Identity (starring John Cusack and Ray Liotta) is stylish, tense, genuinely creepy and, ultimately, stupid.

The basic premise is interesting enough: a bunch of strangers get stranded together at a motel until morning, their numbers lessening as the night unfolds. So far, so slasher flick. But the strangers come to realise that they all have a connection to each other and they might not be their by accident after all. At this point, there is a real sense of sinister going-ons.

And then the words “ancient Indian burial ground” are mentioned. Thankfully, however, that most laughable of plot devices is never capitalised on. Instead, we’re subjected to something far more embarrasing; the sort of surprise only a writer who ran out of interest could come up with. The audience left laughing.

A perfect example of a movie ruined by a twist.

So, it’s happened once more. To turn it into an end of term tradition, some of my friends and I went bowling today. The last time I went bowling, my hand was all but crippled. This time it’s my knee. How that happened is anyones guess.

We played 10 games: each winning three before the big finale. The person who did worst last time absolutely stormed it this time, stealing the last game and ridiculing the rest of our scores.

On the plus side, I managed to get the high-score of the day: a modest 150. It’s probably my personal best.

Anyway, bowling might look like a sport for the lazy, but boy does it hurt if you’re not used to it. Ice-pack this way, please.

A week or so ago, I updated the palindrome code found on this site, but I couldn’t implement everything I wanted to. Now, I have the time to do it. For the past day or two, I’ve been messing around with XMLRPC servers and clients, trying to get a feel for how it all works. It’s really quite simple once you get into it.

So, in this spirit, I have now got an API for the palindrome checker. While it only has one method at the moment, I’m sure if anything else comes to mind, it’ll be trivial to add it in.

More importantly, by having an XMLRPC server running, I’ll be able to add and incorporate support for more web services; such as pingback. While it’s not available yet, it will be soon enough.

Yesterday, I paid my annual bill for hosting (so the site won’t be disappearing for at least a year). But I also made a sem-major change.

I used to host a site called Frustrated Artist Commune. Other than actually providing hosting and incorporating Finetto for them, I had nothing to do with it. After months of inactivity and absolutely no interest in the site from its owners, I’ve removed it. It ate a fair whack of server space and was, in effect, dead.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is the main domain at vkps.co.uk. For months now, it’s been inactive (other than the EWN namespace, which takes a fair number of hits to this day). This site was only supposed to be a temporary measure to keep updates going while I worked on the main site. In reality, I focussed any development time on Finetto, which was then incorporated into this site. So really, I’ve just been working on this site.

Over time, Solitude has evolved into pretty much what vkps was supposed to be: a constantly updated resource, with code, film and music reviews and other essays. So what to do with the main domain? I don’t really know. Do you?

After hours of trying to get it to work online and offline simultaneously, I’ve finally managed to change the permalinks around here to something approaching respectable. They’re now in the form “/Archives/Year/Month/Day/#Title” rather than the Google-incompatible “/News/Archives?ArtID=YearMonthDayTime”. The first time I tried it (a few weeks ago), I ended up crashing one of my servers. Now that my exams are over with, I’ve had time to clear my head and solve the problem.

Why did it take so long? Well, I had to fork two very subtly different versions of .htaccess to serve up each new URI to each server. Then I had to make sure that every conceivable permalink that has been used in the past is still compatible (there are a lot of variations and it’s a non-trivial job); they all do. Then I had to change the templates and archive code to actually output the new URI. There’s more, but I won’t bore you further.

The best part, though, is that there is an even better permalink scheme on the way: providing incredibly flexible and intuitive paths (yes, it will be able to figure out any relevant crap you throw at it), while remaining completely compatible with this scheme.

Also note, the links in the main navigation are all in the URI form now, but will still work with the older paths.