Happenings

Dasher Input

This is one of the oddest things I’ve seen in a while. Dasher is a way to input text using nothing but a mouse (or other pointing device).

You “drive” the mouse towards oncoming letter blocks, which lead to more letters, and eventually spell out words. The predictive features and adjustable scroll speeds mean that once you get your head around it, you can write essays pretty fast.

Infact, I wrote this entire entry using this program; HTML and all (Dashblogging, if you will). Given a bit more time to get used to it (it really is a bizarre thing at first), I think it could be very handy for various applications, particularly mobile input.

Krueger And Voorhies

With a title like Freddy Vs Jason, it was never going to be a classic. As should be expected, the acting is awful and the premise is weak at best. You can pretty much guess everything else about it.

To be honest, though, I’m not entirely sure how much I disliked this film (I did dislike it though). I had such low expectations of it that it easily managed to surpass them; being watchable even if mostly terrible. So, while it’s about as scary as a kitten in a cotton wool jacket, it’s not as bad as you might think. Go see it? Still no.

Creatures, The Matrix, and Snakoban

Lazy days abound: More random links.

That’s enough for today. More to follow.

In Pursuit Of Perfection

A long time ago, I joined the X-Philes. I promptly forgot about it, since everything was working well. Recently, I came across another website dicussing various matters about XHTML and markup: Anne van Kesteren.

Among other things, I learned that I could improve my content negotiation. Thanks to Ben for providing the correct user agents, I’m now one step closer to perfection.

Update: Because I never really bothered checking old entries before the mime type switch in May, there were a few broken archive pages. That won’t stand. I went through the entire archive and fixed the few entries that didn’t work. One step closer…

Next step: using an xml stylesheet processing instruction. (Yawn).

Tweaking UGC RSS

I tweaked my UGC RSS feed creator to include a few cinemas that I apparently missed. It should now cover every UGC cinema in the UK and Ireland. While I was at it, I also added information about the director and actors in each film to the description (if you want a plot synopsis, just follow the link on each item).

I also was about to change the mime-type from text/xml to application/rss+xml, but to do that I’d need to generate a link to the feed, rather than take the user straight to the feed. This is, of course, pretty easy to do. Unfortunately, I’m knee deep in coding something else, so it’ll have to wait.