Year: 2005

They Crawl

Choosing the movie to watch in a hurry never worked for me. “They Crawl” is just one of those silly attempts to randomly pick a good movie on a stand with bad ones.

Directed by: John Allardice
Genres: Horror, Sci-Fi
Cast: Daniel Cosgrove, Tamara Davies, Dennis Boutsikaris, Ken Lerner, William Keane, Scott Rinker, Brandon Karrer, Bennet Guillory, Tim Thomerson, Tone Loc, Mickey Rourke, Grace Zabriskie, Andi Eystad, Chase Hampton, Adam Gordon
IMDB raintg: 3.4
My rating: 1.0 [rate 1.0]

This is one of the worst movies that I have seen in a long while. Really.

The story is very simplistic, predictable and boring. There is no acting what-so-ever. The usage of Mickey Rourke’s name is totally marketing move. His screen time accounts for less than a minute. And he is only in one very short scene.

There is no character development or any attention to details. Camera work is as cliche as it can be. Computer graphics and other special effects suck big time. They made me think that I can do better, although that is totally not my area.

That’s about all the time that I am going to spend writing about this film.

Working with named pipes in Perl

The collegue of mine came across a problem that developed into an interesting solution that I decided to share with the world. Actually, I think the world is pretty much aware of the solution, but just in case that I will ever be looking for this solution again, I’ll have it handy here.

The task at hand was to do some processing of the logs on the fly. The syslog was configured to filter the appropriate logs into a named pipe and a Perl script was written to read from the said pipe and do all the processing.

The original piece of code looked something like this:

open (SYSLOG, "<$named_pipe") 
  or die "Couldn't open $named_pipe: $!\n";

while () {
  do_processing($_);
}

close(SYSLOG);

The problem came with syslog daemon restarts. Every time the syslog was stopped, the EOF was sent to the pipe and the script stopped reading it.

Continue reading Working with named pipes in Perl

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-09-13

Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989) was a Soviet physicist who became, in the words of the Nobel Peace Committee, a spokesman for the conscience of mankind. He was fascinated by fundamental physics and cosmology, but he had to spent two decades designing nuclear weapons. The acknowledged father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, he contributed perhaps more than anyone else to the military might of the USSR. But it was his top secret experience as a leading nuclear expert that was instrumental in making Sakharov one of the most courageous critics of the Soviet regime, a human rights activist and the first Russian to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He helped bring down one of history’s most powerful dictatorships.

The quote is from this site. If you are not familiar with this person, I suggest you browse through the link.