Solitude 

This weeks random links:

• Throw Rocks At Boys - A charming little flash game where you throw rocks… at boys.
• IE HTTP Headers - Like Live Headers, but for a crap browser.
• Plucene - A perl port of Lucene, the java indexing project.
• Regex For URLs - A mammoth regex that will parse almost any kind of url. Complex stuff.
• Anime Cartoon - An odd little gif animation.
• Link Bar - Another workaround for Internet Explorer’s lackings, a link bar. Comes as standard on other browsers.
• Sharp Edges - Funny image.
• Yahoo Vs Google - Visualisation of search engine overlap and differences.
• Bright Fish - Who knew that MP3s are allowed to be tagged with “a bright coloured fish”? It’s in the spec.
• LinkFader - A link fader script that seems to be markup friendly. Nice.
• Things My Maths Teacher Did - Some absolutely bizarre behaviour from a teacher.
• Ninja Golf - A great idea, whether it is a spoof or not.
• Pikasso - Imagine the rocking you could do on this bad boy.
• The Viagra Prank - Taking a viagra and then going to church. Bad idea, but funny.

That’s it for today.

Although I’m loathe to include any personal entries on this site, I feel compelled to write about something odd I saw today. I was (and to an extent still am) having a terrible day, and on the way home I spotted something odd: 24 magpies.

One for sorrow, two for joy… and all the rest. Now, as I recall, the things you get for seeing more of them get better and better as you go. Six is for gold, seven for a secret never told. Twenty-four must be one hell of a great thing; and I know what I want.

24. 24. More soon.

A (comparatively) short review of The Dreamers: unengaging, self-involved, border-line pretentious, near-arthouse garbage.

This ground has been treaded before, down less smug avenues; in ways that aren’t overtly dull. Avoid.

Finally there is a prepay 3G mobile plan in the UK. Three have unveiled their top-up based system, no longer requiring huge contracts for the new features.

As expected, there is a catch. Or two.

It’s expensive compared to other mobile companies. If you have no motivation to constantly use the video features, it might not work out well. It’s 15p per text message to other networks, and with added complications (the first £1.50 of your credit is priced differently), the pricing structure is bloated.

The other main set-back is that all credit has to be used within 30 days of activating it or it gets removed. That’s right, you’re effectively having your money swiped out from under you if you’re a little lax one month. This is the same trick the first prepay mobile plans tried to use to leverage wallets. It failed. You would think Three had learned the lessons of the past.

Seems like a good idea on the surface, but hold off another few months and maybe they’ll get the pricing under control and remove the restraints.

From the trailers it is easy to imagine Tim Burton’s new film, Big Fish, as just being more Hollywood fantasy tripe, with about as much depth as Chicago (how I love that film).

Surprising, then, is the fact that Big Fish is actually quite entertaining.

It’s not laugh out loud funny, but the tall tales being woven into a bizarre cornucopia of imagery and tangents. The bit parts are fantastically acted, even if Ewan McGregor’s accent is a little irritating.

A good film, that managed to surpass low expectations.

This is going to be a sizeable, but slightly dated link post, as I’ve been sitting on some of this stuff for 2 weeks. Enjoy:

• Slice City - Play Sim City within The Sims. Look at the screenshots and it’ll make much more sense.
• Googledorks - Some google searches that you can use to get at sensitive information. People really are this stupid.
• MozCC - A mozilla extension that allows sites a Creative Commons license to be parsed in the browser. Not a bad idea.
• Poignant Guide To Ruby - Funny, yet informative, guide to Ruby. The best language guide I’ve seen (there are cartoon foxes everywhere).
• Pronounciation of SQL - It all makes sense now.
• Elephant Vs. Bird - Flash game where you need to avoid being squashed.
• Doxygen - A tool for autogenerating manuals for code. Works in C, Java, PHP and more. Via Derek.
• Seven Steps To Better Presentations - I’m going to need this fairly soon. The comments also have some fairly good suggestions.
• Atom API and Nokia - The mobile phone company looks like backing Atom. Nice.
• Logo Trends - Interesting study of logo trends at the moment. Some of the spirals are very nice.
• Compilers Are Easy - Making writing compilers sound easy. I have my doubts.
• Design patterns and PHP - Interesting article that suffers from terrible readability.
• Why C Is Not My Favourite Programming Language - A little harsh, but bang on for the most part. The lack of strings or booleans in C is a constant annoyance.
• Redesigning Comment Forms - I have always implemented the basics of this, and if I ever get round to adding the ability to remember users I’ll do the rest.
• Character Encodings - Everything anyone ever wanted to know about character encoding issues, and more.
• dotemacs - A wonderful resource for those new to the worlds of emacs.
• Bush Vs. Palpatine - Which of these quotes was said by George Bush and which by Emperor Palpatine. Hint: the worst ones are all Bush.

That’s all for another day.

Slightly formulaic, but still amusing, School Of Rock is exactly what you might expect.

The plot focusses around Jack Black trying to teach some school kids to rock. You know what to expect, he helps a few of them through hard times in their life, and helps them to loosen up. They, in turn, teach him to grow up.

Despite the predictable, back of a matchbox script, it is still fairly amusing. This can be attributed more to the charm and energy that Black puts into his perfomances, than to the jokes themselves. Either way, though, it is well worth watching.

Deciding on which font to use is always a difficult decision. In recent versions of Solitude, I’ve tended towards Verdana for almost everything: body text, headers, fields. Now, no more.

Thanks to What The Font, I can now figure out exactly which great font other people are using for images. This is exactly what the internet is about: stealing (in this case, ideas) through sharing (services). Great.

In all seriousness, it’s a wonderful service that seems to do its job well. More, please.

A few quick links for the weekend (nowhere near as many as normal, but sleep beckons):

• Operashow Generator - Use Opera as a cheap but pretty powerpoint substitute. A very nice feature.
• Decompression Bombs - Overload most computers by creating special zip files. They start off at 7k, and unzip to 100Gb. Frightening, cool and utterly amazing at the same time.
• iCapture - A service that displays pictures of websites as seen by Safari, for all the appleless developers. Handy.
• Unicode Spaces - Unicode has an insane number of space characters. Wasteful.
• Free Rockstar Classics - Rockstar are offering their old games (optimised for modern PCs) for free. The current two are the classic Grand Theft Auto, and Wild Metal Country. A superb idea, and absolutely the right thing to do.

And that’s all for the weekend.

Via Jacques Distler comes news of a plug-in for internet explorer that allows it to understand MathML: MathPlayer.

A great and useful tool it will be given that there will be no new versions of IE made available for free download (according to Microsoft). But it shouldn’t be up to a third party company to fix the deficiencies in the browser: Microsoft, if it is to show any commitment to the web, should have added this a long time ago.

Sadly, it won’t happen. If IE is going to change, it will be the hackers that change it. Or people could try changing browsers. Firefox is brand new, much faster than anything else on the market, will be constantly updated, and does everything you could possibly want from a browser. It has a large development community working on extensions to make it do even more.

Take back the web, as the new FF motto goes, get a browser that works well.

This says it all about MS: Microsoft House XP