R.I.P.D.(2013)

The ANU film group solicited short reviews for the semester 2, 2013 programme. I didn't choose R.I.P.D., but it was allocated to me to review anyway. I did my best "reviewing" it sight unseen, especially when it was obviously going to be pretty bad.

Gravity (2013)

The ANU film group solicited short reviews for the semester 2, 2013 programme. I requested to review Gravity(2013), as I thought I'd have the chance to see it before I'd need to submit the review... I didn't... I had to write this review as if I'd viewed and enjoyed the film, when there were nothing but teaser-trailers out. Even the plot was a mystery, but I could at least Google the names of the two lead characters!

Life of Pi (2012)

The ANU film group solicited short reviews for the semester 1, 2013 programme. This is my review of Life of Pi for them.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

The ANU film group solicited short reviews for the semester 1, 2013 programme. This is my review of Bonnie and Clyde for them.

Portable Virtualbox with Alpine Linux

Introduction:

I have a need for a small yet functional, portable, virtualised Linux system with a graphical web-browser, so I set-about finding one.

Firstly I needed a portable virtualisation environment (Hosting on Windows is all I need) and a small linux distribution to run on it.

I decided on using Portable-VirtualBox for the virtualisation, because it's free-of-charge, easy to download and configure (Although it seems to claim to be more portable than it actually is).

I used Alpine Linux for the guest OS distributions because it's about the most microscopic distro I've found with a moderately easy to configure GUI capability.

The install's not perfect, but it's "good enough for me". Here's the basic steps involved in this installation:

Bat-Slap Retro-vectored

I was always impressed with the dynamic impact of this popular panel from World's Finest Comics #153 (1965). It just irked me how bad all the scans of it are. It was crying out for an SVG do-over, so I've finally done that!

Here's the original Inkscape SVG (With no text). Here's a "Plain" SVG, which might be more compatible with other applications: Batslap-plain

I should add that this was done using the magnificent Inkscape tool and the sample PNG uses Neale Davidson's nice Comic Book font.

Beware debugging Java 1.3 synchronised sections!

Single-stepping through interlocking Java threads in JDK1.3 can result in irresolvable deadlock. Specifically if one thread is blocked stepping-into a section synchronized on an object and another thread that already holds the lock steps-over a wait() on that object.