This was going to be a random links post, a fairly lengthy one at that. But before I submitted it, my login session ran out and the entire post got rejected. Ouch. I’ll rewrite it tomorrow (with even more links), but for now I’ll just hang my head and curse the way browsers won’t let you go back to retrieve your precious data.
As mentioned earlier, I went to see House Of 1000 Corpses. Don’t do the same.
Although it has some good (but brief) moments, and one of the funniest lines in cinematic history, it fails to be scary or funny. The horror and gruesomeness are muted by the lack of tension, comedy overtones (who can take rednecks seriously?) and the poor characterisation; you really won’t care when people are being butchered. That said, the comedy isn’t overt enough to be truly funny. Sure, you’ll giggle when the rednecks get angry, but nothing overt.
It’s not worth seeing. Really.
It occured to me earlier that I haven’t done any work for this site in a good few weeks; easily the longest I haven’t added, updated or upgraded the technical side of things in recent history. Time is, as Matt Bellamy recently said, running out.
Biggest killers of time then? Going back to university. The workload is phenomenal, and they keep piling it on. Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic is also taking up a fair bit of what was previously coding time. I’m not a Star Wars fanboy (although I like the films as much as the next male), but this game is fantastic. So much depth, so many choices that actually matter, so many side quests. Hopefully, that won’t last much longer.
So, in the few minutes before I go to see House Of 1000 Corpses (expect a review within the next day or two), I decided that I should improve the links to comments on these entries. So, if you click the comments link on an entry you will now be taking to the comments section, rather than the beginning of the entry.
10 seconds of coding well spent.
I would normally save this for a random links post, but it’s far too important for that. Joel has written the absolute minimum you need to know about unicode and character sets. I personally knew most of it (although UCS-2 was news to me), but I know how important this stuff will be in the future.
Get it learned if you want to work with computers in 10 years time. It’s really not that hard.
A slightly extended random link post this week, it’s just been building up over the last few days:
And that’s your lot for the day.
As the final part of Robert Rodriguez’s trilogy of gunfighter films based around the legendary El Mariachi, Once Upon A Time In Mexico stands strong. While not as exciting as its two precursors, it’s easily as funny (though none of them are comedies).
The pastiche of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns is obvious, but not unwelcome or overbearing. The actors play their traditional parts well, even Enrique Inglesias puts in a surprisingly good performance. Johnny Depp, as always, comes off best in his quirky CIA rule.
All in all, a film worth seeing, even if you don’t really know the backstory.
As part of a little research into word analysis and how effective it is (a few people can probably guess why I’m doing said research), I decided to analyse the reasonably predictable musical genre of nu-metal.
From about twenty minutes work came the Generic Nu Metal Analyser. Input some lyrics (proper English only - yes, that means you nu-metallers will have to learn to spell), and check out the results. It seems reasonably capable on the tests I’ve tried, but will undoubtedly give out false positives and so on. Give it a try though.
I would recommend Linkin Park and Evanescence as particularly generic nu metal songs that get picked up on (although they’re bound to have a song or two that aren’t so generic).
The University of Illinois is thinking about starting a Master of Fine Arts in Software (via Simon). It seems like a very interesting angle to study computing from (certainly more so than the cludge of mathematical approaches and rote learning that is so common these days).
People have to accept that, like any creative form, coding is an art. There’s certainly a lot of code that isn’t art, just as there is art which isn’t particularly artistic. Elegant solutions, engaging ideas, inspiring work; these are some of the defining characteristics of art. They all apply to software.
I know I’ve been somewhat lax in posting the past few days. I’ve been fairly busy with the huge amounts of work expected of me in 3rd year university, so at least part of this week has involved several meetings to form a team for a large project (that will no doubt be the cause of much swearing and a few posts later in the year).
Anyway, it’s time for the (almost) weekly random links:
Expect updates to stabilise more over the next week.