Solitude 

I’ve never seen unicode mathematics written down quite as simply as Hixie’s unicode crash course.

Read it? Frightened? Good. And yes, that was the simplest version. You can imagine how complex it gets. UTF-16, anyone?

It is, however, worth the effort to incorporate unicode in any product that you build. The benefits include internationalisation, future-proofing, and kudos from anyone else who cries at the sight of that maths.

Incidentally, if you want to see unicode characters visit this fantastic unicode resource.

Somehow I’m in the Utah state government’s RSS workshop (towards the bottom). Anyone know how this happened?

It seems to be a fairly comprehensive list of RSS resources and techniques (but we’ll just keep it quiet that they’ve put me in the XSLT section, despite my hatred for its ugly syntax).

There are two ways of looking at Underworld: either as a mindless, yet stylised action film that happens to have vampires and werewolves as the protagonists, or as overblown convoluted tripe (with fights).

I tend to side with the former. Enough action to stop thinking is good sometimes.

The acting in the film is, however, appalling, as is the character interactions. Very formulaic stuff. Just don’t go expecting a work of genius and you’ll be ok.

Time for another round of random links (if I get time, I’m going to create some basic link sidebar scripts - then I won’t wait a few days until I have several new entries before posting):

• Radiohead Rorscach - What would happen if you played Radiohead’s choice moments to a bunch of school kids and asked them to draw? Some very frightening and funny things.
• 50 Unsexiest Things - While I can’t agree with all of them, most are pretty on the money.
• Abbr Vs Acronym again - One markup debate that I’m still not settled on. I currently use acronym for everything. This might (read: probably will) change. But life is far too short to obsess over this.
• KHTML2PNG - Create thumbnails of websites. Fantastic! Just wish I was still using Linux as my default OS (until I get a new modem, it’s not going to happen).
• Firebird editCSS - Modify loaded stylesheets in browser. Great idea, can’t seem to get it to work in my (admittedly old) Phoenix install.

And I’m spent…

I didn’t initially hold out a lot of hope for The Italian Job remake. It seemed pointless, if not outright stupid, to recreate such a well-loved, classic film. Later, it became abundantly clear that they were using the name, the minis, and a few minor details.

A cash-in, then.

Unfortunate, certainly, but not entirely worthless. Judging the film on its own merits, it’s a very slightly above par film, marred only by how painfully slick it is. The amount of Hollywood polish begins to detract.

The film also suffers severely from trailer trashing; the practice of putting all the good bits in the trailer, thus ruining a lot of the film for those who remember the trailer.

All in all, not as bad as I expected, but nowhere near the original.

There’s not a lot to be said about Tears Of The Sun. The action is weak qualitatively and quantitively, with little plot and less acting to back them up. Waving such flags as “soldier does the right thing”, and “do the mission, whatever it takes”, it does a poor job of actually making you care. When people die, you shrug and go back to sleep.

Dull, mediocre (at best), superficial junk. Don’t see.

Based (in part) on advice from the insanely smart Jacques Distler, I made a list of 7 things to do that would improve my commenting system. I had intended on doing at least 6 of them yesterday (the last one being quite difficult, taking at least a day on its own). As should have been expected, I got a little sidetracked. Damn you, Knights Of The Old Republic!

I did, however, get 2 of those features done. First up is comment counts, making it easier to see if someone has commented on an entry on the front page (chances are they haven’t, but hey, that’s life).

Secondly is much better error handling. Rather than outright reject a comment if it doesn’t resolve as valid XHTML, I now redisplay the form with all the fields as they were, with helpful advice on what is invalid.

The other features will probably appear more slowly over the course of the next fortnight as university starts back and I’ve got a backlog of work to do.

Just over a week ago, I experienced some phone woe. While I won’t bore you with all the details (basically Trium people wanted me to send my phone off to get fixed without telling me how much it would cost, which I didn’t like the sounds of), I bought a new phone. A spangly Motorola C350.

This post was originally going to be called “More Phone Woe” because the synchronisation software provided with the USB software is pretty terrible. This afternoon, however, it just decided that synchronising my contacts was no longer reason to crash. Hooray! Now, just need to get SMS messages synched and I can start building a software RSS aggregator for my phone (the plans are done).

I’ve got a back log of links that I want rid of, so I’ll dump them here. They all do exactly what they say on the tin:

• Group Typography - Creating a font based on multiple users ideas of what letters should look like,
• Worst Jobs In Science,
• XSLT Questions And Answers,
• PEAR Primer,
• Mind World Map - Users decide what the world map should look like. It’s starting to take real shape, if only more detail was allowed.

Don’t know how many of them are worth reading.

It be International Talk Like A Pirate Day (via Kryogenix! So be grabbing some grog, ye scurvy bilge rats, while I do a jaunty jig.