I don’t really want to say too much about The Matrix Reloaded (that’s got to be the millionth time I’ve linked to that site in the past week or two – I really should automate it). I’ve now seen it and it didn’t live up to the (admittedly ridiculous) hype I created in my head. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but if you absolutely don’t want to read anything that might ruin the film for you then do not read ahead.

Now, don’t get me wrong – it was a good film: full of great action sequences, interesting insights into the workings of The Matrix world, and pseudo-philosophical conversation. But I’m sure there are a hundred other sites (rightly) extolling the virtues of the film. Go find them. For me the bad points were:

• Morpheus – or, more precisely, Laurence Fishburne‘s portrayal of him. It was considerably weaker than his previous perfomance, and considerably more hammed up. This, to a degree, is understandable (given the circumstances he finds himself in) but jars with my memory of the character.
• Possible Changed Premises – Is it just me or have the rebels gotten a huge deal better at dealing with agents and other machines? And these ones are supposed to be “upgrades”. It wasn’t so long ago that they were saying things along the lines of “if you see an agent, run, run away”. Confidence boast or change? Also, Neo is supposed to be able to “bend the matrix to his will”. So why didn’t he? Sure, he flew around a bit and did some Jedi-esque pulling of objects, but so much for being in complete control.
• New Characters – the new guy who follows Neo around: pointless. Link: unnecessary comic relief. Niobe and Ghost: barely in it (is Ghost even mentioned by name?), but they do make it to the game. 95% of the characters in Zion: boring and pointless.
• Impact – It just wasn’t as innovative or ground-breaking as the first one. But that’s my fault for expecting it to be.

Now, like I said, these things did annoy me, but I did enjoy it. It’s certainly worth going to see. If you do, sit through the 8 or so minutes of credits for the trailer of The Matrix Revolutions. It looks sweet, but I won’t be getting my hopes up as much.

Taking a lead from Steal These Buttons and the new online button maker, I’ve added a buttons page to this site.

For the most part, it’s utterly useless. But maybe you’ll find something remotely interesting in there. I doubt it though.

Philipp Lenssen gives us an interesting way to bookmark information: the MemoMarker. It tries to get around the fact that URIs do change (despite the W3C saying that Cool URIs Don’t Change).

It does this by looking at a page and determining what the longest words are. The logic is that these are generally the most unique words on a page, when taken as a whole. It then creates a Google search string using those words. In the end, when your site gets indexed by the googlebot, you can use the search string (or memomark) to find moving content in the google cache.

The only problem is that the googlebot takes roughly a month to update its index, so the links are absolutely useless until then.

Simon Willison shows us how to style blockquotes with CSS. Very useful stuff. I need to do something like this because, currently, my blockquotes look awful.

How can days start off so well and then go down the toilet so fast? Everything was going great. I had a decent (last) day at uni, and everything was roses. Then I came home and thought I’d do some work on improving the URLs around here.

Locally (I run an Apache server on my own computer), I got everything looking nice: URIs everywhere, and everything looking simplified and clean. Things worked well. Now, despite the test sampling I tried a few days ago that worked fine, when I uploaded, my host crapped out. It refused to load any page that used the mod_rewrite rules I specified.

After a while of trying the new permalinks (of the form /News/2003/05/19/#PageTitle), I gave up. But then my host completely crapped out. The server went done and FTP calls were blocked for a long time (or so it seemed). So, not only did the new URLs and permalinks not work, I couldn’t change them back.

In the meantime, I though I’d try out the new version of Firebird. Needless to say, it didn’t go well. Although everything was initially fine, after a few minutes pages would take forever to load and then the browser would drain all resources. The net result was that pages didn’t show and my music wouldn’t play. Fun.

But, as things usually do, things semi-worked out: I got the old files uploaded (so those lovely new permalinks don’t exist anywhere but on my computer), and managed to revert to my old version of Firebird. So nothing lost, but nothing gained.