numbersix

Wally Gentleman designed The Universe. If I were to believe in a God I would want him to be called Wally Gentleman. He also supervised the special effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey, which by a sad co-incidance was also the year he died. He said some interesting things.

finally decided that Empire will not be getting their monthly 3.50 from me any more. the magazine was never the most cerebral of reads, but over the last year it has plunged new depths. they are overly obsessed with the commercial aspects of the industry, anything that isn't a blockbuster is just ignored. even the films they do turn their attention to are just superficially skimmed. the recent editorial summed it up for me perfectly, the whole shpiel on Spiderman being the most influencial film of the year - bollocks! it was rubbish, a painting by numbers, brain dead attempt at something that had so much potential. anyone with half decent directorial skills could have turned that out. and the CGI was terrible, they even admitted as much themselves in the previous issue. and what is this obsession with DVD? Ok so the quality is better, but does it warrent 50% of the magazine's content, no! if i want DVD monthly i'll go and buy it.

excellent article in the Guardian on where North Korea fits into current world politics.

George Roy Hill, director of, amongst other things, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting died on Dec 27th 2002. I should try and see Slaughterhouse-Five.

Odeon - Fanatical About Film. Really? Book over the internet, queue 20 minutes for the ticket, 1 machine in 4 working, queue 10 minutes for loo, then an other 10 minutes for extortionately priced pop corn - utter rubbish. And while I'm on the subject, what's with the 'Powered By Empire' web site? I thought Empire was supposed to be an independent, un-biased magazine?

neat. existence of this file means that non root users are prevented from logging in, even from the console. instead the contents of the file are displayed.

have you ever wondered how much a film actually costs to make? these guys are almost finished making a full feature film on a budget 335,000 pounds, and have a very interesting web site explaining how they did it.

base conversion on the command line:

$ echo "ibase=10;obase=16;15" | bc
F

where in this case we want to know what base 10 15 is in base 16

Word of the day - pusillanimous

adj : lacking in courage and manly strength and resolution; contemptibly fearful [syn: poor-spirited, unmanly]

Currently reading Learning Perl. Although I've taught myself most of the basics in the last year or two, there is still a lot in there that fills gaps, and it's good to have things explained properly. And the best bit is finding out little nuggets like for instance the very cool feature of being able to attach a DBM file to a hash with one line :

dbmopen(%somehash, "dbmfilename", 0644);

That's it. Seems to work without any extra modules either. Neat!

Hayao Miyazaki has outdone himself with Spirited Away, what an incredible imagination. This puts the normal Disney output to shame, making it look bland and boring (and no awful Phil Collins soundtrak either). I've been a fan of Miyazaki ever since I saw Crimson Pig and Lupin III a few years ago.

Very interesting article in the Guardian about the the development of Elite, the ground-breaking game written in the early eighties. Backroom Boys the book the article is taken from also looks very interesting, "The Secret Return of the British Boffin". My bro receives a promotion from Above Average to Competant for supplying the link.

I know very little about the film, or the comics behind it, but judging from these images, HellBoy looks like it could be pretty good. Directed by Guillermo del Toro who did the very underrated and beautifully imaged (?) The Devil's Backbone. Check it out, it's worth a watch.

'spect to the bro for the heads up.

Some very nice T-Shirts - http://www.lastexittonowhere.com/