I recently came across the PostCon format (an RDF-based format) in a document describing an article on monsters. Take a look at it: that’s a lot of metadata! It got me thinking: how much metadata should we store on a given article?

The Finetto XML format is very small, but also in its early unsettled days (Finetto is the content management system I use and build). The elements are:

• ID – a unique ID for each article, derived from the time it was written,
• Title – the title of the item, not necessarily unique,
• Date – The date the article was created. This is a throwback to when I didn’t understand how to use event-driven parsers properly, and has always annoyed me,
• Description – A short description of the article, entered manually,
• Author – Name of the person who wrote the article. This appears automatically (taken from a users log-in), but can be entered manually,
• Content – The content itself as a chunk of XHTML.

Now, compared to PostCon, that is tiny. But there are times when I wish I had stored category information, or used an RSS-like format, or even scrubbed the date (it can be taken from ID). The question is should we attempt to store all information that could possibly maybe be useful down the line? I’m not convinced either way.

On one side, you’ve got the benefit that if you ever need to know anything about the document, it’s right there: no need to infer it from other sources (the web page that the article appears on, for instance). But, on the other side, you also have a tremendous amount of bloat if the data is never used. If a post is small, the metadata outweights the data which strikes me as horribly wrong.

When I can get a clear path to backwards-compatibility, I’ll seriously look at getting a lot more metadata into my format. For now, I’ll just muse over how much is enough.

Note: this contains minor plot spoilers.

After many mixed reviews from friends, I thought I’d better see X-Men 2 for myself. So I did. Today.

Although it wasn’t as bad as the first film (which had a wafer-thin plot, badly written script, wooden acting etc), it was hardly ground-breaking or fantastic. More mutants from the comics were paraded around (for future usage), plot lines for future films were wedged into it in unsubtle ways (anyone who has seen either the cartoon series or read the comics will know what happened to Jean Grey), dialogue was poor, and Halle Berry gave another wooden performance (how does she get work?).

The good points? Nightcrawlers attack on the White House at the start was a stunningly executed sequence. Thinking about it, it went downhill after that and never recovered. A shame.

All in all, a passable film.

There’s a moderately old article called “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You” that I was thinking about recently.

A lot of programming languages allow for classes, generic classes and beyond. In the real world, companies insist on using object-oriented programming. Why? So they can re-use objects and methods at a later date. Now, outside of the codebase that the objects were originally created for, how often do you think they’re used? That’s right: close to nil.

Now, why have I been thinking about it recently? Because I’m being forced to use “generic classes” AKA “one layer of abstraction too far”. The chances of reusing a generic procedure in the real world? Absolutely nil. The things are too generic (you can basically only do assignment operations on them) to be useful for anything.

Abstraction is all well and good, but only if there is actually a need for it rather than when it could be implemented (i.e. all the time).

The film Dreamcatcher is bad. Words can’t possibly sum up the badness. In fact, I’ve done my absolute best to wipe most of it from my mind.

It starts out reasonably: 4 friends reunite and reminisce about how they got super-powers from a mentally handicapped boy they saved from bullies. Yes, that’s the reasonable part. After that, all manner of bizarre (read: shit) plot contrivances make it laughably bad.

I would recommend people see it, if only for the short film they’re showing before it: “Final Flight Of Osiris”, part of the Animatrix films (no direct link). Now that’s how you make a film.

This has got to be possibly the funniest crash bug for IE. Basically, by having an input element (used in forms) with no body tag, IE dies on its arse.