Solitude 

A reasonably large random link post today:

• Towers Of Hanoi - The classic puzzle in dozens of different computer languages, including an OS designed to solve the puzzle,
• Ocarina Of Time 2D - Someone is recreating the classic Zelda 64, in 2 dimensions. It looks quite nice, in a retro sort of way,
• Blogshares is gone back - After the recent closing of Blogshares, the site is now back with new management. It’s a fun game, in the short term,
• Atom Info Proposal - A proposal to make Atom readable in browsers (and by means of an extra tag and CSS. Why not just cut that down to using an XSL processing instruction? Makes sense to me,
• Ideogram Maker - Decide what various ideograms mean. Via Kevan,
• New IE bug - A very nasty Internet Explorer bug, making it a lot less safe to enter important details into that browser. Why does anyone still use it? It is garbage,
• How Not To Blog - Starting a blog? Pay attention to most of these rules and you’ll be fine, possibly even interesting,
• Find MIDIs - An excellent resource for finding MIDI files,
• Free Flight - A very absorbing, 3d paper plane flying program. It’s in shockwave, and is very relaxing,
• Airspeed Velocity Of An Unladen Swallow - Someone finally figured out the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. Pythoners worldwide rejoice.

And I’m done.

You should be able to change feed URLs in Luke Hutteman’s Sharpreader without any hassle. You can’t. Here’s how you do it:

1. Close SharpReader, making sure it is completely gone and not just hiding in the SysTray.
2. Open your SharpReader data directory. On Windows XP, this will be something like “C:Documents and Settings%USER%Application DataSharpReader”, where %USER% is your username.
3. Open the file called subscriptions.xml in a text editor (Notepad will do fine). It contains the list of all your current subscriptions. Find the line which applies to the feed you want to change and change it to the new URL. Save the file and close it.
4. Open the subdirectory called “cache”. There will be a list of XML files. Their names correspond to the feed they are caching. If you updated the feed name, change it here as well. If you updated the feed’s extension, things are trickier. If it has been changed to .xml, remove the old extension from the cached file name. If it has been changed from .xml, you will need to add the new extension to the end of the file name (it will not currently have a .xml extension).
5. Restart SharpReader.

That’s what works for me, but as protection for me try this at your own risk.

There are three ways to reasonably serve up RSS, listed here in order of preference:

1. application/rss+xml
2. application/xml
3. text/xml

Since the first is the type we say we’re serving in the link tag (despite that type not being a real MIME type), that is the one we should probably pick to serve our feeds as. The problem is that browsers (rightly) refuse to display application/rss+xml. Instead, they try to download it or pass it to another viewer.

This behaviour doesn’t help someone who doesn’t know what an RSS feed does (a problem that needs addressed). They will see something they do not understand being downloaded and abort. Not good. To aid in this, it would be nice for the user to see the styled feed (my RSS 2.0 feed already has CSS styling).

Two thoughts occurred to me: “Are there any workarounds?” and “How are others serving their RSS feeds?”.

Changing the content-type to application/xml fixes the visibility problem, but means that feeds are inconsistent with the link tag. In turn, changing the link tag to suit the new content-type isn’t feasible. There are dozens of aggregators who need to see application/rss+xml in the link tag to do auto-discovery properly.

Step 2 was to see how others serve their feeds. The results were disconcerting, at best. Jacques Distler and Anne van Kesteren both use text/xml, Mark Pilgrim uses application/xml, and Sam Ruby uses application/xml for RSS 0.91 and application/rss+xml for RSS 2.0.

Ouch.

In the end, it’s probably best to settle on the middle option: application/xml. Why? It provides visibility, is the parent of the “correct” MIME type (if you see these things as hierarchical), and it is a real MIME type.

The situation is hardly ideal, but it’s the one we have.

As an aside, my RSS feeds now have a new extension (.rss, rather than .xml). I’ll be doing a transparent redirect for now, in a month or so I’ll make it explicit, and a month after that I might remove the old style entirely. Please update your subscriptions now to avoid disappointment later.

Forget the critical acclaim. Forget the well-known cast. Forget the music by Billy “I’m Deep” Corgan.

The fact of the matter is that Spun is dire, save one scene.

The cast are largely annoying, perhaps by design. However, it certainly doesn’t make them any more endearing or interesting to watch.

The most grating part of the film is the music, where horribly overt acoustic tunes abound. They detract from the film by being played along to driving sections, cutting the pace in exactly the wrong places.

If your idea of gritty realism (a phrase that is bound to appear in any review of the film) is anything with a low-grain camera, jaunty angles and some faux arthouse dialogue (in limited doses), then this might just appeal to you. To anyone expecting actual depth, go elsewhere.

A staccato review for a staccato film.

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.