tiedyedave | dave's moving castle

And here is the last of the posts I have been meaning to make.

I recently opened a Netflix subscription, starting the queue with a burst of Miyazaki films I had always wanted to see: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Howl's Moving Castle. They were all very good. Of the three, I had the most reservations about Howl's. The art was beautiful, but the plot (mostly the character motivations) got muddy in multiple places. I had a much clearer picture of it after watching it a second time, and between the sub (first time) and dub (second), I was able to piece together what was going on. While I am generally very unhappy with -- almost scornful of -- English dubs, I was surprised with the acting quality in some places. Christian Bale is a pretty good Howl (though nearly an octave too low) and Jean Simmons as Grandma Sophie is actually better than her Japanese counterpart. Billy Crystal as Calcifer is suboptimal; he doesn't give the voicing the nuance that it needs.

You can probably tell I liked Calcifer a lot, given the new icon. Also, my computer's name is now calcifer, and my new wireless router's SSID is movingcastle.

In addition to the physical upheavals in my apartment, I also did some castle-moving on my computer. It's been running Dapper Drake, Kubuntu-flavored, for about three weeks now. It has been running quite smoothly, with a handful of exceptions:

Wireless was a chore. Since I moved my computer to my bedroom, I decided to get a wireless card and router at long last, rather than running a long and thoroughly inconvenient wire. Unfortunately, my wireless card did not work 'out of the box', but it appears that almost no wireless hardware does under Dapper. I ended up using ndiswrapper and KNetworkManager, which appear to be working fine (I even have WPA encryption), but discovering that solution took a day and a half of frustration, and undermined my confidence in Dapper as the killer distro I had hoped it would be.

The EasyUbuntu script to set up nonfree packages (Java, Flash, codec support) seems to be totally hosed under Kubuntu. I ended up using Automatix instead, which seems to have worked fine, but again this required time and frustration to figure out. I concede that this is not entirely Ubuntu's fault, since license issues are a continual thorn in Linux's collective side regardless of distro.

Eclipse seems to be unable to support CVS operations, making it very difficult for me to do implementation work from home (which will be increasingly important over the next two months). Again, this is a Java issue, so I don't hold Ubuntu entirely accountable, but I really do wish these things would go as smoothly as everything else seems to. Sigh.

I have begun to keep a chunk of my home directory in a Subversion repository, on a separate OS-less partition (which is also holding my music collection and various other personal stuff). This was partly inspired by

creidieki's suggestion to mount home on a separate partition, and partly inspired by this. I have a data directory under home, whose subdirectories are various "projects" in the repository, like interface, logistics, personal, etc. This lets me pull different pieces to different machines as needed: for example, I use the svn+ssh protocol to access the repository from my campus machine and sync the logistics project, which has my calendar and to-do list. I've also replaced a few pieces of my home directory with symlinks that point into these projects; for example, ~/.bash_history is now a symlink to data/machines/calcifer/.bash_history. Using symlinks lets me embed pieces of versioned data in my normal home directory structure, making it easy to slowly migrate more pieces to the repository. This all seems to be working out pretty well. However, I still need to figure out how to run scripts on login and logout with Kubuntu's graphical login setup.