From the trailers it is easy to imagine Tim Burton’s new film, Big Fish, as just being more Hollywood fantasy tripe, with about as much depth as Chicago (how I love that film).

Surprising, then, is the fact that Big Fish is actually quite entertaining.

It’s not laugh out loud funny, but the tall tales being woven into a bizarre cornucopia of imagery and tangents. The bit parts are fantastically acted, even if Ewan McGregor’s accent is a little irritating.

A good film, that managed to surpass low expectations.

This is going to be a sizeable, but slightly dated link post, as I’ve been sitting on some of this stuff for 2 weeks. Enjoy:

• Slice City – Play Sim City within The Sims. Look at the screenshots and it’ll make much more sense.
• Googledorks – Some google searches that you can use to get at sensitive information. People really are this stupid.
• MozCC – A mozilla extension that allows sites a Creative Commons license to be parsed in the browser. Not a bad idea.
• Poignant Guide To Ruby – Funny, yet informative, guide to Ruby. The best language guide I’ve seen (there are cartoon foxes everywhere).
• Pronounciation of SQL – It all makes sense now.
• Elephant Vs. Bird – Flash game where you need to avoid being squashed.
• Doxygen – A tool for autogenerating manuals for code. Works in C, Java, PHP and more. Via Derek.
• Seven Steps To Better Presentations – I’m going to need this fairly soon. The comments also have some fairly good suggestions.
• Atom API and Nokia – The mobile phone company looks like backing Atom. Nice.
• Logo Trends – Interesting study of logo trends at the moment. Some of the spirals are very nice.
• Compilers Are Easy – Making writing compilers sound easy. I have my doubts.
• Design patterns and PHP – Interesting article that suffers from terrible readability.
• Why C Is Not My Favourite Programming Language – A little harsh, but bang on for the most part. The lack of strings or booleans in C is a constant annoyance.
• Redesigning Comment Forms – I have always implemented the basics of this, and if I ever get round to adding the ability to remember users I’ll do the rest.
• Character Encodings – Everything anyone ever wanted to know about character encoding issues, and more.
• dotemacs – A wonderful resource for those new to the worlds of emacs.
• Bush Vs. Palpatine – Which of these quotes was said by George Bush and which by Emperor Palpatine. Hint: the worst ones are all Bush.

That’s all for another day.

Slightly formulaic, but still amusing, School Of Rock is exactly what you might expect.

The plot focusses around Jack Black trying to teach some school kids to rock. You know what to expect, he helps a few of them through hard times in their life, and helps them to loosen up. They, in turn, teach him to grow up.

Despite the predictable, back of a matchbox script, it is still fairly amusing. This can be attributed more to the charm and energy that Black puts into his perfomances, than to the jokes themselves. Either way, though, it is well worth watching.

Deciding on which font to use is always a difficult decision. In recent versions of Solitude, I’ve tended towards Verdana for almost everything: body text, headers, fields. Now, no more.

Thanks to What The Font, I can now figure out exactly which great font other people are using for images. This is exactly what the internet is about: stealing (in this case, ideas) through sharing (services). Great.

In all seriousness, it’s a wonderful service that seems to do its job well. More, please.

A few quick links for the weekend (nowhere near as many as normal, but sleep beckons):

• Operashow Generator – Use Opera as a cheap but pretty powerpoint substitute. A very nice feature.
• Decompression Bombs – Overload most computers by creating special zip files. They start off at 7k, and unzip to 100Gb. Frightening, cool and utterly amazing at the same time.
• iCapture – A service that displays pictures of websites as seen by Safari, for all the appleless developers. Handy.
• Unicode Spaces – Unicode has an insane number of space characters. Wasteful.
• Free Rockstar Classics – Rockstar are offering their old games (optimised for modern PCs) for free. The current two are the classic Grand Theft Auto, and Wild Metal Country. A superb idea, and absolutely the right thing to do.

And that’s all for the weekend.