A thanks to Derek for pointing to a BBC news story about the French royally screwing up an explosives exercise. That is absolutely shocking.

It’s one thing to train sniffer dogs in an airport, it’s the real situation they’ll face, but to plant plastic explosives in a random passengers luggage is just madness. You’re really just asking for the dog to mess up and let it get away. Surely someone saw this coming.

I’m sure with this being in France and all that some will put this in the “News that isn’t news to anyone” category, but I’m genuinely stunned that anyone thought this was a good idea.

It’s rare that a film is both stupidly funny and funnily intelligent, where existential crisis is explored through hitting people in the face with a spacehopper. I Heart Huckabees pulls it off with style.

First, the cast: superb, not a single poor casting decision. Jude Law is the slightly smarmy marketing man that becomes the object of Jason Schwartzman’s hatred. Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin also work well together as the quirky and disturbing existential detectives who investigate Schwartzman’s crisis. The best performance, however, is by Mark Wahlberg. He is spot on with timing, expression, everything. I never liked him before this, but he has gone up hugely in my estimation.

The first hour of the film rips past, exploring the characters, and settles the remainder of the film into a debate on whether everything is interconnected (leading to a harmonious universe) or discrete (leading to a random and cruel universe). Being a slightly surreal comedy (reminding me of the superb Being John Malkovich), it does it in ways that you’ll never see coming. Right up to the end, the film charms; the closing lines are both smirk-worthy and poignant.

One of the best films of the year.

Tragedy hit last night for many students when The Shack burned down. Famed among students for cheesey pop, the lack of access will mean having to go to, shock horror, The Garage.

Stuwee, unofficial spokesman for The Shack, was said to be “totally gutted”. Expect him to set up a support group soon.

Mad, stupid, silly, daft, bizarre, off-colour, odd. All terms that describe Shaolin Soccer well.

At it’s core, Shaolin Soccer is about an idea rather than a story. Someone thought it would be a good idea to mix bullet-time special effects, CG effects and wire-fu with the most basic of comic stories to create a surreal football film. The results are stupid but amusing scenes of balls smashing through players like bowling balls.

Although apparently cut for Western release, the film is still entertaining enough to watch.

Up until fairly recently, I didn’t use an RSS aggregator. Using my own bandwidth to check so many sites was just hammering my connection, and starting and stopping the application when I needed to reserve the bandwidth was just a pain.

Enter Bloglines. Yes, I’m late to the party. People have been praising it for months now but I only very recently saw the light. It is an excellent tool: allowing me to check sites quickly when I want to (and not using up much of my bandwidth), keeping unread items up to date no matter which computer I’m using, and making me far more productive.

Before Bloglines, I was struggling to keep up with about 50 sites regularly. I now easily keep up with around 120. Thoroughly recommended.

Now, I checked my server logs for the first time in months tonight and noticed that a single host had hit my site 2000 times this week. That’s a hit every 5 minutes from one entity. Investigating a little further made it clear that the one entity was an aggregator: the bloglines aggregator.

Now, Solitude is not a high-throughput site. I attempted to update once a day, but it’s usually more like once every two days. In the last week, there have been 3 updates (this being the 4th).

Think about that: 3 updates, 2000 checks. 3. 2000 checks. Notice the ever so slight disparity?

Those Bloglines guys make a very usable interface to a damn fine service, but they really need to work on the crawler updating logic. It’s not that hard to extrapolate predictable update patterns. If a site is updating every 15 minutes, check it every 15 minutes. If it slows down and stays at once every day, 15 minutes is probably very inappropriate. Once an hour would be better. You don’t less any real sense of freshness and you don’t over do server hits.

Common sense and the polite thing to do.