John Lindal’s Blog

Lord of the Rings

My wife and I finally managed to finish watching The Return of the King yesterday evening. This experience, combined with what my wife told me after she saw King Kong, has changed my attitude towards Peter Jackson. After watching The Fellowship of the Ring, I wanted to sponsor a remedial reading course for him. Now I think the money would be better spent on a frontal lobotomy.

I can understand that D&D fans and people who haven’t read the books could like the movies. It certainly had better special effects than the D&D movie, and the plot worked at least as well as Hawk the Slayer, though the latter is eminently more watchable since it is only 90 minutes instead of 9 hours.

But for those of us who can and have read the books, the movies are a disaster. Not that I expected the movie to be exactly like the book. Leaving out Tom Bombadil is completely reasonable. Even leaving out Sharkey’s End is understandable, though it was very important for the character development of the Hobbits. But there were so many changes that were just plain wrong, from twisting Denethor into a cruel fool who would murder his own son by sending him on a doomed mission, to making Gandalf fool enough to turn his back on the Balrog in Moria, to making the Nazgul stupid enough to attack a city defended by archers and making the archers of Gondor stupid enough not to take advantage of it, to inventing a troll who, after getting his foot on top of Aragorn’s chest, would not merely squash him like a bug, to not having Gollum scream in agony as he was swallowed up in lava.

And where did they get the idea that Sauron was a flaming eye attached via invisible gimbals to the top of Barad-dur?

If it were not for huge mistakes like these, I would even be willing to forgive wasting screen time on silly cliff hangers like Frodo hanging by one hand above the lava and converting faceless Orcs into idiotic, Hollywood-style villains whom audiences can enjoy seeing defeated.

Frankly, I think I’d prefer to listen to “If there’s a whip, there’s a way.”

Debugging memory allocation

I just received a very pleasant surprise: Code Crusader core dumped because it double deleted an object.

The reason this was pleasant was because glibc caught it and dumped core immediately, allowing me to easily track down the error in my code.

This is a major improvement — on par with when it started dumping core on “pure virtual” errors!

Passion

On the way home from work today, I found myself driving behind a white Beetle with a white Apple logo on the rear window. Thoughts for the weekend:

How many cars have you seen with a Windows XP sticker? For that matter, how many anythings have you seen with a Windows XP sticker?

How many people do you know in whom Windows inspires passion? I mean the positive kind, of course. I hear plenty of people swearing at their Windows laptops!

How do Apple and Volkswagen do it?

The X’s

Since basic cable only costs us $4 — above the price of broadband — I occasionally go slumming when I’m too braindead to do anything else. Over Christmas, I caught a couple of episodes of the new cartoon The X’s on Nickelodeon. I found it pretty funny, since I enjoy satirical silliness.

The basic premise is to laugh at the antics of the family. Dad is the leader, Mom is the hand-to-hand combat expert, the daughter Tuesday — a nod to Friday on The Adams Family, I think — is the weapons expert, and the son is the technical genius. They’re all either normal or nuts, depending on how you look at it. They are perfectly normal as super secret agents go, but they fit into the real world about as well as a square peg fits in a circular hole. They don’t even know how to keep the house clean or do laundry — which makes for wonderful fun when the son uploads a “harmless” patch to the central computer, causing it to crash, just before a sanitation inspection.

Of course, every secret agent needs an arch-nemesis. In the case of the X’s, however, this is a token-arch-nemesis, since the focus of the show is the family’s wackiness. He still gets plenty of good lines, however, like:

This is the best secret lair ever! It has a Pit of Doom (points to his right)…a shark tank (points to his left)…and spinning blades of death (points to the ceiling).

Uh, sir, those are ceiling fans.

Oh, uh, well I’m sure we can find something evil to do with them…

In one episode, Mom arranges a slumber party for Tuesday — by paying three randomly chosen girls from school, no less. They are (1) the Goth who enjoys contemplating the meaninglessness of the universe, (2) the ditz who states her interest to be lip gloss, and (3) the nerd who wears Princess Leia cinnamon buns and eagerly demonstrates her talent at intergalactic yodeling. Chaos ensues when the X’s blast off into orbit — in their house, shaped like an X — to blow up their token-arch-nemesis’ new space base. Tuesday must keep the girls distracted while the others blast away and dodge return fire. At one point, she turns on the “TV” so she can also monitor the progress of the battle. The nerd becomes suspicious because, “I’ve seen every science fiction movie ever made, and this isn’t one of them!”

As I said, well worth watching if you enjoy satirical silliness.

Second Life

If you haven’t already seen it, you ought to check out the new virtual world called Second Life. Personally, I’ve been waiting for this for about 10 years, ever since I started designing such a system in grad school. Second Life works pretty much the way I dreamed of doing it. It’s a social place, but it also has an economy.

Since it’s virtual, anybody can create stuff and then either keep it, sell it for whatever the market will pay, or give it away. Duplication costs are obviously zero, but you control who has the right to duplicate your creations, so you can be the sole supplier of an object — at least until somebody else figures out how to build it from scratch

The physics engine and scripting language seem quite well designed. Scripts lets you attach arbitrary behaviors to the objects that you create. The language includes the concept of state, so you don’t have to build a state machine yourself.

Basic access is free. If you sign up for a paying account, you are allowed to own land. You control who has the right to create objects on your land, so you can either build a castle and defend it against all invaders, or you can open it up for everybody to play.

RedHat Fedora Core 4

After years of putting it off, I finally upgraded my ancient system from RedHat 7.3. Now, I’m running Fedora Core 4 plus about half of the updates reported by yum. I guess putting it off didn’t actually save me any time. I just had to put it all in this weekend!

It takes forever to install, of course, both because my machine is ancient and because I like to install pretty much everything — for testing purposes, if nothing else.

After taking most of Saturday to grind through the four CD’s, I tried building JX 2.5.0. Imagine my surprise when it failed to link dynamic libraries via -l. When I deleted the .so, it accepted the .a, but then makemake promptly core dumped because a statically declared variable in the same file was not initialized!

A bit of research yielded yum as the solution. gcc 4.0.0 surely needed updating. My OS X laptop is running 4.0.1, and that works.

Being the naive fool that I am, I ran yum update. Now, for people with 1TB hard drives, this might actually work. Unfortunately, with my measly 5GB root partition — I have 10GB in /home — yum used up all the available space for the downloaded updates, so when it tried to install them, it couldn’t. Unfortunately, it got just far enough to trash some core system libraries…

So, I started all over again bright and early Sunday morning. Thankfully, it managed to chew through the CD’s before we left for Church. But when I got home and begin configuring it, I noticed that the swap partition was not mounted. Thankfully, fsck helped me find it so I could fix /etc/fstab.

This time, I ran yum check-update and then selectively updated the packages that I cared about. Even so, I had to update /etc/yum.conf to move the cache to my /home partition because OpenOffice is just too darn big

Finally, I applied the same patches as for RedHat Enterprise Linux 4: install fvwm2, load the pcspkr module, etc.

After all this, the linking problem was fixed, but I discovered that the core dump from makemake was my fault after all. My for loop was wandering right off the end of my statically allocated array. I am horrified that this works without complaint on OS X Tiger but very happy that Fedora complained!

But my troubles are not yet over. The Fedora installer discovered my aging ZIP drive, but nothing I have tried so far can convince mount to actually mount one of my ZIP disks. I may need to find a new method of backing up my data — not that off-site backup wouldn’t be a good idea…

Problems with Potter?

A random comment I found somewhere on the web a few days ago set me off on a hunt for discussion on the Harry Potter series. What I found is that the debate over the virtues of the series is still raging after all these years. I remember hearing about a pastor in Texas wanting to burn the first Harry Potter book many years ago.

Now, I know that we all like to live in our own version of reality — Douglas Adams made this point quite cleverly with the Total Perspective Vortex — but I cannot understand why people get so hung up on the magick in the Harry Potter books, unless they are like one person I heard of who allegedly believed that the special effects in the old TV series Bewitched were real.

J.K. Rowling is writing a fantasy story. It is based on assumptions that are not true in our world, namely that magick is real, and that some people are born with the power, like it or not. In the first book, Harry causes several strange things to happen, e.g., sending Dudley into the snake exhibit, without realizing what he is doing — and without a wand. Under these circumstances, it would be irresponsible not to have schools devoted to teaching kids how to use their power — both technically, for control, and ethically, to avoid abuse. In the books, the Dark Arts are only considered acceptable by those who are not hampered by moral scruples. Hogwarts only teaches defense against the Dark Arts and only out of necessity. While one might grumble that God is absent from the books, morality certainly is not.

Rowling’s magick has nothing to do with the oft-quoted commandments in the Bible banning witchcraft because our world works differently. Nobody is born with power, as far as I know. If magick does actually exist in our world, then it appears to be accessible only by dealing with supernatural beings — beings not from our world. The Biblical commandment forbids making deals with such supernatural beings — demons, if you will — and this is for our safety. Demons do not have our best interest at heart!

Rowling’s magick should instead be compared with our technology. We are born with the ability to create both wonders, e.g., modern medicine, and nightmares, e.g., modern warfare. Under these circumstances, it would be irresponsible not to have schools devoted to teaching kids how to use this power — both technically and ethically. We only developed the nuclear bomb out of necessity, because Nazi Germany was trying to invent it, too!