Well, it's been quite a while since the last update once again. I am certain millions of advogato readers have been anxiously waiting for a new one... oh well... who am I fooling... if not even I bother to proof-read it, why should someone else care about what I write?
Anyway, many things have changed, so this might get a little lengthy. Here it comes...
New computer
Yes, I actually bothered to buy a new system recently
(named it Asuka), to do
stuff my "old" box didn't really handle well. It has
built-in graphics accelleration, hardware DSP mixing etc.,
but it came shipped with a proprietary OS which I still have
to replace (or, at least, partially replace, for
dual-booting) with Debian. It's probably one of the fastest
of its kind available, an Amiga 1200 with a Blizzard IV
turbo card. sic. Now I have an Amiga and an Alpha. I guess
I'd start buying Betamax hardware if I had a TV.
Anyway, it'd probably be a nice little system if I'd take a
day or two to get it into shape, and I'm quite looking
forward to doing this once the semester is over. It's a bit
hard to use without manuals, though; I haven't even found an
easy way to enter the shell yet (short of starting to boot,
then removing the disk I'm booting from).
FreeSCI 0.3.3 is actually going to be released shortly. This is one free software project with a highly erratic development cycle... Exult
hasn't seen much of me lately, which, despite probably being better for it, is rather unfortunate, IMHO- I'm still hoping on "fixing" it for building on DEC cxx this weekend, but it's just a vague hope. New currency
Here it comes, the Euro. Shiny new coins, looking a bit like the newer 10 Franc pieces. The notes are a bit too colorful for my personal taste, but I thought the same of the new DM notes when we introduced them a few years ago; I'll get used to this just as I'll get used to having an EUR 0.2 coin.
Of course the Euro isn't just a new currency, it's a political event as well. It's up to TPTB now to use the momentum they've generated to push any pro-Europe agendas they might have in store; let's just hope those agendas will be something better than certain "Anti-terrorism" laws introduced by opportunistic politicians recently.
Bright and shiny they are, these Euro coins, not as scratched and dirty as the other coins I'm still carrying around. I wonder how they'll look in a few years.
LOTR
So I've actually seen it now. I've always wondered whether
it's possible to take a book of the narratory depth of one
of the LOTR's parts and turn it into a movie- a long one, of
course- whithout missing a lot and still having to rush
everything.
Now that I've seen one of the best directors around try it
with a very large amount of money at his disposal, I'm
pretty certain it's not.