I’ve not really posted much in the last day or two, and won’t for another day or two. This week is class test week: a whole lot of testing and not a whole lot of time for studying.

Other than working hard, I’ve started to prepare the next major overhaul of Finetto, the CMS I’ve been developing (and that runs this site). There’s a lot of stuff going in that I’ve wanted to do for ages (Comments, an event-based model for dealing with changes etc) and some new ideas (those can remain private until they’re implemented).

I’m surprised at the amount of redundancy I’m going to be able to remove: there’s lots of similar code in there just waiting to be made more generic, lots of tweaking waiting to be done.

Anyway, there will be a return to normal service on Thursday, if all goes well.

I’ve been messing around with RSS 2.0 feeds a bit lately. I thought it was about time I added one myself. So, I had a look at the feed Sam Ruby has and took what I needed.

Then I got to thinking: we have an XHTML body for content in the feed, so why not use it as we would in any other web page? After a little messing around, I added some CSS rules and now have a feed that’s smarter (looking) than your average feed.

I give you my RSS 2.0 feed.

The internet quiz: the most pointless waste of time we’ve come up with on the net. You know the sort I mean: “What kind of (blogger/thinker/zombie etc) are you?”. Answer 30 question and you’ll reveal everything about yourself. Or will you?

The problem with these quizzes is that they don’t tell you anything new; you only ever get what you want to hear out. Anyone with a reasonable amount of intelligence can see the result answering a certain question will give you. For example, “Do you like listening to music: a) a lot, b) a little, or c) not at all?”. What a shocker it is when, after answering “a lot”, that you’re a musical person.

Now, whether we do it consciously or not, we always answer these questions the way we think of ourselves, rather than the way we actually are. This is the only insight into our own nature we get: that we’d rather live in our own private little fantasy than see ourselves for how we are (assuming a quiz could accurately profile a person in the first place).

What prompted this ? The BBC Thinker Quiz. Was I surprised when it profiled me as both a “logical-mathematical thinker” and “a musical thinker”? No. I do maths and computing, and I’m passionate about music. This is how I see myself. No great revelations, no big surprise, no wizard behind the curtain.

So, if you want an ego boost (“wow, I’m really as [insert quiz variable here] as I thought I was”), keep trying those quizzes. Me? I’m going back to the roots of quiset; literally “to question” – Question the point of these quizzes.

Given a primary location that is roughly the size of a portaloo, you wouldn’t think “Phone Booth” could be very interesting. Of course, throw in the other key ingredient of the film, a sniper aiming at the occupant of the phone booth who starts picking off nearby people, and you’ve got a considerably more interesting prospect.

The small location doesn’t detract from tension, drama, or even characterisation. We get to see the inner workings of Stu (Colin Farrell), and the mysterious sniper (Keifer Sutherland). Although Stu isn’t the best of people (he’s an asshole), we can still feel for him; trapped in a claustrophobic nightmare, being instructed by a madman who can play God with his life.

I don’t want to say too much more (I try not to ruin films for others), but it’s definitely worth seeing.

Honestly, this’ll be the last “links only” post, I’ll make for a while. I want to get rid of the rest of these before they get too stale (some of them already had to be thrown out because they were getting a bit whiffy).

• WTheRemix Winners – The winning entries have been announced in the competition to re-design the W3C Homepage. This is badly needed, since the current page isn’t exactly a shining example of what standards can do,
• Web Buttons – Buttons for possibly every conceivable occassion. When I get time, I might contribute a kitchen sink button for completeness,
• Confirmation Bias – This idea occured to me not too long ago: people believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of evidence. The smarter they are, the better they are at defending their own position rather than using their intelligence to be more open-minded. The article does a much more thorough job of explaining it,
• Better URI links – Just what it says on the tin: links to articles about using better URIs. I’ve also been meaning to start using proper URIs for permalinks on this site, but can’t seem to bring myself to implement it. It’s near the top of my to-do list for the site,
• Irate Scotsman and Bug’s Blog – While playing around with GeoURL, I decided to see who lived within 10 miles of me. I was surprised to find these two: they both go to my university and are in my course. Finding someone I knew (or rather knew of) offline while online was a little disconcerting. I later tried to find more people from my course, but gave up after a grand total of 0 finds. Oh well.

Like I said, that’s it for link-only posts for at least, oh, another week.