Tim Bray makes some interesting points about the abstraction of Nations. I can generally agree with him on most of it.

But there’s one thing that I think is important: just because our families and friends are more important to us than our countries, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t contribute to our country as a whole. We should help to make it as good a place as we can, since it is within our reach.

From there, our country (government and national organisations) should help other countries. The notion of “doing good” could potentially be distributed well across this abstraction.

Of course, that’s never the way it works. Maybe it’s late and I’m tired, maybe I’m just dreaming, but maybe we could use these arbitary systems to help others in other arbitary systems.

It’s not that Bruce Almighty is a particularly bad film, it’s not. It’s not even that Jim Carrey places the same character that he has in every other film he’s been in (barring The Truman Show). It’s not even that the assumptious preachy content is overt and irritating… Actually, maybe it is.

As with all slapstick comedy, it’s funny in places and sure to make most people smile at some point. But you won’t be quoting lines from this in a years time, or even a week. Comedy-lite: As a sandwich, compared to something like Wayne’s World‘s steaky goodness.

I’ve added a few new syndication formats today, thanks largely to the fact that the generic feed creation script I wrote last week actually works. So what are these fun new flavours of syndication?

First up is my ESF feed. This is a very simple format: date, title and link all in plain text. And that’s it. The ESF spec explains everything you need to know.

Secondly, is my CDF feed for IE users only (after the enhancements users of better browsers get, it’s the least I could do for those poor people still suffering a slow bloated browser). Click on the link to the feed and it’ll try to add itself to your favourites. Let it. This will then give you a list of all the current items.

A little bit more difficult to implement. I basically copied the format used by Sam and Aquarionics and did my best to get it to work. The only thing that wasn’t fairly obvious was that it must be served with a MIME type of application/cdf.

Both feeds, and others, can be found on the syndication page.

I’ve made a few small changes over the past week or so that should make reading this site a bit easier:

1. Justified text – text on all pages is now justified. This took a seconds worth of work and makes everything look a lot better. To anyone who doesn’t do this already, add p {text-align: justify;} to your CSS immediately.
2. Smaller CSS – The remaining CSS has been made more detailed, yet the file is smaller. If you’re seeing any weird effects during the change, press CTRL and F5 together.
3. Valid XHTML for code – the code pages now show valid XHTML (where appropriate) rather than the default mish-mish. This is all thanks to conversion code from Xiven.
4. Meta tags changed – Hopefully Google will actually figure out how to follow my permalinks now that I’ve updated my meta-tags.

As with most things, you probably won’t notice most of these changes. That’s a good thing: I like seamless changes.

Ever have one of those zen moments when you see a problem in a perfectly clear way, removing the garbage that you had before? I had one today. It makes my previous effort really quite embarrasing.

I’ve updated the Palindrome code to make it a million times simpler. How did this happen? I was looking at the PHP manual for something entirely unrelated and noticed the strrev function. Everything immediately clicked into place in my head: rather than compare the first and last characters of a string recursively after stripping it down, just strip it down and compare it to its reverse. Simple.

The changes have been uploaded and should have propagated automatically through to the online palindrome checker and XMLRPC API interfaces.