EXECUTIVE ORC HOUSE

I’m going to try and complete the Advent of Code puzzles this year, in Haskell, without bouncing off of those stupid interpreter problems that have always driven me away in the past. Encouraged by a fellow poster on lobste.rs, I’m going to try and blog my attempt here.

I don’t have a lot of extra time, but I would like to be better at blogging, and also at Haskell, so let’s hope that this works out. I’m hoping to build the habits here over the next couple of weeks that will enable me to solve the puzzles in a timely fashion, and write up a description of my solution. I’ve done a bit of Haskell, largely in this Advent of Code context, so I’m not entirely a beginner, but I’m nothing like a “Haskell programmer” yet.

I got stoned and this is my movie review.

Q: Why does Mahershala Ali want to kill Alita?

Q: Who is Dr Ito and why do they all like him so much?

Q: The whole “get a pro contract by racing in this open and then somehow leverage that pro career into … magic beans?” plan seems like a pretty convoluted way to move the plot forward?

Q: Who’s doing the productive labour in this society? Where are all the excess calories coming from?

I didn’t really know anything about this, going in. It was tonally all over the map; the performances were good, it was competently put together. The pure aesthetics of watching Henry Golding and Blake Lively interact was pretty great; but at the end of the day, the plot was stupid, the pacing weird, and the tone veered too radically between farce and thriller to work for me. Any time you “solve” the big mystery with a twin, you have failed, screenwriter. Sure, that might be the plot failing of the source material, but it’s still dumb of hell. I give this movie two stars: one for the aforementioned aesthetics, and one for Anna Kendrick’s teeth.

There is a lot that I should like about this movie:

1. Jason Statham (including a hilariously unnecessary shot of his eight? 10? 12? pack);
2. the strong international cast (although I can’t see Cliff Curtis and not get the residual Once Were Warriors creeps);
3. it’s a Chinese/US coproduction, with all of the bi-cultural rah-rah silliness that that entails;
4. the titular creature is a GIANT RELICT SHARK, I mean, precisely in my wheelhouse.

But as it happens, this movie stinks. It’s stupid, of course, but that’s expected. The real sin is that it’s boring. Everything is telegraphed, and the movie moves on the rails, but a stupid movie often does. It’s just so totally lifeless, so that where a movie about a 100’ long Carcharodon should feel like a Toho Studios joint, featuring humanity helpless in the face of some unstoppable rubber suit monster; it’s really a lot more like an episode of Law and Order, a lame and stilted procedural. I give this movie two stars – one for the shark, and one for the Chinese co-production.

Today, in the normal course of doing my job, I encountered a situation that caused the JVM to blow up, and, being the friendly and helpful piece of software that it is, it emitted 28,092 lines of stack trace. That’s twenty-eight thousand lines, totalling 2.2 megabytes worth. But, thankfully, the JVM doesn’t do tail-call elimination, so none of those super useful stack frames could possibly be elided. Software wins again.

It never ends. Now, I’m trying a new blog generator: Athena.

There is a way in which this blog is less a blog and more of bikeshedding therapy. I admit that. This new thing is nicer, because it does less, and it outputs to Tufte CSS, which definitely makes my semiliterate babbling about whatever nonsense at least look like someone cared.

Otherwise, eh. I wonder if I should store my posts in some intermediate format, so that they can be output to the input format of any given static site generator. I’d probably use a SQL database and the bikeshedding opportunities there are nearly unparalleled.

Linux =

For perfectly valid reasons, I need to install Linux on my main computer. As this is a bog-standard Intel PC, of course the kernel on the latest “CentOS” distribution is too old to work. Exotica like Intel’s X99 chipset and Intel’s 5930k processor are apparently too weird for CentOS, because, software, I guess? There’s doubtless some stupid song and dance you can do to put an updated kernel on the installer media, but really, at the end of the day, what you get is a RedHat based distribution. If I’m going to wrassle with Unix on my workstation, it’s going to be monkeying around with kexts to get OS X running, instead. I wasn’t looking forward to a RedHat based distribution, anyway, because of the farcically bad nature of dependency management, but it would’ve been nice to have my home machine use the same environment as the work cluster. I understand why there are Linux distributions, but man alive, how I hate the Linux ecosystem. If I could be sure that nVidia’s CUDA compiler worked on FreeBSD, I might take that route, but at the end of the day, I find working with free Unixes to be really, really painful. I am 100% on board with the ethics of free software, but I am increasingly of the opinion that the process as it currently exists is not capable of building software that fulfills my expectations of usability and quality. Too, truly original ideas never survive committee groupthink, and “committee groupthink” is the way that I see free software development methodology. The crazy loner school (Chuck Moore!) produces results that are at the very least interesting. More clones of bad enterprise software from the ’80s? No, thanks. Sigh.

I recently found myself wanting to add Canadian holidays to my (OS X) calendar. Apple doesn’t make this easy; as you have to switch your primary region to switch calendars, that’s probably a step too far for me. It’d be nice to have a curated, updated list of holidays for both the US and Canada (to be reminded to wish friends and family a happy True Thanksgiving and False Thanksgiving, respectively).

Add to the A bucket:

• Babadook (also probably cracks my top ten)

Add to the B bucket:

• ‘71

Original here.

In grade order; otherwise, not ordered (IOW, Birdman is not sorted higher than Frank in any way other than orthographically)

My top five:

• Boyhood
• Whiplash
• Only Lovers Left Alive
• Calvary
• Under The Skin

Just on the outside, looking in:

• Frank
• John Wick
• Guardians Of The Galaxy
• Ida
• Edge Of Tomorrow

It was, in my opinion, a very, very good year.

A

Birdman + Blue Ruin + Boyhood + Calvary + Edge of Tomorrow + Frank + Grand Budapest Hotel + Guardians of the Galaxy + Ida + Inherent Vice + John Wick + Locke + Only Lovers Left Alive + Under The Skin + Whiplash