I’ve finally gotten around to updating the Archives code. Now when you look at a specific month (for example, March 2003), you’ll get a list of entries and descriptions, rather than a list of days.

This makes it a million times easier to find old items, since you don’t have to trawl through every single day in the archives to find something. It used to take roughly 30N/2 to find entry N. It now takes N/2. Just a slight improvement, then.

From Philipp Lenssen, the same guy who made the MemoMarker I mentioned a few days ago, is a brand new new toy: The EgoBot.

Ask it a question and it will query Google and make up an appropriate answer. For example, I asked it “What is your quest?”, and got back “My quest is and has always been: to create music, dreams and words that dance through sound”. Very impressive stuff for a chatBot-style script. Like most scripts of this nature, it’s fun for a while.

Tying in with what I’ve already mentioned about abstractions, Joel has written up The Law Of Leaky Abstractions; something that I’ve known for a while, but have never managed to consolidate in my head. This is why too many layers of abstraction are dangerous: if something leaks (and they do), it takes an age to track the problem through the layers and then figure out why it leaked.

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.