Everything has got a moral if you can only find it

Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal.  To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2004/03/

You know how sometimes (what, like in the military or something?) you have inspectors that come, put on a white linen glove, and slide their finger across the windowsills looking for signs of dust? Well, in this house, the inspection is constant. The inspector and white glove have been combined into one pink windowsill inspector that goes by the name of Ebenezer. Not having hair, he picks up every trace of dust and grime in any of the windowsills. Instant dirt notification! You, the reader, probably do not want to know the details of Ebenezer nearly puking on Kate's things today when she came to visit. Nor do you want to know that the cause might have been a half-eaten pile of vomit upstairs.

So, I semi-released a new plugin for Ant and Maven this evening. Mac-Package works with Apache Ant and Apache Maven and allows you to build native Mac OS X application bundles from your Java programs. It basically took two or three pages of build scripts (that I used for Tasty Safari and iGallery, and reduces that to a single line in Ant and zero lines for Maven (by extending Maven itself). The scary thing is how easy, using Maven, it was to build the app and the website. It took me a good chunk of last night to build the app. It took me about 20 minutes to customize the auto-generated site, documentation, cross reference, statistics, reports, dependencies, etc. Maven is nice like that.

I got the various copies of Alice in Wonderland that I ordered from Amazon with my Christmas gift certificates today. I also watched the one I had not yet seen. Recap:
Jan Svankmajer's Alice – Surreal and very good. The stuff you can follow sticks pretty well with the book, but that whole lack of dialog thing makes it difficult to tell at times.
Jonathan Miller's Alice in Wonderland – “A Victorian Gothic version of Alice in Wonderland.” Surreal and very bad. Alice was a brat-bastard. Peter Sellers was mediocre as the King. Peter Cook (who??) was pretty good as the Mad Hatter (occasionally looking at the camera and making remarks about Alice). Well, at least the Ravi Shankar music was decent. The costumes were blah. The makeup was ick. The scenery was good, but not fitting. The effects were a little non-existent–not that you NEED special effects, but they could have at least done some good camerawork to make up for it.
Alice in Wonderland (the TV movie) – “Much better than Cats. I am going to see it again and again.” Seriously, I had really low expectations for this (which is why I Netflix'ed it), but was pleasantly surprised (which is why I bought it). You can see my previous entry for the details. Still, it is rather funny to see Gandhi–I mean Ben Kingsley–smoking a hookah and having hallucinations.

Also, I worked on a somewhat difficult…or perhaps I should say non-standard, since it wasn't hard, just not normal because the answers were not mapped 1:1…logic problem today. Drawing the grid to help with the solution reminded me of Lewis Carroll's excellent symbolic logic book, which tied in really well with the big box o' Alice movies I received from Amazon. I'm a little bit sad that the jacket for my Alice in Wonderland is starting to fall to shreds. Maybe that will push me to get The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll when I go to Powell's tomorrow. Because, really, I want to see the facsimiles of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, as well as some of the lesser-known stories (The Hunting of the Snark, Phantasmagoria, etc).

Posted in: Code Dear Diary Movies Projects

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *