Thanks anonymous person

I'd like to thank the anonymous benefactor who wished me happy new year by offering me a copy of WALL·E on Blu-Ray. You just bought me my first Blu-Ray movie.

I'm usually a bargain hunter for films, and will usually spend a fiver at most on a film, so even the Blu-Ray "sales" of two films for £30 I find outrageously expensive.

Thanks again, and I'll mention that your message was a bit mangled and some characters appeared as XML entities, so feel free to send it again by mail :)

Flying in the mofo all over this b*tch

Landed in Portland for Plumbers.

Why on earth does Delta give personal video systems for internal flights, when the 9-hour translatlantic flight I was on only had the communal screen? And why would one want to pay $6 to watch a single film when a personal screen is available. It's like an American Ryanair.

Where's the mofo?

Best meme ever

pjones says:

You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:
1. One weapon
2. One song blasting on the speakers
3. One famous person to fight along side you.

Pretty straight forward:

1. Pump-action shotgun, plenty of ammo
2. Could have been Rob Zombie, or Zombie by the Cranberries, but it's White Zombie's The One (from the Escape from L.A. soundtrack)
3. Seth Gecko, Clooney's character in From Dusk Till Dawn (even though he killed vampires then, he looks like he could handle it)

Update: Planets seem to be removing the nice little video. So here goes the direct link to enjoy White Zombie's fury.

Whaaaaaappaaawooo! Shoof shoof!

My good friend told me two years ago that I should “check out the cast and
director it's a forgotten gem”. His words.

I rented the DVD, and here's my checklist:

• Badly dubbed, check.
• Grainy picture, worse than a VHS, check.
• Bad translations (they call each sister and brother, when they're married, or cousins...), check.[1]
  
• Incomprehensible story line, check.
• Powerful enemies bringing you to a netherworld like in X-Or, check.
• Dodgy sound effects, and badly timed ones, check.
  

The film is called “Deadly Snail vs. Kung Fu Killers” in one version, and “Deadly Snake Versus Kung Fu Killers” in other one. Confusing as hell. I still don't know who's supposed to be the snake/snail or the kung-fu killers.

I hate you Rog.

[1]: See also, John Woo's The Killer, french DVD version, where the translations and the dubbing don't match.

The movie trail

3 evenings, 3 films, and all connected.

Day 1, Inside Man: When there's blood on the streets, buy property.
Day 2, The Corporation: The corporation of that sort is the proto-typical of a psychopath.
Day 2, Twelve Monkeys: But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally *ill*. Fact, Jim, fact.

All three come highly recommended.

30 Days of Night, 29 Days Of Plot Holes

Went to watch 30 Day Of Night, and it's so bad that it needs to be mentioned as such. People looked very pissed off coming out of the cinema, and multiple mentions of the word shite were heard. A DVD of that film is, in fact, shit-in-a-box. If you have to go watch it, ingest large amounts of recreational drugs, and laugh when it looks most inappropriate.

The pedant in me found that in the "You wants to win £100" sketch, on the Peter Serafinowicz Show, the answer to "Which city is the capital of France" question was wrong. Vichy was the capital of France during most of the second world war, even more so during the London bomb raids. Still a great show.

Watch O News.

Films list is back

Rather than pollute and bore people with films list in my blog (I'd rather do that with useless trivia, and self-deprecation), I thought I'd use IMDb's My Movies feature.

The hardest part was getting all the films from a variety of sources into the database, without having to click through all of them. Here comes the Mechanizer (in US English in the text). Given a list of @imdb_ids:

my $mech = new WWW::Mechanize;
$mech->get( "http://www.imdb.com/register/login" );
$mech->success or die "Can't get the login page";

$mech->submit_form(
  form_number => 2,
  fields => {
     login => 'email@test.com',
     password    => "mypassword",
  },
);

my $id;
foreach $id (@imdb_ids) {
  print "Adding $id\n";
  $mech->get ("http://www.imdb.com/rg/title-lhs/mymovies/mymovies/list?pending&add=$id");
}

I used my old code from film-gallery.pl code to grab the IDs from blogs, and various types of files. HTH.

Hell-o-ween

The great José has dodgy tastes in films. Very dodgy. Following a mention of Amazon UK's sale on scary movies for Halloween, he admitted to wanting to buy: The Refrigerator.

The best bit is the plotline:

A couple move into a bad apartment in a bad neighborhood in New York. The apartment contains a refrigerator, which is the only thing they like in the place. However, they slowly discover that the refrigerator is a monster which kills people in gruesome ways and then sends them to hell. The refrigerator is already gaining mind control over the husband. What will happen?

José now officially has the worst taste ever.

Lists

I came back nearly two weeks ago from my holidays in France. Very relaxing, 4 barbecues with merguez each time. Wicked.
I brought back a few things though, and pictures of it!

Ezio "Stripes-guy", wearing a (too small) gift of mine

Noddy made it to France. Stop nodding already!

There's frogs in France. Who would have guessed.

I got to watch Le Viager, as Michel Serrault passed away shortly before.

Next post is about behaving like a kid.

New releases

bluez-gnome 0.10 was released, and now includes my patches for the "Browse device" functionality. I also released a new shared-mime-info and Totem devel version today. Everything's nicely sitting in rawhide now (or it will be if my last build worked).

Now, I'll go back to doing nothing, as I'm supposed to be on holidays.

By the way, the Simpsons movie was really nice, go and see it. That was my Wednesday morning AFK :)

Films

Way late on that one, so plenty of films.

• Zodiac: very good, if a bit long, closure definitely not up to par with All the President's Men, or similar journalistic investigation films.
  
• Ma petite entreprise: funny, little French film.
  
• Tenacious D: just as I would have expected it, plenty on fart and rock jokes, for the fans.
  
• The Kind Of Comedy: I was disappointed, hostage situations should have more to them, and we don't feel like De Niro and Bernhard are quite as psycho as they're supposed to be.
  
• Laputa - Castle in the Sky: funny title, way below Howl's Moving Castle in the fairy-tale business.
  
• Goal II: shite, but there's not many footie films about. Goals were ludicrous (anyone remember Olive et Tom?), and plot is more straight forward than an episode of Neighbours.
  
• Sicko: he should do television, it's a thoroughly enjoyable documentary, as usual, but very caricatural in its handling of foreign matters (like the visit of the NHS hospitals, or the discussions with bourgeois American expats in Paris, not mentioning the falling standards and rising debt of those medical systems).
  
• The Last Boy Scout: one of my all-time favourites, one-liners and broken noses.
  
• Shrek 3: I think I laughed once, not sure if it wasn't an acid reflux from the dinner.
  
• This Is England: an interesting view into what the Falklands, Thatcher, and skinheads brought to England in the '80s.
  
• Une Liaison Pornographique: intimist French film, definitely a good late evening film, if you want to question the nature of relationships.
  
• Ghost Rider: Marvel is scraping the barrel, let's hope there's no sequel.
  
• Knocked Up: feel-good comedy, they get together at the end (as if you'd expect it any other way).
  

And quite a few TV series as well:

• ATHF: I want to see the film now!
  
• House MD: went through Season 2 and 3, although the latter muddles a bit in the weird/not so interesting medicine (and probably inaccurate at times), but the dry-wit and soap hold it together.
  
• The Smoking Room and The Book Group: two great sitcoms, without the canned laughter. As per usual, short series, and only 2 seasons each.
  
• Monkey Dust: onto season 3, the Paedo-Finder-General gets on my tits though. Dobsky is still wicked.
  

And, finally, if you want to see some good films, that nth Channel 4 best stuff or other countdown show is nicely accurate: 50 films to see before you die. Time to fill your Netflix account.

Je devrais avoir su mieux

Thanks John for providing me my pickup lines (via Google's translate feature).

I did watch some half-decent, and some crummy films:

• The Aristocrats, some pompous unknowns, but also some very good actors/stand-up comedians. For the late nights in front on the sofa, with the laptop where it should be (that's on your lap).
  
• White Chicks, I'm afraid to say I laughed, it's funnier than anything Eddy Murphy wish he'd done in the past ten years (minus Shreks). Actually, I looked at the filmography and it's 19 years since Coming to America.
• Babel, I remember being torn between this film and Blood Diamonds when both came out at the same time at the cinema. The latter was a better film to watch at the cinema, but Babel stands up on its own as a character movie. I think I set my expectations too high, still good though.
• Idiocracy, I can see why it went direct to video here, it's not worth showing in the cinema. This is no Office Space. Time for Starbucks!
  
• Spider-man 3, oh the expected disappointment. I was pressured into watching it by a super-hero lover that didn't read the reviews. Read the reviews, kids! It's for your own good!
• L'Empire des Loups, a horrid pile of crud. Looks like a Luc Besson-produced film, and certainly smells like it (but isn't one, despite how the saying goes). Ewww!
• The Krays, just a film to polish my accent, a half-decent cock-e-ney gangster film. You're no Italian Job, mai love.
• My Super Ex-Girlfriend, a film for the evening, with a few good belly laughs. At least, unlike Eddie Murphy, Ivan Reitman made something half-decent after the eighties with this one.
  
• And the best for last, Flushed Away, during which I felt just a little bit of wee come out. Especially when the frogs are called into "Action". I just love it. Rent it, buy it. I think I'll watch it again now. No I shouldn't. But I COULD! It's that good...
  

Stripey #... huh, I forget...

Andy Burns sent me a (unrequested) picture of this pair of Wellingtons. Thanks Andy.



Ezio is green with envy, but just replied "You guys are obsessed with stripes ;-). Yeah, right, that's all our fault now, is it?

Fittingly, I watched the Italian film Malèna. Some reminescence of Cinema Paradiso, that I haven't seen in a long while.

Well stripey week-end (aka stripey #5)

Lapo Calamandrei went a bit mad, and produced a clever piece of artistic genius.

I'm sure he'll post the full icon theme somewhere soon for all of us to enjoy (he sent me a copy, but it didn't install properly).

Another little computer gets on the market (where you at Jeff? missed the Zonbu?), runs some form of Linux with KDE, but uses Totem for their movie player. Can I get a free one, guys?


On Friday, I managed to solve that really annoying problem that made the browser plugin with the xine-lib backend just not work at all.

Good and bad things this week-end:

• Cello, creepy, although not the best of the kind
• Man United finally won it! After the debacle of last Wednesday against Milan, we'll get a row of honour against Chelsea on Wednesday evening.
• Pan's Labyrinth, a special fairy tale. Beautiful. Narnia is for weenies.
• Ma Mère, a couple of tits, but horrible French art-house malarkey
• Arsène Lupin, pretty shite
• Michel Vaillant, pretty fun if you remember the comic from when you were a kid
• Les Poupées Russes, where you see that Romain Duris can be a good actor
• Shite results in the French elections (not that the alternative was much better, but it still was). Berlusconi, I'm sure Nicolas can show you how to be a better crook, his predecessor has quite some experience too.

Guess what I did this week-end? (with stripes)

I watched another nerve-wrecking performance from United. I didn't yell that much though, as I was watching the game with Everton fan Gareth. I'm not one to rub it in.

We also went to said Gareth's girlfriend's birthday party, and had very little luck getting the Kärcher going. The hose keeps popping out under the pressure from the tap (ar, ar).

I've also spent some time trying to get both my laptop and my desktop to suspend. The laptop was fairly straight forward. No hacks, no quirks, just echo mem > /sys/power/state, and you're done. But I'm still hitting a weird bug when using gnome-power-manager to do it.
The desktop (a Dell Optiplex GX620) is a bit more problematic, as pm-suspend doesn't seem to use vbetool at all (despite having an Intel video card in there, but being an older FC6 install...), and the video is completely screwed up (yellow lines, and a lot of flashing blue and red) when resuming under X.

Watched Filles perdues cheveux gras (stopped after 20 minutes, French variété is only below some of their TV shows in things I hate about France), 300 (stopped after about 30 minutes, and finished some weeks later, why would Spartans behave like they were Gulf War I vets), and a Journey Through Porn (stopped 10 minutes near the end to watch Match Of The Day, not great, but still the best docu about pr0n I've seen).


PS: What on earth is going on with them stripes? The window of the local JJB Sports shop. Could it be the metrosexual influence of David Beckham?

Sqeaky bum time!

Fedora 7 is gearing up, and I'm spending most of my time fixing bugs. If you have a pet peeve (a bug, not a feature) for Rhythmbox, or Totem, be sure to let me know (by filing bugs in Bugzilla!).

I'm very happy that project for accepted for an SoC project. It means I won't have to do it myself, and that the person got the best mentor possible, the BlueZ man himself. And I'm never tired of hearing some success stories with the browser plugin. Changes a bit from all the bugs :/

I hope Aaron finishes his encoding profiles code in time for GNOME 2.20, as I don't won't to have to deal with gnome-media's profile code anymore.

Watched a couple of films: The Interpreter (I wanted to slap and drown Nicole Kidman for most of the film, certainly not her best film by a margin, and Sean Penn should stick to indie movies, which is what we like him for), and The Jacket, a tip-top if weird thriller. Bit like bath water near the end (soapy).

PS: In case you wonder where that title comes from. Plenty more goals where that came from.

Easter trackback

I had a very calm and relaxing Easter week-end, some strolling in the castle park under the sun, drank plenty of Pimm's, and some bank holiday gardening. I managed to catch up somewhat on my films, and I watched:

• Domino (rubbish)
• The Prestige (full of twists and turns, A-class)
• MI: 3 (worse than the 2 prior iterations, by miles)
• Porco Rosso (not as good as I expected, but entertaining)
• Howl's Moving Castle (a magical must-see)
• Night At The Museum (guilty pleasure, and not as bad as the trailer made it anticipate)
• and the Pursuit Of Happyness (excrucianting rags to riches film, horrible to watch even if you know it's all going to end well).

I've also managed to add some covers to my MP3 rips of Mixmag cover CDs. Took a while, but the great discogs had pretty much all of them with decent quality.

Totem news

At least some sort of news.

First off, I just committed support for xdg-user-dirs to Totem, so your Movies and Music directories will show up in the file choosers (which fixes a bug where Ross tried his hardest not to understand what I was talking about, and used "fab").

Secondly, Tim and Thomas have been hacking on codeina, the interesting part of Codec-Buddy. It allows users to purchase the codecs from Fluendo when they can't play a proprietary format. Hopefully, it will be useful for users that want to support Fluendo/don't know where to get Open Source alternatives/want great Windows Media support.

Paying for stuff can look good!

Finally, I committed some rough code to watch TV in Totem (xine-lib backend) using DVB cards. It's far from finished, but after creating a ~/.xine/channels.conf using w_scan (the easiest way I've found to create tuner data yet), "totem dvb:" will list all your channels in the playlist, and you're ready to lose some time.

Films: one great film, The Machinist (for those who liked Memento), 2 decent ones, Angel-A, and Cars, one I'm ashamed of, but not that much, The Devil Wears Prada, and an utter pile of crap that I stopped before the end (actually, near the beginning), Ultraviolet.

Less connectivity please!

Today was mostly spent wondering why France couldn't repeat their Ireland heroics to snatch victory against England, and getting Linux installed on A's laptop, in place of the virus/malware/spyware/bloatware infested Windows.

I was quite lucky to manage to find Grub4DOS, and associated tools. The laptop's busted CD/DVD drive (it can only read pressed CDs, and not even that fast) didn't make things any easier, and thank fsck I have a floppy drive in my desktop machine. The first install, bootstrapped from WinXP using the NT version failed halfway through with a network error, leaving me with a bricked laptop. The second try was more successful after I managed to get FreeDOS installed on the hard disk, got all the Fedora images over via floppy, and finished the install over the network.

I also saw for the first time the ACPI error message telling me that the BIOS cutoff date was past (the BIOS claims to be from 1997, even though the machine is 5 years old). I still managed to get quite an impression after showing suspend-to-disk, and boot/login of under 5 minutes (Windows is so shit).

Some old film news: Hot Fuzz, Bienvenue chez les Rozes, The Italian Job

Film update

And more blogging, this time films:

• Bombs and blockbusters, a documentary about blockbusters, and how to make one. Not ground-breaking, but interesting nonetheless.
• Confetti, a very very disappointing British comedy. I was expecting better from reading the casting.
• Melinda and Melinda, a Woody Allen that's a bit more like the old stuff (ie. good)
• The Brothers Grimm, a very entertaining fairy tale (with scary bits and decent plot included)
• Children Of Men, excellent post-apocalyptic (ie. in 10 years time) Britain, solid acting, and interesting characters. I want more!
• Blood Diamond, I got more! Di Caprio with a Zimbabwean accent for most part of the film, except when dying/yelling while dying.
• The Last Kiss, I wanted to see more Zach Braff, and was a little disappointed. A film about relationships and "freedom" (ie. lack of responsibility). Doesn't really dwelve into the reasons for Braff's cheating, or that lack of commitment all the characters seem to be looking for.