This is the archive for February 2006. Recent posts can be found at the main blog page.

One happy family

Friday, February 24, 2006 ★ 15:17 ★ Category Films ★ Permanent url

Masjävlar (marketed as Dalecarlians in all non Swedish speaking countries) shows the not-so-nice history of a family in a small Scandinavian town. Mia, now living in Stockholm, returns to celebrate her father’s birthday in the town in which she spent (wasted?) her youth.

Dalecarlians

Although the plot is not as shocking as Vinterbergs Festen, director Maria Blom managed to create a very misantropic film about unhappy people living unhappy lifes.

Nothing ever happens

Thursday, February 23, 2006 ★ 12:14 ★ Category Films ★ Permanent url

Nothing ever happens in Millbrook… until two criminals try to rob a coffee shop. Tom Stall, the shop keeper, starts a fight and manages to kill the two armed men. The story of Tom, who is now a local hero, is broadcasted in several television shows.

A history of violence

Viggo Mortensen as Tom Stall

A couple of days later other men in black cars show up, claiming they know Tom from a long time ago. Tom insists he doesn’t know them, but the men seem pretty sure about it. Then the threatening starts…

A history of violence, directed by David Cronenberg (other films: eXistenz, Camera), sounds like a cheap B-movie. Although the film itself is not, the story is not that impressive, not to mention the really weird mix of happy family life and cruel violence.

The Constant Gardener

Thursday, February 23, 2006 ★ 11:50 ★ Category Films ★ Permanent url

The Constant Gardener is a film about political and commercial corruption, people abuse and the power of pharmaceutical industries.

The Constant Gardener

Murder, intrige, conspiracy, loyalty, honor… anything I forgot?

Reload, reload, reload!

Thursday, February 23, 2006 ★ 11:40 ★ Categories Gnome, Programming ★ Permanent url

Epiphany, the Gnome web browser, has a wonderful feature: it reloads local files automatically if they change on disk. This is a great feature if you’re doing (X)HTML mockups and don’t want to hit refresh all the time. I’ve expanded this feature by adding support for local directory index reloading. Bug report here and patch over here. I hope it will be included in the next release.

Update: The patch made it into Epiphany CVS.

GNOME 2.14 is coming

Friday, February 17, 2006 ★ 18:28 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

For all the Planet GNOME-NL readers that didn’t know already: GNOME 2.14 is almost ready for public release! For an overview of the changes and the new exciting features, you should read A Look at GNOME 2.14 by David Madeley.

GNOME-NL logo

Of course your favourite desktop environment will also be available in Dutch!

Quick font selection

Tuesday, February 14, 2006 ★ 12:19 ★ Categories Gnome, Programming ★ Permanent url

A few days ago I wrote a simple Python script to quickly select a (fontconfig) font name using a standard GTK+ font selection dialog. This is useful for browsing your font library (I have many fonts installed) or when changing configuration files that need font names.

Select font

The font name is copied to the clipboard and printed to stdout by default. Command line switches are provided to disable copying or printing.

Save the file into a directory that is in your $PATH and chmod +x it to use it. Of course you should have PyGTK installed, but this is the default on most distributions.

Download: gtk-select-font (Python script)

Update: I’ve also provided a simple color picker.

Quantus tremor est futurus

Friday, February 3, 2006 ★ 21:16 ★ Category Music ★ Permanent url

This year Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would’ve turned 250 years old. To celebrate his birthday, I’ve made a desktop wallpaper dedicated to the last piece of music he wrote, but didn’t finish: his famous Requiem in D minor. A requiem is not really a piece of music one would expect to hear at a birthday party, but I’ve not been in the mood for parties lately (for various reasons).

Quantus tremor est futurus

A full-scale version is also available.

Trivia: Did you know Mozart’s grave was reopened ten years after his death? His skull was taken out by the man who buried him. It seems several of the successive owners heard music and screaming coming from the room where the skull was kept. It is kept safely in a museum nowadays, hidden from public view. Read more about this ghost story at the Castle of Spirits.

Update: The image looks good on my laptop screen, but can hardly be seen on my Iiyama CRT monitor… the contrast is too low to read the text. The high contrast version may look better, depending on your monitor.