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.

As their respective code bases have been stable for a few months now (at least), I’m taking feature requests for both ActoRSS and UgcRSS. Already requested is the ability to see more than just the current days cinema choices and an update to the cinema list itself.

This is likely to be the only chance to request any features, as I would like to close these projects (except for any necessary screen-scraping fixes).

Although I seriously doubt that anyone who wants one doesn’t have one already, I have a few Gmail invites available. Actually, I have 1 left now (after giving several to friends). So if you want it, post in the comments. Possibly leave a joke.

Update: Ok, I have another 5 invites to give away. You know what to do.

In an interesting development for Gmail account holders, they can now mount their account as a linux file system thanks to GmailFS. According to the site (and various other testers I’ve spoken to), you can use all your standard unix commands to utilise that extra gig of off-site storage. Very nice.

Now imagine NFSing a bunch of gmail accounts together to provide near unlimited storage. It will happen. Oh yes, it will happen.

Even nicer than that though is the fact that I got a gmail account just yesterday (gary.fleming@gmail.com). Looking forward to trying out all these little toys.