Posted on by mwhybark

Noir

Tonight I foisted 1948’s Act of Violence on Viv over dinner, which largely drove her to bed. I was quite taken with the location shots in Glendale and one presumes Pasadena, the wartime fallout plot, and the lady leads, a very young but no less striking Janet Leigh and a ripe – even naturalistic – Mary Astor.

According to that link up there, director Zinnemann followed this noir up eventually with From Here To Eternity. There’s no beach in this flick, the architecture is superior, the women are better looking, and the moralizing is less obstreperous. Oh, and this film’s in black and white.

Posted on by mwhybark

Oh, the pain

After a week of struggle, correctly identifying crufted permissions applied in layers dating back to around 2000, when I first installed OS X on the home server, I concluded that a drive wipe and clean reinstall was the only way to sort things out.

This has proved partly true, in that permissions have been the cause of my pain and suffering, and partly untrue, in that the frustrations I have been experiencing with them can now be definitively attributed to the Mac OS X default user structure.

I am quite close to a resolution, however. I have been able to connect to my crufty MySQL databases via PHP. Perl is still complaining, but does appear to be trying to talk to the databases.

With luck, tomorrow, I can extract the data needed and start shifting miscellaneous stuff over to the hosted environment.