I’m watching a documentary about the creation of new weapons systems. It’s always interesting to see the technology, but I’m always made somewhat uncomfortable by the fact that the machinery is designed to take human life. Many of the military personnel they talk to use euphemisms which, I imagine, are drilled into them to depersonalize battlefield killing. (I’m really just guessing at that.) They say, for example, that they will “deactivate an enemy installation” (by raining shrapnel into a foxhole).

So, I’m watching “Movies That Shook the World,” and they’re talking about The Last Temptation of Christ. I just don’t understand why people got so riled up about that movie. It was a good movie. I doesn’t say that Jesus wasn’t the Messiah – although I don’t see why a movie can’t be free to make that claim. It actually shows that Jesus was the Messiah, wholly man and wholly God. It shows Jesus living a real, full life. He gets married, he has children, and all that stuff… but it’s fiction! I don’t just mean that it’s a movie, but that in the context of the movie, Jesus’s life beyond the Calvary is just a fiction, presented by Satan as a temptation. Is it that they see Jesus doing things that they don’t think he did (getting married, having sex)? The movie then asserts that these things didn’t happen. Are the images themselves offensive for some reason? It can’t just be that we’re seeing Jesus tempted and conflicted. We see that already in canon. Most people who protested did not, presumably, see the movie. Someone told them about the movie and told them that it was bad. What was the stake of the people giving those instructions?

At first, I wrote this introduction to this entry:

I’ve been using a SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys since it was Hydra. I basically can’t deal with it as a full-time editor, but for things like brainstorming and some forms of pairing, it’s totally fantastic. I can /msg my coworkers about some upcoming software, and once it’s clear that we’d rather be writing tests than talking about design, I can fire up SEE and paste around a URL. Everybody drops into the file, and we write tests and comments and maybe even documentation until we’re all tired of it, and we end up with a document that we can all work against to Get Things Done.

I’ve been doing some reworking in the guts of Sub::Install, trying to steal good ideas from Sub::Define and to implement some of the ideas that came out of discussions with its author, Johan Lodin. Several of these deal with warning handling, which has led me to produce this little routine. I’m finding that I really like it:

So, apparently there was some kind of controvery with the earlier iPods’ battery life. Apple advertised eight hours and they only lasted six, or something like that. Maybe the battery replacement plan fitted in. All I really know is that I got a class action form, filled it out, and then got a gift coupon. It was for $50 on Apple branded hardware from an Apple outlet.

I did some overhauling to a module a few months ago. I added a new interface to it, and left the old one in with a deprecation warning. After a little while, the original author uploaded a new release that totally removed the old interface. Within a day or two I’d received comments on IRC and via email. They were all something like, “The new interface is definitely better, but I had code using the old one!”

This looks sort of neat: it lets you build automator-like actions and assign them to different kinds of triggers like keypresses or mouse gestures. I’m afraid that it will lack the ability to usefully script things I want to do, that it won’t talk to Growl, and that it will stagnate when it’s abandoned and its source is never released.

Someone I know wrote something like this in his blog, this week:

I bought my current laptop just before OSCON ‘03, and my plan was to keep it for three years. That was the deprecation schedule for laptops at IQE, as I recall, and it seemed like a reasonable number to latch on to. That time is quickly approaching, and isn’t it just my luck that the kind of hardware I’m likely to want isn’t currently on the market, exactly.