Although it has been billed as a shockingly brutal retelling of the Columbine massacre, a must-see, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant is turgid and dull.

Lasting little more than an hour, it seems to last forever. Following the kids around the corner is supposed to bring the audience closer to them, but in reality it just makes us care less about these uninteristing, one-dimensional portrayals of stereotypical school life.

The killers implied motivations (playing games, nazism, and being gay) are picked from the usual list of pop culture bogeymen, and never justified (not that they can be). Their acting is also atrocious. They don’t seem interested in it at all.

This film had no redeemable qualities. Avoid.

Without realising it, for the last few days my XHTML has been invalid. While in pursuit of markup perfection, that will not stand.

The problem was that a blog entries title began with a number. That’s ok. However, those titles are used as ID values on the headers for that entry. ID values aren’t allowed to begin with numbers – I have no idea why, but that’s how it is.

The fix: prepend an X to the title.

The moral: just because an XML parser (my browser) didn’t notice the error, doesn’t mean that it’s valid XHTML. Validate, validate, validate.

Time for some random links:

• Drop Shadows – CSS drop shadows in most browsers (not IE).
• Cellular Automata – A constantly evolving header graphic, depicting flowers reacting to weather and interacting with each other.
• SScrable – A (slightly flawed) single-player scrabble game. Fantastic (and I hate scrabble). Via Submit Response.
• Crazy Game – The most insanely difficult but compulsive game of all time.
• When Word To XML Conversions Get Nasty – An article on converting nasty word docs to XML; a rather large project on its own.
• Ontology, Taxonomy, And Vocabularies – The differences explained.
• PHP mag – A decent resource for PHP related tutorials.
• 10 Myths Of Copyright – Some of the more pervasive copyright myths put to rest.
• How To Write Good – “There are many more writing hints I could share with you, but suddenly I am run over by a truck.” Genius.
• Helicopter game – Great one button game. Fly a helicopter through a tunnel.
• Definition Lists Explained – A clear article on the usage of definition lists, with some interesting ideas on how to style them.
• CSS Pencils – Making images of pencils entirely from CSS. I remember seeing something like this except with images from KnightRider.

That’s all for another few days.

Currently burning a lot of time in this part of the world (specifically, computing labs) is the psychedelic game Dolphins.

Possibly the most insane, challenging and fun game to pass these shores in months.

After having received the first piece of Comment Spam, I started thinking about the various strategies I could put in place to fight it should things get worse. Bayesian filters, compulsory previewing, proxied links (to make the act pointless), throttling, allowing previously visited IPs only, putting the comments system into the brain of a monkey and using pavlovian techniques to train it to fight spam…

… Then it occured to me. The number one, must-have feature of any comment spam filtering system is: the ability to delete spam.

Although the delete function has been done since the comments system was created, it was never wired up to the admin interface – leaving me with undeletable spam. Doh!

It is, of course, hooked up now.