Et tu, Cthulhu

In the year that went:

• My old blog went south. Which is just as well, I guess, since the hosting was pretty shitty. I now have a shiny new blog hosted with a more reliable provider. Maybe I’ll even be able to rescue the old content…
• Our cat, Tina, died.
• The trees in our garden were infested with an assortment of parasitic organisms, and had to be completely cut back. They’re already sprouting new growth, though.
• I turned 30 on a hot day in Havana.

I’m at the GNOME Summit. Right now watching the Hotwire talk.

Oh, and since my blog was broken when it mattered, I’m late to the party - but what the hell: openSUSE 10.3 is out! And it’s actually not too shabby, with GNOME 2.20 and all.

Spent last week in Stockholm working on GVFS with Alex. We made great strides - pretty much all of the file system operations are now implemented in gvfs-daemon, gvfs-fuse-daemon and the SMB backend. Plenty of work remaining, though.

We bought a used car. Ford Fiesta 2003 (American cars are cheaper), gray. Four wheels. Now all I need to do is learn how to drive.

I bought a bicycle.

Robust with a couple of gears, reasonably priced. Unfortunately, there was not a single one for sale that didn’t have front-wheel suspension. Apparently you can only get “urban bikes” without suspension, and they are - irrationally - not in season. Oh well. I’m pretty happy with it anyway. It’s been about 8 years since I last owned a vehicle, and I’d totally forgotten the thrill of speed and the satisfaction of putting momentum and gravity to work for you.

Dark. About zero degrees. No snow.

Yesterday, Maru and I saw El Laberinto del Fauno at the cinema. Highly recommended. Although the movie has fantasy elements and the main character is a child, I would say it’s definitely not for children. I.e. it’s not in the “Harry Potter” category which can be enjoyed by both children and adults. This is for adults only, and it contains plenty of graphic violence to underscore that fact.

I won’t say any more. If you - unlike IMDB trolls - can come to terms with it a) not being in English and b) being “leftist-liberal” for portraying fascists as, er, fascists, go see it.

I dag fant jeg ut at en gammel kompis, John, driver og skriver på en slik fiskeweblogg sammen med noen venner (deriblant Gustav og Jan Ole, som jeg kjenner såvidt). Loggen deres heter “fisk fisk fisk,” og er festlig lesning selv for meg som ikke har peiling på fisk eller fiske.

Events have had me thinking about computer games lately, so I thought I’d share. In case you’re looking for a Freed computer game classic, these are two underrated ones I’ve enjoyed:

Star Control 2 - Released for DOS in 1992, this is one of the few games I’ve played that actually provoked belly laughs at more than one occasion. Toys for Bob released the partially ported source under the GPL in 2002, to the delight of its persistent fan base. The game now runs pretty much perfectly on Linux, Windows and MacOS X, and fans have contributed additional artwork gravy.

Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe - This one is a real gem with a rough edge: The engine has been re-implemented from scratch and extended with tons of features including improved network play, but you need the artwork from the original game in order to play it. An effort is underway to produce high-quality replacement graphics - in the meantime, I’m told the original artwork is easy enough to “find”. This one is tri-OS too.

Oh, and don’t forget Toshok’s Starcraft clone! Although I’m not sure that’s playable yet. The SCSharp site seems to be broken at the moment.

In other news, Joakim is taking the Mexican media to task for its political bias and general hilarity. Hopefully he’ll keep this up with regular instalments - it’s funny because it’s true.

The lime tree in our garden keeps bearing large amounts of fruit.