Now that's an obscure movie. First I did not get Alex' opening monologue about the Tibetan Book of the Dead (I switched to better subtitles later). It would have made the movie more predictable and probably less interesting - he basically describes the rest of the movie in terms of both content and form! The whole reincarnation thing is of course childish. But the use of incandescent lights and the strange hovering really reminded me of my dream-like days in Tokyo last year. Expecting some cultivated being lost in translation I stumbled into a full fledged culture shock. This movie captures a lot of this feeling which is basically about being exhausted, losing the ground under one's feet and being confused by too many blinking lights. If only the movie's story wasn't so childish!

Monsters is visually up to date, the message is very 2010 as well. Of course District 9 comes into mind, which is much less melodramatic. And it made actually more sense when its metaphorical content is read critically: If you think the (too obvious) main metaphor in Monsters through: Aliens (in both senses, here they all lean on Men in Black) threaten the USA which react by locking the invaders out (and themselves in). So those floating octopi are images for foreigners: If you leave them alone, they leave you alone and in the night there is some beauty to their uncomprehensible movements. But they are still NATURE, they mostly reproduce. Here, the metaphor does not leave the grounds of its racist equivalent. In District 9, however, we had aliens who have plans and fears and all the things we all have. Still, some poetic moments. Suckers (like me) for Stalker images of decaying civilisation and the Heart of Darkness evergreen will spend entertaining 90 minutes. 

Of course this is not how it should be, a blog only containing info about which version of which software it is running on. On the other hand: who cares... And the plugin/themes installer-module is really useful.

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At work I have switched back to Windows. It's a boring story involving a corrupted file system and the necessary re-install. What made me revisit the evil os was that I cannot do my computer supporting at work all alone. There is a couple of very nice guys paid for repairing my windows pc, and so it shall be.

Some comfort lies in the fact that the software I use on top of windows (XP) is open source (unison, svn, openoffice, winscp, putty, gimp, etc), which works quite well. On the other hand - it doesn't make a huge difference, the tools should stay out of the way, and if they do I am happy. For now.

I guess the tricks in my previous post are not working any longer. No problem, news is mostly boring anyway. But here is something new: Kulturzeit, a German somewhat snobbish show about all kinds of culture. The problem: it is only offered as live stream. So we have to record it when it is streamed.

Add this to your crontab:

20 19 * * 1-5 /usr/local/bin/get_kulturzeit.sh &
00 20 * * 1-5 killall mmsrip

The get_kulturzeit.sh script called here is attached to this post.

We use mmsrip again and the linux command line version of asf-bin. The latter is necessary to fix the index of the streamed video file to keep audio in sync and to make it seekable.

German and Norwegian state television still have the best news shows (compared to their private contenders of course). And they offer them on the net. Unfortunately, their download is made difficult. This may have legal reasons or not, I don't know exactly. If it has, it is not my problem. Therefore, I have built a workaround using OpenKapow robots.

This url:
http://service.openkapow.com/MaxSnauth/nrkdagsrevy21.csv?header=no
returns (among other) the url of the newest Dagsrevy 21.

In a script together with the handy little mmsrip this line

mmsrip $(echo `wget -qO- http://service.openkapow.com/MaxSnauth/nrkdagsrevy21.csv?header=no` | sed 's/^"[^"]*","\([^"]*\)"/\1/')

downloads the latest show.

The same for German news:

mmsrip $(echo `wget -qO- http://service.openkapow.com/MaxSnauth/ard.csv?header=no` | sed s/\"//g)

Here the latest show produced by ARD is downloaded.

I've included the attribute :tocdepth: Set it to 1 to include only ---- level headings.

And while I were at it I also included 2 more attributes:

:imgpath: /some/path/with/trailing/slash/
If set images are searched in this directory (I keep all the images I use for talks in one directory).

:titlegraphic: some_logo.jpg
If set this file is included in the title slide. It uses :imgpath:

This is my first attempt to simplify the production of beamer presentations. I chose asciidoc because of its ability to produce a host of output formats (natively and via its mature docbook output). The state of the backend is highly experimental. Please see the example files (ascii source and pdf output) first, it contains all you need to know for installation and use.

Now it has almost been a year that I started to experiment with frugal browsers. I started with ion which worked very well (even thouh the lua bit takes some time to get used to). Ion's immature developer's open Anti-Open Source stance then drove me away to wmii. Again tweaking (this time a shell script which houses the configuration) until it did what I wanted. I followed the mailing list but had soon to learn that wmii's man developers neither are the kind of people I (as luser) would trust to drive the development into my direction. So I moved on to Awesome. Very active project with developers who do not think that using firefox is your own fault. So far I really like it: Snappy performance and a very decent kind of eye candy.

This is a test, what else could this be?

I've hacked together a simple tv episode downloader script. As always it has a lot of perl module dependencies (all of them available from debian unstable repositories). It uses the feeds from tvrss.net. It downloads the torrent to a designated dir, where it may trigger the client (if your client supports this, most do). As a bonus it drops an email when a new episode has arrived.

I have written a cheat sheet for AsciiDoc. You get it here as pdf and as odt.

What is AsciiDoc? Here's the description copied from its homepage (as most of the examples i use in the cheat sheet):

AsciiDoc is a text document format for writing short documents, articles, books and UNIX man pages. AsciiDoc files can be translated to HTML and DocBook markups using the asciidoc(1) command.

AsciiDoc is highly configurable: both the AsciiDoc source file syntax and the backend output markups (which can be almost any type of SGML/XML markup) can be customized and extended by the user.

And once you've got your text in DocBook format a whole world of different output formats is awaiting you.

Found this little movie over at archive.org:

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drums beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60's soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of
a 'B' side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that 'information wants to be free'- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

The visual style is frugal, it's actually a sound clip more than anything else. But the story it tells is interesting - if you didn't know it before.

I've just updated this site to drupal 5.0. It comes with some nifty templates, one is called antique_modern, I wonder what's antique and what's modern about it. But it is nice. Internally some improvements, but nothing I would write home about.

An einem Wochenende wie diesem schau ich eine Reihe Filme, aber nur selten sind sie alle so gut, dass ich der Welt davon erzaehlen moechte. Diesmal war es aber so und daher platz frei fuer snauth's quadrupel-feature of January.