Solitude 

It had to happen sometime. I knew that as soon as I heard about Atom that someone would inevitably get round to styling the bloody thing, forcing every alpha geek from here to xanadu to do the same (”but better”). It finally happened: Sam Ruby is styling Atom.

Not that it’s any harder than styling RSS. And not that I’m going to do it quite yet. I don’t think there is any demand yet for a stylised Atom feed. I’ll wait until nearer that time.

I’ve always been a sucker for spoon-based games (especially the classic card game, Spoons). So when I read this I had to pass it on. From Yea, but is it art:

Visit their home and then, when leaving, tell them that you’ve hidden a spoon somewhere in the flat and they have to find it. You could mention that there is a five pound note wrapped around it too… The missus’ pal then phoned up sounding rather angry and demanding to know where we’d hidden the spoon. Apparently she’d broken three nails and killed a plant which was uprooted from its pot in the quest to find the missing spoon.

Read the whole thing, very funny and certainly worth trying.

Yes, I finally got round to really updating the tech side of this site for the first time in ages. To aid accessibility, comment permalinks now have title attributes attached (not much, but it helps). For those occassions when standard acronyms are to be over-ridden, I’ve added the ability to switch off auto acronyms. Finally, I added a comment previewing feature (that should keep Jacques happy, at least). Go on, have a play with them.

I also got round to updating my foaf file. Expect that to change a bit more in the near future when I might get round to adding contacts to it.

When I was born: breathing, squirming, crying, making noise, pooing.

When I was 5: starting primary school, Roland Rat, Mask, tab clear, blocks in the hole.

When I was 10: getting along, being the oldest in school, group politics (the effects of Ribena).

When I was 15: girls.

Today, I’m 20: my girlfriend, friends, university, enjoying life.

When I’m 25: …

More random links:

• CSS Tips - A bunch of useful CSS tips and tricks, including some stuff I’d never seen before,
• Beating Copy Protection - How do you beat new fangled copy protection? Hold down shift,
• Podlob - Experiments in flash and DHTML. Fun to look at and play with,
• This Is The Title Of This Story - Bizarre self-referential story. Worth reading just for the confusion,
• Nokia Gameboy - Turn your Nokia phone into a gameboy. Emulation taken too far just far enough,
• Monopoly Probabilities - Various probabilities in Monopoly. The square you’re most likely to land on? Jail, of course,
• Rendering The Segway Obsolete - Funny and true, this will make the Segway a thing of the past,
• ESP Game - Making humans index the images of the web under the subterfuge of scoring points. Genius.
• Every Language War - This is exactly what every language war ever has boiled down to,
• Sliding Doors - The relaunch of A List Apart comes with this fantastic article on CSS tabs,
• XPath Tutorial - Thanks to this tutorial, I finally get XPath. I’ve been playing with it for the past few days. Very nice,
• Define: solitude - How could I not try this? Google has a new tool.

And that’s that for today.

Following on from yesterdays iTune Vs Winamp 5 post comes a few more iTunes horror stories.

Firstly, Dylan Greene is claiming that iTunes is the worst windows app ever. Oucho.

Secondly, The Great Metadebacle shows in detail what I meant about moving files around. That’s just not on.

I won’t post the rest (do a feedster search if you must know). Either it was a really lazy port, or it just plain sucked in the first place. I don’t know which.

Ported from OS X, iTunes is the newcomer to the windows media fight making the big noise. Are nullsoft (makers of Winamp going to sit back and take it? Apparently not. A brand new beta version of Winamp 5 has coincidentally been released. But I’ll come back to that.

First up, iTunes. The best feature has got to be the smart playlists. Being able to pick a bunch of conditions and let it pick matching files from your library is both convenient and easy. Very powerful stuff. It also, of course, looks the business. Chrome and clear blue interface makes for abundant geek drool.

The bad parts:

• The horror stories - Some rather poor behaviour has been reported on behalf of the program. And by poor I mean “unforgivable”. A default option should not change a huge bit of the filing system. That is flashing red light stuff,
• Performance - Terrible. It’s a processor and memory hog. With over 4000 files loaded into the library, it uses up 20Mb or so. That’s comparable to the rather bloated MusicMatch. The minimum processor speed is 500Mhz. For an mp3 player. It means it as well, get just over that and use a few light weight apps and the system will start hanging. There is no need for that at all,
• Can’t use m3u files - Contentious, certainly, but not allowing people to use existing playlists (especially in an open format like m3u) is going to put people off. Personally, I have 20-30 playlists. I’m not going to reconstruct them in another format,
• Smart playlists don’t go far enough - This really frustrated me, although the smart playlists are great, they don’t go near far enough. I want to be able to write compound boolean queries, not being restricted to “all” or “any” queries. Certainly an advanced feature that should be in there.
• Very poor customisation options - No skins, no plug ins, nothing. Fortunate, then, that the default skin is good enough.

And then there is Winamp. It’s embarassingly (and unexpectedly) better. Taking the best parts of winamp 2 and 3 and combining them was a work of genius, done near flawlessly:

• Lightweight - With the same 4000+ song library, the memory usage peaks at 8Mb. Much better. CPU time? Negligible; not a single performance glitch.
• Looks - A good looking default skin (certainly better than Winamp 2’s boring default), and eighteen thousand more for download, there is a look waiting for everyone,
• Plug ins - Backwards compatability has afforded the winamp team the luxury of plugins to do pretty much anything. I especially like the DSP plugins (if you don’t know, you don’t need to).
• Slider - The slide down equaliser (default skin) is also a cause of much drool. Very nice.

What did they get wrong? Not a lot. The media library search could be doing with the same compound boolean searches that iTune could use. That’s all I can think of.

The all important crash count: Winamp 0, iTunes 5. That’s in a few days.

This piece might come off as heavily biased towards Winamp 5; that’s because it’s plain better. Deal with it.

I’ll say it up front: Kill Bill is a damn good film. Tongue in cheek direction coupled with over the top kung fu scenes conspire to make you laugh and look away simultaneously; disgusted by the gratuitous amount of decapitations, yet undeniably amused by it.

And no, it wasn’t only my occasionally sick mind that thought so (anyone been around long enough to remember the rabbits? Thought not.)

The acting, dialogue and plot are suitably cheesey, the ending perfectly done, and the anime section breathtakingly done. Very bloody, yet artistic.

A definite must see film, certainly one of this year’s highlights.

As Disney films go, Finding Nemo fairs well. It’s the story of an over-protective father who loses his son. Of course, they’re both fish. This much you know from the adverts. I’m sure you can also guess that there are morals and lessons to be learned all over the place.

What you might not have realised is just how funny it is. And that, for once, Ellen Degeneres isn’t very annoying. She, shock horror, actually manages to be funny.

I don’t want to say too much more about the film, just that it’s very funny and very worth seeing.

Here’s a slightly briefer version of the random links post that got tragically wiped yesterday:

• CSS float tutorial - Can’t get your head around floats in CSS? This is the guide. Clear, concise and well illustrated; makes everything much easier,
• Unicode Applications in PHP - A guide to getting PHP applications to use unicode. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it looks quite good,
• Multibyte String Functions - Or PHP’s built-in unicode handling functions.
• Secure Shell Access Instructions - Everything you need to know about secure shell access (if you don’t know what that is, you don’t need to),
• Atom API - Mark lays out a brief history of content management APIs followed by a close look at the upcoming Atom API. A must read for anyone working with content management or syndication,
• Mozilla - The Mozilla website has been redesigned by Dave Shea (of Mezzoblue). It looks great, can’t wait for the rest,
• Death Of A Metatag - It has been done: metatags are now dead. Don’t even think about indexing them (not that anyone does anymore),
• OPML Considered H.. awful - An outline of why the OPML serialisation format is piss poor. My own experiences with it are less than pleasant,
• A 3d House In CSS - An interesting way of making art with CSS. Very clever,
• Example User Stylesheets - Pretty much what it says on the tin: examples of user stylesheets.
• PHP Scalability - An article on how scalable PHP is. If it is good enough for Scott to build Feedster, then it’s good enough for me.

Quite tech heavy; I’ll try to make the next link post a little lighter.