Rake’s progress.

Phase Four (modified) of the Big House Reboot is now complete.

Today we went and got a little desk for the little ones (and Eleya) to use up on the main floor, an unfinished real wood piece that we are going to stain to something resembling rosewood. Please wish us luck.

We also found a perfect baker’s rack to replace our worn-out, apartment-era microwave cart, which includes plenty of shelf and hanging space, and a wine rack underneath. Not originally in the plan, but hey, we’re flexible.

We also found some decent speaker stands to accommodate the surround speakers for the home theate. I’d prefer to mount them on the wall, but unfortunately I hadn’t the foresight to have the great room wired when we had the basement finished a few years back.

Thanks to Eleya’s superpowers of assembly, and a quick return to the store to pick up the missing “Carton 1 of 2″ (always read the side of the box), we soon had a beautiful addition to our kitchen with the new baker’s rack. Meanwhile, I put my superpowers of disassembly to work on the big desk downstairs. (A good marriage definitely means shoring up each other’s skill sets.)

Tomorrow will conclude the lion’s share of the work when I move the home theater downstairs and figure out what to do with the wall mounts that are up there. Leaving them in won’t be pretty, but I don’t know if I can face drywall work tomorrow. I think we’ll try and tackle that a few weeks out.

Finally, I wish everyone out there still reading my drivel the happiest of New Years, including all you Planet Fedora readers. I hope 2008 brings you comfort, peace, joy, and love.

Oh, snaps.

I realized that I didn’t really include any shots from Christmastime here, so let me take care of that problem. This first one was completely unstaged, right before coming downstairs:

Revolting, isn’t it? I wish this was a one-time occurrence and they could just beat each other up like normal kids, but NOOOO. They have to love each other, and all that yucky stuff. Here’s about 120 seconds after the kids get downstairs:

Proof’s in the pudding, the XO rocks hard! And fortunately Daddy’s always on call when the need arises:

Spring cleaning, either early or late.

Finally Eleya and I are getting our plan on the road for rearranging our house. Now the kids are older, and we don’t have to worry so much about where they are — now it’s usually about why they can’t be quieter wherever that is.

We kicked off The Big Plan this weekend by finally getting rid of a bed we took off a friend’s hands years ago and put in our finished basement to make a somewhat sparse guest room. Suddenly the room looked so spacious, yet filled with the promise of new purpose!

Phase Two had me buying a used music studio desk at a great price from a Craigslist seller who’s a musician, producer, engineer, and business manager in Arlington. Nice guy, by the way. What was a Spartan guest room will soon become a beautifully appointed music studio and work area for me.

Phase Three is to get a small computer desk for our living room/library (not the same as the family room), and move the main computer workstation to that floor. Incidentally, this makes it easier for us to keep an eye on the kids as they use the computer, since our house has a pretty open design on the main floor.

Phase Four is to remove the enormous office desk and (possibly) repaint in the great room in the basement. Our main server — a repurposed secondhand desktop — will stay…

…And reside next to the home theater that is moving in Phase Five from the main floor to the basement great room. We are looking forward to having a warmer family room on the main floor, no longer dominated by a 50″ HDTV, instead to be used for (gasp!) actual conversation, reading, and playing games.

We’re not sure how much longer we’re going to be in this house, but we’ve been talking about this kind of rearrangement for the better part of 2007, and the New Year is a great time to resolve to make a more comfortable and useful home space.

How to outsmart Hollywood in two easy steps.

One of the gifts I gave Eleya for Christmas was a DVD of the superb ultra-low budget indie film Primer, a film we saw a couple years ago which made a very strong impact. Made by Texan engineer-turned-auteur Shane Carruth, who also starred, edited, scored, and so on, it’s a brilliant science fiction film that stands head and shoulders above any of the entries in recent memory from the little California town that couldn’t. Carruth recruited friends and family and wrangled a miniscule budget of $8,000 to tell a story simultaneously about trust, power, entrepreneurial innovation, and the intricacies of paradox in under eighty muscular (if somewhat confusing) minutes.

The film is ostensibly about two central characters, a pair of engineer friends who discover time travel purely as a spinoff of their attempt to tackle superconductivity at closer to room temperatures. Primer really pays off with repeated viewings, and the commentaries are very illuminating as well. Ultimately the confusing final twenty minutes becomes clearer as we realize that — just as would occur in any reality that allowed time travel into the past — our experience of the film, practically from its outset, is not necessarily what we thought it was.

One of the most insightful observations from Carruth in the commentary is that at some point the protagonists are, in the final analysis, vying for the position to experience an authentic past. The erosion of trust between the two friends comes not as a moral judgment on either character, but as the inevitable effect of the frightening power that comes with control over history.

Highly recommended, preferably more than one viewing.

Another great add-on.

Courtesy of the inimitable Karsten Wade, and in response to Allen’s post, I’d like to add It’s All Text! to the list of good Firefox extensions. Karsten and I use this to call Emacs for doing editing of wiki pages — so important when you have a twitchy touchpad.

Santa strikes gold.

I knew that when we ordered a G1G1 XO laptop for my daughter, it would either hit it big, or go down in smoke and flames.

As I’m sure the OLPC folks could have guessed, it’s an ENORMOUS smash.

Evie hasn’t spent more than a few minutes away from it since this morning. I’ve been careful not to hover while she plays, but I’ve looked in on her from a distance, and she is busily exploring lots of the activities. The big hits so far seem to be the music program TamTam (which I think confirms the OLPC team’s observations) and the Paint program.

Super-good: My wife and I are both running Empathy 0.14 (from the Fedora 8 repos), and Evie pops up in our Contacts list automatically, and we appear in her XO’s Neighborhood. Not so super-good: Chat doesn’t appear to work even when she invites us. Hopefully I can find out how to fix that shortly without joining her to a Jabber server; the telepathy-salut that runs on the XO should allow that.

That aside, I can see that Evie is going to get countless hours of entertainment and education out of this “toy.” We had told her that Santa was bringing her “something special” because she generously and graciously — in a way in which we’ve tried to bring her up, apparently succeeding somewhat, to our surprise and joy — gave her LeapPad to her brother, who is equally enamored of his new computer.

All hail the king.

What’s with the aristocratic bent of recent titles here? There may be something subconscious going on there that will make sense to me later, but I’m afraid to look too deeply into it right now.

This post is about a film that changed my life when I saw it. I didn’t get a chance to see it until I was in college, because I wasn’t allowed to see R-rated films until I was practically out of high school. The main floor of Clemons, the undergrad (read: more pedestrian) library, was peppered with cubicles, each with — wonders and miracles! — laserdisc players. I’d never even touched one, but I knew cinephiles treasured them. My parents had only a standard VCR of the VHS variety.

Most importantly, they had a wide variety of both classic and contemporary films, including some of the Criterion editions of truly great films. And among those was a prophetic, visually astounding, mind-bending film called Blade Runner. Audacious to an extreme, almost ludicrous level, it turned everyting I thought I knew about the tired science fiction film genre on its head. Everything from the color palettes to the lighting and set design, to the incredible visual effects, to the intelligent script full of its throwbacks to film noir, was breathtaking.

Years later, we’ve been treated to the far superior Director’s Cut version, which, among other fixes, removes the annoying monologue and pathetically tacked-on happy ending — two of the features I didn’t hate when I first saw the film but which I now find grating. Last week saw the release of the Final Cut, which tweaks some timing and other details in the way that director Ridley Scott revisited his equally superb film Alien a few years ago. And in a word, assuming capital letters and italics don’t undermine the meaning of that word, it is SUBLIME.

The themes of the movie I need not repeat, and in any case they don’t fully reveal themselves until you’ve seen the film several times. Each new viewing is rewarding in its own way, and every shot is a work of genius, from the opening shots of the hellish metropolis of future Los Angeles, to Deckard silhouetted in the apartment bathroom, to the overhead blimp shot through the roof of Sebastian’s gutted apartment building, to water running down moisture-swollen walls as Deckard’s gun creeps slowly and shakily forward during his final confrontation with Roy. All of these joys are multiplied a hundredfold with the newly 4K-scanned, remastered print and its crystalline 5.1 sound.

All the new DVDs feature the astonishingly good making-of documentary, Dangerous Days, which at three and a half hours is almost twice as long as the feature film and itself very much worth watching more than once. And if you have an awesome spouse as I do (or facsimile thereof), you might even find yourself in possession of the superb five-disc edition, which comes with goofy packaging but also includes every known version of the film, including the 1982 original US release, the 1982 international release, the 1992 Director’s Cut, the new Final Cut, and the highly prized and rarely seen workprint that stirred the film’s resurgence as a cinematic masterpiece.

If you love film, this is a must-own. Probably worth mentioning that the film is pretty damn entertaining, too.

“The king is dead, long live the king” sounds wrong.

Matthew Szulik steps down as CEO of Red Hat.

I’ve met Mr. Szulik a few times, but he really doesn’t know me from Adam. However, I will never forget the opening remarks he made at the 2006 Red Hat Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. He talked about his kids — his daughter in particular, if I recall correctly — challenging him to make a difference, to use Red Hat as a vehicle for global change. Mr. Szulik has helped make corporate good citizenship a part of the vocabulary of every Red Hat employee I’ve met, and of all those folks, I’ve not met one who had a negative thing to say about him.

Undoubtedly Mr. Szulik will continue to be a great asset to Red Hat as he continues on as Chairman of the Board of Directors. Speaking just for myself as a member of the Fedora community, I hope Mr. Whitehurst is ready to fill some mighty big shoes, and that we will all welcome him to his company’s partnership with us.

Picking up the pieces.

On Tuesday night before going to bed, I started to thaw my Dell XPS M1330 laptop from hibernation, and hard powered it off to abort. Perhaps an ill-advised move, I agree. (The beatings have finally ceased.)

The Dell BIOS (I assume) “helpfully” took this opportunity to survey my disk and realize that I had done away with their Microsoft Windows-based “Dell Media Center” boot system. Yes, it’s true, approximately fifteen seconds after I unwrapped the laptop, that’s exactly what I did. In fact, I only discovered such a feature existed on a Wednesday morning flight, when I booted the system and saw the GRUB shell rather than my beloved framebuffer penguins.

Dell is apparently making use of some BIOS code in cahoots with either the hard disk’s HPA or DCO feature to “fix” a machine that has problems booting. It’s well known that diagnostic partitions are used for this purpose, often hidden at the beginning or end of a disk. The user can start restoration interactively using the BIOS or a special key sequence at boot time. But I wouldn’t have expected it to happen just because a boot failed once.

• Good: It only took 20 minutes to get the laptop fully working from a cobbler server at home, including wifi and video.
• Bad: I didn’t have it working on Wednesday while on the road.
• Good: I make regular backups of my /home partition, and did so on Tuesday night right before leaving work.
• Bad: I have to go back to the office to pick up the backup disk.

If I’m a little slow getting back to you by email, now you’ll know why. I should have everything back in shape tomorrow night — I can’t stop by the office until late tomorrow afternoon.

By the way, when’s the last time YOU made a backup?

A good flip-flop.

Max posted to fedora-devel-announce that we might swap days on the FUDCon schedule, splitting the hackfest days — Friday and Sunday — with the BarCamp day on Saturday.

This potentially could turn out to be a great routine arrangement for FUDCon. since now the Saturday sessions can benefit from being informed by a prior day of hacking. FUDCon sessions now can be just as much about showing off work completed the day before, like a progress report for a code sprint, or the results of brainstorming and prototyping sessions.

I can’t think of anything more exciting than hearing people proposing sessions in the morning with words like, “Come see the cool stuff we did YESTERDAY.” And of course, there will be the additional boatload of cool general sessions that feature ongoing efforts and newly-hatched ideas. Bring it on!

I’m pretty sure FUDPub will move to Saturday night too, because we wouldn’t want to miss any of the morning FUDCon sessions, NOW WOULD WE?