Aidan Delaney’s weblog

My GnomeMeeting incomming _should_ work now. The only problem may be my sound as I “optimised” it earlier today and it may now be b0rk3d. I have no more time to spend “optimising” today.

I watched Dead Presidents last night. It’s an old movie circa. 1995 and it’s one of the most depressing films I’ve ever seen.

It depicts the life of some kid (I can never remember character names) from just before his graduation, through his volunteer service with the U.S. Marine Corps in the Vietnam war, his return to a socially devalued neighbourhood and his eventual downfall; incarsaration for life because of a bungled robbery.

I can’t help feeling for the character. He starts out by saying that he dosn’t want to go to college, like his older brother, but wants to join the army. He comes from what seems to be a good home, where his parents and older brother are supportive of him and care about him. Yet he is, what can only be termed as, abused by his country.

I’m generally not a supporter of war. I don’t believe, in general, that it is the solution to a problem. However, I’ve read several authors on the subject of keeping standing armies. Plato, in particular, is clear that if a young man (it was men in his day) volunteers for the army he should be commended and supported by his state. After all I may generate economic value for my state, but it is the members of the standing army that pledge their lives in the protection of our way of life.

So on the one hand you’ve got my view; that war is generally uncalled for. As examples I’ll cite both of the Iraq wars and the Vietnam war. On the other hand there’s the argument that a standing army is required to defend our way of life as in World War II, where if the Brits didn’t have a standing army they’d be speaking German.

So you’re left with this poor character that believes in the standing army ideal and pledges his life to fight. And fight he does, valiantly, recieving medals and commendations. However when he gets home, he can’t adjust to normal life. His neighbourhood has changed beyond recognition and those who didn’t fight the war don’t understand the psycological trauma he’s going through.

Eventualy, because he recieves so little support from the state/community he was protecting, he feels the need to resort to violence to feed his children. Thus the bungled heist and his downfall.

…I have tendancies to be an architecture astronaut. I came up with this really great OOified, XMLdriven, App Server hosted persistant singleton cache architecture for a web program thingy I’m trying to do.

It turns out that I use the XML as a configuration file, which dosn’t leverage any of the advantages of XML. I have one object which exports a horrendous interface of an array of hash tables and the cache is not in an app server as I’ve not had time to play with mod_perl.

I’m moving towards my design; but slowly so. I really need to think about how a user would want to use the system, which is what Dave always says.

I went for a pint last night with a few people. One of them was a RedHat pre-sales rep. I think that means he does all the technical talk to customers to convince them to buy RedHat.

I spent the night trying to convince him that they should give free RHEL copies to student societies like MiNDS> (balor uses the old-skool capitalisation). Problem is that he was convinced after 10 minutes that it was a good idea but I still kept talking all night. Me and organic beer don’t mix, and these guys drink fast. I’m going to have to start drinking water every second round.

It’s 08:53, I’ve been in since 08:00 and I’ve drank a litre of water. At least I met some cool people

Just an observation