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.
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.
There are 2 hours or so until Christmas, so I thought I’d better say Merry Christmas to everyone who has ever read this site, to everyone who has left a comment (from some of the comments, it’s apparent that there are people who comment without reading), to all of my friends and family, and those that matter most to me: Merry Christmas!
As a bonus, have fun with this fun Make A Snowflake game. There are some jaw-dropping designs in the gallery.
Update: Thanks to the mighty Feedster, you can feel the christmas spirit on a bunch of sites you’ve never been to.
It’s been a while since I left the cinema quite so happy. It wasn’t because SWAT is a good, well-written film. Quite the opposite.
It is utterly terrible; bad in so many ways as to be hilariously good.
No-one will ever beat the character names in this film: Jim Street, the top swat member who gets kicked off the team following an incident with his risk taking partner, Gamble. He’s later recruited to a new “ass-kicking” swat team by Hondo Harrelson, along with other fantastically monikered characters such as TJ McCabe and Sanchez (the latino).
The dialogue is straight out of an episode of McGarnacle (the fictional show in The Simpsons), with a plot and stereotyping to match; with classic lines like, “You feel me, chief”.
I loved every cheesey, pathetic minute of it.