Lavonardo

Whoah, january sure was a busy month in this blog - no less than eightyeight entries saw daylight in thirtyone days.

Do not expect a similarly freeflowing performance in the coming months.

Been a while since I stumbled onto the blog of Greg Kroah-Hartmann, one of the key Linux kernel hackers.

And there’s quite a crop of interesting things in the recent entries:

The most recent topic is the offer to assist vendors in crafting device drivers. While this effort is unlikely to budge the likes of ATI and Nvidia from providing binary drivers, it’s a mighty public relations blow for the kernel community - no longer can they be accused of being aloof and distanced.

Another interesting entry is the one on Linux Kernel in a Nutshell, a brand new book from O’Reilly. It’s a thin book on a weighty subject. And like a few other of the publisher’s books on the Linux kernel, it’s freely available on the web.

Saw a halo (or more accurately, an icebow) this morning.

Would have really wanted to photograph this with a real camera, but the 6680’s handiwork fortunately isn’t distractingly bad.

This is the first halo I’ve ever seen, and while the circle is by no means complete, it’s still a spectacular sight. The sundogs on both sides were not plain white (as shown in the image), but bore vague colours of a rainbow.

Rule #n for aspiring video game companies: when localizing games, make sure it’s done by someone truly competent.

Case 1: Travian and amateurs.

Case 2: Blizzard and a true lapse of professionalism.

Suosituin Verkoppeli Suomessa.

Disastrous. Spellchecking, it’s your friend when treading unknown waters of language.

Google Maps + Books = showing where the story happens. Brilliant.

Now if only somebody put up a map of the Middle Earth or Westeros in fully zoomable form.

DNS down. This is never good. And lasted uncomfortably long. Like four hours (after which I went to bed).

Welho, you’ve been warned.

Watched Guillermo del Toro’s fairy tale set in wartime Spain yesterday.

The movie has been nominated for six academy awards, and quite rightly so, it is an amazing spectacle to watch. Filled with fabulous scenes mixed with gritty realism. Of the former my favorite was the verdant forest glade, with sun-lit pollen dancing in the air.

But like most fairy tales, it is simplistic. A majority of the characters are one-dimensional, and this detracts from the power of the story, since their motivations (and expected fates) are pretty much given from the very start.

Like most fairy tales not softened for consumption for children, this one has a definite mean streak. Death is present in almost every scene, and painful lessons are sown with abandon.

And like the best fairy tales, this one has moments of utter sense of wonder, carefully built into everyday scenery. Doug Jones’ twin performances as the faun and the unnamed child-eating monster run circles around garden variety fantasy.

Go watch Pan’s Labyrinth - this and Prestige have kicked off the cinematic year nicely.

South Korea, often touted as the model of a broadband society, has hit an unexpected snag.

The country seems to be held hostage by IE6-specific ActiveX software. And the reason behind this is “security”. All financial transactions must be encrypted with such controls. An approach that was fumbled when the government permanently tied the on-line security to an immature standard that was quickly superseded. A standard that is not supported by the new windows version just about to surface.

Somehow I doubt that Vista will sell like hotcakes in Seoul.

This week’s photo thursday challenge subject is “exertion”.

My take is the attached image - of doubtlessly gigantic mental exertion required to design this toilet. A toilet, which seemingly seems to be equipped to handle wheel-chair bound customers. But actually doesn’t, as the paper-dispenser is spectacularly misplaced.

Completely forgot to mention the Razzie counter-awards in the annual Oscar nomination entry.

The Razzies site is hopelessly non-navigable, and hence the nominees are much more easily browsed in Wikipedia.

Apart from Da Vinci Code (which isn’t really bad enough to be featured alongside such greats of BloodRayne), I’ve seen only one movie of those listed for any category. And of that, Just My Luck, just a few snippets over lunch on a plane to Boston.

And I am seriously considering picking up the new Pink Panther one of these days, it seemed to be on the OK-side of things based on the trailer. Then again, it might be that the only two non-disastrous minutes have been distilled into that snippet, and the rest of the film is grounds for justifiable homicide.

On a nudge from the guys of katuoja I took a look at the first issue of Phonogram - freely available courtesy of Newsarama.

Music, magic, underground occult and complicated characters fronted with an unsympathetic protagonist. Sounds like yet another Hellblazer/Books of Magic/whatever ripoff, but manages to bring in enough good vibes to be interesting enough to warrant a page-per-page read.

I’m not very good when it comes to buying comics as single issues (especially with finnish vendors shying away from them towards collected editions only), and thus the news of this six-issue miniseries arriving in trade paperback form in march is welcome news.

Surprisingly, the scandinavian edition of the first season of the “new” Doctor Who is much cheaper than the UK original and the US release.

They cash in at 70 pounds and 100 dollars, respectively. The scandinavian one costs 30 euros. Which in my book is a much more decent price.

Sure enough, the release is not perfect, for some reason english subtitles have been left out. But at a fraction of the cost, this is hardly anything for serious complaints.

Second batch of Wiis arrived in Finland, and picked up one. And an RGB-cable, just to be on the safe side even though the console is on the high end of this generation.

No games yet. Though Zelda looks mighty good, and Wario proved its worth as a party game already.

The online component seems nowhere near the quality of XBox Live, with slow connections and a need for multiple rounds of updates at the very beginning. The games offered in the Virtual Console do contain some to pick up, sooner or later - Mario 64 being one of the very few 10/10 games in Edge, and the Donkey Kong Country something out of the Rare stables that I never had a chance to play yet.

And yeah, the attached Mii is not a truly convincing copy of me, but the best that fiddling with the editor a minute came up with. The worst clash with the reality are the glasses, the frames being too thick and of wrong colour.

The annual parade of the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business is out.

Unfortunately parcelled out at a rate of one per page. But that decision isn’t nearly dumb enough to land cnn on the list.

Lost a game of Arkham Horror. And by “lost” I mean that the game beat us, and no-one won.

Score is now 3-1 for the human element, and we came quite close to beating the Challenger from Carcosa in the final battle.

Indeed, this was the first game that ended in the Great Old One awakening, previously we’d been efficient enough to take care of the gates and minions in short order.

That did not happen in this game - we all drew gunslingers, which is nice for normal combat encounters, but sucks painfully as a balanced party. Managed to stave off disaster for many, many turns (game lasting well over four hours) after the sealing of gates in a few key locations. But that was just a temporary advantage, as an unresolvable rumor soon doubled the planar activity, and the three of us were unable to cope with the avalanche.

Next time, a date with a late pharaoh, and after that, a detour to Dunwich.

This week’s photo thursday challenge subject is “why?”.

My take is the attached image - of a wire sculpture of a woman, but what’s the reason of her grin?

In addition to finally sinking to a proper temperature for the season, Helsinki has been covered with powdery snow.

Which is nice. And much later than usual. And not really deep by any means.

No snowmen have been sighted yet - it’s been below zero all the way. The ones in the attached image are by Joscha Sauer, a german cartoonist of the garylarsonian persuasion (and one who that singlehandedly proves that the germans are not averse to absurdism). Sadly his output has been seriously curtailed of late.

Pop. 7.

Elevation 1069′.

• Bill Gates said that spam would be gone by 2006 - according to a new study it’s back and worse than ever.
• Never was much of a Final Fantasy fan, but the games long history covered in a lengthy article on IGN makes interesting reading.
• Employer2.0, just when you thought the bubble couldn’t get any more inflated.
• ogleearth, a cornucopia of geographic-web- connected things.
• eat.fi, a gourmet/map site of Helsinki.
• A very brave bunny, wouldn’t expect many rabbits to dare to pester a snake like this.
• The new and supposedly authentic chinese restaurant has opened its website.

The nominees are out.

And amongst them are unknowns, good choices, odd omissions and controversy enough to last until the ceremony.

Amongst the good: Departed for best picture, Prestige for art direction. Among the odd: Leonardo di Caprio for Blood Diamond (at least the south african accent in the trailer is way less convincing than his act in the Departed), replacing Jack Nicholson with Mark Wahlberg (as the angriest cop in the world) for supporting character.

But the tally of unseen films (starting from Pan’s Labyrinth) is too high for comfort - so the new year’s resolution of “a movie a month” must be upgraded, at least to two per…

A good rule of thumb if I ever saw any.

Unfortunately this Celine Dion masterpiece of “covering” AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long has recently escaped to Youtube.

[ via Jason Kottke. ]