In which my life gets rock&roll for 5 minutes

Several glasses of Champagne at 4PM, having had only a cake in the entire day, are probably not good. Can't remember passwords. Can't read pop-ups. Life is tough for a drunken geek.

Firefox Add-ons :: Better Gmail

Lovely little extension containing the most useful greasemonkey scripts for GMail. Google Reader and Calendar integration is a must, the "filter assistant" is also a better way to create filters than the standard wizard. Lots of other goodies, definitely a keeper.

Technorati Tags: GMail, GoogleReader, GoogleCalendar, Firefox

Unfocused + unsolicited reviews of popcult items

That's what I feel right now. Spent three days pretty much doing fuck all, fixing the odd thing on the new home server and that's it. I have a horrible queue of books to read, but didn't feel really compelled to touch any of that. I have at least two projects to work on, but I wasted much of the time allocated to those.

We watched a couple of weird movies (which were the only ones mildly interesting at our local Blockbuster). Probably the weirdest was "Frozen Land", a Finnish flick on chaos theory, human depression, and the "interconnectedness of it all". Finnish movies are always so bare, they probably get it from their climate... Or maybe these movies are the only ones sold abroad, and as such they reinforce stereotypical images of "cool Helsinki", this "frozen land" of desperation, drugs, technology and strange sunlight. Suomi is extremely weird to hear, very odd in the European landscape, only vaguely Slavic... Should I ever need a language for talking whales, I'd use that.

Amazon.co.uk: Frozen Land (Paha Maa) [2007]: DVD: Aku Louhimies ASIN: B000MV8392

Also seen "The Darwin Awards", a quick-buck-job for everyone involved (including Winona Ryder and Joseph Fiennes). "Inspired" by darwinawards.com, the plot is an excuse to link together some of the freakiest (real) accidents described on the site. Production is TV-like and direction is simply bad. You can really see the Hollywood team, meeting over a (vegetarian) meal, banging together the movie... "ok, this one is basically like Jackass, but we wanna sell it to the Ryder crowd too which is a bunch of Gen-Xers with degrees... we need a "higher" subplot here, what about... a serial killer? maybe a literate serial killer?" "Yeah, that's clever! He could quote poets... like, beat poets!" "But we also wanna make it like this stuff if really real, or we lose the Jackass crowd... what if all was kind-of-filmed-on-super-8-sorta-thing?" "Yeah, cool!"... So Winona can pay the rent and Ferlinghetti can pay for the drugs (or the other way round), and you can have the odd laugh here and there while waiting for Joe Fiennes to get laid (which he'll invariably do, I guess his agent put it in the contract as usual) and go away. Did I say this caters to the Jackass crowd? It even has the unavoidable Metallica guest appearance, full of shit as they usually are.

Amazon.co.uk: The Darwin Awards [2006]: DVD: Chris Penn,Joseph Fiennes,David Arquette,Juliette Lewis,Winona Ryder,Tim Blake Nelson,Finn Taylor ASIN: B000O771YM

I'm currently in the middle of The Third Policeman, surreal book recently rediscovered thanks to random product placement on Lost. Better books than BMWs, I guess. Review when I'm done.
( And since we are on product placement, the last Bond movie was a very stylish 20-minute-long film followed by an hour of adverts. What a waste. )

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien Read more about this title...

I've finished the first book from the Earthsea tetralogy (or "quartet", as they put it). I hadn't read fantasy for a looooong time, and this book reminded me why. The careful use of epic language never falls in common traps and avoids boring down the reader in useless world-building details... but it left me with a sense of "so what" which didn't really push me to read the following books. Enjoyable distraction, probably very good for teenagers (no disrespect intended here).

The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula K. Le Guin Read more about this title...

So many other books on the shelf... "From the Gracchi to Nero" is a lovely introduction to Roman history; it reminds me at every page of how similar they were to us, how they really built the foundations on which every "democracy" (i.e. "extended oligarchy") now runs. We went from daggers in the dark to sex scandals, but the concepts are the same, the political questions are still the same (who is a citizen? What is Law? Who executes the Law?). You could probably write "The Emperor's West Wing" in five minutes; now that i think of it, HBO's "Rome" is more or less that, plus the customary brawls and orgies.

From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 BC to AD 68 by H. H. Scullard Read more about this title...

For people tired of technical (or personal) posts...

You can subscribe to only the "personal" part of my blog. You need to use this feed (right-click, copy link): Subclassed (only "personal" posts) (if your news aggregator doesn't like it, try adding "?alt=rss" at the end). I should probably put this on the sidebar... Added to the sidebar (broken in IE, fantastic).

UPDATE: if you'd rather have only the tech posts, you can use this other feed: Subclassed (only "GeekDiary" posts).

svn+ssh from Windows

Another one for Google, since currently the first hit is from a muppet advising to use a commercial product... If you want to connect to a Subversion repository using the standard SSH tunneling (svn+ssh), but you have a Windows workstation, you can use the Putty utilities. Here's what you need to do:

1. Go to the Putty download page and download putty.exe, plink.exe, puttygen.exe and pageant.exe (since you are there, you might as well get the full installer, since stuff like pscp is also very useful). Put them in your Windows PATH (e.g. C:\Windows) -- you don't need this if you ran the installer).
2. Start puttygen.exe and click Generate to generate a key. Enter the comment (usually your email) and a password. Then save the private key somewhere safe.
3. Start Putty.exe and connect to your machine, with the user/pass you use when working in Subversion.
4. go back to the puttygen window, and copy the generated key text
5. in the open ssh session, type
   

   echo '

   
   then right-click and Paste then
   

   ' >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

   
   then Enter
6. close Puttygen ad exit the ssh session, start Pageant. A small icon will appear in your taskbar.
7. Right-click on the icon, "Add key". Select your private key and OK, enter the password.
8. open a new command window, and try this:
   

   plink your-username@your.host.com

   
   You shouldn't be asked for a password, and be straight in. Perfect! One last thing...
9. go to your %APPDATA% directory (C:\Documents & Settings\your-name\Application Data), and enter the Subversion folder. Open the "config" file, locate the [tunnel] section and add this line before saving & closing:
   

   ssh = plink

10. Now you should be set! Try doing
    

    svn co svn+ssh://your-username@your.host.com/your/prj

I don't know if using TortoiseSVN or other UI this process can be easier or more complicated. This works, and it will give you the standard basic svn+ssh features.

Technorati Tags: Subversion, Putty, SSH, Windows