The difference between Western and Eastern samurai movies is exemplified best by Zatoichi. Written by, directed by, and starring cult hero Takeshi Kitano, the film continues the story of the legendary Japanese hero: a blind man, wandering the country, getting entangled in the fights of others.

It is the style in which the story is told that is most interesting. For instance, various scenes are scattered through the film which have absolutely no bearing on the plot. That just doesn’t happen in western films; every line of dialogue is usually spent building plot.

The sword fights are also very telling, generally consisting of a single well-placed blow per opponent, rather than the extended sword play found in western films. And it’s certainly an improvement, the action focussing the plot, rather than distracting from it.

Zatoichi is certainly a strange film, after having been force fed so many generic action films, but nothing short of excellent.

Despite early misgivings when hearing about a remake of Starsky And Hutch starring Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller, it was apparent that everything would be ok from the trailer. This has been confirmed now that the film is in cinemas.

While it is more parody than remake, it does the original series proud; staying loosely true to the two title characters.

Best moment is the scene with Will Ferrell. You will never think about dragons the same way again.

It won’t win any awards, but is an amusing diversion nonetheless.

They’ve been building up for a while now, so time for some more random links:

• TypeKey FAQ – After the backlash, more of TypeKey becomes clear.
• Naming Classes – Getting class names can be tricky, here are some best practices.
• Ask Dr Michael – People asking a 7-year old for advice. Very funny answers.
• Lego WorldBuilder – Really quite fun Shockwave strategy game, based on lego animals.
• Logo Generator – An online tool for generating logos in interesting fonts. The first step in the Solitude redesign is being done using this. Via Kryogenix.
• Goliath – The best of the short stories set in The Matrix (from the official site).
• Exercises In Style – An interesting look at how the same (unfunny) cartoon can be conveyed in different ways.
• Screen – An excellent tutorial on the equally excellent GNU multiterminal utility.
• PageRank Calculator – Figure out the pageRank of any site. Handy for marketing strategy evaluations.
• 100 Most Mispronounced Words – Lists like this are useful just for reference (and a project I intend to begin working on soon).
• Morse Code Music – Morse code messages hidden in music? Some people have way too much time.
• Teach Yourself Programming In 10 Years – Despite what the books may claim, you won’t do it any faster.
• Dictionary of Data Structures And Algorithms – Helpful for above.
• Zend Goodies – Simon Willison links to a whole bunch of great PHP5 articles.
• Doom: The Board Game – There’s a Doom board game coming. Dear lord, no.

More real news in a few days.

Yes, it has been an inordinately quiet week here. The last push of work in third year, along with the weekend of celebrations following the end, meant that I’ve been kept rather busy. Which brings us nicely to the subject of this post.

As part of my third year at the University Of Glasgow, I’ve been involved in building a distributed, topic-driven web crawler in Java, with Derek, Matt and two others.

The end result is TwentyFour24bot.

There isn’t much there on the site yet, but I think we’ll be putting the source up (once we know it is ok to do so), as well as the dissertation.

I don’t know how interesting the dissertation would be to most people (at 90 pages, it’s not exactly easy going), but we do outline some of the more interesting aspects of the design: keeping data moving smoothly around a distributed system under heavy load, implementation of politeness constraints for a crawler (a heavily overlooked area – we couldn’t find any other papers on this), and relevance algorithms (that don’t rely on PageRank networks).

It’s probably not worth reading if you don’t have an interest in information retrieval, but we’re all just glad it’s over (and the website was sitting there, unlinked).

Although certain people would have you believe that 21 Grams involves intricate, interleaving plot lines coming together to form a carefully planned story, it doesn’t. After seeing it, you might agree with them, you’d be wrong.

The real intelligence behind the film is the editing. The whole thing has been cut to give a fairly bland story a sense of interest by showing what happens to various characters out of order. This has been done far more convincingly elsewhere (Memento, for example), with more imaginative reasoning behind it.

Despite this reliance on editing, 21 Grams is an ok film, but certainly not uplifting.