With enough twists to make anyone doubt every characters motives, Cypher is surprisingly well-written for how subdued it is. It’s the story of Morgan (Jeremy Northam), a man who wants to escape the drudgery of his life by going into espionage. Inevitably, he gets into a lot more than he wanted.

Surprisingly, the film also shows that Lucy Liu, the lead female character, can actually act. Shocking, when put side by side with her work in Charlie’s Angels.

It is not the best film in the world, the twists do start to push it after a while, but it’s certainly a great deal better than some of the garbage that is being showing recently.

Someone has done a hacky max-width feature for IE. I’m not sure what I think of it. It works well, and can easily be set up to also work in browsers which already support the feature. It can also be used as a basis to fix other similar problems with IE.

The problem is that it uses IE proprietary expressions, and thus uses invalid CSS. That’s bad. While I don’t know of any browsers that would choke on it, there are always some who will. Is it worth invalidating your CSS for IE again (ala the box model hack)? Maybe. The features this hack enables are very useful and, as such, should be enabled where possible.

Hmm. Possibly worth it, as long as it doesn’t break any other browsers.

The art of Google hacking is an excellent demonstration of the power of Google, and the idiocy of not controlling access to sensitive directories.

I’ve done a few slighty dodgy things like this before (not that it’s particularly wrong). Hint: don’t call your password files “passwd.txt” and leave the passes unhashed.

A few days ago, I spotted a bug in the new Feedster bot, just before it made a proper release. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Later, I noticed I had been thanked on the bots help page. Kinda odd, for having not really done anything.

Scott (of Feedster) disagrees. Fair enough, I’m just glad to have a new toy to play with.

Today, I noticed a (fatal) bug in the UGC RSS Feed Creator. Ampersands weren’t being properly escaped. It’s now been fixed.

Bugs, like buses, come in threes. First person to spot the last one gets a (theoretical) prize.

Yes, I’ve finally finished my site redesign. It went through a fair few different designs before settling on this one: from a forest theme, to big blocks of primary colours, to very dark designs.

This particular design was done last night (and this morning), built largely on top of one of the unused designs. While I’m reasonably happy with it and tested it thoroughly, it’s still in a state of flux. Anything can change (especially since I found some interesting colour combinations that I didn’t have time to experiment with fully), bugs might creep in here or there, but it’s essentially done for now.

To be honest, I just wanted to get it out of the way so I can get some other work done. Having too many projects on the go at once is a bad thing, absolutely none of them get done.

Update: I’ve also started using an xml-stylsheet processing instruction for browsers that can handle it.