Time for another round of random links (if I get time, I’m going to create some basic link sidebar scripts – then I won’t wait a few days until I have several new entries before posting):

• Radiohead Rorscach – What would happen if you played Radiohead’s choice moments to a bunch of school kids and asked them to draw? Some very frightening and funny things.
• 50 Unsexiest Things – While I can’t agree with all of them, most are pretty on the money.
• Abbr Vs Acronym again – One markup debate that I’m still not settled on. I currently use acronym for everything. This might (read: probably will) change. But life is far too short to obsess over this.
• KHTML2PNG – Create thumbnails of websites. Fantastic! Just wish I was still using Linux as my default OS (until I get a new modem, it’s not going to happen).
• Firebird editCSS – Modify loaded stylesheets in browser. Great idea, can’t seem to get it to work in my (admittedly old) Phoenix install.

And I’m spent…

I didn’t initially hold out a lot of hope for The Italian Job remake. It seemed pointless, if not outright stupid, to recreate such a well-loved, classic film. Later, it became abundantly clear that they were using the name, the minis, and a few minor details.

A cash-in, then.

Unfortunate, certainly, but not entirely worthless. Judging the film on its own merits, it’s a very slightly above par film, marred only by how painfully slick it is. The amount of Hollywood polish begins to detract.

The film also suffers severely from trailer trashing; the practice of putting all the good bits in the trailer, thus ruining a lot of the film for those who remember the trailer.

All in all, not as bad as I expected, but nowhere near the original.

There’s not a lot to be said about Tears Of The Sun. The action is weak qualitatively and quantitively, with little plot and less acting to back them up. Waving such flags as “soldier does the right thing”, and “do the mission, whatever it takes”, it does a poor job of actually making you care. When people die, you shrug and go back to sleep.

Dull, mediocre (at best), superficial junk. Don’t see.

Based (in part) on advice from the insanely smart Jacques Distler, I made a list of 7 things to do that would improve my commenting system. I had intended on doing at least 6 of them yesterday (the last one being quite difficult, taking at least a day on its own). As should have been expected, I got a little sidetracked. Damn you, Knights Of The Old Republic!

I did, however, get 2 of those features done. First up is comment counts, making it easier to see if someone has commented on an entry on the front page (chances are they haven’t, but hey, that’s life).

Secondly is much better error handling. Rather than outright reject a comment if it doesn’t resolve as valid XHTML, I now redisplay the form with all the fields as they were, with helpful advice on what is invalid.

The other features will probably appear more slowly over the course of the next fortnight as university starts back and I’ve got a backlog of work to do.

Just over a week ago, I experienced some phone woe. While I won’t bore you with all the details (basically Trium people wanted me to send my phone off to get fixed without telling me how much it would cost, which I didn’t like the sounds of), I bought a new phone. A spangly Motorola C350.

This post was originally going to be called “More Phone Woe” because the synchronisation software provided with the USB software is pretty terrible. This afternoon, however, it just decided that synchronising my contacts was no longer reason to crash. Hooray! Now, just need to get SMS messages synched and I can start building a software RSS aggregator for my phone (the plans are done).