A new toy for you all: ActoRss. It generates RSS feeds for any actor available on IMDb.

The idea for this came when I recently wondered what Steve Buscemi was working on. Rather than going and finding out, I’d prefer to be told. And along came ActoRss.

If you want to make stalking following Liv Tyler easier, just go to the spangly new Liv Tyler RSS feed.

Enjoy.

The makers of Kazaa have created a new uri scheme to help make P2P files easily retrievable from a web link. Called Magnet Links, the scheme is supported by Kazaa (2.6 and up) and various Gnutella clients (including limewire). While this idea has been done before (poorly), this particular iteration is an open freely implementable standard.

This is definitely a good thing, bridging the gap between the web and the file sharing networks.

Interestingly, they specifically mention bloggers on their site. They’re probably hoping to use us as meme propagation. And it’ll work. It’s a great idea, and could save bloggers bandwidth. Got a big file to give to your readers? Shove it onto a network and magnet link to it. We will be watching it closely.

More random links, this time of a web/tech persuasion:

• PHPDoc – After being recently impressed by JavaDoc, I thought this might prove very handy. Haven’t tried it yet, but it looks promising.
• IE Behaviours – A whole bunch of scripts to make IE behave itself. Could be the way forward now that development has stopped on IE.
• HTTP tracking – Track users secretly with Etags. Avoid long boring part at the start, before the real exploit comes in.
• Minimise IE flickering – Minimise flicker in internet explorer. Another fix.
• Url2Bmp – Converts urls 2 bmps. Similar to Khtml2png, but works on windows.
• Pure CSS tooltips – Style tooltips for users. This will cause some severe accessibility problems.
• The Behaviour Layer – More client side scripting.
• Site Mixer – Mixes the content of one site with the design of a site. Odd.

Done.

Writing is difficult. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying or has no sense of their own inadequate writing.

Take that last sentence for example. The first section (before “or”) is ok, the second poor.

Now look at that last sentence: it is better, with a much shorter, snappier second clause.

Finally, look back. The previous is weaker; using lazy words.

Ten Mistakes Writers Make.

Having recently read Why I Don’t Like Databases, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Stuart.

Further to his second point on a databases good points (the power of SQL), I don’t think that is necessarily a clear advantage now that XPath is available. Given that XPath can run across any XML file, it’s easy to imagine XML files in a filesystem that can be queried with as much power as SQL.

As time goes on, I hope to see the differences between database backends and filesystem backends become more transparent. There’s little reason for it not to happen, and plenty to gain from it.