Random News from the Month of May

Yesterday Susan and I braved the scattered rain to attend Dallas Artfest 2005. It turned out to be overcast and cool but only a tiny bit of rain fell. Susan found some interesting jewellery and it made a nice break from work.

I’ve been working with David Anderson in porting his robotics library for the MRM board to gcc 3.4.3. I’ve added a little code of my own in the process and I’m using Doxygen to produce pretty web-based documentation for the whole thing. We still have a ways to go but I’m hoping to release the completed library as a DPRG project in a month or two (under GPL of course).

We saw Hitchhiker’s earlier this month and found it sadly disappointing. It appears to have been adapted to the big screen by people who had no clear understanding of Douglas Adams brand of humor (or British humor in general). It almost appears they didn’t understand it was supposed to be a funny story and tried very hard to turn it into an action movie by excising anything remotely amusing from the script. Even worse, they frequently removed the setup for jokes but left in the punch line or left in the setup and removed the punchline, making the story incomprehensible (or at least very non-funny) for those who hadn’t read the book, heard the radio version, or seen the TV adaptation. The one redeeming moment was when the real Marvin made brief cameo appearance. I suspect everyone reading this has seen the movie by now but if you haven’t, save your money and buy the very nice DVD of the BBC television version which is a lot more fun.

We also saw Revenge of the Sith. What can I say. At least it’s finally over. It was better than the last two but I’m afraid the original version of the first movie is the only one that was really fun as a stand-alone story.

I’ve had some time to start working on mod_virgule again. My highest priority is porting it to the Apache 2 module API so I can finally ditch Red Hat 7.3 on the robots.net box. I’ve almost got a clean compile but it’s going to take a little while to get it debugged and stable before I switch robots.net over.