Apathy is a way of life now. How many times have you walked past the homeless, begging for change, with a shirk and slight fleeting shame? Far too many, I’d wager. Would it have killed you to give them a small amount? Probably not.

Apathy is becoming more apparent to me. At this time of year, of celebrations and over-indulgence, we either keep ignoring our fellow man or through them scraps of kindness to sate our own guilt.

You don’t even have to show respect for someone worse off than yourself, just help someone. Suggestions:

• Give someone you see begging or selling the Big Issue the time of day and a small donation. Honestly, if you’re reading this you can probably spare a quid, can’t you?
• Buy a CD you have downloaded. Anything at all you do not own, but have a copy of. You’ve probably got dozens to pick from. Buy at least one.
• Someone in a shop give you particularly good service over the rather frantic festive period? Let them know. Write their company a letter applauding their efforts rather than letting it slide. You’ll guarantee yourself a similarly high level of service later and probably make someone smile.
• Smile! Smile at a random stranger on a bus. You’re only burning calories but smiles are infectious little buggers.

I know that it is not likely anyone will do any of these things, but at least consider why you are not doing them or something similar. Why are you not looking out for everyone else? What does it say about you?

It is not often that you leave a film unsure whether you liked what you saw or not. Generally you can tell by the amount of snoring or head-shaking at plot points that you do not like it. It was odd, then, that Napoleon Dynamite left a fairly empty feeling inside. It is funny, but also embarrasing.

The eponymous character is a loser, not the sort of loser who is just non-conformant like in so many US high school films, a genuinely odd loser. His family are stranger, and it can be very uncomfortable to watch them interact.

Just like the film, I’m not sure where to go with this. It’s odd, but not necessarily good or bad.

Alexa, Amazon’s search engine, is apparently encouraging people to create info.txt files. I say apparently because I can’t find the page myself, but I trust the source.

URI namespace pollution is a bad thing!

We can’t do much about it in the case of robots.txt, that standard is too deep-rooted now, but we should be severely discouraging anyone from following that same route.

Why? Spurious requests cause bandwidth to go up. You will already be getting hundreds of requests a day for favicon.ico and robots.txt if you run a site, do you really want more?

This pollution is bad. It’s not extensible or open to pre-discovery. It’s rooted in a view of the web that no longer exists, where the root of a domain represents a website and the only website at that domain. The web doesn’t exist like that any more.

This kind of pollution is damaging and will eventually reduce the scalability of the web, as more protocols suffocate the reasonable URI namespace. There is no need for this. We have enough mechanisms to allow more fluid interactions to discover information that is needed, if present.

So, please, no info.txt files.

Just a quick apology for the brief downtime earlier. Seems someone hacked my host and pissed around with the cache files. All should be back to normal now. If you don’t know what I mean, it doesn’t matter now.

Keen observers of Solitude will have noticed that it has been over a month since the last random links post. Well, that’s because I’ve been working on the all new Random Links sidebar.

From now on, random links will appear in the sidebar (have a look at the left side of the main page). It even has an RSS feed.

Although the entries in it right now are over a month old (I’ve been busy), expect a lot of updates.