I am de­bug­ging a perl pro­gram writ­ten by some­one else.

Here's all I am go­ing to say about it:

1. For some­one with a ham­mer, ev­ery­thing looks like a nail.

2. For a suf­­fi­­cien­t­­ly ad­­vanced ham­mer, ev­ery­hing is in­­dis­­t­in­guish­able from a nail.

3. Perl is a suf­­fi­­cien­t­­ly ad­­vanced ham­mer. It prob­a­bly can do any­thing. It is not a pret­­ty sight, though.

Ok, so, as I said, I bought my­self a Sony Clie PEG-SJ30.

Just for good habit, I de­cid­ed to go to Sony's web­site and check if there were any up­dates on the soft­ware for it, or what­ev­er.

Mine is a PEG-SJ30/U mod­el. Sony has nev­er heard of it. If you check for it in Sony's prod­uct sup­port DB, it says it's a bad mod­el name.

Ev­ery­where you gonna find pic­tures of the PEG-SJ30 and will see a sil­ver-­plas­tic case.

Well, mine has a teal-and-black plas­tic case.

The one you see ev­ery­where has a flip-­top ny­lon screen cov­er.

Mine has a (sony orig­i­nal) book-shaped leather cov­er (I don't like it, it's way too thick­).

Oh, sure, it ex­ist­s, you can find it in google, but it seems it's a very un­usu­al mod­el. It works great, though.

I saw Troy last night. I live close to the At­las the­ater, which sports the largest screen in South Amer­i­ca (although, sad­ly, no THX sound), which is well suit­ed for this kind of thing.

And it is a tra­di­tion­al movie. It´s like Cleopa­tra, on­ly the girl can´t act and the guy is not a mid­dle-aged al­co­holic.

I think Ebert got it right when he said that the ac­tors are try­ing to make their char­ac­ters hu­man, and it´s coun­ter­pro­duc­tive be­cause the char­ac­ters in the Il­i­ad are not hu­man, they are archetype­s.

It´s a damn greek tragedy! The whole idea of greek tragedy is men with­out will be­ing thrown in­to their fates by evil god­s. I won­der how the greeks man­aged to stay re­li­gious con­sid­er­ing all their deities seem to be bas­tard­s.

On the oth­er hand, Ba­na as Hec­tor was ok. He has that what the hell am I do­ing here look a char­ac­ter in tragedy would have if he at the same time was aware of what he is do­ing, thinks it´s nuts but can´t stop it, which I think is how any­one would look if the gods forced him to go fight hand to hand against a guy that´s sup­posed to be in­vul­ner­a­ble, while a thou­sand nice archers who are on your side just look.

What dis­tract­ed me most dur­ing the movie is how mod­ern mil­i­tary ideas made the lo­gis­tics of the troy siege in­com­pre­hen­si­ble. For ex­am­ple, the land­ing is like a Delta-­Day: D-­Day with greek­s. Sav­ing Pri­vate Achilles. Any half-not-brain­dead guy would de­cide that maybe it was a bet­ter idea to lad a few kilo­me­ters away in a non-de­fend­ed coast, take over a few farm­s, what­ev­er. But no, they land smack in front of Troy. The boats are rammed in­to the beach. You know what that does to a flat-bot­tom greek boat? (I am as­sum­ing they were flat-bot­tomed, or it´s just too stupid).

Those things were pret­ty frag­ile. And if the tide was low, they would flood and sink as soon as it went up.

There is a rea­son why the am­phibi­ous troop trans­port ship was in­vent­ed: you can´t do that with reg­u­lar seago­ing ship­s.

Then they don´t sur­round Troy. So, any Tro­jan that felt like flee­ing could use a sec­ondary gate and walk away from it al­l.

Oh, and just for kick­s, the greek camp is at the bot­tom of a hill.

Not to men­tion massed armies run­ning at each oth­er over hun­dreds of me­ter­s. March­ing was in­vent­ed be­cause if you do that, you are al­ready tired when you get there. And fight­ing with bronze-age sword, spear and shield is a tire­some job!

Ok, I ad­mit that 50000 greeks walk­ing would­n´t be so cin­e­mato­graph­i­cal­ly ex­cit­ing, but hey, I am just whin­ing here.

Oh, and it seems the siege last­ed all of a month. I won­der why the tro­jans did­n*t just sleep through it. Ok, they are sup­posed to be mo­ron­s, with the horse and all that.

But don´t get me wrong, I have seen much worse movies, like re­turn of the lob­ster man or eyes wide shut. It´s just that Homer (or as he is known in Hades, "Spin­ning Guy") wrote a rather fun epic po­em, and it re­al­ly did­n´t need all that much tam­per­ing.

A long while ago, I post­ed a sil­ly ar­ti­cle ex­plain­ing what was first, the egg or the chick­en. Noone seemed to no­tice un­til now.

Any­one reads es­to­ni­an, cares to trans­late?

Es­to­ni­an stuff

On a sim­i­lar note: ac­cord­ing to my zeit­geist this blog is most­ly about nerdy stuff, and hinges.

So, here's an­oth­er way to fool google. Pick a word noone cares about, and write an ar­ti­cle about some­thing pop­u­lar while us­ing a metaphor which has the use­less word in it.

Sud­den­ly, you are the num­ber one google link for that word. This site has been, ac­cord­ing to google, the place to go for in­for­ma­tion about hinges, for months al­ready.

As I men­tioned, I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2.

While I en­joyed Vol­ume 1's child­ish no­tion of grandeur by ac­cu­mu­la­tion, I must con­fess I was wait­ing for that emo­tion­al mo­men­t, like S. Jack­son's mono­logue at the Din­er in Pulp Fic­tion.

Or the whathe­heck mo­ment like the death of Robert de Niro's char­ac­ter in Jack­ie Brown.

Or even the goofy quar­ter-­pounder-with­-cheese mo­men­t.

But all I got in Vol­ume 1 was Uma Thur­man in the slick Bruce Lee out­fit, blood, Yakuza­s, and the brass of RZA­'s ver­sion of "Bat­tle with­out hon­our".

Which is not ex­act­ly a small amount of things to get, don't get me wrong, but not quite what I wished for.

And much lat­er I start­ed read­ing the re­views for Vol­ume 2, and it seemed a more QT flick, and I like those, and I saw it.

And it's good. And it has the quater-­pounder-with­-cheese mo­ment (Su­per­man), and the whatthe­heck mo­ment (Elle's), and it has the emo­tion­al mo­ment (a lot of them), even if they are dark­er, and let's face it, ba­si­cal­ly evil.

So, there's a lot I liked. I was even hap­py about David Car­radine's part (although his lisp drove me nuts (and I don't mean LISP (I mean he says yeth in­stead of yes))).

BTW: I read on a news­pa­per an ex­cerpt from an in­ter­view he did for Un­cut mag­a­zine... he's one crazy guy.

The Pai Mei stuff is hi­lar­i­ous. Michael Mad­sen's Budd is awe­some. The very pic­ture of moral deca­dence wrapped around the nas­ti­est lit­tle-broth­er syn­drome ev­er.

So, I ac­tu­al­ly quite loved this movie. It's not my favourite QT flick ev­er (that's Pulp Fic­tion, then Jack­ie Brown), but it's a hell of a lot bet­ter than al­most ev­ery­thing else I saw in the last year or so.

All I want to know is what hap­pened to Sofie Fa­tale (cheesi­est name ev­er for a french char­ac­ter), and I would be hap­py as a clam.