When the monster is among us
Steven Speilberg is a master of his craft. And when he does sci-fi, he has me eating out of his hands! Artificial Intelligence, Jurassic Park and now Taken. A mini-series for the SciFi Channel, Taken has already won an Emmy for the ‘Outstanding Miniseries’ of 2003.
It’s based on the Roswell incident and weaves a tale of three generations of three different families - and their role in our encounters with the third kind. It’s beautifully told and brilliantly filmed. The story is told by six year old Allie Keys (Dakota Fanning) who is, if I may put it this way, the raison d’etre of the series - both literally and figuratively. Literally because she’s the central character and figuratively because it’s her narrative which had me glued - watching one episode after another without a break!
It’s on DVD now, so if you can get hold of it, do watch it. It’s got an A+ dungeon rating :-)
Why am I writing about this now though? I saw this series more than two weeks ago now. Oh yes, read the title of this entry again. That’s one of Allie’s lines in the series. Last night, something happened which kind of reminded me of this. Okay, nothing weird, maybe even boring for some of you.
I was writing a bunch of classes for my project work. I was using Kdevelop 3 which, despite being a usability nightmare, is the best free IDE available for Linux. As things turned out, after some fiddling around on my part, the class browser stopped showing any of the classes I had written. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong and needed help. Looking around for some (help!) at two in the morning isn’t exactly beneficial. But thanks to the internet, you can be sure that there’s someone, somewhere who’s awake and free at any given point of time.
Here’s a tip: if you need good and free linux help, use IRC. Which is what I did. Joined #kdevelop and found one of the developers online. He helped me for an hour and half at the end of which I realized it was a stupid syntax error in my code which was making all my classes look like a bunch of characters and nothing more to the Class browser.
The error, the culprit, the monster was in my stuff - and how easy it had been to blame the kdevelop guys for crappy software. The guy wasn’t mad at me (I would be!) and even gave me a few tips on how to make kdevelop suck a little less in the usability department.