Happenings

And I’m Off

Once again, I’m leaving for a few days. This time I’ll be spending my weekend at T In The Park. Yeah the line-up is the weakest in years, but it should still be good.

Anyway, I’ll be back on monday.

Charlies Angels 2

In Charlies Angels 2 the action is weak, the plot laughable, the acting below par, the costumes skimpy (not necessarily a complaint), the plot devices clumsy and obvious, the comic relief inappropriate, the serious parts funny, the funny parts serious, the direction distracting, the music editing outright aggrevating (and I liked a fair few of the songs), the dialogue as weak as it comes… I could go on but I think you get the idea.

Money was thrown at this film. Marketing everywhere, and it still sucks. Thus proving that money means nothing in the world of cinema. Except that a million people will still go and see it because they’ve been told to. Shame.

Easy as PHP

Have they made upgrading PHP easier without telling anyone? Last time I attempted it, it took an hour of fiddling with ini settings and my apache config to get precisely nowhere. I did a rollback immediately.

Yesterday, however, I dropped in 4.3.1, modified 2 ini settings and was done in less than 5 minutes. Majorly impressed by how it has smoothed out.

In other news, the first beta of PHP 5 is out. Looks like a lot of improvements to the class structures (private and protected methods and values, abstract classes) and not a lot else. Still, worth watching.

Pie, Beer And Textile?

First up: How do we feel about 99 bottles of beer in 571 languages? Programming languages. Yes, someone has created a list of very similar programs in pretty much every language that’s ever done anything useful (and about 550 others). Too much spare time, but interesting to compare syntax nonetheless.

We now have Necho support in the feed validator (formerly the RSS validator). It is based on the 1st of July snapshot and, although there have been changes since then, it works nicely.

Most exciting for me is the announcement of Textile 2. Textile is an integral part of my developing CMS these days (I even have written permission from Dean Allen to include it in any final public release I might make).

There were a few things I had to change about the first version: it got a bit scatty for me when dealing with del and ins tag, and refused to do the right thing with code tags without a fair amount of mucking around. I also really wanted a detextile function for editing and began work on it before giving up. At a glance in the code of Textile 2, there seems to be an experimental version in there. Nice! I look forward to being able to mess around more with it.

Links Are Fun

In lieu of actual content, I thought I’d do one of those entirely links based posts that people are so fond of. Note: there are actually a few pieces of real content waiting to be added, but I thought since I got a decent set of links today, I’d post them instead.

Pixie Theory: RSS vs. Necho: By thinking of the opposing sides as either pixies or not pixies, we can figure out what side of an argument we should be on. Necho wins, of course.

BurningBird: I remember usenet: AOL is coming for weblogs. As any right thinking individual knows, this is the first sign of the apocalypse.

Be A Grafitti Artist: A (partial) return to form for Nothing Sacred with this article about how to be a grafitti artist.

Drop Shadows With CSS: A nice little technique for adding shadows to boxes in CSS.

Blogshares: I finally became a blogshares millionairre today. To celebrate, I devalued the stock for this site by selling a shitload of it; earning myself yet more money. Capitalism is, indeed, fun.