Basement Macs!
Check out this incredible collection of Apple computers…
I know it makes me sound very sad but I’m really quite envious! It makes my Apple II and Mac Classic look less like a collection and more like I’m too lazy to chuck ‘em out!
Take a look out for the Mac LC 580, that’s a rare one - I don’t believe it ever made it as far as Europe… Then there is my old favourite, the Performa (labelled PowerMac 5500, must have re-branded them at some point…)
I wonder how much all those machines would go for… *sigh*
An evening at lfpug
Last night I went to a meet-up of the London Flash Platform User Group with my boss in an effort to try and recruit a couple of flash developers.
I had a very interesting evening. I saw the latest build of papervision3d which is an open source 3D engine for Flash written purely in ActionScript, and I’m here to say that it rocks! A few years ago, back when I was screwing around with Flash, I got this distinctly doggy cloud of text to spin around using trigonometry and I thought that was pretty impressive but now we’re talking Quake II models and importing stuff from 3D Studio Max and Maya at run time! Amazing stuff…
The other thing that stuck me was how far, Flex aside, Flash has come in terms of a development platform as opposed to an animation tool. With a little Java experience I was easily following along with the talk on how to make your own SWCs (reusable components) and extending stuff in Flex.
The more I look into this technology the more I am impressed.
Clerks 2: That guy’s being awfully forward with that donkey.
A long time ago, in a Jersey far far way, a young man left film school (slightly earlier than the rest of the class…) and went back to working in his local Quick Stop connivence store. Then he thought “Fuck this, I’m gonna make a film and put all my friends in it.”
So was born Clerks.
Financed, filmed, written, directed, edited and produced by Kevin Smith himself (with a little help from any one who’d help) Clerks was truly an independent film made for the pleasure of the cast and crew rather than audience… full of private jokes and far to much fucking swearing, it was never going to be a big it, right? Wrong.
After clearing up at The 1994 Sun Dance Film festival Smith embarked on his movie career, making more films for his friends: Mall Rats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jersey Girl and now a sequel to the original Clerks.
This film finds Dante and Randal eleven years on, thirty three and still living with their parents… and of course still clerks. The Quick Stop having burnt down the pair now work in a Mooby the Golden Cow themed family restaurant… The only thing that has changed in their lives is Dante’s engagement to a beautiful women and his imminent move to Florida with her.
So, will Randal lose his best friend to adult hood? Will the two ever get to see a Donkey Show? And will either of them ever be able to make a decision for them selves? Or will they always coast down the path of least resistance?
The best thing about first Clerks movie was the pop culture references: Were there innocent contractors on the second Death Star when it was blown up by the Rebel Alliance? Or do a contractor’s politics come into play when choosing a job? Needless to say Clerks II serves up a Bovine Sized helping of pop culture… The Lord Of The Rings, Silence Of The Lambs and even the new Transformers’ Movie are all on the menu - along with Freedom Toast and Udderly-Delicious Mooby shakes.
What is new to the recipe is a slightly vulnerable Randal. He’s still as cocky as ever but now his best friend is leaving him he is starting to fear being alone or worse - having to make new friends who’d judge the decisions (or lack of) he’d made in his life. When he doesn’t get the last word with a former class mate, who calls in to rub his success in the clerks faces, Randal is so upset he has to get away from the restaurant to calm down… No I think you can see her kidneys…
or spitting water in this job.
All the themes of this movie stay true to, and as subtle as, the original. My favourite thing about Smith’s writing is the way he hides touching stories behind outrageous comedy. It’s very easy to miss or take the wrong way, I can understand how some could consider it vulgar but they’re missing the point - just ask the once secret Clerks fan Alanis Morissette, who’s song ‘Everything’ makes a brief appearance at the end of the film.
All that combined with cameos from all the View Askew favourites (Oh, that Affleck!), a dance number and a donkey show… not to mention our old friends Jay and his hetro-lifemate Silent Bob… and it’s a very funny film. As to the slight twist at the end, I will say that the story takes place after the events of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Need I say any more?
Snoochie Boochies.
Free Cash Withdrawals
Tim spotted this while we were at lunch…
Eat Me, Drink Me
The name of the new album was announced today, and in keeping with the Lewis Caroll theme of Manson’s film project, it is called Eat Me, Drink Me. The tentative realise date of St. Valentine’s Day ‘07 has slipped back to Spring.
More here.
Installing swfmill on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Today I had to compile and install swfmill from source on Red Hat Enterprise Server and all did not go according to plan!
I was getting this error:
checking for XSLT_LIBS...
Package libexslt was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libexslt.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'libexslt' found
configure: error: Package requirements (libexslt) were not met.
Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.
Alternatively you may set the XSLT_CFLAGS and XSLT_LIBS environment
variables to avoid the need to call pkg-config. See the pkg-config
man page for more details.
The missing library (’libexslt.pc’) proved allusive, neither locate or find would tell me where it was, so I started a game of Google the RPM.
Needless to say I ended up having to download the source code and compile it my self. You can get it from ftp://xmlsoft.org the tar file you need (at the time of writing) is called libxslt-1.1.19.tar.gz and is dependant on libxml2-2.6.27.tar.gz being installed. Compiling them is very straight forward:
tar -xzf libxml2-2.6.27.tar.gz
cd libxml2-2.6.27
./configure
make
make install
cd ..
tar -xzf libxslt-1.1.19.tar.gz
cd libxslt-1.1.19
./configure
make
make install
Then a quick updatedb and another locate libexslt.pc should tell you that our missing file is in /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/, so before you try and recompile swfmill you need to set an environment variable to tell the configure script where the missing file is (obviously put in your own path if it is different):
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH
After that it’s as easy as:
cd swfmill-0.2.11
./configure
make
make install
And your done.