Gaeta: Not much. The Matrix is a three-act play: What began underground concludes in Revolutions on the Earth's surface, in Revelations-like fashion.

I'm totally freaking out. I can't wait.

New thought: the Matrices didn't rerun the same period of history over and over again, but instead represent sequential periods of what we think is our history. The first Matrix? The garden of Eden. Important question: who were the previous five Ones? The Architect makes a point of saying Neo is the first one to feel romantic love instead of just love for his fellow humans. So was Jesus a One? Buddha? I'm not enough up on my comparative religion to field guesses here, but I'm thinking the Brothers Wachowski had specific historical figures in mind.

(Has anyone else written about this idea? Brief Google searches didn't turn up much.)  9:38:40 PM  (comments [])   

I've got a nice dual G4 tower, which compiles much faster than my laptop does (faster disk, more processors, yadda, yadda). But I'm a laptop bigot: I can take my world with me when I travel, it runs quieter, and I can use the laptop screen as a second screen (invaluable when doing fullscreen OpenGL debugging, and generally nice at all other times for moving my "information cloud awareness" stuff like IM and RSS onto the subsidiary display).

But I work on a big app, and updating to the latest source & doing a compile can take time. So it's pretty fantastic that XCode, the new developer tool in Panther/OS X 10.3, supports distributed builds.

What's that mean? If I'm doing a lot of builds, I fire up my tower. My laptop sees that it's online, and farms out compilation tasks to it. This cuts my compilation times in about half. When I'm visiting Pittsburgh, where there's a festival of co-workers machines available for compilation sharing, it cuts it down even more dramatically. Obviously it doesn't linearly scale with the number of machines, since they have different levels of resources available and it costs time to ship code over the network, but it's pretty freaking remarkable.

And when I'm not compiling, I can turn all that off, and still have blessed silence. Although now I'm tempted to stick the tower in a closet somewhere so I can get the speed boost all the time without ever having to listen to that whirring fan...

Update: I hadn't realized this, but we got the distcc engine that powers this from distcc.samba.org. So yay open-source, too.  12:57:29 PM  (comments [])