The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Ah, it’s always nice to be greeted by a message of decay on a sunny Sunday morning.

Because IMDb’s message boards continue to be utilized by a small but passionate community of IMDb users, we announced our decision to disable our message boards on February 3, 2017 but will leave them open for two additional weeks so that users will have ample time to archive any message board content they’d like to keep for personal use.

Source.

Because of my annoyance with that cavalier turn of phrase about “ample time,” I’ll share an entry from my private Zim notebook.

Monday 16 Jan 2017

Noticed Inventum on F-Droid, a simple TMDb (The Movie Database) client. This in turn led me to omdb (Open Media Database).

Something to keep in mind if IMDb ever goes bad.

Another potentially interesting website is Letterboxd.

It’s a pity that omdb isn’t the MusicBrainz of movies. The Movie DB looks like a more viable alternative with a possibly more usable website than recent IMDb to boot, but I’m not sure if it is as open. Still, you can use their API to scrape the entire DB. Note that The Movie DB is essentially a fork of 2008-era omdb data, as stated on older versions of their about page.

After some update or other, Broken Age refused to start.

$ ./start.sh 
Running Broken Age
libGL error: unable to load driver: radeonsi_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: radeonsi
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast
X Error of failed request:  BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)
  Major opcode of failed request:  155 (GLX)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  3 (X_GLXCreateContext)
  Value in failed request:  0x0
  Serial number of failed request:  91
  Current serial number in output stream:  92

Oh well, let’s give it a little hand, shall we?

LD_PRELOAD='/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgpg-error.so.0' ./start.sh

This loads the included libraries before any others, in order to override the incompatible libraries shipped with the program in question. The same trick also works for Steam. If gaming is your goal, you should probably stick to whatever version of Ubuntu is supported best. I’m just pleased that I can play the occasional game like Oxenfree (no preloading required, mind you) or Broken Age on my workhorse without having to install any stability-reducing binary blobs.

Last year I wrote a little about Gmail’s interesting attempt to translate English to English. Similar failures pop up from time to time, but usually I forget to take screenshots as evidence. This time I did.

A few weeks ago, while I was reading La vie: mode d’emploi, I came across a term I didn’t know. “La pièce où nous nous trouvons maintenant — un fumoir bibliothèque — est assez représentative de son travail.” (The room in which we find ourselves now — a fumoir bibliothèque — is fairly representative of her work. At the top of p. 134 in my copy.) Obviously a bibliothèque is a library, but I was a little less sure on the smoke-related part — fumer is to smoke. Ergo, in a brief moment of madness I decided to type the phrase into Google Translate rather than to look it up in my Aard version of Wiktionary or in Le Petit Robert.

Obviously it’s not a place to burn books, now is it? Wiktionary defines a fumoir (2) as a “Pièce qui, dans les appartements, dans les hôtels, dans les entreprises, est réservée aux fumeurs.” A room that, in apartments, in hotels, in enterprises is reserved to smokers. A smoking room. Ah, that makes more sense. But the titular joyous part refers to what happens when you change that automatic uppercase letter to a lowercase one.

Well, there you go. I’d say a smoking room with books or a smoking library is a distinction worth keeping, but statistics can sure do funny things.