peteg's blog

Munich

/noise/movies | Link

At The Ritz.

/hacking/mindstorms | Link

My big haul (in a little box) of Lego™ bits turned up. I bought them from the Brick Artist Depot, run by a very pleasant and accommodating bloke in Atlanta. Very happy. Go and make him a rich man.

I now own another two motors that look identical to those that come with the Lego™ Mindstorms kit. Slightly worrying is that these are known to fail. Conversely the four turntables should come in quite handy.

/hacking/mindstorms | Link
Allen Smith recently released an updated version of Bricksmith. It's an excellent Lego™ CAD tool for Mac OS X.

Romeo is bleeding.

/noise/movies | Link
Gary Oldman, Lena Olin, what's not to like?

Lilja 4-Ever

/noise/movies | Link

Another Moodysson. He almost reaches von Trier-levels of blackness here, and once again proves he is worth keeping an eye on.

/hacking/mindstorms | Link

This looks interesting: a Wikipedia-style collaborative robotics textbook. Sounds like a great idea.

A three speed automatic transmission built out of Lego™. Wow.

Elvis Costello and Steve Nieve, State Theatre Sydney.

/noise/music | Link

With Peodair. The crowd was serious. I remember him blowing the outro to I Want You.

/noise/movies | Link
A Hole in my Heart. Quite (intentionally) banal.

Isn't darcs great?

/hacking | Link

I've put off trying out darcs for ages, indeed, longer than I've been putting off checking my stuff into a crusty old CVS repository. My main operations are diffing (to see if I've screwed things up more than I'm aware of) and finding that little bit of code from ten revisions back that hacked around that little problem that came back. pcl-cvs in XEmacs was good for the former, and I just dug around in the repository itself for the latter.

It seems there's a pcl-cvs-equivalent for darcs in the pipeline, and moreover is being actively hacked. Find the repo here, darcs'ed, of course.

Well, it works, and that's a good start. A Haskell program doing useful things? Unheard of!

/noise/movies | Link
Corpse Bride.

Ghost in the Shell

/noise/movies | Link

Russian Dolls

/noise/movies | Link

With Sean at the Academy Twin. If they'd billed it as a RomCom I could have saved myself $12. Audrey was her usual ace self, the rest more-or-less forgettable. As far as I could tell there's only one plot point, and Xavier (the French stud who incidentally writes screenplays for this sort of pap for a living) chooses the predictably capricious path of cliche purely so that the movie can last a respectable amount of time. Everyone loves being told what they already know...

/hacking | Link

I've been meaning to get a new X-server for a long time now, as the one I have is bug ridden. I thought I'd managed to upgrade it in the past, as the build process for these X.org servers continues after fatal errors... and restarting with make World kicks off a big clean, which makes this behaviour both misleading and somewhat useless to non-hardcore hackers.

The short story is that at this point in time X.org R6.9.0 does not readily compile on Mac OS X 10.4 (using GCC 4.0), but R6.8.2 does after you do some fiddling. Most of the trick is to replace the files that fail to compile with their updated selves in a R6.9.0 tree, and the rest is a small tweak to darwinKeyboard.c. Here's a patch that does it for you. Apply it with:

patch -p1 < patch-Xorg-R6.8.2-OSX-10.4.3-GCC-4.0.1

in your <build-dir>/xc/ directory.

Thanks to Torrey Lyons for the pointers.

/hacking/mindstorms | Link
Lego™ pneumatics: what else could be said? The extensive survey of compressors is great.

Hal Hartley: Kimono

/noise/movies | Link

Too arty for me.

Fay Grim — a sequel to his masterpiece Henry Fool? Could it be?

/hacking/mindstorms | Link
Lego™ intends to release a new version of Lego™ Mindstorms in the third quarter of 2006 — here's the press release, and Slashdot has some links.

/noise/movies | Link
Broken Flowers with Lucy at the Palace in Leichardt, and much later in the evening, Magnolia.

/noise/sport | Link
Went to watch South Africa play cricket against Australia at the SCG with my Dad. The SA batting was fairly tedious — they are masters at slow scoring, as they proved in the first Test in Perth. The last hour or so saw the collapse of the Australian top-order, which was perhaps a bit over-eager, understandably so given the crappy weather on the first day and an exhausting day in the field today.

Tillsammans

/noise/movies | Link

On Cath's recommendation. Very Swedish. The subtitles I had seemed to leave out a lot of nuance.