I filed an RFA: for hesiod. The University of Michigan should be held accountable for my decreased motivation to maintain this package.

We spent last week at the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan. This was the second year of the festival as well as our second year attending. Unlike last year, there was no “Freedom Festival” organized by Michael Moore-haters this year. Perhaps they are still recovering their debts from last year, when they lost money and had to stop their showing of “Michael Moore Hates America” after discovering it had inappropriate language for the family audience they were targeting. We saw nine films in just five days — four in one day was our max. (Rachele saw one more — The Beauty Academy of Kabul — that I missed, unfortunately, and we gave our tickets to Jesus Camp to Rachele’s parents.) Our selections were:

• Flirting With Disaster
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Men at Work
• Winter Passing
• La Moustache
• Paradise Now
• Innocent Voices
• Viva Zapatero
• The Killing

The one that sticks most in my memory is La Moustache. The essence of the plot is revealed in the first minute of the movie: a man shaves off his mustache. His wife of fifteen years doesn’t notice. In fact, she doesn’t remember he ever had a mustache. While the film starts as vaguely comic, it quickly spirals into a psychic breakdown with a possibly unreliable narrator. It was quite nearly perfect. The beautifully restored virgin print of Monty Python’s Holy Grail was astonishing. The film was shown for free on a large outdoor screen by the lake, and the sound was crystal clear (now in stereo!) no matter where you sat. There are a bunch of scenes everyone always remembers in the Holy Grail. I realized after watching it again that the movie is composed entirely of these memorable scenes. (I had the same feeling watching the Wizard of Oz after a ten to fifteen year hiatus recently.) Finally, Stanley Kubrick’s first film, The Killing (1956) also merits the maximum rating, whatever that is (5.5 stars?). While it lacks the surreal/experimental feel of his later films, Kubrick was already beginning to play with narrative structure and sequencing. The film walks through the events leading to the climax several times, each time from a different character’s point of view. But really it’s just a great heist flick. Mani Haghigi, the Iranian director of Men at Work, had an interesting observation about the festival. Unlike most other film festivals, he, as a director, could just hang out and enjoy the films and the company and not worry about impressing executives and distributors. The festival’s motto is accurate — “Just Great Movies.”

The New York Times: “Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and who led the campaign to get the [48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured by American troops] released, does not believe they have received adequate scrutiny. Mr. Hoekstra said he wanted to ‘unleash the power of the Net’ to do translation and analysis that might take the government decades.” Bonus: In addition to this being “open source” in the same sense that Howard Dean’s presidential campaign was open source politics and that the term “open source” has been applied to a wide range of non-software fields, including computer hardware, genetics, journalism, publishing, and even cola, “open source” is an actual term for an intelligence gathering discipline that uses information collected from sources available to the general public. Interesting!

FOSDEM is one of the events I really enjoy. Unfortunately, I couldn't attend last year because I was at a conference in China. However, this year I was back, and the event was bigger than ever. There's so much going on that it's really hard to keep up. There are a number of people I'd really like to have talked to more but there just wasn't time in those two days which were fully packed. It was nice to meet a number of people again, though, in particular the usual suspects, including Michi Banck (aka Hurd illusionist, "it supports two wireless cards now"), Guillem Jover (Spanish mafia boss living in exile), and Jordi Mallach ("World Domination for Catalan^WValencian"). I also hung around the Spanish free software research people with whom I'm going to spend a few months soon. Crazy Spaniards... I've no idea how I'm going to survive there. Oh, and Neal Walfield, who still stinks, and who thinks I have a British accent now (which he thinks is a bad thing while I took it as a compliment). Regarding new people, I had the great pleasure to meet and talk to Lennert Buytenhek. I talked to him on IRC a bit recently because he's involved in the big-endian ARM port and I've been hacking on the ARM based NSLU2 device. Lennert is quite frustrated because joining Debian is so hard. As it turns out, there's currently a six month wait to be assigned an Application Manager. I haven't really followed NM recently, but when I acted as Front Desk I tried to keep it less than approximately six weeks. Unfortunately, a great number of AMs resigned in the last few months and years, and it has been quite hard to find good new people as AMs. Lennert is the kind of person we really want to have in Debian since he's extremely kind, smart and productive. Given that the current situation seems really bad I decided to act as Application Manager again, but I only intend to do that temporarily. I'm sure I forgot lots of other things. But the summary is that it was a great weekend, with way too much stuff going on at the same time. And while I wish I could have devoted more time to my research, I gained some important insights and did one interview which was really informative.