Solitude 

This is a large links post today, due to the lack of time to post it over the last few weeks (and some minor PHP and permissions problems).

• Bowman - An excellent flash game, with very satisfying hit noises and blood.
• SpotCode - Using your mobile phone’s camera as a pointer for your computer. Will it replace the mouse? Doubt it.
• Is the ninja death touch real? - Apparently not. Well, maybe not.
• Writing efficient PHP code - Some stuff even I never knew, like string concatenation runs faster when using single quotes.
• Fight Club: The Game - The very idea sickens me.
• Ticked Off Links - Checkboxes on visited links. Very clever effect.
• Google Software Principles - A reasonable set of guidelines from the upcoming giant.
• O’Reilly openbooks - The tech book company give away old editions. Very forward thinking. Kudos.
• Mr T Vs. Everything - I bet he won all of them too. He’s just that tough.
• Musicology Strategy - Prince gives his new album away at his concerts. Very forward thinking. Kudos.
• Object Oriented Improvements in PHP 5 - If you’re a Java programmer, most of this will be second nature.
• Backslider - An interesting history browsing idea, but not sure how it’d fair with a multiple tabs and windows.
• What is RAID? - A nice overview of the various forms of RAID.
• DTD mapper - Creates a hierarchy to browser from a given DTD. Nice.
• PNG Sun demo - An interesting little lighting demo for Mozilla browsers.
• Scribe - Mozilla plug-in that saves and restores text areas upon CTRL+S. An absolute gem.
• Onion Skin Shadows - A good tutorial on getting rounded edges and other effects using CSS.
• PHP Coding Standard - Not sure I’d agree with all of this, but not a bad start.
• Detente - The syndication formats all have specific purposes. Use the right one for the right goal.
• Perl Operator Periodic Table - Unbelievable number of operators.
• I Chased You For 12 Years… - Tragic but hilarious tale.
• Cows With Guns - Very funny flash cartoon, particularly the ending.

End. And I’ve still got enough links left for a regular size post.

Yes, it’s been quiet here for the last few days. A full random link post will follow shortly (and it will be rather large), but for now I’d like to draw attention to an interview with the HHGG movie writer.

Although, like many fans of the excellent Douglas Adams books, I was apprehensive about the film possibilities, this interview quashes all fears. The film looks like it is in safe hands.

Via Submit Response comes news that today is Towel Day. Sure the day is almost over, but you can never be too careful with your towelling needs. This one is for the late great Douglas Adams.

Films billed as epic rarely live up to the hype. It’s hardly surprising then that Troy is fairly terrible. Not absolutely dire, but there is nothing to make the viewer care. Or indeed to make this reviewer give much more than a list of what went wrong:

• The prologue. Everything important from this introductory text was in the film. Why bother?
• Battle Scenes. Lacking a certain amount of visceral imagery, a lot of the huge battles looked like swords under the arms affairs (particularly the first beach assault at Troy). It was difficult to get a real sense of scale in most battles.
• Brad Pitt. Now, many years ago, I thought the boy Pitt was just eye candy for the ladies (no, never confused), but his performances in many films since then have convinced me he is an excellent actor. Why, then, this dire souless performance? Dry, lacking personality, painful.
• Orlando Bloom. Now, in the short time since he first appeared, I’ve thought that Bloom was talentless. I still do. Who told him he was an actor anyway? He gives the same performance he did in Pirates Of The Caribbean.
• The direction. Cuts don’t go together properly, lazy use of cityscape panoramas, CG inserts. Trying to be epic for the sake of it, rather than because the material is there to warrant it (not that the Trojan War wasn’t epic, just that this interpretation is far from it).

Eric Bana, however, really showed off how skilled he is; an excellent actor with a bright future. The rest is dead weight.

Those nice people over at Ping-O-Matic have finally set up an XMLRPC interface. If you use any pinging service at all, I implore you to stop and just ping rpc.pingomatic.com. Keep it centralised and simple.

First thing I’ve added to this site in a while.

Never write a to-do list in public. Almost a year on and I’ve done way less than half of that stuff. The things I have done have largely been the easy ones (although I did sort out that comments business nicely).

Never again.

There are three main components of any car crash, although they do not seem to occur in the order one might expect. The cause (part 1) slowly burns into your conscious in the minutes and weeks following the crash.

The truth of the matter is that the real cause will never be known. It started too long ago; a chain of events, large and small, snowballing into this final collision.

Did you check the mirror? Did you see anything behind you? The blind spot is always there and becomes a matter of much self-loathing after the crash.

Maybe you did see something coming. Maybe you hoped it would be alright. Yeah, everything will be alright. Keep your eyes on the road ahead and never deviate. Focus and ignore the doubt.

Delude yourself. Do what it takes to believe that “it’ll be alright”. You are heading for a car crash.

Time for some more random links:

• Nifty Tricks For Emacs - Lots of interesting little ideas for extending your text editor.
• Verbless Book - A Frenchman has written the first book without verbs. Why? Because he could, dammit.
• PDML - A markup language and processor to turn XML into PDF. Good use of php minilanguages.
• Metroid Cubed - An isometric version of the original Metroid. Absolutely awesome.
• Man 1, Bank 0 - Very long, but highly entertaining story about a man who banked a junk mail cheque and got more than he bargained for.
• The Return Of Andy Kaufman - Can we really expect to see him soon? Maybe, just maybe.
• Why You Should Never Put Your Picture On The Internet - Dozens of spoof pictures.
• Reuters RSS - Reuters are now providing categorised RSS feeds. Nice.
• The Infinite Cat Project - Cats looking at cats looking at cats…
• Adventure Morality Fable For Boys #7 - Don’t eat rubbers.
• Is Evil - Bert is, apparently, most evil.
• Navigation Matrix - Very nice looking CSS navigation.
• Regex Tutorial - Great tutorial on regular expressions and the problems they can cause to amateurs.
• Pacmanhattan - Pacman played in the middle of a city.
• Drinking Alone - Why drinking alone is a noble art.
• PearPC - OSX on Linux.
• The Shining In 30 Seconds (with bunnies) - Flash animation that is exactly what it says it is. Excellent.

Updates will be sporadic for the next few weeks, as first exams are tomorrow.

Erik Benson is saying some very interesting things about self-explanatory objects and context, by extension.

Is it possible to remove an item from context, away from social convention and understanding? To truly understand something you have to be able to contextualise it. The untrained ear might be forgiven for thinking that heavy music is just noise. Those more familiar with a band’s influences find it easier to pick out melody, inflection, and more significant technical achievements (tapping a cow bell every 16 beats, while still hammering away elsewhere, say).

Context is key to all understanding and enjoyment. There was a study many years ago to do with the influence of music on film. They played a really serious scene (violently so) and showed audiences it with dramatic music and then more comical music over the top. From the context of the music, audiences were either highly uncomfortable or laughing heavily. What does that say to you?

Tags in markup languages give text a predefined semantic meaning; whether it be a simple P tag to indicate a paragraph, or an H1 tag to indicate headers. These tags clearly delimit the text and provide meaning to certain areas.

There are people who say, with good reason, that a markup language should be purely about semantics; that there is no place for other elements.

A question: do hyperlinks really have any semantic value?

Consider that hyperlinks are used to create links from one page to another, thus providing a layer of functionality in the markup language. Where are the semantics in that?

Well, most people would argue that the link location gives the link text more meaning by being related; providing further details in another document. That makes sense. It also means that the semantic value of the the markup is intrinsically connected to the relationship between link location and link text. If the link location is unrelated to the link text, then there is no value added.

Generally, the semantic value of a hyperlink is disputable.