virtual-sushi

I’ve not looked forward to many movies in the cinema for a while. The only thing that’s kept me going is the promise of Johnny Depp in Sweeny Todd. Honestly, there aren’t very many good actors out there and out of the few there are, Johnny Depp has got to be one of the best. If he starred in Lord of the Rings, it’d be the best trilogy ever. If he starred in Star Wars it’d be the best trilogy ever. If they hadn’t made the last two films of Pirates of the Caribbean, it’d be the best trilogy ever.

There’s no mistaking what Sweeny Todd is about. Opening credits show it all: Blood and romantic grotesquery. The movie starts off bloody and doesn’t go too far off track. The entire plot formula is simple, but you’ll watch it for the atmosphere. Burton’s rendering of Todd’s London is dirty and macabre and fun. The only thing that let it down for me was the singing. I have a low threshold for people belting out plot lines, and most of the movie is propelled by song lyrics. In fact, it seems like the trailers include pretty much all of spoken words (possibly the studio was worried a musical wouldn’t be so successful?) Still, some brilliant lines, like Todd’s repeated description of London. Brilliant acting too. Extremely Burtonesque, which is a good thing if you like his movies; an awful thing if you don’t.

I’m told that Charlie Wilson’s War has the same writer as The West Wing, and would be ranked alongside a mediocre episode from that series. Knowing that may convince me to give the show a chance. The movie is a based-on-a-true-story (kind of like Fargo was…) retelling of how the first Afghan War was won in secret thanks to the efforts of one Texan senator (played by Tom Hanks). Hanks plays this role well in his typical heart-warming sad-sack style.

One negative is Julia Roberts, who looks a bit like a weird alien and is far too monodimensional. Possibly I’m a bit biased after watching Notting Hill on telly last weekend. The CIA man is an excellent character that gives life to otherwise-dull moments.

The movie manages to maintain a close and personal sense of conspiracy with the main characters trying to effect a change below the radar. I, personally, had some trouble understanding all the words due to the heavy texan drawl employed.

Doesn’t need to be watched on the big screen. Definitely don’t watch it in Odeon’s “premier” seats. One slip and you’ll end up with your knee half way into the back of someone else’s head.

(n.b. There’s a good comparison between the movie and real life located here.)

My LinkStation Pro NAS is great for holding all my files, and really has made a small portion of my life more convenient. The only fly in the ointment is transferring huge files to/from it over my wireless network can take ages. Copying 8 gig of data would, as a relevant example, take me the best part of the rest of my evening. Maybe the USB ports at the back can be put to good use?

The LinkStation can’t be connected to a PC via USB (as far as I can see). It can, however, connect to other USB harddiscs. It does this to expand storage, but also gives us the ability to transfer data via the USB port - which is so much quicker. To do this, we’ll need to connect to the NAS via Telnet (the web interface doesn’t support using USB thumb-drives as a transfer medium), detect and manually mount the USB drive.

First, to telnet in we’ll need to enable Telnet on the NAS:

1. Download ACP Commander from here.
2. Use ACP Commander using the command java -jar acp_commander.jar -t <linkstation_ip>.
3. Telnet in. Look! It’s Linux!
4. The standard username is root, with no password. Note this gives you complete access to the software innards of the NAS. You don’t want to do anything rash, like delete random files, in this mode.
5. Poke about if you’re interested.

Now we need to find out where the USB thumb-drive is (obviously, your thumb-drive needs to be stuck into one of the ports at the back):

1. Run the command dmesg | grep -i "SCSI device". The output will look something like:

# dmesg | grep -i “SCSI device” SCSI device sdb: 16121856 512-byte hdwr sectors (8254 MB) SCSI device sdb: 16121856 512-byte hdwr sectors (8254 MB)

We’re interested in the bit that says sdb. Yours may be different (possibly sda). This is the location of the USB drive in the dev directory.

Okay, to mount it:

1. Create the directory /mnt/usbdrive to create our mount point.
2. Run the command mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/usbdrive.

The USB drive is now accessible from within Linux on the NAS. You can copy files to and from it using the standard Linux cp command.

Unmounting the USB drive can be done via umount /mnt/usbdrive.

(Thanks to this site, here, for all the info).

If you can’t get syntax highlighting to work in a new Ubuntu install, it’s probably because the standard Vim install in Ubuntu is from the vim-tiny package. This is a cut-down version of Vi that does very little but edit files. If you want full Vi (with syntax highlighting), you need to uninstall the vim-tiny package and install vim-runtime:

1. sudo apt-get update - may as well make sure we’re aware of the latest package updates
2. sudo apt-get remove vim-tiny - we’re going to replace this package. You’ll be asked if you want to uninstall ubuntu-minimal. It’s safe to do this (explanation below).
3. sudo apt-get install vim-runtime - this is quite a big package (20 meg or so).

Now we have the latest version of Vim. The command :syntax on will turn on syntax highlighting. To have it on automatically for yourself, create the file ~/.vimrc and enter the text syntax on. You can also edit /etc/vim/vimrc (as root) and change the appropriate lines to make the settings global instead. You can also set whether the background is dark or light (which affects the colour scheme).

When uninstalling vim-tiny, you’re prompted about the removal of ubuntu-minimal. This is an umbrella package that has lots of dependencies to packages needed for a basic workable Ubuntu install. If you uninstall one of the packages, you’ll need to uninstall the umbrella package too. This doesn’t affect the other dependencies so it should be safe.

As an aside, it seems to work better over Putty too. Happy days!