Thanks to the last entry being rushed (I was leaving minutes after I wrote it), the zombie simulator link was pointing to the wrong place. It’s been fixed now.

It would make sense to add some sanity checks to links in entries: prompt the user if they link to the same place twice in one entry. Not a big idea, but one that would stop things like this happening again.

Anyway, the zombie simulator is a lot of fun. Go play now!

It’s Thursday. It’s 2pm, and it’s time for more random links:

• Fight The Spammers – Over at the Feedster blog, there is a dicussion about fighting Spammers at the bandwidth level. Not a bad idea, but costly at the allied end.
• Neural Nets in PHP – Someone has created a neural net class in PHP. Astounding stuff, I can’t wait to see what people do with this.
• Gender Determination – An algorithm that determines whether someone is male or female by a sample of their writing. It worked on every test I tried, bar one. Of course, that one person was myself. Yes, I write like a girl.
• Zombie Simulator – FIXED LINK. Easily the coolest link of the day. A java applet that simulates zombies overrunning a city. Lots of emergent behaviour is apparent, and lots of switches to play with. I will be playing with the code for this very soon.

Some big news coming soon… But probably not for another day or two.

As much as I expected it to be a big budget wash out, Pirates Of The Caribbean is actually reasonably entertaining. Johnny Depp leads with his usual balance of excellent timing and quirky delivery, Keira Knightley plays her part adequately, and Orlando Bloom… He showed up.

Yes, the plot is predictable, some of the lines are horribly overwritten, but there are enough mildly amusing bits to make it a worthwhile watch. Certainly a lot better than that hideous dog shit I watched later the same day.

Watching Chicago is a lot like falling off a large cliff towards a spike: initially terrifying, your entire life flashing before your eyes, a voice shouting “WHY ME?”, and, just as Richard Gere begins singing, the spike can’t hit you fast enough.

Of course, as soon as you want sweet jagged relief, Father Time pulls a fast one and everything goes excruciatingly slowly. Every note hangs in the air for hours, every word spoken in a forced accent cuts, every torturous second eating away at your will to live.

The end never comes too soon.

Yes, I’m getting lazy, more random links:

• DHTML Lemmings – a fully featured version of the cult classic Lemmings. Probably the best DHTML thing since… yeah. Via Paranoid Fish.
• ReUseIT: make Nielsen look good – An unofficial redesign for Jakob Nielsen’s boring site on usability. Should be interesting.
• Protocol7 – It just deserved a link for the thorougly decent job it’s doing of providing interesting links. Recommended.
• Deng – A beta version of Deng is out, proving that standards can be implemented in innovative ways with small footprints. Genius.

That’s your whack for today.