John Lindal’s Blog

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The game has changed.

I was very skeptical when I read that James Cameron was out to out-Lucas George Lucas. I don’t believe it’s possible, but only because every game changing quantum leap up has the same general effect of blowing the public’s collective mind. But there is no question that Avatar has now changed the game in exactly the same way that Star Wars did thirty years ago. Audiences will not put up with 2D summer blockbusters much longer.

The story is certainly not as sweeping in scope as Star Wars, but Cameron deserves credit for at least thinking up an entire continent instead of only a few square miles of jungle. The characters were all stereotypes, and they died in the standard order, but they were still well done and served the purpose of making as deep an emotional impact as possible. As far as I can tell, that was what Cameron wanted: amplify the impact of watching full 3D by giving the audience characters to whom they can readily respond.

Chuck E. Cheese

We just escaped from the ear-splitting, crass, insult that is Chuck E. Cheese. No offense to the parents who scheduled the birthday party there, but the place is intolerable. While I carried my daughter to the car, she listed out everything she doesn’t want for her next birthday party: no loud music, no screaming children, no Chuck E. Cheese. Wise kid. From now on, I’m referring to the place as Yuck E. Cheese.

Fortune Cookies

I’ve finally found a fortune cookie with a prediction that I don’t want to come true:

Your most memorable dream will come true.

My most memorable dreams turn into stories, and while I enjoy writing them, I certainly wouldn’t want them to happen!

flex on Mac OS X

I just discovered a horrible bug in the default version of flex (2.5.33) on Mac OS X 10.5.8. It strips out [[ and ]] from literal strings inside %{...}%! First, I tried building flex 2.5.35 from source. This doesn’t mess up the strings, but it blows up inside yy_get_next_buffer(). Then I tried building flex 2.5.4 from source, but it does very strange stuff, too. I finally gave up and split the double square brackets up by using string concatenation: "...[""[:digit:]""]...". It’s ugly, but it works!

Erlang Message Passing — Part 2

I just finished a major overhaul of my Erlang Actor in Java library. Not only does it now provide three different threading strategies (persistent thread, transient thread, thread pool), but these strategies are pluggable. Implementations derive from Actor and implement act(), and the threading strategy is provided when the Actor is instantiated, by passing in a concrete implementation of Agent. I also added in the concept of a MessageSpy, for logging and monitoring. Any number of MessageSpies can be installed, and each one gets to look at every message that is sent.

Re-enabling Eee PC External Monitor

I use my Eee PC as my dev box at home, so of course I have my Sony monitor plugged in. The wonderful feature of Metacity on Eeebuntu is that it automatically adjusts to the size and resolution of my monitor. There is a minor bug, however: the size of the root window is reported to be the size of the notebook screen, not the size of my monitor. In an attempt to fix this, I made the mistake of using the Video Displays menu in the Eee PC Tray. This disabled the external monitor, no matter which option I selected! After tracing through shell scripts, I discovered that /var/eeepc/vga_saved needs to contain 1. This re-enabled the external monitor.

Update (9/30/2009): The latest system update has fixed this. The Video Displays menu works. After the update, the external monitor went back to low resolution, but as soon as I selected External Display Only, it worked perfectly.

Negotiations

I just finished another story. This one is set in the Star Trek universe, because I dreamt it that way

Medieval Poetry

I read up on Wagner’s Ring Cycle this weekend, so I guess it’s not surprising that I dreamt of epic poetry. Normally, I don’t remember anything I read in my dreams, but in the dream, my wife asked me to explain the first line, and I woke up immediately afterwards, so I was able to reconstruct it from the explanation:

As proceeded the lancing of night’s knees,

My interpretation is that, since lancing the knees would cripple rather than kill, this must refer to the pre-dawn.

Apple Rocks

My wife admitted a long time ago that iPhoto really good at making photo books. Recently, we were discussing typing in Chinese, and she didn’t believe me when I said that Apple included it as part of the OS, since on Windows, she has to purchase special software. About 5 minutes later, I had it working on my Mac, and she had to admit that Apple really was good. A couple of days ago, she actually uninstalled both Internet Explorer and Firefox from her Windows XP laptop and loaded Safari instead. And she loves it!

Dear Abby

I recently saw an advice column in a newspaper at a friend’s house where a person was asking about how to discuss budding bisexuality with a conservative, Christian family. The advice boiled down to, You are not alone. If you are afraid of abuse, get help. While true, it completely missed the point. A conservative, Christian family will expect that one practices abstinence until marriage, and that marriage is a lifelong, monogamous relationship. If the person intends to do that, then bisexuality would be irrelevant. If not, then that should be the primary topic for discussion. Having sex all willy nilly is a very different lifestyle and carries all sorts of risks, e.g., STD’s.