Match Point

I finally sat down to watch Match Point last night.

It's been sat around unwatched for quite a while now, I had it figured as a fairly standard sport comedy film, but it's far from that.

The first Woody Allen film I've ever seen, it will serve me as a good introduction to his films... if they hold their own against this film.

The film revolves around Chris Wilton, a retired tennis-pro turned instructor, who uses his charms to work his way into the upper echelons of society.  He has the house, the wife, the job... but ultimately he becomes involved with his friend's fiancée, Nola Rice [Scarlett Johansson].

Over at IMDb it has a 7.8/10 rating, which is pretty good for any film, but really, I think this deserved a higher rating... I thought I knew what was going on all the way through, but I quickly found out I was way off the mark (not necessarily a difficult thing to achieve).

Definitely worth a watch.

Gnome calendar

I know I didn't blog about this when I first read about the proposed update, but now that it is real and I can use it, it's definitely worth a mention.

Sun ship a modified version of the panel calendar that supports multiple timezones, very handy when you work in a global organisation and regularly collaborate with people in different timezones.

Admittedly, this doesn't apply too strongly to me in my current role at Sun, but at home, it's very handy to glance quickly and know what time it is in China.

Hopefully Sun will quickly abandon their (in my opinion) third-party changes now that a far superior implementation is available upstream.  I present you, the Gnome calendar:

 

MacBook Air

Congratulations, Apple!  A laptop that's only three years behind Sony's Vaio X505, you're close to catching up!

 

Not only have you not managed to make it as slim, it weighs just shy of twice as much, has two-thirds as many mouse buttons, fails to pack a DVD-RW burner, gigabit network port and, just like the iPhone, there's an utter lack of built-in UMTS support.  Worse still, no PCCARD slot means we can't even use an ISP-supplied card.

Good job!

P.S. did I mention you can't swap the battery?

vim tips: deleting lines matching regex

In vim you can use :global to perform actions based on regular expressions.

Thanks to MichaelRaskin1 in #vim on Freenode I can now remove lines that don't match what I'm looking for in a file.

To try it out, let's have a testcase.  You have some truss or strace output you're looking through and want to see all of the open() calls (without dropping to a shell and running grep); try this:

:%g!/^open/del

This is pretty straightforward: delete (del) all lines (%g) that do not (!) start with (^) open.

Boosh.  Thanks Michael.

Qingdao

Just booked flights to Qingdao in February. My Mum and I will be flying out to meet Quentin when he sails into Qingdao for a short stop-off on his yacht race.

We're flying British Airways from Heathrow. Unfortunately we have to spend close to a full day waiting in Beijing airport due to the connections.

As there is little to do around Qingdao, the current plan is to fly (or maybe sail) to Incheon, South Korea. We'll spend a week in Seoul before heading back, seeing Quentin off and flying back on the 25th (in time for work on the 26th).

Outward flights:

Tue 12 Feb 2008: Depart LHR 1305

Wed 13 Feb 2008: Arrive PEK 0705, Depart PEK 1455, Arrive TAO 1620

Return flights:

Mon 25 Feb 2008: Depart TAO 0755, Arrive PEK 0855. Depart PEK 1210, Arrive LHR 1515