Coredump

UPDATE: It’s finally up, my review of 2007 in pictures, cover-flow style.

I’m building up a review of 2007, using Flickr photos. Nothing spectacular — just a retrospective tool for me. We have had many blessings this year, and what better way to reminisce than through pictures. For now, I’m collecting photos from various sources, one of which is provided by Flickr:

Originally uploaded by iandexter.

At SMX, SM Mall of Asia. Lots of prizes were given away, but none came my way. Still, it was fun. One word: Mocha.

Just a quickie. Movable Type is now open source (under GPL), so I’m testing it out.

Like Wordpress, it’s very easy to install. Provided you have the database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite), all you have to do is

$ wget http://www.movabletype.org/opensource/nightlies/MTOS-4.1-en-boomer-r1116-20071214.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf MTOS-4.1-en-boomer-r1116-20071214.tar.gz
$ mv MTOS-4.1-en-boomer-r1116-20071214/* .

Then browse to http://domain.name/path/to/your/MT/install, and follow the prompts. Nightly builds are available, but if you want the bleeding edge, you can grab it through SVN (there’s an extra make me step, though).

The interface is intuitive, with the dashboard having that warm AJAXy feel, but it was a little too slow for my taste. Applying new styles (or “themes”, in Wordpress parlance) is as easy as select and apply, but adding widgets is counter-intuitive: you’d have to edit the style manually to add the widget code snippet.

The mix of Perl and PHP code is a bit weird for me as well — heck, I’m a purist: give me PHP or Perl, but not both. There’s also the lack of specifying table prefixes for the database. I use a single database instance for my side projects, and I’m used to just adding prefixes to distinguish the apps, but apparently (from what I have read from the docs so far), there’s no way to configure that in MT.

Other than that, it’s a cool new toy. There’s no immediate plan of moving over to MT, but it’s well worth checking it out.

I was browsing through my blog archive, when I came across this site: Primal Scream, one of my first web “design” — yuck, tables! But I did get around to using CSS (I was enthralled by z-index — now *that’s* a catchy phrase) later on with &c.

Which is actually a convoluted segue to the subject of this post: my favorite poets. Here’s the intro in full (duplicate content be damned):

Thus wrought the masters

FILMS, textbooks, your occasional cornball greeting card. You may have encountered their works in more mundane settings, but that does not make them any less great. Or edifying. Or enticing. However you may have met them, they still bring out from you deep-seated feelings, long-hidden traumas, heavily suppressed memories. That’s why they are so great — they have achieved what every poet aims for: to touch the lives of those who read their words.

W. H. Auden
My first encounter with Auden was in the romantic comedy, Four Weddings and a Funeral. Who could forget Funeral Blues, a eulogy serving as a dedication in a wedding? Auden is best known for the remarkable variety of his body of work, ranging from ballads and sonnets to limericks and free verse.

e. e. cummings
When I first read somewhere i have never traveled, it struck me: hey, this is a song! (You know, the one that goes: “The first time I loved forever…”, the theme song to that 1980s TV show “Beauty and the Beast”.) The poem became a grist of many love letters, shameless plagiarisms all. “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” God, who wouldn’t fall for that? Despite the complex structure (or non-structure, as he is specially known for violating rules of composition) of his poems, his ideas are fairly straightforward and traditional.

T. S. Eliot
Eliot was — and will always be — unfathomable. I don’t mean that as a pejorative. With his copious endnotes and eclectic literary allusions, you can’t help but read up on themes like classic mythology, medieval romances, even Tarot cards and Eastern and Oriental mysticism, to get his point. The Waste Land is a major literary coup, with its obscure literary references — some in foreign languages — and a complex theme that portrays the decay of modern Europe and a longing for things past.

Allen Ginsberg
No one can beat the Beats, too. With a contemporary like Jack Kerouac, and a hangout like San Francisco, no wonder Ginsberg writes the way he does. My own take on why the Beats got their name is that they dance to a different beat. (Or is it: they beat to a different drum?) Beats me. Seriously: the Beats gave voice to that generation’s growing clamor against conformity and false values, advocating peace and civil rights, thus setting the stage for radical protests in the 1960s.

Federico García Lorca
Along with Miguel Cervantes, García Lorca is one of the greatest Spanish poets and dramatists. The imagery he evokes are striking and delicate in its simplicity. Lament is his finest poem.

Pablo Neruda
Il Postino, where else? With a delightful soundtrack and a powerhouse of voice talents to render his words (Andy Garcia, Julia Roberts, Madonna, to name a few), one cannot resist being drawn to Neruda’s “songs of love and despair”. Neruda is better known, though, for his surrealist, sometimes violent, imagery, and a portrayal of universal chaos consistently cropping up in his themes.

Rainer Maria Rilke
I bummed a copy of Sonnets to Orpheus from a friend. I almost deliberately forgot to return it. Rilke is way up there in the pantheon of German literary greats along with Goethe and Kafka. His Letters to a Young Poet displayed his deft mastery of the craft.

It was another movie night for all company employees. I missed the previous movie nights (Beowulf, for one), so I wasn’t about to miss out on the last one for the year.

Based on Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (part of his Dark Materials trilogy — ohnoes, not another one!), the film portrays the quest of an orphan destined to lead the fight against evil, for — among others — free will and self-determination. The antagonist is the evil authoritarian Magisterium, a finicky antagonist, and a bit O.C., too, what with its obsession against “dust”.

The visuals are stunning, as one would expect from any multimillion-dollar fantasy flick, and the actors are quite engaging. Nicole Kidman’s character, the Coulter “woman”, is a cunning villain who plots and does the Magisterium’s bidding. James Bond’s Daniel Craig is also cast in an almost cameo role — heck, we only see him for about 15 minutes, tops.

What is embedded in my mind, though, are the armoured ice bears, a warrior race in the north, where war is “breathe like air, drank like water”. They remind me of the polar bears in the Coca Cola ads:

Nice.

Despite the supposed bad press it’s getting — that it’s a diatribe against organized religion and authority — the film somehow dilutes it. There wasn’t enough tension, not enough build up of conflict that would have made the story richer and more engaging. But, heck, it was fun, and it’s just a movie! I give it four snow flakes.