freezing the flash

There's this new ad running on TV, with Sean Connery's (I'm pretty sure it's him it is!) voice set against piano, then ends with a string-ish and harpsichord ending. But I couldn't recall the song's title. I was pretty sure it's by the Beatles, but not the lyrics exactly.

So I tried 'beatles lyrics all our lives' -- that got me "She's Leaving Home". Far from it! After some more prodding, I recalled their enunciation of the word "affection". I got the song using "beatles lyrics affection". Wow! Perhaps it's the only song with that word?

It's one of those songs that want you to listen carefully, just like Sound of Silence.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2d2llB4oIQ
Edit: Wow! Exactly! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NUpOovSItA

There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed,
Some forever, not for better,
Some have gone and some remain.

All these places had their moments,
With lovers and friends I still can recall,
Some are dead and some are living,
In my life I've loved them all.

But of all these friends and lovers,
There is no one compared with you,
And these mem'ries lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new.

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before,
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more.

-- solo --

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before,
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more.

In my life I love you more.

So, just discovered that your RHEL/Fedora/CentOS /usr/share/locale is over 200mb? Debian/Ubuntu have this neat (but risky) tool called localepurge that cleans out the directory for you. Unfortunately, it's a .deb package, so if it isn't a Debian-based distro, you need to take some extra steps.

1. Grab the source package here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/jaunty/localepurge
   
   
2. using your favourite editor, save the below into /etc/locale.nopurge (sudo'd too):
   
   MANDELETE
   DONTBOTHERNEWLOCALE
   SHOWFREEDSPACE
   VERBOSE
   
   en
   en_US.UTF-8
   fr
   fr_FR.UTF-8
   
   the last few lines being the locales you want to keep. (I kept fr just for fun; remove it if you will.) These are the default options (except for VERBOSE, I turned it on), and will delete man pages in unwanted locales too.
   
   
3. And now, the moment you've been waiting for. Deleting locales is difficult to reverse, so be careful.
   
   $ sudo mkdir /var/cache/localepurge
   $ sudo echo > /var/cache/localepurge/localelist
   $ sudo localepurge-0.5.9/usr/sbin/localepurge

200mb, zap!

I'm pleased that the patches got through without a hitch:

http://repo.or.cz/w/git.git?a=commit;h=eb1c78d76bd5ad6ad49d468323d4eb4168cfbed0

For the description/cover letter of this series,

http://wiki.github.com/rctay/git/http-fix-push-fetching

This post is horribly late, and reading it now, I realise I really was very dizzy at that time to write this. As it happened, I could hardly get up from my seat at that time.

My mind received a jolt as I watched TMSO's one-night-only concert. Bows slicing through the air, bodies swaying fitfully -- they almost seemed possessed by some meta-physical spirit, a mindless mass moving in tandem at its every mad and drunken whim.

Immediately, I was reminded of the Dionysiac spirit, which I encountered in the Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche. (I had tried to read it, but my attempt was defeated by an ignorance of Greek tragedy and Schopenhauer's aesthetic theories. Of course, I can't be sure of my idea of the Dionysiac; I'll just have to revise this when I get around to read it again.)

Yet amid the seemingly dispossession of control -- wildly varying tempi, rampant brass and woodwinds, hair-raising crescendoes -- a tinge of ruthless precision was unmistakable. Whether this was a result of their musicianship or practice, I rather not speak, but judging from their performance schedule, this must have been their umpteenth performance of this symphony!

In 1984, there's a passage where Winston describes how he feels while reading the book:


I used to be incapable of reading some books and had put them aside, but when I approached them later on (that is, now), I couldn't understand what made those books what was so crippling. There was no need to run their arguments and propositions through my head -- they were self-evident -- because some time, some where, I had already thought of these things and sufficiently convinced.

Perhaps those books required a certain level of maturity and knowledge of the world before they could be read. I used to force things along, even if I read at a crawl, until I gave up. Now, I don't waste anymore time and just leave it aside, leaving it for a future me that can hopefully grasp it.

Perhaps a book changes for its reader. Perhaps a re-reading years later might lead the reader to think he had read a different book of the same title, or an older edition, in the past.