Dune: Part Two
This afternoon, Conny and I went to see the film Dune: Part
Two. I feel rather disappointed. I feel that in a sense, Denis Villeneuve, is like Paul in the book. It looks like that when
Villeneuve smelled success, he could not withstand the pressure and instead
staying true to the book made it into an action film of which we already have
so many, one which is full of plot-holes we accept for these kind of films. I
will not even start comparing the script to the book, like I did for
Dune: Part One. I feel betrayed and feel that
he squandered the legacy of Frank Herbert. Just some things that are the
opposite of the book:
- Paul communicating with his unborn sister.
- Excessive use of lasers in attacks.
- Paul and Jessica not immediately accepted by the Fremen.
- Chani not giving Jessica the Water of Life but being outside of it and
being skeptical about it.
- A division between Southern and Northern Freemen. (This totally breaks
the image of the Fremen culture as described in the book.)
- Jessica actively fueling the myth around Paul.
- Jessica encouraging Paul to try the Water of Life, fortelling that that is
the last step for him becoming the Kwisatz Haderach. (This gives the
impression that Paul is the only one who does not know what he is doing,
while in the book he seems to be much more in control.)
- Chani stating that Paul can never become a Fremen.
- Chani does not give birth to Leto II.
- Alia communicating from the womb.
- The Bene Gesserit behind the decision to kill the Atreides.
- The Bene Gesserit having 'telepathic' powers.
- The Baron (instead of Hawat) behind the slave not being drugged during the
fight with Feyd Rautha.
- Feyd Rautha being tested with the gom jabbar.
- Feyd Rautha send to Arrakis and 'eliminating' the Fremen.
- Gurney not wanting to revenge 'the traitor'.
- Paul being lead by Jamis in a vision.
- Paul drinking the Water of Life in the South instead of the North.
- Paul sending a message to Kaitain to challenge the Emperor.
- Paul killing the Baron.
- Rabban being killed by Gurney.
- The Great Houses openly declaring war and not accepting Paul as Emperor.
- Paul abandoning Chani in favour of Irulan.
- Chani leaving for the desert.
Maybe, I noticed all these changes because I reread the second half of
Dune in the past month. Somehow it feels like
how Brain Herbert and
Kevin J. Anderson
would have written the second half of Dune.
Some more reaction videos to Dune: Part One:
Wissinks Möl
This afternoon, during our walk, Conny and I visited
Wissinks Möl, an post mill that was build by J.H. Wissink and functioned as a gristmill from 1802 till 1921 for farmers in the area. It fell into
disrepair and when the ownere wanted take it down, it was moved to village
Buurse with the plan to be part of an open air museum. But that did not work
out. Then the plan came to restore it at its original location. That happened
in 1981. We were given a private tour by one of the millers. It is quite a
unique post will having three pairs of millstone. The miller demonstrated the
brake and showed the extra wheel to lift up bag of wheat to the mill floor. It
was an interesting tour. (A short video of the mill.)
Zonnebeek
In the afternoon, Conny and I walked to (and through)
the Zonnebeek estate from home. We walked about 9.5 kilometer. The last time
we walked there, it was on September 25, 2022, but that time we took the car to
park it about halfway. On May 10, 2020, we
also went there. It might have been the first time that I went there. Due to
the abundant rain of the past month, the water levels in the forest were still
quite high. At one place we had to cross over a tree trunk. I first held
Conny's hand while she crossed. Next the handed me a big branch that I used to
keep my balance. Below the picture looking back after we crossed the location.
Pruning
I spend some time pruning the tree in the back of our
backgarden and sawed off a large branch and some smaller with dead wood.
Conny helped with cleaning up all the branches.
Judging from a picture from
April 1, 2022, it must have been about two years ago that I pruned is
substantially including sawing some large branches except for the two that went
straight up, because they could not be reached from the ladder I was using.
Last year, on April 16, I cut the top out of
the largest of the two, which required me to 'climb' in the tree, and also cut
one of these large branches. Today, I cut the other one. The previous time, I
mentioned pruning this tree is on Saturday, February
21, 2015.
21.2°C
On February 11, I wrote that on Friday 9,
the World
(60°S-60°N) Daily Sea Surface Temperature reached a record high of
21.2°C. But now that is no longer the case in that graph. Now it shows that
the temperature of 21.2°C is reached for March 3-6. Today, it is one year
that the North Atlantic (0-60°N, 0-80°W) Daily Sea Surface Temperature
has been higher than ever before on record for each day. Still a week and this
will also be the World Daily Sea Surface Temperature. And it looks like this
wll easily be met. It would not surprise me that it will still take four months
before we do not have a new record every day.
Being too senior
I have had job title of 'Senior Software Developer' for some time now. The
predicate 'Senior' as opposed to 'Junor' is not very significant as it is my
experience that almost all software developers developers are given the
predicate 'Senior' after having ten years of experience. There is not a special
exam that you have to take nor are there any official qualifications that you
need to meet, except for having relevant work experience. I have seen that some
developers, especially those you stay at a company for a long time, do not
progress beyond a certain level. I have to admit there are areas in which I am
also stuck in my development and might even become worse. It is simply a fact
that your mental abilities do decline when you get older, which you can partly
compensate by becoming wiser. There are still areas in which I am really
struggling, such as deep rooted sense of
insecurity. I think that some of the most important abilities of a senior
software developer are:
- To cooperate with people both inside and outside software
development.
- To be a team player.
- To understanding the end users.
- To take responsibility.
- To priotizing issues.
- To deal with risks.
- To be pragmatic and accepting that there is no silver bullet.
- To self management your work.
Because these are abilities where there is always room for improvement, it is
not possible to be too senior in itself. But I do think that it is possible
that you become too senior for a certain work environment if the organization
fails to recognize your abilities and tries to impose working processes not
matching your abilities. This can lead to frustration if you cannot deal with
not being recognized for your abilities.
Book
At 17:12:17, I bought the book The Imagination Chamber: Cosnic Rays from Lyra's Universe, part of
the His Dark
Materials series, written by Philip Pullman in English and published by Scholastic in 2022,
ISBN:9780702315510, from bookshop Broekhuis
for € 7.95.
Flower half open
This afternoon, many flowers on out magnolia half
opened. We had some sun in the morning, but in the afternoon it started
raining. Not sure when they are going to open fully. It rather early, but not
the first time that they started to blossem this early.
Harvest
Yesterday Conny and I walked past Herenboeren Usseler Es because an archaeological exploration was done
there the day before yesterday. That was because there are plans to build a
water basin/pond. Everything had now been closed again. This morning there was
another issue of the harvest. What you got was determined by the number of
mouths you purchased and the choice you made. I came home with (clockwise in
the photo and starting at the bottom left):
- Wintercress
- Stem of curly kale (approximately 185 grams of usable curly kale)
- 2 leeks
- 2 bags of whole wheat flour (which we regularly use to bake bread)
- Half a red cabbage
- 2 young garlic plants.
For dinner we used the curly kail as a simple
hotchpotch together with a salad that contains carrots and the wintercress.
This week we also baked some rye bread, the pumpernickel like. It tasts like the Frisian rye bread you can buy in the store here.
Magnolia flowering
Earlier this afternoon, I smelled the flowers on our
magnolia and did not smell anything. But when I came in to the garden
around 15:16, I clearly smelled the magnolia. I also noticed that some of the
flowers did open completely.
I saw that 달이_눈부신_현진이의_생일
was trending. When you replace the underscores with spaces, Google Translate
translates it into: 'Hyunjin's birthday where the moon shines brightly'. I
understand that Hyunjin is one of the members of the South Korean boy band
Stray Kids, who has his
birthday on March 20. This made me read something about Hangul, which is a rather unique writing system, a so-called feature writing system of which there are just a few.
How to Change Your Mind
This morning, I finished reading the book
How to
Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, which I started reading on November 24, last year. I
bought it on September 7 while attending GOGBOT.
The book is about psychedelics. It talks about the history, the therapeutic
and the scientific research with respect to psychedelics. The author also
described four trips he took with different types of psychedelics. I understand
that psychedelics have a strong effect on reducing the activity of the
default mode
network. I understand that meditation techniques can also surpress the
default mode network. It was an interesting read. Although magic mushrooms are
forbidden in the Netherlands, magic truffles are (kind of) legal and there are many 'smart shops' where you can buy them.
Working in the garden
In the afternoon, Conny and I were busy in the the garden. We first went to a local garden center to get some more flower
seeds, flower bulbs, (small) fruit trees, fertilizer, a compost sieve, and a
bottle of Mrs H.S.Ball's Chutney Hot. We removed some dried flowers. I sieved
some compost and used it when planting the fruit trees. We also planted some of
the flower bulbs.
Natural well
In the past months, some work has been done under the bicycle path along the
road called Hendrik Ter Kuilestraat where water kept on welling up in the
past years. I repored something about this on Wednesday, February 7, 2018. It is at location 2 as shown in the picture I described on Thursday, March 26,
2015. I noticed that the area is dry now. But now there is water welling up
at the road called Lonnekerbrugstraat as shown in the picture below. This is
close to area shown in a picture I
mentioned on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 as 'the
second spot'.
Memory layout
I wrote a small C program to find out something more about the memory layout of
a program that is being executed on Linux. The program returns different
addresses every time it is executed. I think this is because of the
address space layout randomization that Linux has implemented. It looks
like two memory ranges are used. One for the stack (that grows downwards) and
another for the code, the global variables, the string constants, and the heap
(that grows upwards). Before the 'main' function is called the stack is filled
with the values of environment variables (as returned by the env
command) in reverse order, the command line arguments, also in reverse order,
the array with pointers to the environment values terminated with a null value,
and an array with pointers to the command line arguments, also terminated with
a null value. Assuming that the parameters of main are named
argc and argv then argv[argc+1] points the value of
the first environment variable. The code of the program I used is:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <malloc.h>
void func()
{
int a;
printf("%p &a\n", &a);
}
int global;
const char *hello = "hello";
int main(int argc, char *argv[], char *env[])
{
int m;
printf("%p &global\n", &global);
printf("%p hello\n", hello);
printf("%p world\n", "world");
printf("%p func\n", func);
printf("%p argv\n", argv);
printf("%p &m\n", &m);
for (int i = 0; i < argc; i++)
printf("%p %s\n", argv[i], argv[i]);
printf("%p env\n", env);
for (; *env != 0; env++)
printf("%p env %30.30s\n", *env, *env);
func();
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
char *a = (char*)malloc(10*i);
printf("%p alloc\n", a);
}
return 0;
}
Typographic Matchmaking
I finished reading the book Typographic
Matchmaking: Building cultural bridges with typeface design by Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès. I already started reading the book on
September 14, 2023 but did not get far. After having read Taras Typeface: Graduation project I wanted to continue reading it but I
could not locate the book. Some weeks ago, I found it again and started reading
it afresh. I already bought it on February 26,
2016. The book is about the Typographic Matchmaking Pilot Project during which five Arab-Dutch design
teams created Arabic companions for Latin fonts. The book starts with an
introduction and history of Arabic type followed by a description how the five
teams worked together on the project and their results. It also gives some
information about the ten type designers involved in the project including some
samples of their work. The book also includes a CD with the fonts. It was
interesting to read, but even more so for someone who has a greater knowledge
of the Arabic script and the various types and of the principles of type
design, both of which I am lacking. A short introduction to Arabic type
design would have helpfull. I found this interesting page:
Writing Systems And Calligraphy Of The World.
Four chestnuts and three heads
Today, I brought four chestnuts and three 3D
printed Einstein heads home from my office. The chetsnuts I must have been
picked up in the past four years from the street. The 3D printed heads might be
based on BUSTA 0585. I got those three heads for a co-worker for coming up with an
efficient algorithm for calculating the 3D offset for slicing primarily using
the routines of the Clipper library, which is a library for performing operations on polygons.
Into the City
I went into the city. I visited two exhibitions
at Concordia. I first saw the short documentary Kitten or refugee (in Dutch Kitten of vluchteling?) by Tina
Farifteh, which also had some fragments of Frans de Waal, you died some weeks ago, about empathy. The second
exhibition was Inkspot 2023 with a selection of the best political
cartoons that appeared in Dutch newspapers. After this, I went to open day of
TkkrLab. There I saw an automated version of
RoboRally that had
scanners for the cards and and applied the moves automatically using a
mechanism below the board. It was build by one of the members of TkkrLab.
Quite impressive.
This months interesting links
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