I’m putting together the lighting plan for Anything Goes in June. It’s set on an ocean liner – the S.S. American, and in the cheesy spirit I think it deserves to bit lit, I’d quite like some nautical imagery projected at various points, the problem being that I can’t find any anchors or ship silhouettes or anything at all right. Of course the solution is to get custom gobos cut, but that’s prohibitively expensive for the effect I’m looking for. Someone must have some though, stuffed in a drawer somewhere who’d be willing to loan them out for a small amount of money… the problem is finding them… so now I’m off in search for the right forum.
Archive for April, 2007
Well, it was something a little less than a disaster, but still not great. On Thursday night I decided to buy a new laptop. That was for a few reasons, not least to keep personal stuff separate from work stuff and because I want to be able to take a computer into the theatre and the iMac isn’t ideal for that. So the next morning I went to the Apple Store in Southampton where they were happy to sell me a MacBook. I took it home, started migrating all the data from the iMac to the MacBook. Just before it completed, it stopped working. I flailed around for a while with lots of tools and configurations and it seems that the new! hard disk I installed last year has failed as well.
Smugness in some form prevails though, because, since the last failure I’ve been keeping pretty good backups so I’ve now recovered all of my important data. I’m definitely going to keep doing decent, regular backups.
Performance and Environmentalism
Published April 14, 2007 Tech , environmentalism , global warming 0 CommentsI’m (pretty) sure I’m not the first to notice this, but I see a strong correlation between software performance work and dealing with climate change. What are the similarities? Firstly, It’s all too easy to focus on easy to understand, simple to fix problems what are of little significance. Secondly, the most effective solution seems to be to stop doing things.
Open Source and Lawyers
Published April 14, 2007 Open Source , apache , harmony , java , standards 2 CommentsIn my recent silence (busy and a holiday), a couple of legal disagreements with open source have come to light. The excellent Gaim project (now Pidgin) has apparently been in a year-long discussion with AOL and now Apache Harmony has publicised a disagreement they’re having with Sun.
Having looked at the public information about both, both have tried to solve the problems in private. It’s taken a very long time in the case of Pidgin and resulted in some form of agreement (though the details aren’t public) and in the case of Apache Harmony, they’ve decided to go public because it’s been ages so far and there’s been no progress.
This has had (imo) a negative impact on both projects. Pidgin has been developed very quietly in the last year and has, in fact, looked dead! I don’t follow Apache Harmony very closely but I know at least some of the project have been wanting to do this testing for a while to help them make progress, so this has held the project back.
So please, to all companies about to deal with open source communities, please take account of the major impact any legal dealings can have, even when you might view them as ’small’.
To Sun: What Apache are asking for seems entirely reasonable. If you want to be seen as open source friendly you’ve got to walk the walk.
