From the “at least I’m proud of myself”-department: I pulled the complete GNOME from CVS today, planning to take on a new bounty (yes, the hunt is still on!). After 12 hours of building with jhbuild (which was pretty painless once I got the dependencies right), I took this neat screenshot! Nice to see this in a complete vanilla build of the latest GNOME!

12 hours of building GNONE does have a devastating influence on your state of mind though… Nothing a nice episode of The Office can’t fix though.

Update:: series 1, episode 6 of The Office is brilliant!

The release of Evolution 2.0 has also made it to Slashdot. Quoting the article:

Most importantly it has built in JunkFilter support with SpamAssassin, web calendars, and NNTP support. Oh, and some bugfixes.

The announcement on the GNOME mailing lists is here, quoting:

Major New User Features:
* NNTP support
* S/MIME support
* Integrated Junk Filtering with SpamAssassin
* Web calendars
* Overlayed calendars
* Improved UI
* Many bug fixes

Way cool…

As an update to yesterday’s story, BOL.com just sent an e-mail stating the item has been sent and should arrive shortly. Way cool!

Update (23-09) I actually received the CD’s today! Whoa!

You may remember that earlier on, I wrote enthusiastically about the Free Record Shop site, at which I, after looking through all of Leeuwarden’s record stores for cheap copies, I ordered two Radiohead CD’s:

I ended up buying both at Freerecordshop.nl [at 01.09], which was a pretty painless process (…), and they even had an action causing the two CD’s to actually cost €15 together. If you know what you want, for pretty popular, older CD’s, in conclusion, the internet is the way to go.

But.

The Free Record Shop mentioned a probably shipping date of two to five working days, depending on whether the article was in stock. After two days, on 03.09, I received a message stating both Cd’s were “ordered” by the Free Record shop:

While processing all orders of this article, we unfortunately found that today’s available stock of the article is insufficient to satisfy all orders, which we process daily on order of arrival, at one time.

Okay, that’s unfortunate, but no reason for panic: the article could still arrive in time. But it didn’t. After ten days, on 11.09, I received the following message:

Unfortunately, we have to tell you that (part of) your order, numbered xxxxx, has been delayed.

The message promised the article would be re-ordered and should arrive in a few days though. And, today, another ten days later on 21.09, I received the same message again…

Though I’m not particularly angry the Free Record Shop, it does seem that the communication between the FRS and the companies it ships from could be improved a lot, so that the FRS can actually give accurate information on how long an article is going to ship. And whether it is going to ship at all, actually, because now on the FRS website, it is mentioned that the Amnesiac CD is no longer available, so apparently they did get some sign from their shipping companies that the CD is not available anymore.

Anyway, so I ordered the CD’s today at BOL.com, which mentioned a shipping time of two to three working days, suggesting they do have the items in stock since some other items have much higher shipping times mentioned. It’s costing me 5 euro plus shipping more than ordering at FRS, but I have good hope I will finally receive the CDs this week.

Which is a bit of a pity, because the concept of ordering online and getting the articles at a nearby shop could have been a very nice one. Though the question remains what items are actually shippable, the FRS does have a nice large online catalogue that’s definitely worth browsing about.

In the cult movies department, today it’s time to feature The Meatcleaver massacre, a movie to score quite high on the cult-ladder.

The story behind this is that I heared on Kink FM that you could send an e-mail if you wanted to receive some good horror movies. So I e-mailed them and a few days later, I received the Meatcleave Massacre DVD.

Well, in short, the story is this: a professor in occult history is hit on the head, and his family murdered, for nonobvious reasons by four of his students, and as a result he gets into a coma. Fortunately, he can make demons come after the four killers, so they get killed after each other. In itself, it’s a nice idea, but the very, very clumsy implementation makes it really bad to look at. The blood scenes are, well, stupid, even for a film from 1977. Before each scene, we get an image of a painting of the demon which is supposed to be frightning, but which actually gets more funny each time you see it. And after that, well, there’s nothing interesting to see, either. Add that to the slow progress the story makes, and you can understand the IMDB rating of 1.7/10. If only more people would have seen the movie, its rating would have easily brought it into the Top-10 of the IMDB Bottom 100…

I have no clue how this movie made it to a DVD almost 30 years after its creation, but the Dutch importer Dutch Filmworks released it in the Netherlands this year, and that’s why a Google for this movie turns up mostly Dutch results: other parts of the world are wisely ignoring this movie. Sites that the movie does show up have such titles as “the Video Graveyard” and “Trash Film Orgy”. A typical review would look like like:

If you’re looking for a good horror movie, leave this movie. But if you kick on really bad horror movies such as Ed Wood’s, then this film may be something for you.

One reason, actually, for the release of the DVD is the fact that it features Evan Lee, known among othe things for its role as Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Which has quite a funny story attached to it, quoting from the IMDB trivia, among othe sources:

Christopher Lee has said that he had no idea he was appearing in this film. He said that he was hired by a different producer to narrate an entirely different film, and that the producer apparently sold Lee’s footage, without his permission, to the producers of this film, who then advertised it as “starring Christopher Lee”. He initiated legal action against this film’s producers, but withdrew it when he was advised that it would be a long, drawn-out and expensive procedure.

Really imaginable given that no real actor would like to be associated with this kind of thing. And indeed, on the DVD box, it mentions “Starring: Christopher Lee (The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Sleepy Hollow)”, with no other actors mentioned.

The movie box, which does look pretty professional, also mentions “An occult film so terrifying it will never be shown on TV”. I also had the privilege of viewing the “Uncut and uncensored version”.

Finally, in an apparent attempt to generate buzz for the movie, a press release was issued one day before April’s fool, on 31 March, mentioning an apparent attempt to prevent the release of the DVD (no further info available):

The court in Antwerpen today decided that Dutch FilmWorks has to withdraw the exTreme DVD Meat Cleaver Masscre – by the disappeated director Evan Lee – by tomorrow, because the film would contain an alleged ’snuff scene’. The 1977 movie is about a professor taking revenge on his students after they gruesomely killed his wife, kids and his dog…

Ever since the movie appeared, there has been talk about the murder of the dog being real. Even though, this was never proved convincingly. (…) [The withdrawal] happened after a complaint by the Belgian Animal Protection Organisation,

While this seems to be a joke, the following is mentioned:

Director Evan Lee has been associated with snuff movies before. After Meat Cleaver Massacre, the only movie directed by Lee, he became famous as the producer of the extremely controversial Face of Death videos, on which, according to its cover, real executions and suicides ae shown. Unfortuntely, comment from Lee is not available since nobody knows his current living place…

Though the Face of Death video series has its own website, the claim of Evan Lee being the producer seems to be unverifyable.

Oh, in other news, if you want a nice horror-kind-of movie, view Shaun of the Dead, it’s dead funny.

It’s often the ideas that seem the best when you think of them that turn out to be a bit disappointing when implemented. Like, for example, when some years ago I tried to write a compression algorithm that would compress any kind of data — which is of course impossible.

My reason for trying it, then, was a documentary by the Dutch news television program Netwerk, about a Dutch inventor called Jan Sloot who had supposedly invented a method for compressing movies — compressing them so much that multiple movies could be stored on one 64kB chip. Accidentally, the documentary was re-broadcast only last week after the release of a book on this obvious cock-and-bull story, and can be viewed here.

Typical Fons de Poel Netwerk-style documentary: very pompous and emotional, without much factual evidence: the technology would “direct all existing technology to the stone age” and “a threat to the industrial world”, among other pointless quotes by dumb, righteus people (the typical subjects of Netwerk documentaries) . Anyway, the story was that the inventor of the technology was afraid of showing it, and would thus tend to keep it in a black box nobody would be allowed to open, The man died one day before signing the contract for distributing the technology (this was in 1999 IIRC), and nothing was heared since.

Anyway.

What I wanted to tak about was how often I seem to want to handle streams of data and execute some simple task on them. For example, when I copy-and-paste source code from a web page to a text editor, I get a file with a line of code, then a blank line, then another line of code. Removing all empty lines would be a very easy task for a program, but writing a program would be slightly tedious. What I’d want to do is kind of visually create such a program: having an imput stream, run it through a filter to remove all even lines, and then save the output. Think gst-editor for data (I thought about that earlier).

Anyway, I did a bit of architecture myself before finding that such a thing of course already existed: FlowDesigner.

It is more suited for digital sound processing and robotics and stuff like that, and less for tasks like string processing, batch-renaming files and such which I imagined it would be useful for. Luckily, it is extensible, though the documentation about that does lack in some parts. Apart from that, it took me a few hours finding the right linker settings for my extension to be finally loaded into flowdesigner (I did succeed though as can be seen above, the StrReverse function is mine).

So, how do you go with the flow (sorry, couldn’t resist)? Well, in the end I just used one of the libraries shipped with FlowDesigner as the framework for my library, and a pretty empty framework for creating extensions can be found here. You can use it as a base for your own extensions.

Anyway, as I stated at the start of this longish piece of writing, what seemed like a good idea is beginning to get a bit more realistic proportions. Flowdesigner doesn’t really help you make applications fast – also due to the fact that saving freezes the application for me – but a better less-clicking-more-productive GUI, and better docs (I don’t seem to be able to understand how to create loops) would probably help solving that.

I might be developing some more functionality for FlowDesigner for everyday tasks, but I have some more important things pending that I have waited with for too long, so fat chance much will come out of it: I really need to do DNS update for Posadis, and money needs to be earned, too: the Babyrent Leeuwarden went live but still needs work, and I should do another Horde bounty…

From the self-promotion department, babyrentgroningen.nl. the website of Babyrent Groningen, my mother’s baby shop, went live today! Put together in a few days. Registration was at BHosted, who were very cheap (you can have your own domain all-in for &euro 24 a year, which was quite a surprise for me), so that’s quite nice.

For reservations, I used this great JavaScript/DHTML calendar, which also features a Dutch translation, but unfortunately, that translation is a bit incomplete, so I updated the translation and submitted it to the author. Until it’s added to the distribution, you can download my Dutch translation here. To see it in action, try this.

Back from my holiday in the Czech Republic now. In one of the main shopping streets of the city (dunno about the name – it ends at a large museum building near the main train station), there was a music store just called “Music Store” which I normally wouldn’t have entered except they played a Radiohead record when I walked past it, so I had to take a look. Pretty neat store.

The interesting thing was that they had some 10 Radiohead records, only one of them being a regular studio album: the rest of it was live CD’s and compilations I had never even heared of, including some really neat stuff such as the Lost treasures collection of B-sides. Didn’t buy anything though — once you start collecting that stuff, I fear there’s no stopping it.

This did make me question what Radiohead records are available in my hown town, Leeuwarden, so today I did a bit of bicycling between Leeuwarden’s record stores to do a bit of a comparative research. I looked in the Yellow Pages for all record stores in the city, added a warehouse and a general electronics store to the list, and checked what Radiohead items they had in stock (well, I checked for some other things as well, but my main mission here was to compare the availability of Radiohead records only). The main goal was to find cheap copies of Kid A and Amnesiac, the two Radiohead albums I still need to buy. Both are available for € 10 on Freerecordshop.nl, so the goal would be to find the two albums at a cheaper price. Here’s the results:

• Music Store, Wirdumerdijk 28 – Three CD’s: I Might Be Wrong for €15, Kid A for €18 and Amnesiac for €24. Both the albums were there, but buying them both would cost me €42, double the target amount.
• Free Record Shop, Zaailand 123 – The Bends and OK Computer at €20; Hail To The Thief at €22. Both CD’s I need not there, though available on their web site.
• Vroom & Dreesman, Nieuwestad – My Iron Lung at €10, I Might Be Wrong at €18, Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief at €22. No Kid A though.
• Joan Records, Westersingel 52 – Without this being mentioned on the Yellow Pages, this is not actually a record store but rather some kind of CD distributor. The fact that it is housed in a corporate flat directly raised some doubts, but on the inside it became clear that they were some kind of classical music distributor. I accidentally overheared a discussion about the gross margins another company selling CD’s for €1.16, so cheap classical CD’s are probably their main activity. No Radiohead CD’s to be found though.
• Ear & Eye, Bilgaardspassage 56 – Replaced by an opticien. Both my non-city centre addresses thus proved fake.
• De Poort, Voorstreek 6 – All 6 albums except Amnesiac in the €18-€22 price range; Com Lag available for €23.
• King Kong Records, Voorstreek 11 – Kid A for €12, Com Lag for €20, OK Computer for €17, My Iron Lung for €10, the Bends for €20, the 2+2=5 DVD-single for €6,50, Hail to the Thief on vinyl for €22 (way cool!).
• Deja Vu, Slotmakersstraat 1a – As the name actually suggest, a second-hand store, and open only on Thursday to Saturday anyway so I couldn’t look.
• Media Markt, De Centrale – All 6 albums except OK Computer but with I Might Be Wrong in the €14-€18 range.
• B v/d Akker, Nieuwestad 39 – I Might Be Wrong, The Bends, Kid A, Amnesiac and My Iron Lung in the €18-€23 range; Com Lag for €27.
• Black Marker, Voorstreek – Not mentioned on the Yellow Pages being pretty new. Closed, but last time I checked they didn’t have any Radiohead items in stock anyway, being more of a cheap leftovers shop.

Anyway, I’ll admit there isn’t that much interesting here, though it makes up for a nice spending of your afternoon. One of the reasons I like smallish cities like Leeuwarden is that visiting all record shops is still a pretty manageable process. Doing a bit of a popularity contest, we see that the Bends and Kid A, the albums released before and after OK Computer, respectively, are the most sold, in 5 out of 7 stores. Interestingly, OK Computer, the most popular Radiohead album, is only sold in 3/7, and the latest album, Hail to the Thief, in 4/7 (counting the vinyl copy at King Kong we get 5/7). Also remarkable is that 3/7 still sell the My Iron Lung EP from 1994. Com Lag, an EP released this year, is sold in 3/7. For new releases, King Kong is apparently the place to go, it having Com Lag, the 2+2=5 DVD single and the Hail to the Thief vinyl. Media Markt and De Poort both have 5 out of 6 Radiohead studio albums, making them have the best general offering.

To conclude things, no record shop sold the records I wanted anywhere near the target price of €10, except for the €12 price of Kid A at King Kong. I ended up buying both at Freerecordshop.nl, which was a pretty painless process (except for a silly error causing the registration not to work with Firefox – I had to reboot and use Internet Explurer — Ugh!), and they even had an action causing the two CD’s to actually cost €15 together. If you know what you want, for pretty popular, older CD’s, in conclusion, the internet is the way to go — if you live in Leeuwarden, anyway