Here’s a slightly briefer version of the random links post that got tragically wiped yesterday:

• CSS float tutorial – Can’t get your head around floats in CSS? This is the guide. Clear, concise and well illustrated; makes everything much easier,
• Unicode Applications in PHP – A guide to getting PHP applications to use unicode. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it looks quite good,
• Multibyte String Functions – Or PHP’s built-in unicode handling functions.
• Secure Shell Access Instructions – Everything you need to know about secure shell access (if you don’t know what that is, you don’t need to),
• Atom API – Mark lays out a brief history of content management APIs followed by a close look at the upcoming Atom API. A must read for anyone working with content management or syndication,
• Mozilla – The Mozilla website has been redesigned by Dave Shea (of Mezzoblue). It looks great, can’t wait for the rest,
• Death Of A Metatag – It has been done: metatags are now dead. Don’t even think about indexing them (not that anyone does anymore),
• OPML Considered H.. awful – An outline of why the OPML serialisation format is piss poor. My own experiences with it are less than pleasant,
• A 3d House In CSS – An interesting way of making art with CSS. Very clever,
• Example User Stylesheets – Pretty much what it says on the tin: examples of user stylesheets.
• PHP Scalability – An article on how scalable PHP is. If it is good enough for Scott to build Feedster, then it’s good enough for me.

Quite tech heavy; I’ll try to make the next link post a little lighter.

This was going to be a random links post, a fairly lengthy one at that. But before I submitted it, my login session ran out and the entire post got rejected. Ouch. I’ll rewrite it tomorrow (with even more links), but for now I’ll just hang my head and curse the way browsers won’t let you go back to retrieve your precious data.

As mentioned earlier, I went to see House Of 1000 Corpses. Don’t do the same.

Although it has some good (but brief) moments, and one of the funniest lines in cinematic history, it fails to be scary or funny. The horror and gruesomeness are muted by the lack of tension, comedy overtones (who can take rednecks seriously?) and the poor characterisation; you really won’t care when people are being butchered. That said, the comedy isn’t overt enough to be truly funny. Sure, you’ll giggle when the rednecks get angry, but nothing overt.

It’s not worth seeing. Really.

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.