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).

The University of Illinois is thinking about starting a Master of Fine Arts in Software (via Simon). It seems like a very interesting angle to study computing from (certainly more so than the cludge of mathematical approaches and rote learning that is so common these days).

People have to accept that, like any creative form, coding is an art. There’s certainly a lot of code that isn’t art, just as there is art which isn’t particularly artistic. Elegant solutions, engaging ideas, inspiring work; these are some of the defining characteristics of art. They all apply to software.

I know I’ve been somewhat lax in posting the past few days. I’ve been fairly busy with the huge amounts of work expected of me in 3rd year university, so at least part of this week has involved several meetings to form a team for a large project (that will no doubt be the cause of much swearing and a few posts later in the year).

Anyway, it’s time for the (almost) weekly random links:

• Best Practices For Time Travelers (sic) – Are you visiting from the future? This guide will tell you how to best mesmerise and dazzle us simple 21st century folk.
• How To Write Bad Documentation That Looks Good – Sabotage and obfuscate documents in a professional, orderly manner.
• Tools For Weblogs – A few handy tools for assistive weblogging.
• Thirty Six Dramatic Situations – This apparently covers all possible situations in drama. To be honest, I expected less than 36.
• TBL‘s semantic web map – The only man who has an internationally recognised acronym for his name has posted a subway like image of the semantic web.

Expect updates to stabilise more over the next week.

I’ve never seen unicode mathematics written down quite as simply as Hixie’s unicode crash course.

Read it? Frightened? Good. And yes, that was the simplest version. You can imagine how complex it gets. UTF-16, anyone?

It is, however, worth the effort to incorporate unicode in any product that you build. The benefits include internationalisation, future-proofing, and kudos from anyone else who cries at the sight of that maths.

Incidentally, if you want to see unicode characters visit this fantastic unicode resource.