I have some songs stuck in my head for decades. Nowadays, you can immediately google something you casually find and quench the curiosity right away. We didnt have that kind of luxury.

The Lonely Man
Old TV series have very definite and distinctive soundtracks. Mostly they really came out with a bang in the opening title. If I am not mistaken, some today’s series omit the opening title completely. Anyway, the soundtrack that’s stuck in my head is the closing credits from The incredible Hulk series, a piano ballad, The Lonely Man. Hearing the piece with seeing Dr. Banner back on the road trying to hitch a ride is surely a difficult thing to forget.

Weather Forecast
Do you guys remember Dunia dalam Berita? I still remember waiting eagerly for the news from Seoul 88 just to find that the Olympic was over. The main attractions for me were sport news and weather forecast. I didnt really understand about sport, I just liked seeing the athletes giving their best to win. As for the weather forecast, I thought it was kinda cool graphic, showing towns around the world with pictures of cloud, sun and so on. That was probably the earliest geography lesson I got.

What does weather forecast have to do with this topic you might say. One thing I particularly remembered is they put some soothing memorable songs in the background. These songs were almost forgotten, until somewhere in the 90s, a Jackie Chan classic made me remember. I heard some songs in The Snake in The Eagle Shadow, a Jackie Chan’s movie. My interest on those long lost songs were back. About a year ago, I watched a movie, The Rain Man. I am not sure but I think one of its soundtrack (by Hans Zimmer) was also played in weather forecast.

The songs are Oxygène Part II and IV by Jean Michel Jarre and Magic Fly by Space. They’re all in the Jackie Chan’s movie but I dont know whether all of them were played back then in weather forecast (but I am kinda sure that Part IV was). I seems like TVRI used a lot of these French, ambient, trance, whatever music in their programs so every time I hear them, I get the feeling that I’ve heard them before (like Part II and Magic Fly).

That being said, the search is not over. I am still looking for this one song, the song that I most remember. It is definitely in the same genre.

Let’s say you have a blog in Django and want to have archive link on the sidebar. The link of course is matched to the date of your posts. You cant have a ‘June 2010′ link if you never post on that month. This post will try to handle that, creating nested archive link yearly and monthly.

data = Post.objects.all()

Here you got a QuerySet containing all your posts. Next is getting distinct year/month values from your posts grouped by year. To do this you need a set of distinct years.

year = ([d.year for d in data.dates('publish', 'year', order='DESC')])

Now that you have it, you can get what you want. I originally used a dict to contain the result,

result = dict([(y, data.filter(publish__year=y).dates('publish', 'month', order='DESC')) for y in year])

but dict is not sortable (you can sort the keys on an external data structure, though), so I put it on a nested tuple.

result = ([([y, data.filter(publish__year=y).dates('publish', 'month', order='DESC')]) for y in year])

I use date_based generic view, so I put this on extra_context for easier inclusion. All that remains is viewing it on the template with filters and stuff. I am pretty new with this, any better suggestions?

I personally think that detective series writers could keep the series as long as they want without fear of the story being dragged on. TV series live off conflicts, but while you can keep adding conflicts to prolong the series, there is gonna be some point that, despite how good the conflict is, the viewers will feel the show is unrealistic. This, IMO, wont happen on the detective series because they only need good cases. The protagonists live by solving other people ‘conflict’ and some of their own. That is why it’s normal to see a lot of conflicts, since they’re not exclusively owned by protagonists. I guess this is enough for the opening paragraph.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Granada Television)
This series was purely based on the book, mostly contains Sherlock’s deductive reasoning. I dont know much of Sherlock portrayal but this one I consider the best. Sharp looking (unlike Downey Jr), skinny Jeremy Brett made Sherlock Holmes came to life. His particulars are also portrayed well, since they really stayed true to the books. IMO, this lacks of entertainment value. You better read the book to follow Sherlock’s reasoning thoroughly. But this series serve really well if any of you just want to see Sherlock on screen.

Monk
Another Sherlokian detective. The best part of this show is solely the characterization of its main character, Adrian Monk. Give a Sherlock Holmes hundreds (no, this is not a hyperbole) anxiety disorders (mostly known as phobias) and you get our main protagonist. He remembers everything (mostly but not limited to photographic). The case quality went worse as the seasons go by, but it’s still a decent comedy.

Criminal Minds
This one took the cake. Combining my favorite genre, crime, with one of my interest, psychology (this I believe was begun in 2007 when I started listening to this band, which led me to him). The story is revolving around an FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit team, solving serial killing cases. It also emphasizes on the criminals rather than the crimes. A guy with eidetic memory seems a must in a detective story, so a guy, Reid, just like Monk, has one (mostly remember what he read). It is a bit different from other detective shows, facts finding and deductive reasoning exist but also psychological things, like profiling or interrogation techniques. I always pay attention when they say any psychological babble. One good point about this show is they keep the team’s personal problems in the background. Funny thing I didnt notice Meredith Monroe on her first appearance(s), so I was like “did they change the cast?” when I finally noticed her. And Patinkin is gone, Mantegna to replace him. Patinkin looks like a lawful authoritative figure, and I dont think Mantegna does since I only saw him in a mob movie (he did a good job at it). I havent see him on the show yet, I bet it’s gonna be weird, we’ll see. Good show overall, added to that they always feature a quote or two (sometimes more) per episode.

The world doesn’t live off jam and fancy perfumes, it lives off bread and meat and potatoes.

I decided to try another operating system while waiting eagerly for metad release. This video conviced me enough to give OpenBSD a try. Go here to know more about BSD and GNU/linux difference (if thats too long, just read the base system and philosophy parts).

So, OpenBSD on my old computer. I highly doubt that my optical drive there is still working. Too often I cant boot my PC from it. I tried OpenBSD live usb and failed. Luckily, once in a blue moon I can boot from my cd rom. After setting up partitions (which made my PC unusable because I bailed out the first time LOL), my cd rom cant read the distribution sets, so I chose to get them via ftp (thankfully, it points to the closest mirror). It took 1-2 hours so I ended up watching English Premier League and Natalie Portman on TV. OpenBSD installer alocates a single partition for OpenBSD, and you get to choose your own layout (swap, /usr, /var and so on) inside that partition.

After installation, I relied heavily on lynx and man pages. I intended to make this computer a workstation so I went installing desktop, firefox, pidgin and mplayer. First, I tried to install gnome and decided that it wasnt worth it (lots of packages). I settled for a simple window manager, openbox. And then I continued installing pidgin, firefox (both are old packages) and emacs (22, not 23). I havent tried the ports tree.

I decided that was enough OpenBSD for this weekend. I went to bed after breakfast and now Im having a headache.

I watched a lot of movies/TV series lately and had some writing materials. For now this suffices.

This Theme
I made a wordpress theme some years back. Well, actually, not me (japran did mostly). It is nowhere to be found now. You can find the release note here. To prevent that, I decided to put this blog theme publicly available. Get it here. I actually wanted to host it on github (just for learning git in the process), but they dont allow write access via http, and I cant connect to them via ssh from my machine.

Emacs Rant
It has been a few months since I started using emacs. I am getting familiar with a new habit but still having difficulty since I also use vi and regular editor. It is quite annoying and funny to misuse key bindings on a different environment. The version control integration is nice but I still have some problems. Kill ring and system clipboard separation is unusual, GNU coding convention is rarely used outside GNU project, and many more. Actually they are not much of troubles, we can customize everything on Emacs. I am just too lazy to fix those things.

Anyway there is a kit around to help emacs newbie (WARNING: it is HUGE and makes you feel comfortable). I also put my emacs setup under version control, just in case.

Yesterday, I got the opportunity to meet rms. He was scheduled to give a speech here. Thanks to the organizer.

He brought a small black netbook with him. I immediately guessed that it must be the portable dragon. I sneaked to confirm it while he was busy doing photos. This hardware is going to be the first complete 100% free software compatible (yes, that includes the bios). There is a heavy effort to port gnewsense into that machine. I wonder if he got next release of gnewsense on that.

His talked about the free software movement, its history and so on. Most software enthusiasts already know this stuff via this page but still can get a few new things from it. The beginning of GNU project, recursive acronyms, Swindle (LOL, he mentioned 1984 too) and open source practical approach are part of his talk about software freedom.

Funnily, that’s not what he supposed to talk about. It supposed to be “copyright vs community”. Well, in my opinion, this is a difficult topic to cover. Most Indonesians confuse the copyright (hak cipta), patent, and maybe even trademark (merk dagang), all thanks to the term ‘kekayaan intelektual’. Yes, that term helps us to combine those mumbo jumbo into one single word. But just like removing GNU from GNU/linux, people won’t get to know that ‘kekayaan intelektual’ consists of many totally different things. rms apologized for talking about the wrong topic and took some extra minutes to talk about copyright issue (mainly how copyright nowadays tends to prevent inventions).

He talked about copyright in the middle of QA session. I got my questions answered too. I asked about pirate parties (I actually understood his stance and solution on this, but forgot LOL) and AGPL. I asked about the AGPL question cause his unending hatred towards ‘software as service’. I didnt really get his answer, but I think despite AGPL or whatever license, ‘software as services’ makes him uncomfortable (ethically not right). I would love to hear his answer again (video from the organizer?). Pak Ibam also ask some interesting questions (after having a few words in Bahasa Indonesia with rms. ‘tidak boleh’ LOL), one of them is why Linus refuse GPL3.

Just before QA session, he transformed himself for a moment into his alter ego, St Ignucius form the church of emacs. Too bad, not much of emacs user in this country. One thing I forgot, rms speaks a little Bahasa Indonesia. He’s pretty good at it and without his american tongue (it’s really clear, most foreigners have difficulties with pronunciation). His fluency in our language is really great, the crowd really liked when he used any local words, or even talked in it for some sentences. After QA, there was a photo session and everyone went home happy.

It seems that next version of gnewsense will be based on Debian. This means we’ll get some interesting stuff. Things like debian installer (lean and mean, yay), eglibc, and even FreeBSD kernel. This news really surprised me (in a good way) since it was just told casually on the list without any formal announcement whatsoever. They probably announced it on the channel.

I kinda think that the new Debian release policy played an important part on switching base from Ubuntu to Debian (there is no certainty on this. Purely my presumption). Well let us hope that with this new Debian release policy, the packages will be as latest as possible (not as latest as Ubuntu but still). And of course, I also hope that my favorite mirror will host this.

This is a review for a movie called Merantau. I got the chance to watch its workshop not so long ago and got free tickets to Press Screening from it. My friend is even luckier (is he?), he got free tickets to the Gala Premier. I’m still waiting to hear from him. Lucky bastard hung out with celebrities (his take on the movie).

Okay, if you uninformed readers never heard about this movie, I suggest to take a look at that link above. I will jump right to the review without any introduction.

Plot/Story
The story is simple. I can’t talk much about it. It simply reminded me the story of my late grandfather (I don’t think he had the luxury of an address and money when he started his journey before his teens). What I really like is they really show the whole merantau tradition. They told it with his mother’s monologue, stories from his brother and Eric, and the scene where the whole village sends him off. They also told the audience a bit of silat philosophy. I think I should thank Bapak Bule again for not just picking the martial arts. Is it just me, or the last scene was really great. It made me accept the movie as it is.

Directing
Landscape exploited. They really took the advantage of Bukittinggi. Most outdoor scenes showed how beautiful the landscape is. My favorite was the Bukittinggi bus stop scene, when the camera slowly zooms out. The chasing scenes were pretty good. And I really respect the decision to take the fighting scenes wide-angle (and in one take IIRC). It’s definitely harder to pull off but this is the best approach if the fighters are numerous (IMO close up fighting is only applicable if it’s only a duel). I was quite surprised when they used a long take (the camera was a bit shaky though) on a scene where Eric walks to ‘malamar karajo‘ (that was the best line, caught me out of the blue).

Casts
Iko and Yayan were not actors before but did pretty good aside from the accent (but that’s okay, it is hard). Yusuf had the curious and innocent looks needed. Sisca was a bit loud and annoying, I guess that means her act was pretty convincing. Mats Koudal was perfect for the insensitive European clod. Laurent Buson still got his Shaolin moves. Alex was doing well as a pimp-wannabe. Donny didn’t have enough screen time. Christine Hakim got less scene time but still delivered great (my fave were Iko’s departure and the last scene).

Fight
It’s less flashy and more practical. You won’t see a somersault kick here. There were still choreographed maneuvers showed, but thankfully, not much (and for the observant, there are some ‘waiting times’). Overall, I’m pretty satisfied.

Music
I was too distracted. I only remembered opening music, the guitar and the violin(?), and some upbeat percussion during the action scene (it’s pretty much upbeat during the action scenes, but not limited to percussion).

Conclusion
For Indonesians, this is a must watch. We didn’t have action movie for so long (this one is drama-action). Thanks to the management who served me. For once, I thought I lost it for good.

Changing our habit is considered to be one of the unwanted things. Even if it will be better, we still cling to our old habit which is placed perfectly in our comfort zone. I guess I don’t need to give some examples here because we rarely see new habits, ours or other people’s, emerging. Why is that? That’s right. What’s the point of leaving our comfort zone to pursue bewilderment, some might say.

Currently, I try to give Editor for Most Adorable Computer Scientists a chance (since it’s installed by default in my OS). The consequence is pretty hard, changing my keyboard habit. I don’t have any idea which one is worse, getting yourself familiar with Emacs key binding or changing from qwerty to dvorak/colemak/whatever.

First, put your left control key into the caps-lock key (replace or swap, your choice). This is easy on Gnome. In Windows, you have to do some registry hacks. “Why?” you might ask. Emacs use control keys heavily. You have to put it in a more accessible place or your wrist will go bad like Stallman or Gosling. I’d rather recommend getting rid of your caps-lock key than swapping it with left control. In most cases, your muscle memory will make your left pinky immediately go to the bottom-left of your keyboard as soon as you think ‘Ctrl’. Try your best to change that while using Emacs. Love your wrist.

Second, the key bindings and the environment. This is not easier than the former. I am really familiar with normal key bindings. Cut, copy, paste, save, undo, redo and find have different key bindings on Emacs, or worse, different mechanism. Well, mechanism aside (that’s the one you must learn), you can customize Emacs to your liking, so that’s not much of a problem except that you have to write some lisp code.

That’s the purpose of Emacs, you get to learn functional programming naturally. Being able to use the editor operating system front end is just a bonus.

ADD : A band used Katy Perry’s “I kissed a girl” on Emacs

This is not much but the only thing I can do

I dont have much credibility on this, so here’s my friends’ blogs. Happy reading.

http://cacianqalbukunderemp.blogspot.com/ (a lot of articles and references)
http://staff.blog.ui.ac.id/jp/2009/06/04/an-act-of-solidarity/ (nice summary and insight)