Sunday, 11 July 2004, 11:59:02 EDT

Yesterday I watched all of the first season of HBO's series Deadwood. This series is much different than anything I have watched before. At first it seems like a rather poor series when comparing it to HBO's other ventures like The Sopranos or Six Feet Under; after a couple of episodes though, it is quite clear that this series will stand on its own and present something very different. The character development is very weird and complex. Characters that you would think are "bad guys" are just that yet are "good guys" at the same time. The series presents you with characters such as Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, and Seth Bullock and follows them through their arrival at Deadwood to the beginning of the town becoming a legitimate place. If you are at all interested in the old west I suggest you watch this. It seems to be a fairly accurate portrayal of one gold rush town's formation and the people involved in its creation. I must warn you, however, that if you find offense to the use of the word "cocksucker(s)" and variations of "fuck" then you might not want to watch this. Evidently, the script writers really love these two words. They make up ninety percent of the dialog.

I have taken to liking Mono. The combination of C#, Gtk#, and Glade# is very easy to work with. I already have a couple of projects very well advanced and I am still just learning the language and toolkit. I believe the first one that I will make public is an application for browsing web comics. Initially it will only support the comics that I read but I plan on making it extensible enough that it will be easy to add comics and select the ones you wish to read. While functionality such as that is still a good ways off I would say that a usuable application is not. I just figured out a hurdle that had me stumped and can now continue on with the project in a more productive manner. If you are interested in development I highly recommend you check out this combination. If you are using Windows you will want to install Mono, the gtk-sharp runtime, and gladewin32 2.0. If you are using Debian you can read the Mono for Debian page to get it, or just `apt-get install mono` if you are using the unstable branch. I have not been able to use Monodevelop yet because it doesn't work well with my window manager but it looks like a really promising product that will be incorporating Glade in the near future.

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