Solitude 

The links are coming fairly fast these days, so I’m just going to dump them as soon as I have enough (rather than post them at the end of each week):

• Endor Holocaust - Apparently, the destruction of the second Death Star would’ve wiped out Endor. Some people have far too much time,
• Caching Web Pages - I’ve been meaning to implement this stuff for literally years, but my current (internal) caching system isn’t good enough. It’s on my to-do list though,
• Accesskeys and reserved keystrokes - Thinking about making your site more accessible by adding accesskey attributes? The combinations to avoid are fairly comprehensive,
• Polytope Tetris - Ever wondered what 3D Tetris would be like? This program is your chance to experience it; along with 4D, 5D, etc. Imaginary dimensions are fun,
• An Introduction To Quantum Computing - In Quantum Mechanics, you’ve already had a good read of this,
• Top 10 Internet Fads - I remember at least some of this. All bad, all the time,
• Dilbert Hole - The rather sick reworked Dilbert comics. Very funny (via Derek).

Expect another batch within a few days (at this rate).

Given that their is a dearth of pictures of me on my site (with good reason), it’s with some trepidation that I link to a photo of me asleep in a lecture. I feel that it shows off my best features. The photo comes from Matt, who sneakily took it while I was in that particular pose.

I didn’t go to see The Medallion with particularly high hopes. I expected some typical Jackie Chan action, with some buddy comedy moments provided by Lee Evans. Mindless, enjoyable entertainment.

I was wrong.

It’s an absolutely dreadful film, to the extent that it’s quite amusing. It’s rare that a film manages to be so poorly done, so horribly cheesey, that it gets back to the funny stage.

Plot “twists” and occurences frequently appear from nowhere: the little boy suddenly gains the ability to travel between dimensions at the end of the film (which would have been handy when kidnapped by the evil doers), a plane suddenly appearing at Lee Evans’ house, Lee Evans’ wife having a huge weapons cache (we presume that she is some sort of secret agent, but it is never stated or hinted at), the fact that Jackie seems to be both invincible and immortal despite only having half of the medallion (despite being told something to the contrary in the film). There’s a lot more.

Poor acting, poor plot, no characterisation. All in all a humourously bad film.

After the UGC recently changed their pages to a more irregular format (in terms of code), the screen-scraped RSS feeds I made from them fell apart.

I finally got a chance to have a look at the code tonight and was terrified that it might be part of the main scraping that was going wrong (it’s fragile, very fragile), rather than the postprocessing.

Thankfully, the problem was that rather than leave directors and actor details blank (as previously) they now remove the line entirely. This actually reduces the amount of code I was using to parse out the details I didn’t want.

In short, there was a problem and I’ve now fixed it. Please resume enjoyment of the UGC RSS feeds as long as they last before breaking again (such is the perilous nature of screen scraping).

Since my random links bar was bloated already, I thought I’d post early:

• Scott Johnson under the iron - Creator of Feedster and nice guy gets interviewed,
• New Scrabble Proposal - Some idiots want to put txt-spk into the official Scrabble word set. Better idea: let’s remove them from “conversational” English instead,
• How Regexes Work - Fascinating look at how regular expressions work, not how to use them, but how the language converts them into machines and does state manipulation,
• Blizzard Chess - A new patch is out for chess,
• Progressive Chess - How the rules of chess have changed over the years, including making the Queen so damn powerful,
• FOAF splinters into 10 groups - The FOAF group have split into 10 different organisations. Very funny,
• CSS Underscore Hack - Yet another way of targeting IE users,
• Stroke gives women British accent - Imagine: brain damage that can make you sound better.

And that’s all.

The new romantic comedy, Love Actually, can be described reasonably accurately in terms of the dimensions of the film it came on.

It’s a few millimetres across, far too long, and about as deep as a piece of paper.

That does wrap it up nice and neatly but for anyone who wants a slightly extended review, here goes: there are about 6 plot strands that are vaguely interwoven (i.e. the characters know each other vaguely). The characters in each are poorly acted (with the exception of Alan Rickman - but, you know, he’s Alan Rickman after all), and underdeveloped. You can’t really care that they’re all caught up in love because it’s never built-up or developed on. Everyone is just in love, and you have to both accept and care about it. Nothing is dealt with any further than that. Really.

Don’t see it. Unless you get dragged by a partner, you have no excuses.

It’s about time for another random link post. Because I’ve been tied up with work this week, some of this is old news, but I’ll propagate it anyway.

• Skinning in Seoul - A fascinating look at the things being done with mobiles in the East. I know I want the phone with the built-in TV,
• Regex Blog - A blog about regular expressions. A bit of a dry subject, certainly, but this is the sort of thing that will come in handy for a lot of developers,
• A Life Without Tivo - A child who has never known TV without a PVR thinks any other TV is broken. The marketing people will have a field day,
• Devkit Advance - Programming GameBoy Advances. A bit niche, but interesting,
• Nokia N-Gage cracked - Security on the new N-Gage has been cracked already, allowing games to be run on other mobiles,
• Let Them Sing It For You - Type in some song lyrics, and you’ll get an interpretation back taken from words in other songs. Bizarre,
• Family Guy could be coming back - Excellent news. Due to high DVD sales, Family Guy might be getting revived
• First Galaxy Jedi - In the new MMORPG Star Wars: Galaxies, the first Jedi have appeared. Within hours, a bounty was on their heads. Very appropriate,
• FOAFFinger - Using FOAF to provide a rich fingering repository (no jokes, please),
• Ninja Monkeys - And finally, some pictures of my friends and I pulling ninja poses in the 3rd year computing lab of Glasgow University. Why? Why not.

Some really good stuff today. Enjoy.

Finally finished this week’s assignment, so I’ll be doing a link post later (from home). I couldn’t wait to post this though.

Easy CSS drop shadows provides a way of doing decent drop shadows for images, with no redundant markup. Very nice.

Better though is the hilarious picture of the waving cat. I laughed for a good ten minutes.

It has been brought to my attention that the UGC RSS feeds are broken. Unfortunately, I won’t have any time to fix it until next week at the earliest. Sorry for any inconvenience caused, I’ll get on it as soon as I can.

Up until relatively recently, I didn’t think I had a strong mental block (except whilst sitting in exam rooms). As can be inferred, it turns out I do.

For me, it is absolutely bizarre and foreign. Not being able to think about something (for whatever reason) is just so very odd. You start vaguely thinking about the subject and forming questions, but before they get anywhere it’s all gone. Nothing quite like it.

It irritates and interests me. Thinking about it clearly doesn’t help (and neither does not thinking about it). What can one do?