Archive: 2010 January | Eugeni's blog

Since I first heard about the filming of the Lord of the Rings movies, my life was almost divided into two stages: before I heard about it, and after that. The Lord of the Rings was the first book I read (at age 4 or 5, I don’t remember exactly), and I read it at least 50 times since that. So the waiting that movie was really, really expected.

After the last of the LOTR movies, I was a bit lost. There was no more need to wait for the next movies. I felt almost like ‘the cinema has got to its top, and I don’t think any other movie will entertain me, and allow me to go to the other worlds as the LOTR did’. For several years, I was waiting for the next LOTR movies like a child who is waiting for the Santa’s gifts at the end of the year. And suddenly I felt like all the wishes were fulfilled.

However, some new movies appeared and made me feel almost as when I was waiting for the Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King – movies like the Spiderman series, The Jason Bourne series, the last episode in the Starwars movies (well, the 3rd episode to be correct), Pirates of the Caribbean, 300, the new Batman and The Dark Knight movies, and many others. However, most of those movies appeared before 2009, so I started the year thinking ‘oh my.. this year will be a really boring one, with nothing interesting to watch’.

Well, to sum it in a few words.. I was completely wrong. The year of 2009 brought me a lot more excellent movies that I could possible hope. Just to name a few: Watchmen (until the very end of the year, I thought it would be simple the best movie in a long long time), 500 Days of Summer, Zombieland, Terminator Salvation, Inglorious Bastards, Taken, Star Trek, Pandorum (almost-the-best SciFi movie in a long long time), District 9, and many many others. I have to say that all those movies were great, and left a mark in my memories.

And then Avatar came and put them all into the background.

I already expected a lot from this movie, and also was quite afraid that it would not live up to the expectations. However, I had a lot of trust in James Cameron – the cinema magician who created Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, Abyss and Titanic.. and he made yet another cinema miracle. In my opinion, Avatar is the biggest happening in the cinema world of this decade. And it is specially true for the ones out there who happen live some part of their life in different worlds – worlds created by writers, cinema guys, or RPG games.

The writers manage to create great worlds, and make you believe that they are real in your mind. Role-playing games put you in those worlds, and make you part of it. But with Avatar, James Cameron was the first guy to in fact create a different world, and let us to live in it for a while. That world feels so real, that you forget about all the computer-generated graphics, effects, and a (few) plot holes, so you just lose a few hours of your real life to spend them on Pandora.

So, to sum it all up – if you haven’t done it yet, go watch Avatar – and, if possible, watch it in 3D. You’ll probably feel the same feeling as the people in the beginning of the past century had, by watching the first movies ever.

I think that resumes pretty much everything I have to say about it .

From time to time, several questions appear asking about the support for Mandriva products – either with bugfix updates, or the security ones. According to the policy, each update is assigned a specific advisory, which can affect one or more distributions. Besides, each advisory could receive an errata, to correct a regression caused by a previous update. Moreover, most of the updates fall into the bugfix (e.g., fixing some bad behavior or crash or simple improving the application), or security (fixing a security issue which could lead to remote compromising of the system, denial of service or other nasty effects) categories. We also have the general updates category, but this is not that different from bugfix updates, so I’ll count both of them together here.

Now that we are entering the year 2010, I thought that it would be interesting to give you some quick follow-up on how many updates were done during the last few years.

In 2009, there were a total of 436 security updates for all Mandriva-supported packages (e.g., the packages in Main repository), and a total of 288 bugfix updates. The bugfixes are usually provided by the package maintainers, who are responsible for issuing the fix/patch, properly testing the updated package, and send it to the secteam. Secteam does the final validation, signs the package with the update key, and releases the advisory (which is sent to a mailing list and to the Mandriva web site). Later, the packages are sent to the mirrors, and become available to the users.

With security updates, it is a bit different. The entire process is usually handled by the secteam, which is responsible for identifying the security issue, locating the relevant patch or solution, updating and testing the fix, and releasing the updated packages. After that, those updates have a similar fate to the bugfix ones (e.g., signing, releasing the advisory, and so on).

If we look into the detailed numbers, things become quite more interesting:

In 2006, we had 67 bugfix updates and 250 security updates. In total, 10769 RPM files were provided as updates.
In 2007, there were 144 bugfix updates and 262 security updates, with a total of 17786 updated rpm files
In 2008, we had 213 bugfix updates and 264 security updates, totaling 25718 rpms provided as updates
And in 2009, there were 288 bugfix updates and 436 security updates, with a total of 41024 rpms provided as updates.