The Cliffs of Inanity

District B13

Since hearing about parkour somewhere I was interested in seeing District B13 (btw I never liked making imdb links for films, but I found wikipedia — of course — has a film project so I plan to make links there). It finally came out on DVD and I rented it the other night.

First, it was dubbed, which is really bad. The voices didn’t really match the characters too well, so some of it sounded very silly. I suppose there was probably subtitling on the DVD, but I was feeling pretty lazy so I just let it play.

The plot is lame, as you might expect. And it was even funnier to watch the “making of” special feature and hear a couple actors talk about the social impact of the film. Funnier in a sad sort of way; I felt embarrassed for them.

Of course, you aren’t going to watch this film to be dazzled by its intricate plot, or to hear its witty dialog, or to see the characters grow and change. Instead you’re watching for the choreography, hoping to see a violent and hypercool Fred Astaire. The parkour practitioners don’t disappoint. The first chase scene was the best (really you could stop after this and not miss anything); it was delightful to watch.

The other sad thing about the “making of” clip was hearing David Belle talk a bit about parkour. As he talked I thought about punk rock, or the early free software movement, or all the other things I’ve occasionally wished were never commoditized; and I wondered whether he struggles through the same search to find something private, that can be shared, without being flattened, packaged, and sold.

Auto-tools Slides

I’ve uploaded the slides from my auto-tools talk at NCLUG last night. I had a great time up there, as always, though I missed Bob Proulx this time.

I thought the talk went well. It was a gentle intro to the auto-tools: what they do, how to read the common bits, where to get more information. If you want a really thorough tutorial I recommend reading Alexandre’s 550 slides.

Random Stuff

A few random things.

Hook a small camera to a video iPod-like-device… and you could make a TiVo for real life.

I spent part of Sunday trying to figure out a joke about “Car-pool chunnel syndrome”. But really this isn’t funny.

If I had an elephant I would name him Babar Fett.

Thank you for listening.

Return the Gift

I’ve been a Gang of Four fan since the very first time I heard “He’d Send in the Army” while watching Urgh. The only other time I imprinted on a song immediately this way was the first time I heard “Evidence” — which, come to think of it, is a similar song in some ways.

Today I found out (I’m not a very active fan) that they got together again and re-recorded their more famous songs and released them. You can listen to the album online.

It is pretty good, though not as raw as their earlier recordings.

Amber

Kelvin lent me The Dawn of Amber, so I read it last night.

Avoid! The writing is stupidly flat.

Note to all authors out there: don’t let your estate authorize sequels to your books. This turns out badly. For instance, now I will have to go desecrate Roger Zelazny’s grave.

I only have one story about Zelazny, which is that when I lived in Santa Fe I caught a glimpse of his shoe. I was at the Aztec and as the door was shutting the barrista mentioned that the guy leaving was Zelazny, and I turned in time to see the covering of the last exiting bit of his anatomy.

Eclipse and the Web

Andrew’s post about hacking the spec file editor using eclipse made me remember something I wish Eclipse could do: integrate better with free software projects.

I mean, it isn’t terrible that you have to download a team spec file, or whatever. But, it seems like things could be much better in this day and age.

For instance, simply clicking on a team project set link ought to pull up the project in Eclipse. That way every project on sourceforge could have a big “Hack Me” button.

I looked and I see I’ve written about this before. I’m persistent, or obsessive, or something.

Auto-tools talk

On September 12 I’ll be in Fort Collins, at the NCLUG meeting, giving a talk about Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool.

I haven’t been involved in the auto-tools for quite a while, but I still know enough to give a tutorial :-). I gave a similar talk at the Boulder LUG a while back (a few years now); I’ll dig up those slides and also probably take some thing from Alexandre Duret-Lutz… but if you will be there and there are particular things you want me to cover, post a comment.

compiz

I tried compiz on my FC6t3 box today. Fun stuff! I think my favorite effect is the deformation that happens when moving windows around… don’t tell my boss but I spent a couple hours today just dragging a terminal window hither and yon. Surely, I thought, the window would tear down the center if I moved it hard enough. But in the end desktop physics proves deceptive — or windows are tougher than they look.

These effects are a great drug. Every release now seems to have some new GUI gadget that flashes or strobes or vibrates. I suspect that those of us who work on free software every day are becoming increasingly jaded, requiring ever-stronger fixes to achive the same “gee whiz high”.

Fedora Core 23 is going to be truly amazing. Windows will emerge from photorealistic 3-D forests, crouching and scowling. We will use Tarzan avatars to bend them to our wills. As their tails lash we will see progress indications, new blog posts, and stock quotes flicker into being and then disappear in the motion.

Subsequent releases will feature themes downloadable from motion picture and television studios. Angelina or Spongebob will dig through layers of rendered mud — mud which on inspection will be seen to have been constructed from the contents of our home directories — to find shining diamonds. We will peer into the diamonds and, deep within their artificial luminescence, we will behold a galaxy filled with Emacs lisp, each cons a star.

Playing with frysk

I read a thread on the valgrind list about tracking bogus close calls, and I immediately thought that this would be a good job for frysk.

So, I gave it a try. It was absurdly easy to write…

First, frysk has included ftrace in its tree for a while — this is a very simple frysk-based analog to strace. I started by taking the ftrace sources and finding the spot where a system call is printed. Since ftrace.java is all of 200 lines of code, this took about 20 seconds.

Then I changed this code to look for a call to close (another 20 seconds) and in particular a failing call (slightly longer than 20 seconds, due to a frysk oddity — more objective observers would probably note that I hadn’t read the sources…).

Well, that’s it. Unfortunately it still doesn’t work — it turns out that libunwind still can’t properly make stack traces of other processes. I understand this is under development.

That’s disappointing of course. But today, contra both my mood of late and my general disposition, I’m more inclined to focus on the positive. It is very cool that this sort of hacking is so easy to do. In the future I think it will be even simpler: not only will the various bugs be sorted out, but you’ll be able to write little scripts to drive the frysk libraries — using jython, or groovy, or kawa, or whatever suits your fancy.

This ties into a couple of things I think are interesting.

One is that, in Java, most programs double as libraries as a consequence of the design of the language and runtime. No special care is needed to make this work; for very badly written programs you can simply load them via a new class loader and let them operate in their own universe. This in turn makes it much simpler to treat existing java programs as part of a toolbox that you can assemble as you like.

And, frysk is (or for the more cautious, will be) a very useful part of this toolbox — useful in a “java-y” way, in a “script-y” way, and with various front ends, useful in a “unix-y” way, I think. Essentially it enables us to write non-trivial ad hoc debugging and tracing scripts.