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.

For no real reason I was looking at the ZSh man page and found this gem of paragraph:

A userguide is currently in preparation. It is intended to complement the manual, with explanations and hints on issues where the manual can be cabbalistic, hierographic and, or downright mystifying (for example, the word ‘heirographic’ does not exist).

Something about self-referencing humour that makes the English geek in me smile.