I’ve been involved in the atom/pie/echo wiki since day one. Lately, the initial forward motion has been dwindling. Part of this is that every topic that is started brances off in a dozen directions. After a few iterations and loops, resources and opinions are scarce on any given page; making consensus difficult, and prolonging the minutia.

So, today I spent 90 minutes cleaning the wiki. This mostly involved looking at the pages of unanswered questions and answering as many as I could, refactoring old dead pages, and generally abbreviating old content.

I want to encourage others to do the same. Unless the wiki is pruned, we’re going to have a jungle of branching conversation so dense (in more ways than one) that no right thinking developer is going to want to delve in. So let’s cut a path through, shall we?

More on this soon.

Words fail me for a review of The Hulk. While certainly not as bad as, say, Dreamcatcher, it still ranks as one of the worst films of modern times.

The first hour or so is just tedious. A very obvious plot is frameworked, predictable plot devices planted, and paper thin relationships are set-up. So far, so boring. Then we get an array of highly stereotyped characters prancing around, pretending to act.

The editing doesn’t help matters. Why Ang Lee thought that using comic book framing would be good is beyond me. At the most serious moments, we get multiple views of each character in a boxed view moving around the screen; making watching it and taking it seriously a real chore.

The worst moment is the inevitable dream sequence (I did say it was bad). Bruce Banner sees the eponymous character in a mirror, who then pulls a bad Morbo impression.

To be fair, I went in expecting it to be bad, but not this bad; Lou Ferrigno would be rolling in his grave if he was dead (and didn’t have a cameo in the damn thing).

Stuart Langridge has come up with a better way of doing image replacement with CSS. It removes the redundant markup of the Fehrner technique, thereby silencing the critics of the method in at least one way.

Meanwhile, Tom Gilder continues his look at the future of CSS with an article on the CSS3 border model. Looks like being very powerful stuff.

Tim Bray: Someone I have great respect for. His work on XML and searching (the On Search series) is fantastic; the latter seriously influencing my own developing search tool for this site.

However, his link text is terrible. Look at this table of contents for OnSearch. Ouch. He uses the word “this” as the sole link text 3 times (for 3 different articles), the word “here”, and various other bits of link text that require context (“this chapter”, “herewith”).

His headers for each section are exactly what should be used as link text. They describe the article being linked to in a short phrase, without being repetitive. They’re far more accessible than the current links.

My mobile phone is very basic. There, I said it. It doesn’t have polyphonic ringtones (or even customisable ringtones), video messaging, downloadable java games, or interchangeable fascias. I know it’s almost a crime in certain places to not have a phone that is on the bleeding edge of technology, and that’s why I’ve admitted my guilt

However, my reasons for not getting all these features is simple: I don’t want to spend money so I can continue to spend money.

Think about the above features (and most others being added to modern mobiles). While they might be great ideas (or not), they all involve paying out more money to use them. You pay X amount for every game, video message, ringtone or fascia you want. So you pay to have a phone equipped with the feature and then more to use it. Why, thank you mobile companies for recognising my plight: I had all that money going to waste.

The truth is that there are features that I want in a mobile phone. Useful features that, unfortunately, won’t earn the communications companies any extra revenue per usage. As far as I’m aware, these features don’t currently exist:

1. A USB port – This is key to the whole thing. I want a USB port shoved on the side of my phone to be able to access the SIM card. Reasons for this will be more apparent in a moment, but access to a cheap widely available port is necessary.
2. A synchronisable address book – Ever lost a friends details or new number when changing phone? The ability to synchronise number between your SIM card and PC would be invaluable to do this. With the right software and the press of a button you could easily be keeping up to date. In fact, store in the right format and you could use the same information for your phone, mail client, LDAP server etc.
3. SMS message transfers – How many times has your SIM’s inbox been full? On most phones, you can expect around 20 message slots (although this varies wildly). Once you save all those nice messages from your significant other, funny stuff from friends, and other potentially important messages, you’ve potentially stuffed or limited the available slots on your phone. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could transfer them all to your computer for posterity, thereby storing them forever without hogging up your phone? I think so. Perhaps of less value, but still good, would be the ability to prepare a message on a small notepad program on your PC and transfer it for transmission on your phone. Spell checking, no limits on your keyboard, and an endless number of editors.
4. Dictionary updating – I’d kill for the ability to add words to my phones predictive texting dictionary. There are so many words that I use that aren’t in the standard dictionary because not many people need them. Place names are generally very localised, but common within that region. If I could simply add them to the dictionary via my PC, I could potentially save hours of time per year lost when trying to mung them together using predicted text blocks. Very useful, and that’s without getting onto slightly more radical ideas like passing local words around local network cells.

These are the features I’d pay more money for. Simple things, yes. Powerful, certainly. Will it happen? Not while the companies don’t see any more money from it.