While poor sequels tend to re-use plot devices from their predecessors with a large and obvious wink, The Bourne Supremacy does a much better job of keeping previous plot lines alive while not being cretinous.

The story itself revolves around an assassination and fit-up that bring Jason Bourne back out of hiding. It’s as predictable as most Tom Clancy style books (Robert Ludlum most definitely falls into that category) but with slightly more panache. The fight scenes are slightly clumsier than before, but are reasonably solid.

Here’s to confident sequels and the inevitable sequel, The Bourne Ultimatum.

As you may have noticed (unless you use a feed reader or are reading this some time in the future), I’ve finally gotten round to doing a redesign of Solitude. This, the 4th full design since I started the site, is called Hazy Morning.

It seems like I’m in fine company when it comes to redesigns, given recent or in progress changes by Chris, Matt, Fiona, Jack Mottram, Drew Mclellan, Mozilla et al.

Anyway, onto dissecting the trickier parts of the design.

The header uses standard image replacement techniques and some CSS hacking to produce a full-length clickable region. It was more trick than it should be to get this working cross-platform. Much respect has to go towards the CSS Underscore Hack, the most elegant bug fix for IE that I’ve yet to see. Very nice.

Equally getting the individual post headings to be fully targetable was awkward. The key to getting it to work is to make the surrounding block be set to display: inline; and the heading itself to display: block;, and then set the width of both to 99.9%.

Other than that, it was really a matter of tweaking as much as possible to get it to look alright in IE. It still doesn’t look perfect in that browser but I’ve spent enough time catering to a broken application.

If you see any problems in your browser, leave a comment with details of the bug and your platform, browser and resolution. I’ll be tweaking over the next few days anyway, but it’s good to get feedback.

A few rules that recent CSS work has provided:

1. If what you think you’re saying works in IE but not Firefox or Opera, you’re saying it wrong.
2. Cascading is tricky, and will likely invoke rule 1 at some point.
3. CSS Hacks are bound by rule 1.

Bear them in mind.

As everyone should know by now, this film has almost nothing to do with the classic book. It does have the most bold product placements yet to be seen in cinemas; the first twenty minutes are nothing but adverts.

Couple that with cheap plot devices (the winking), poor action scenes (oh, monkey robots), and predictable outcomes (yes, let’s get a nice long shot of that vital neural net and make sure everyone understands that it runs everything). Poor, poor, poor.

Yes, it’s been a long time since the last random links post but it’s time for a big one. I’ve been building up the links for 2 months now, so there are more to come. All the usual stuff is covered: flash games, PHP, HTML and other tech. Enjoy.

• Why PHP Scales – A snarky answer to why PHP scales as well as JSP.
• Race Conditions In Security UI – A security exploit aimed specifically at advanced users. Cunning.
• Sorting Algorithms – Visual comparisions of Java sorting algorithms. If you like this, you’re too geeky for your own good (but it’s a valuable resource nonetheless).
• Robots Are Our Friends – Sometimes they cut human flesh. The first flash animation for today.
• Serving Up XHTML Correctly – A fairly advanced script for sending XHTML properly in PHP. Includes Vary shenanigans.
• HTML Overlays – A way of minimising markup using javascript to import common elements. It all still validates too.
• Top Subversion Tricks – A few handy tips for those using the subversion version control system.
• Zelda Classic – An excellent Zelda fan site, offering the original game and lots of entirely new quests.
• Swinger – Flash puzzle game where the player must swing a rod onto polls in order to change their colour.
• PHP, XML and charater encoding – The joys of a unicode dream in an ASCII world.
• Fitts’ Law In CSS – Applying Fitts’ law to link targeting. If only the initial hit area was as big as the on focus hit area.
• Color Whore – Pretty colours.
• Scalable Image Replacement – Flash image replacement is now scalable. Very nice.
• Butt Plugs – Very funny prank phone call. I nearly cried at one point.
• Tweaking Firefox with CSS – A good guide to doing minor UI tweaks in ‘fox.
• 11 SSH Tricks – Get the most out of your secure shelling.
• XML Command Line Tools – Working with angle brackets a lot? This toolkit lets you query, validate and play with your files from the command line.
• Liberated Games – Legally available games. Includes some classics (Alien Versus Predator is still the scariest game of all time, in the right atmosphere).
• HTTP Fingerprinting – Identify server characteristics with simple tools.
• Drunk Staggering – Flash game: stagger your way along as far as you can.

More soon.