Solitude 

There are three main components of any car crash, although they do not seem to occur in the order one might expect. The crash itself (part 2) happens first.

A crunching, visceral impact; invariably wrenching you forward, hopefully snapping against a seat belt. Debris gains momentum, clashing against anything in the way. The most innocuous of items causes severe damage to those nearby.

A black out. Dead time wasted. A slow realisation the impact is over and the bleeding begins.

An indeterminate paralysis and a cry for help; someone might find you soon, maybe you’ll be alone for a long time.

It’s too early to know if you’ve survived: blood pumps fast, dizziness and nauseousness cloud the senses, and feelings of dread conflict with delirium.

You’ll either make it to Part 3 or you won’t.

After recently being delighted by Archive.org’s new features, they’ve done it again in the form of FreeCache.

It provides a way for content providers with bandwidth limitations to maximise external cache usage. In short, if you want to serve up large files, you save money, your ISP saves money, everyone is happy.

Can’t wait to see what they do next.

The second installment of Kill Bill is a very different prospect to the first. Where Tarantino focussed on stylish sword play, gallons of blood and an almost comic book atmosphere in Kill Bill, Volume 1, Volume 2 instead takes a much more down to Earth approach.

Instead of showing the bloody rampage of The Bride in its gory detail, it instead centres on her relationship with the eponymous Bill, grounding the film in the events that led to the revenge. It becomes almost tender at times; a million miles away from the cold killing of the first film.

Not that the second film is lacking the over the top kung-fu of its forebear. Pai Mei alone ensures plenty of grainy, cheap zooms, as well as a laugh or two.

An excellent film, that only suffers through the previous excellence of its lineage. While it doesn’t compare with the first installment well, it is a great film in its own right. See it.

It’s been a while since the last random links post so this is a big one:

• XHTML and QuickTime - A standards compliant way of embedding QuickTime movies in web pages.
• Princeton 3D Model Search - Make a sketch (either 3D or 2D) and this will try to find a similar 3D model. Results are hit and miss.
• KKrieger - A first person shooter in 96k. The mind boggles. It also looks pretty damn good.
• String Matching Algorithms - All the background and algorithms you’ll ever need for string matching, demonstrated by some Java applets.
• Imagine You’re A Chicken - Dunstan has lost it.
• Game Desktops - Desktop wallpapers based on classic games.
• Installing Linux On A Dead Badger - For the hardcore.
• Movie Budget Records - Most of the losses shown here were down to piss poor marketing (how many of them have you heard of, let alone seen?).
• Kevin Bacon - To make Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon easier.
• IE Mime type mangling - One more workaround for the worlds biggest browser. Sigh.
• Bill Gates Is Not The Richest - Yes, he’s been replaced as the richest business man in the world. Click through for the shock replacement.
• Groovy - A strange mix of Java and Python.
• PHP Style Guide - Some of this looks absolutely hideous. Really ugly code.
• Xbox emulator - Don’t expect too much just yet.
• Bribing Restaurants - Excellent tale of a man bribing his way into some exclusive establishments.
• Learn The Shell - It’s your way to an easier life, really.
• Process Forking in PHP - Interesting…
• Liam Lynch - A brief look at the life of alt.rock personified.
• Tontie - An insane whack a mole style game. Causes stress. Great!

That’s all for another week or two.

In a departure from other recent zombie films, Shaun Of The Dead actually makes use of the Z-word. Not that that is important, just an observation.

The film itself is fantastic. A top-notch script, some excellently timed jokes, and hilarious acting. The Reservoir Dogs homage is worth seeing all on its own.

There’s not too much bad to be said about it, apart from the ever so slightly cheesey best friend fart moment.

Probably the best film this year, thus far.

After being hacked recently and losing some data, I’ve managed to restore the missing files. Permalinks are now working again, feeds have been regenerated, caches are in place, and the backend seems to be there. It’s just a pain having to do it.

If anyone notices anything missing or unexpectedly 404ing, you know how to contact me.

I can’t say much about how absolutely idiotic the new CNET syndication format is. Mark Pilgrim sums it up best in Hot RSS.

Why anyone would rename RSS elements is beyond me. At least Atom is clarifying a lot of the inaccuracy or vagueness of the RSS specs, while providing some new elements.

Partly via Waxy.org comes news that Archive.org has some excellent new features (or maybe this is me just noticing them).

First up is the new movie archive featuring such classics as Night Of The Living Dead, to download for free. Most of the films are extremely old, but the price is right.

Also excellent is the new Live Music Archive, featuring full live sets in the shorten format. Although I hadn’t heard of most of the bands, it has some hidden gems like 19 Tenacious D sets. For free. Take that record industry fools.

I had previously never heard of the shorten format, but do a quick google search for it and everything you need to know about listening to, creating and decompressing .shn files becomes available.

In a story about infamous London gangster, Charlie Richardson, you might expect to hear about his rise to power, the struggles he had with rivals, set-ups for his ultimate fall when finally sent to jail; the film Charlie is not like this at all.

Lacking real focus, the film instead looks at anecdotes relating to the testimony given against him and, more often, other short tales of his criminal endeavours that are largely unrelated.

Although the film is clearly biased towards his version of events, we never really see a hero (or anti-hero) emerge, leaving the film sadly lacking in terms of character and plot. Certainly, we learn something of the man, but never enough to really make us care either way, no struggle, no interest.

While Luke Goss puts in a strong visual performance as the title role, his faux-cockney accent grates and ultimately taints the whole film.

Sub-par ganster action, but not entirely without merit.

The random links have been piling up for the last two weeks, so time to get on with it:

• Hostile Copy Protection - This is surely taking copy protection too far.
• Citizen Kubrick - Absolutely fascinating look at the archives of Stanley Kubrick. An amazing read.
• Hard Disk Risk - You really have to do some serious disk formatting to get rid of data.
• Album Covers From Memory, in Paint - Exactly what it claims to be. Some interesting renditions of familiar album covers.
• Unicode Sampler - Samples of different Unicode characters.
• PHP Iconv Handler - Why was I not informed that converting to UTF-8 would be this easy? I’ll be doing this soon.
• 39 Steps For Story Writing - Sound advice on writing more good.
• Switching from PHP to Zope/Python - Not entirely convincing, but worth a read.
• The Importance Of Fudgeability - Rigid systems die. Extensibility and the human factor must be considered.
• The Nightmare Of Localisation - There are more problems than you have considered.
• How To Be A Programmer - Practical advice for all would be professional programmers.
• Jailbird Man - A flash game based on the fantastic Harvey Birdman. Try and break out some characters you failed to defend.
• IECapture - See what your site looks like in a range of windows browsers. Useful resource for designers.
• RSS Shell Scripting - A shell script for parsing RSS feeds. Insane.
• 100 Movies That Deserve More Love - A list of classic films that do, indeed, deserve more love. Watch at least 5.
• GBA Crash Course - Learn to program a simple GBA pong game.
• Guide To Indie Rock Hair - Everything you need to know to have indie rock hair, for boys and girls.

And that’ll do.