Happy New Year! The Christmas design is gone and it is time to get on with the best things in 2003 post. No reasons or commentary, just the picks.

Best Albums:

1. “Deloused In The Comatorium” – The Mars Volta.
2. “The Neon Handshake” – Hell Is For Heroes.
3. “Once Like A Spark” – JetPlane Landing.

Best Films (starting from the summer):

1. Kill Bill, volume 1.
2. Buffalo Soliders.
3. Igby Goes Down.

Best code:

1. Textile.
2. Magnetic Poetry.
3. Safe HTML Checker.

And that’s all for last year. This year my intentions are to finish at least one of the projects I’ve got in my head (one in particular is hooking me a lot right now, so I need to do it), as well as a major redesign (it’s sketched on paper somewhere, but it’ll take a while to actually do it) and a huge bit of course work for university.

Note: There are spoilers in this review, so look away if you haven’t seen it already.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, Return Of The King is poor, at best. Sure, the giant battles are impressive as always, but even they seem weak compared to the battle at Helm’s Deep. And the way the battle ended at Minis Tirith? Awful! (“Oh, and then a bunch of ghosts saved the day.”)

The acting was atrociously bad. The hobbits, in particular, were painful to listen to.

The ending was also tediously drawn out. I didn’t think anything would be more dull than the endless walking of Fellowship Of The Ring, but the endless ending of Return beat it.

I’m sure that if you like formulaic Hollywood epics then you’ll love this. I didn’t.

It should be plain that Will Ferrell is a comic genius. It’s a shame that his genius was wasted on Elf.

It’s a decent enough film (although it is a kids film), but Ferrell doesn’t shine as he usually does; hampered by an exceptionally stupid character.

There are some great moments, but it could’ve been a good deal better.

I got a strange email from a company in Kuwait recently asking for a quote on stationary and mobile metal analysis devices. At first I thought it might have been some kind of bizarre spam, but the lack of trying to sell me something I didn’t want suggested otherwise. I put it to one side and forgot about it.

An hour or two later, I checked my referrer log and noticed someone had arrived a day or two earlier from a Google search on “metal analyser”. Performing the same Google search, I figured out what had happened.

The company had seen the Generic Nu Metal Analyser in the archives, translated the page badly and thought I was selling metal anaylsers. Whoops, a text analyser was probably not what they had in mind.

Politeness has long been a problem for automated agents on the web. Well, it’s not so much that politeness is a problem; agents are programmed to be impolite, whether accidently or not. Politeness is a solved problem.

Let us be clear on what is meant. “Agents” refers to any automated system capable of talking to web servers, i.e. search engines, aggregators, download managers etc. “Polite” means waiting a while before checking a server again.

1. If a download manager hammers a file on my site 50 times a minute unsuccessfully, that’s impolite,
2. If a search agent crawls my entire site, doing so again 4 hours later is impolite. Doing so again every 4 hours is downright rude,
3. If an aggregator agent checks my RSS feeds more than 3 times an hour, that’s impolite.

How can we solve these problems? As was said earlier, politeness is a solved problem.

However, the current solutions are poor. In all 3 situations above, the user of these agents would be banned from crawling the site (either automatically or after manual inspection of logs). “Good riddance,” you might be thinking, “no good bandwidth leech, I’m better of without them.”

Have you considered that the user doesn’t know any better? They don’t know they’re being impolite because so few tools actually tell them.

Download managers: they’ll let you pick any number of connections and any time interval between retries. Would it kill the implementer to bring up a dialogue saying: “This could cause a heavy load on a server, causing you to be banned. Are you sure you want to change settings?”

Search agents: Is it so hard to say: “The time interval you’ve specified between crawls is impolite, and may get you banned and blacklisted. Are you sure you want to keep new settings?”

Aggregator agents: A similar time interval warning to search agents would suffice. As an aside, there is a mechanism in RSS that allows the producer of the feed to specify a recommended time interval between checks. Do any aggregators support it? Do they tell the end user if they’re in breach of it? Hmmm? Thought not.

If a user doesn’t heed the warnings, ban them.

This puts the pressure on the tool makers to tell users of bad behaviour. And why shouldn’t it be? They should keep their users informed; it’s only polite.