeOS Paradox in 2001

I just posted this on BeNews. Re-posting here because it summarizes my thinking about the operating system that was one of the most important things in my life for the past four or five years. I’ve had to go through a lot of gear-gnashing to come to terms with the current state of things. This sums up where I stand with it today.

Many people seem to misunderstand my current position on BeOS. If my words and my actions seem contradictory, it is because of the apparent paradox of these two true statements:

1) The BeOS _marketplace_ is extinct, done for, and beyond hope of resurrection. This fact would not change even if a major new BeOS release appeared (which I feel is highly doubtful) — it’s far too late for that and too many businesses have been burned by attempting BeOS development. There is no money to be made on the platform. Without either monetary incentive or open source momentum (we have neither), the future growth and evolutionary potential of BeOS and BeOS apps is extremely limited.

2) Despite its shortcomings and missing mature applications, BeOS is the best desktop operating system ever developed, period. So good, in fact, that people will continue to enjoy finding uses for BeOS despite the truth value of #1.

I am bitter because of #1, but I still (sometimes) use and promote BeOS because of #2.

Teeth butcher

“Deep cleaning,” my dentist calls it. So deep they only do half the mouth at a time. Had the left side done two weeks ago, and the right side done today. Sawing between the teeth with diamond dust to make more room for floss. Incessant grinding with sinister looking tools. Polishing, scraping, nitty gritty mouth madness. Such a complete and thorough brutalization of the mouth that I walked out of their office with… get this… another Vicodin prescription. God, what’s happening to me? I used to be immortal. Now I’m just broken all over.