A procession of one

One the many hilarious phrases by P.G. Wodehouse that I remember is ``a dignified procession of one'' describing the butler entering a room. It appeared in ``Leave it to Psmith'' which was first published in the UK in 1923. See also PG Wodehouse's creative writing lessons from the Guardian's PG Wodehouse Reading group.

The other day, I read about another novel, ``I live under a black sun'' by Edith Sitwell, in ``Facades: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell'' by John George Pearson. There, on page 324, is a quote from ``I live under a black sun'' describing a character, based on her father, as ``pacing around the house like a procession of one person''.

This aroused my curiosity about who used this funny expression first: clearly it was not Edith Sitwell because ``I live under a black sun'' was first published in 1937, well after ``Leave it to Psmith'' (1923).

However, it turns out that the expression is much older: thanks to Project Gutenberg , it is easy to find an e-book version of ``The Diary of a Goose Girl'' published in 1902 by the author of children's stories Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin where it occurs in the following sentence about a cock:

In short, I dislike him; his swagger, his autocratic strut, his greed, his irritating self-consciousness, his endless parading of himself up and down in a procession of one.

It should be noted that there is also a relatively recent (2000) book with the title ``A Procession of One'' by Evelyn Hood.

I wonder whether Edith Sitwell picked up the phrase from P.G. Wodehouse or from Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin, and whether P.G. Wodehouse was inspired by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin. Not that it matters, of the 3 books, ``Leave it to Psmith'' is probably the only one that stood the test of time and is still strongly recommended reading, as are most books by P.G. Wodehouse.

Viewing markdown files in chrome or chromium

You would think that this feature, formatting marked down texts as HTML,  would be built in, i.e. going to

         file:///home/me/project/README.md

would transform markdown "lightweight markup" to HTML. E.g. the marked down text below

---

# Scripts and Makefile to install tools

Just typing
```
make
```
will install the packages x, y and z globally, 
i.e. in [/usr/local/bin](/usr/local/bin) and friends. You can install
things separately as well, e.g. the following will all work as expected.
``` bash
make x
make y
make z
```
[Make](https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html) is a very old 
but extremely powerful tool to manage (re)creating things that have 
dependencies.

---

should result in a nicely formatted html page like so:

Unfortunately, chrome does not do that. So we look for an extension that will do the job of converting every file with a name ending with ".md" to html as illustrated above. Pointing your browser to chrome://extensions/ will show you the extensions that you already have installed. At the end there is a link "Get more extensions"  that points to the Chrome web store. The upper left corner there contains an input text area to specify what you are looking for. Thus searching for "markdown" yields -- at the time of writing this post -- exactly 2 candidate extensions, namely "Markdown Preview Plus" by www.ooso.net   and "Markdown Preview" by Boris Smus.

Both are free and claim exactly the same: "Converts and previews markdown files (.md, .markdown) to HTML right inside Chrome.".

The difference is that the first one, "Markdown Preview Plus" works while the other one doesn't. Moreover, it seems that the "Plus" one is actively developed on GitHub. In fact, we can safely assume that the "Plus" version is the successor of the other one which had a last commit on github in 2013. On the "Plus" github site, it is explicitly stated that the extension is a fork of the original one by Boris Smus.

Anyway, problem solved.

PS The first release of Make dates from 1977, thus it is 40 years old at the time of this writing. It must do something good, compare to many other 'tools/languages/..' of the day that quickly fade into oblivion.

Lulu femme nue

A beautiful 2013 French film about a house wife, Lulu (Karin Viard) who suddenly decides to take a break, leaving her family to fend for themselves. During this sabbatical, she acquires a lover, befriends a nice old lady and generally has a good time. Worth watching.

Lulu and her new friend.

☆☆☆

Camping Sauvage

This mercifully short (01:12, 01:16 with the closing credits) French 2005 film presents a boring version of the well-known cliche of a young girl (17 years old in this case) getting crazy about an older man who, at first, is not welcoming her attentions. It all ends badly with a failed double suicide.

Yawn.

☆

La Sapienza

This 2014 French film by Eugene Green is a marvel. The story is simple: a famous architect is disgusted with his client's demands, and goes with his wife, a psychologist, on holiday to reconsider.

He meets with a prospective student with whom he visits some fabulous baroque architecture in Rome.

In addition, the architect's wife meets & cures the student's sister.

The setting is Rome, with some of the famous works of  Borromini and Bermini, and the shore of Lake Maggiore.

As always with films by  Eugene Green, the sound track is exquisite. One of the best films of 2014. Strongly recommended.

☆☆☆☆☆

Toutes les nuits

Toutes les nuits is a French film made by Eugène Green in 2001. If you enjoy films by Éric Rohmer, as I do, you will love this one.  Eugène Green was born in the USA but chose to become (thoroughly) French when he was 28. In my view, he is an excellent successor to Rohmer who died in 2010. In the film, as in others, he puts in a small cameo appearance as a café owner, see below.

Eugene Green

The film tells the rich story about the coming of age of two childhood friends, Henri and Jules. Henri has a well-off bourgeois family and goes off to study in Paris while Jules stays behind in the village.

Jules and Henri

They keep in touch by post and their lives touch occasionally. The story starts in 1967 and covers most of the 1970's. The scenes relating to the 1968 revolt are particularly amusing, and the 'revolution' is made fun of.  For example, in Jule's village, there are less than 5 students in a manifestation that is broken up by a posse of 2 CRS.

The prologue mentions that the film is based on  the book L'éducation sentimentale by Gustave Flaubert.

A beautiful film that I will definitely will want to watch again.

☆☆☆☆☆

PS An interesting take on Green's baroque films can be found in this article.

Installing a package from a particular source using synaptic

Digikam seems to be the only photo management application available in Ubuntu that deals well with photos that contain gps-coordinates in the associated Exif metadata.

Unfortunately, the digikam 3.5.0 version that is installed from the default repository, is all but unusable due to frequent crashes. Fortunately, there is an external repository that contains a more recent version (namely 4.12.0 at the time of this writing) of digikam.

So I followed the instructions from this Tips on Ubuntu page to add the repository to my list of software sources and install the new version of digikam:

# add software source
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip5/extra
# update local package database with contents of new source
sudo apt-get update
# install new version of digikam
sudo apt-get install digikam

To my dismay, the old 3.5.0 version got installed again. This is understandable because there are now two packages with identical names ('digikam') available.

Rather than search the web for a solution, I tried my luck with Synaptic and, indeed, it turned out that there was a button to restrict the 'origin' of the packages (see the lower left corner on the image below).

Synaptic restricted to a particular repository

Selecting the digikam packages and hitting 'Apply' did indeed install the coveted 4.12.0 version.

While the above method is simple, there are alternatives, as described in this Askubuntu page. In particular, the -t option for apt-get is relevant and interesting (but harder to remember than 'just use synaptic').