Et tu, Cthulhu

I think we should just blow up Pluto.

This would put the poor bugger out of its misery and end the debate over whether it’s a planet or not. We’d learn a lot from the engineering challenges, and it’d be an interesting social experiment. Who’d chain themselves to Pluto and try to save it? Environmentalists? Astronomers?

Then someone could upload the movie to Youtube, and people would make billions of remixes - a Matrix version, a ping-pong ball version, the Star Wars version which would make it look like Alderaan and superimpose a giant laser on the footage, etc. Enterprising individuals would mix in their favourite musical scores and add subtitles in languages they don’t master. It’d be, literally, a blast.

And the best part is, I’m sure we could pull this off. Just convince the US administration that it’s time to think a little bigger. Make a statement. Show everyone who’s in charge. It’d make a nice little going-away present for the GWB too. You know, real mission accomplished stuff.

Lots of wind and rain yesterday. Our street turned into a muddy river. Heavy machinery was brought in today to fix it up ’till next time.

We just got back from seeing Inside Man at the cinema. We basically went to see what was on and picked it at random, not even knowing that it was a Spike Lee movie.

Naturally it was far above expectations. It’s an exciting and dramatic bank robbery movie, a fun Noo Yahk cop movie, and at the same time a trademark multicultural Spike Lee movie with a couple of takes at a society that for all its internal conflicts manages to plod along. The director knows when to apply formula and when to add a dash of originality. In the end, the movie isn’t really about the robbery, nor is it about flashy gadgets and big explosions. It’s about some of the strong characters involved in it and their back stories.

It runs longer than two hours, but it feels like a regular 1:30 film. I won’t say any more. Go see it.

Found a biggish spider in the shower yesterday. I’m sure this is everyday fare for people who live around these parts, but for us ex-city dwellers it’s kinda exciting.

I managed to set it free outside without harming it. Sorry about the low image quality - buy me a better camera.

This reminds me that I should post some pictures Maru took of the Tlacuache that visits our back yard every now and then:

You should be able to click on them and get bigguns.

The laptop I’m using for work acted up the other day, and after memtest revealed broken RAM starting after the initial 32MB, I booted it with “mem=32M single” to back up my home before taking it apart. However, the OOM killer would come out and kill everything about halfway into the copying, even if (according to free) about 10MB of memory was used for cache and I had 2GB of swap.

Setting swappiness to 100 delayed the problem quite a bit, but the operation still couldn’t finish. I’m left wondering if stock Linux no longer supports low-memory configurations or if it’s just my distro.

I came across a demo of a game in development called Spore today. It was shown last year, but I hadn’t seen it before. It’s fun to see what people are doing with computer games, even if they’re closed-source, and it’s an entertaining little piece for a friday afternoon.

Although seeing art, entertainment, philosophy and simulation merging in this way is exciting, it also depresses me a great deal. It’s really too bad that we don’t have the critical mass of platform, infrastructure and interested developers to do Free Software game engines like this. We could do so much more with it. Maybe we will in the distant future, when we run out of important stuff to fix (yeah, right) and there’s a Linux desktop in every home.

At least efforts like Xgl will provide some incentive to improve our video drivers. It’s a start.

My parents know how to make me feel homesick. Case in point, the pictures they sent me today.

How cruel. I… want… to… go… skiing. But it’s a 10,000km trip.

Once in a while, there’s an amazingly well-written and informative comment on Slashdot, generally in response to a stupid question you were too afraid to ask yourself. Like, why don’t medics use blood samples more aggressively to screen for horrible diseases?

Thanks to Alterslash, I come across nuggets like that while avoiding the 99.9% remainder.

If all goes according to plan, I’m embarking tomorrow on another Novell-sponsored journey to Boston. The plane leaves on Sunday, but I have to get to Mexico City first. Dunno how I feel about it yet. You know you’ve been in Mexico for too long when you think 6℃ is barely tolerable, and Boston’s going to be a lot colder than that. Since my Mexican visa is still undergoing an upgrade, I’ll have to travel on a provisional one, and I have a feeling it’ll get me in trouble somehow.

I’ve been ill lately, first from food poisoning before Christmas and then with some nasty flu that just wouldn’t let go. Finished recovering, in time to catch some nasty virus on the plane, I’m sure. Oil should hurry up and peak, so I can start going by steam boat. Get lots more hacking done.

Blam!

Kids today. No respect. If I had my way they’d be out tilling the soil.