John Lindal’s Blog

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I went to see Narnia this morning. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to see it after the Lord of the Rings debacle, but since I love the books so much, I couldn’t resist.

I’m happy to report that they got it right.

Sure, they changed things — lots of things. At the beginning, I was grumbling about casting choices and all sorts of details. But part way through, after they successfully pulled off a particularly wild deviation which initially had me writhing in my seat, I realized that there was hope. This team was not the usual gang of idiots. And when I saw the expression on Aslan’s face after negotiating with the White Witch over Edmund’s life, I knew that they understood the book.

In retrospect, I cannot think of a single core detail which they missed or changed. Granted, I have not read the book in quite a while, but all the changes and omissions helped the story flow and the characters develop smoothly within the 2 hour time window. Unlike another director who shall remain nameless, Andrew Adamson (of Shrek fame) knows how to tell a good story in a reasonable amount of time. He deserves special kudos for not Disnefying the climax, even though it was a Disney film. Even the battle tactics were good!

So, if you love the books, go see the movie. It’s not the book, but it’s true to the book. And if you’ve been looking for a conversation starter, take a friend along.

It may be too much to ask that they do the same for the other 6 books, but C.S. Lewis would surely support us in praying for such a miracle.

OS X – The Tiger is loose!

Damn, but this Mac OS X Powerbook is sexy. I don’t usually drool over computers, even though I’m a hacker — I guess I’m a jaded hacker , but when the laptop can detect the ambient light level and automatically dim the screen and backlight the keyboard, well, it’s just sexy.

And I hadn’t realized how much I missed the Command (clover) key until now. Of course I use it in Linux (where we call it Meta and label it Alt) with all my own programs, and I re-wired Word and Outlook to use Alt on XP, but it’s never consistent, because dialogs and other miscellaneous windows cannot be re-configured.

I feel like I’ve come home!

OS X – Tiger

Today I got my Christmas present: a brand new Powerbook G4 with the new, higher resolution screen and OS X Tiger.

Now, I have to admit that when OS X first came out, I considered it a step backwards in terms of look-and-feel. The big, fat dock at the bottom of the screen wasted far too much space, and the magnification feature just annoyed me. The new look for the Finder was also annoying. I like separate windows for separate folders, especially since Mac OS has always made it easy to cope with — at least for me.

I’m happy to report that I was wrong. It took me 5 minutes to realize that Mac still reigns supreme for UI design. I say that having used Windows 2K, Windows XP, Gnome from RedHat Enterprise 4, and my favorite, fvwm2.

With the dock on the left, magnification turned off, Desktop Manager installed, Finder configured to open windows, and Mighty Mouse configured with middle-click for Exposé and right-click for context menus, I’m ready to install Code Crusader and get to work!

RedHat Enterprise Linux 4

I finally upgraded my work computer to RHEL4. It’s nice to have Firefox, but overall, it was a pain.

The first thing I noticed was that Gnome silently overrides the settings in Xdefaults. So I tried using ~/.Xdefaults. After restarting X, Gnome kindly notified me that it was ignoring this file, too. A bit of Googling yielded the solution to create a script and install it as a Startup Program via Preferences → More Preferences → Sessions. Make sure the order is 50, so it executes after all the other Gnome stuff.

Next, I noticed that my computer was strangely silent. The sound test had succeeded during installation, but the command line was not beeping during command completion! A bit more Googling revealed that the pcspkr kernel module is not installed by default. How nice. More research revealed an RPM that claimed to patch rc.sysinit to do this. As if I’m going to trust somebody else to do that! It’s quite a long script, but finally I discovered that adding pcspkr to the other variable, which controls the list of miscellaneous kernel modules to load, solves the problem.

Now that I’m writing this, I’ve discovered that the left arrow key just doesn’t work in Firefox 1.0. When the caret is at the end of the line, left arrow jumps to somewhere near the beginning of the line. Lovely. The good news is that Firefox 1.5 is trivial to install and works just fine.

Of course, now that I’ve gotten this all to work, I’m going to switch to fvwm2 just as soon as I can grab a copy of my .fvwm2rc file from home. It’s very easy to install and eates a lot less memory:

1. Download the fvwm2 RPM from www.fvwm.org.
2. Downloadthe libstroke source from www.etla.net/libstroke/.
3. Install libstroke as root: ./configure; make; make install
4. Install the fvwm2 RPM with --nodeps
5. Edit etc/X11/xinit/Xclients to set PREFERRED=fvwm2
6. Edit /etc/sysconfig/desktop to be a blank value.

I suppose memory isn’t really a concern if you’re running with 1GB, but I only have 192MB, and I need all of it to link Code Crusader statically.