It occured to me earlier that I haven’t done any work for this site in a good few weeks; easily the longest I haven’t added, updated or upgraded the technical side of things in recent history. Time is, as Matt Bellamy recently said, running out.

Biggest killers of time then? Going back to university. The workload is phenomenal, and they keep piling it on. Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic is also taking up a fair bit of what was previously coding time. I’m not a Star Wars fanboy (although I like the films as much as the next male), but this game is fantastic. So much depth, so many choices that actually matter, so many side quests. Hopefully, that won’t last much longer.

So, in the few minutes before I go to see House Of 1000 Corpses (expect a review within the next day or two), I decided that I should improve the links to comments on these entries. So, if you click the comments link on an entry you will now be taking to the comments section, rather than the beginning of the entry.

10 seconds of coding well spent.

I would normally save this for a random links post, but it’s far too important for that. Joel has written the absolute minimum you need to know about unicode and character sets. I personally knew most of it (although UCS-2 was news to me), but I know how important this stuff will be in the future.

Get it learned if you want to work with computers in 10 years time. It’s really not that hard.

A slightly extended random link post this week, it’s just been building up over the last few days:

• Cheezwiz, the game – The game where you secretly swap the meaning of two words for some laughs. Read the examples for a better explanation,
• Mid Pass Filter – A way to target CSS directly at the broken box model of IE 5. Very handy for developers,
• Shades Of Gray – Aaron Swartz discusses what should be done when you know someone is lying, taking in the always fun Dave Winer and George Bush,
• Absurd Church claims – Yes, the Catholic Church are claiming that condoms don’t stop AIDs, despite various health authorities saying they’re wrong. Do the Church fight back with reason and evidence? Course not. “They are wrong about that… this is an easily recognisable fact.” Big hand waving, we like it,
• mod accessibility – An Apache model to help out with various accessibility issues. Nice,
• Pricelessware – Windows freeware repository (Via Mark Pilgrim),
• strtotime – Not quite the function I hoped for, but still a very useful one. PHP discovery of the week,
• Galaxy far, far away – Matt is pointing to a rather amazing rendition of the Star Wars theme. You have to hear it, people should not be able to reproduce music that well.

And that’s your lot for the day.

As the final part of Robert Rodriguez’s trilogy of gunfighter films based around the legendary El Mariachi, Once Upon A Time In Mexico stands strong. While not as exciting as its two precursors, it’s easily as funny (though none of them are comedies).

The pastiche of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns is obvious, but not unwelcome or overbearing. The actors play their traditional parts well, even Enrique Inglesias puts in a surprisingly good performance. Johnny Depp, as always, comes off best in his quirky CIA rule.

All in all, a film worth seeing, even if you don’t really know the backstory.

As part of a little research into word analysis and how effective it is (a few people can probably guess why I’m doing said research), I decided to analyse the reasonably predictable musical genre of nu-metal.

From about twenty minutes work came the Generic Nu Metal Analyser. Input some lyrics (proper English only – yes, that means you nu-metallers will have to learn to spell), and check out the results. It seems reasonably capable on the tests I’ve tried, but will undoubtedly give out false positives and so on. Give it a try though.

I would recommend Linkin Park and Evanescence as particularly generic nu metal songs that get picked up on (although they’re bound to have a song or two that aren’t so generic).