Rafael Bonachela’s 360°
For Manda’s birthday this year I gave her tickets to Rafael Bonachela’s 360°, a contemporary dance performance by the Sydney Dance Company. The performance was in the Playhouse at the Arts Centre (Melbourne). Unfortunately it didn’t meet our expectations.
Now let me preface the rest of the post with the following: We’re hardly connoisseurs of the fine arts. Instead we got the bulk of our prior exposure to contemporary dance through channel Ten’s So You Think You Can Dance. I’m sure the purists out there would scoff at that but we wouldn’t have even entertained the idea of seeing 360° were it not for the show.
With that out of the way let me continue by starting at the end. After the performance finished and we’d endured what seemed like several minutes of applause with much bowing and cutting of lights only for them to return again, Manda and I both said nothing to each other about it. We were both feeling underwhelmed and wanted to withhold our comments until out of ear shot of people that might not agree.
The performance seemed to lack any coherent story. The music choices seemed inappropriate to even tell a story and the projected backdrops seemed to have no relationship with what was going on on-stage. I was left feeling that I was not on the right level to understand it and some aspects were “arty” for arts sake. For example the sand covered skull with the sand falling in reverse to slowly reveal the skull.
Ignoring the aspects I didn’t like there was still things that I did like. The skill of the dancers was most impressive. The use of light and mirrors was creative and clever. So overall the experience was a disappointment. I’m hoping that we will find another contemporary performance to see in the future that will live up to our perhaps uncultured expectations.
Spider a Site With wget Using sitemap.xml
On a number of sites at work we employ a static file caching extension to do just that: create static files that are served until the cache is invalidated. One of things that will invalidate the cache is deploying a new release of the code. This means that many of the requests after deploying will need to be generated from scratch, often causing the full Rails stack to be started (via Passenger) each time. To get around this I came up with the following to use wget to spider each of the URLs listed in the sitemap.xml. This ensures each of the major pages has been cached so most requests will be cache hits.
wget --quiet http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml --output-document - | egrep -o "http://www\.example\.com[^<]+" | wget --spider -i - --wait 1
That should all be executed on one line. There’s a one second wait in there to spread out the requests a bit but you can remove it if you like.
Exclude Directories From TextMate Side Bar for Faster Find in Project
I’m not much of a user of TextMate project files, generally preferring to just mate . in a directory. This works great until the directory or one under it contains large, irrelevant files like log files or database dumps. Its at this point you start encounter massive slow downs in the otherwise very useful ‘Find in Project…’ function. The slow downs turn into crashes if the files are big enough as this results in TextMate atttempting to grab vast amounts of memory. Eventually the OS tells it to, “bugger off, 1Gb is all I can give you”, or something along those lines.
A common solution, particularly when working on Rails projects is to create a shell alias that just invokes mate with the directories of interest. This works ok but given I’m working on a mix of project types (Pylons, Rails, Radiant) I wanted a solution that did the reverse: Choose everything except what I want to exclude. Informed by an answer to a question on Stack Overflow I came up with this:
As the comments in the script note I have this in a file called ‘ate’ in ~/Local/bin, which is in my PATH. I can now happily go to any directory, type ate and have it ignore that list of directories.