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YAWAS (Yet another weblog about Solaris)
Seems like everyone's doing it, so I thought I'd do it too.
I am a member of the Open Solaris pilot program, which is a precursor to the full public launch of Solaris as an open source project.
I'm a big fan of all things Unix, having used various Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X systems over the years. I have a particular fondness for Solaris having been working with it for about 10 years now, mostly in the area of GUI programming. Currently I work for a financial data firm in Manhattan.
I was a technical reviewer of "Solaris Systems Programming" by Rich
Teer which was just published this year. See here for Rich's home page
and a link to buy the book.
posted at: 19:55 | path: /solaris | permanent link to this entry
RoTK Extended Edition - Comments on the extras
The third film in the series had some serious omissions by my estimation :-
Additionally, there were plenty of other minor bits and pieces that turned up in the EE. Here are some thoughts on these and more
Excellent. Christopher Lee completes his role as Saruman and possibly one of the last roles in his career, although I'd be happy to see him keep going. They didn't make the Voice of Saruman as cheesy as the Bene Gesserit voice in Dune, thankfully.
Mixed. Glad to have this sequence, but the visual interpretation is a bit too literal. The Palantir seems to be a bit like a cheap webcam, you have to hold things up close to it for the image to be transmitted. [It's another device similar to how the great eye becomes a giant red searchlight scanning Middle Earth. I completely understand that film is a different media where things have to have visual representations to be depicted, but still, it's a little cheesy, to me.]
In the book, Aragorn turns the device to his own purposes, and it is this power of will, not to mention his birthright to the stone of Numenor that truly signals his presence to Sauron. Nevertheless the effort completely drains Aragorn who is visibly aged afterwards. This could have added more to this scene. No idea if any more footage was filmed.
Pretty good, but surprising. The Witch-King wins this one and destroys Gandalf's staff. I don't remember it this way! I'll have to go back to the book to refresh my memory.
Excellent, and a nice surprise. The Voice is another triumph of
visual design - really grotesque, and even better, Aragorn shows a bit
of spirit by whipping The Voice's head right off. Nice one! Again, I
don't remember it quite like that from the book, but it works.
posted at: 19:43 | path: /tolkien | permanent link to this entry
Hello Blog-O-Sphere
Does this work?
posted at: 15:46 | path: | permanent link to this entry