whizfoo

Finished reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Not really anything to get excited about. The overall theme and characters are simplistic at best. The mystery or “code” in the book is not bad, but once again feels very watered down. Foucault’s Pendulum is a much better book using mostly the same theme.
I [...]

I read The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. An interesting and exciting story about tracking an intruder in a computer system in the late 1980s. This book is a little like the other side of Underground.

Watched a lot of diverse movies the last weeks:

Lola Rennt
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Colossus: The Forbin Project
The Thin Man
The Return of the Living Dead
The Gold Rush
Modern Times
Rounders
Magnolia

I have read Mother Earth Mother Board by Neal Stephenson. Not a book but a long (56 pages) article written for Wired in late 1996. This article is about the laying of submarine cables, or more precisely about the laying of the (by then?) longest cable. I think that this article was either inspiration, or [...]

Today I decided to subscribe to Linux Weekly News. LWN is the best source for Free Software news and articles. Not only in terms of coverage and quality but I dare also say it has the most sensible feedback section. LWN has three full time editors and for some time now haven’t been sustainable, so [...]

The weeks that went past, as told in movies:

Touch of Evil – Maybe THE film noir.
American Beauty – I don’t know why I haven’t watched this one before, it’s great!
Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact, The Dead Pool
The Sting
Martin – Possibly the most interesting vampire movie I have ever seen.

I was very pleased to learn about the existance of X-Moto a free clone of Elastomania. A very addictive little game. X-Moto (and Elastomania) is a 2D motocross platform game, with very interesting physics. So far X-Moto is only alpha code but it feels very polished and I haven’t seen any major bugs. There [...]