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.