After some recent downtime, ActoRss is now fully functioning. For anyone who is unaware, it is a system to get an RSS feed for the latest films an actor has appeared in (or will appear in).

I took the opportunity to rework the original code, with the following improvements:

1. Faster – Although still a little on the slow side (due to the proxy nature of screen scraping), this version is much faster than the previous.
2. Error Correction – If you mispell an actor’s name, it will try to find the nearest, most relevant match.
3. Atom Enabled – You can now get your feed in the Atom format. Although I’m unhappy with some of the constraints Atom places on such a simple feed (modified and issued dates are unknown and irrelevant), I’d rather leave it up to the users to pick their format.
4. Directors – You can now also get feeds for directors, sound engineers, visual effects supervisors… If they’ve warranted a page on imdb, you can get a feed for them.

Now, I know that those last two improvements make a mockery of the name (since it’s now no longer solely about actors and RSS), it just seemed like the obvious extension to the existing version. Hope people enjoy it.

Trying to remake the best zombie film of all time is not an enviable task, bringing the inevitable fan backlash and accusations. Thankfully, then, Dawn Of The Dead is a more than capable film in its own right.

Although largely stripped of the consumerist overtones of the original, the film still makes sense as a survivalist film, conveying in subtle ways the behaviours that would build up in such a situation.

The whole film is suitably paced: from the swift pursuit of safety in the opening scenes, to the survivors starting to settle into a normal life, to the chaos in the closing scenes. The direction and writing of it all does Romero the justice his contribution to zombie films deserves.

An excellent remake of a classic film.

…the harm was done: the topic became known as “computer science”—which, actually, is like referring to surgery as “knife science” — and it was firmly implanted in people’s minds that computing science is about machines and their peripheral equipment.

An excellent quote by Edsger Dijkstra. Most computing science is about design: spending a long time planning things, letting ideas grow, knowing where to cut out the unnecessary, seeing the woods for the trees, and trying to do all this an as elegant a manner as possible.

I had hoped to get an update to a piece of code out today, but I got side-tracked by Wart Hog, a flash game where you have to use grenades to fire a Wart Hog jeep (from Halo) into aliens.

Very puzzling, very fun, very bloody distracting.

Tonight, a nation, once great, was left shamed in public. The last shreds of decency and morality gone in a turbulent public vote. Surely, only chaos can now follow.

I am, of course, referring to the outcome of the Best British Sitcom Of All Time. The outstanding genius of Blackadder just came in second to the great, but miniscule by comparision, Only Fools And Horses. How will people be able to sleep tonight?

Oh well, at least The Vicar Of Dibley didn’t win. How that got into the top ten, never mind third place, is beyond me.