Want to read a good book or two? Have a look at O’Reilly’s Open Books site. I was just browsing around on the Net, thinking that five minutes browsing the O’Reilly website probably wouldn’t hurt my C studies. Now, three hours and an anthology on open source later, I know that I was naive to the extreme.

I’d better unplug the network cable tomorrow I want to get through that chapter on looping.

I’ve compiled my first C program. Successfully! And I wrote the thing using GNU Emacs.

(Those of you who fail to see the implications of these both factoids can safely ignore this post.)

Warner, who owns the rights to most of Stanley Kubrick’s old films, apparently thinks that a new 35mm print of “2001” is what the director would have wanted for the Draken screening later this fall. Why else is the magnificent 70mm print of the Kubrick classic left to rot in the Swedish Film Institute’s freezer? Or do they think that nobody will notice the difference?

It’s a shame nobody told Stanley this during the sixties. MGM could have saved a lot of money. Maybe, just maybe, they would have survived “Heaven’s Gate” 15 years later and none of this would have happened.

Once a week, I show “classics” at the Draken cinema. Yesterday, it was time for “A Clockwork Orange”, again. The film is overrated, to say the least, but some 200 patrons attended the screening anyway.

This I expected. Kubrick has his followers (and I expect more people to attend “2001” in a few weeks’ time). What I didn’t expect was the new print, with restored colours, an SRD (Dolby Digital) track, and, it seems, stereo sound.

Since when is “A Clockwork Orange” in stereo?

The downside of blogging becomes readily apparent when reading the comments to my blogs:

Spam.

C’mon, spammers, do you really think I’d buy stuff advertised in comments posted here? Get real.

…my Debian Sid box, that is. What did you think?

Only when I try apt-get dist-upgrade, apt wants to remove most of my KDE desktop. Apparently, they are switching to a later gcc version and need to recompile just about the whole distribution, which means that the dependencies are a mess right now. I can live with KDE 3.3 (in fact, I’m in no hurry with most of the other stuff I’ve got either), but I’d really like to install klineakconfig to get all those extra buttons on my MS wireless keyboard to work. Without messing with specific older versions, and certainly without manually writing that config file, thank you.

So, please…? This is as good a reason to learn C as anything I’ve heard.

I’m Finnish by birth, live in Sweden, but write this blog in English. Why?

A vast majority of the world’s Internet servers run on old *nix variants and will choke on just about any character beyond ASCII in a URL. There’s a reasonable chance that the Swedish vowels Ã¥, ä, and ö aren’t displayed correctly in your browser, even if you happen to live in Sweden and use a localized browser and a ditto OS. And, of course, even Swedes seem to prefer English to their native language, judging from TV commercials, newspaper ads, and whatnot.

We can send people to space (yes, I know, we may not always get them back in one piece so there’s stuff to be perfected there, too) but is all this really beyond us?

Then again, a potential readership of more than a quarter of a billion readers instead of a little less than nine million does have its advantages, too.

Today was my last day on a project in which I wrote some XSLT and an XML Schema for this web service front end thingie for a large service information database. I’ve been doing this for six weeks, or about two months calendar time, and while it hasn’t been the most rewarding of projects in terms of intellectual challenge, I’ve had some fun in the process.

Today, on my last day, they changed the design of the whole application. No more XSLT, no schema. We won’t need them, thank you very much. Actually, no web service beyond an ftp service left masquerading as one, either, but I was never involved in any of the Java coding, so I don’t care about that. What I do care about is that I just spent six weeks of doing, it turns out, nothing.

This is what you live for when you’re a consultant. Usually, they won’t throw away what you’ve done until you’ve left, but it does happen, and it just did.

My Very First Blog…

Earlier tonight, my wife Karin and I drank some wine (well, I drank beer; she had the wine) while talking about the kind of stuff that people put in their blogs these days (ten years ago, this stuff ended up in unmoderated newsgroups like misc.writing where nobody seldom talked about writing per se). One short subject after another came up, excellent blogging material, all of them. So that’s what I said.

What’s a blog? Karin asked.

What better way to explain than to create one and start blogging? A quick Google search led me to blogger.com (that’s the kind of person I am; I need other people’s opinions for reassurance), and about fifteen minutes later (of which most was spent coming up with a user name and a prefix to the URL), here I am. With my very own blog.

Karin, of course, lost interest in the subject even before we finished the wine (well, the beer), but imagine the fun I’ll have, sending the URL to her first thing Monday morning. Cool.

So I hope you’ll enjoy reading this. And if not, well, too bad.