Snow!

:laugh OK, it doesn’t happen very often and usually grinds London to a halt, but we’ve finally had some snow. It’s great the way it seems to turn the volume down on the world while it’s falling. You notice this particularly in cities.

It’s just a shame it’s not the weekend so that we could enjoy it, rather than during rush hour on the way home from work, during the middle of the week. You just know that it’s going to be a grey, slushy, slippery commute to work tomorrow…

PHP

:unhappy What is it about PHP scripts? I just can’t seem to get my head around them. Everything seems to have installed OK, but whenever I try and run a script I’ve pulled from the net I get various incomprehensible errors. I know that PHP is working because I’ve managed to install phpBB without issue. I just don’t understand why I can’t get any other scripts to work without error.

It’s very frustrating, because I’ve found a couple of php based scripts that will do some really schweet things: -

1. rss2html – this works sort of but still give a few errors in the web browser.
2. nntp2rss – it creates a RSS xml file fine, but just outputs a page of rubbish in the web browser.

Hmmm… I just need to hack away and see how I get on.

Visual Dictionary / Thesaurus

:sun The Visual Thesaurus by Plumb Design is probably one of the best sites/applications I’ve seen in years. I’ve already spent a good few hours ‘browsing’ it. Something that isn’t often heard about a dictionary!

Stress buster

:laugh This is a fab stress buster…. The infamous penguin striker, give it a blast here

intradink – now with Atom syndication feed

:sun Blogger are now offering Atom based syndication feeds for there users. As such you can find mine here.

NASA lose contact with Mars Rover – Spirit

:unhappy What a shame. It seems that NASA have lost contact with their Mars Rover Spirit. This is particularly disheartening after Britain’s failed attempt [Beagle II] a few weeks ago, and after some amazing early pictures from Spirit. It’s almost unbelievable to think that the pictures are from another planet.

I hope they manage to restore communications soon.

The Last Samurai

:sun I watched The Last Samurai over the weekend and generally found it to be an enjoyable film. I’d go as far as to recommend it as a film to be seen on the big screen and probably one to be bought on DVD.

I thought the early battle and fight sequences were excellent, in particular the scenes with the Ninja, and the assassination attempt were great. Apparently the assassination scene was shot in one take, according to an interview with Mr. Cruise on BBC recently. The film did manage to get across the samurai [Confucian] way of life and their strive for perfection in every day activities [more information here].

Saying that, I do have some criticisms…. Like most Hollywood films, I thought it went on about 10 minutes too long, and could have ended with their final charge. There were a couple of cheesy scenes [the kiss, some of the final battle and a couple of others] which I thought were unnecessary and didn’t add anything to the film. Also I was hoping that the ‘The Last Samurai’ would have been one of the Samurai instead of our Hollywood hero, Mr. Cruise… I suppose that is Hollywood for you!

Still, well worth watching and probably one of the best films I’ve seen recently.

RSS and OPML

:sun I’ve added more RSS channels to the news link including some top selling lists directly from Amazon. I think this technology is great. No longer having to search around 100’s of websites to get updates, I just browse the headlines until I see something interesting.

Not only that it, seems more and more sites are adopting this standard and it seems that this is an excellent introduction to some basic ‘web services’. Also with XML standards like OPML you can fast track your way to receiving headlines, by taking someone else’s OPML file and importing it into your chosen news aggregator [see my OPML file]. This file basically contains a list of RSS feeds that I subscribe to under category headings that I’ve defined [news, shopping etc].

IntraVnews is a great [and free] pluggin for Outlook that will retreive headlines from websites and display them in the familiar MS Outlook application. You can directly subscribe to specific RSS feeds from individual sites, or import in an OPML file from someone else.

So while browsing your favorite sites keep an eye out for links or icons like XML, RSS, RDF, OPML and Syndication.

Quantum Dots and Programmable Matter

:unsure "Quantum Dots and Programmable Matter by Wil McCarthy -- Wil McCarthy introduces the concepts of programmable matter and the quantum dot, a device capable of trapping electrons in a space so small it forms artificial atoms that can be controlled in real time. If you'd like to learn more about this "programmable matter," Wil plans to explore the social and technological implications of quantum dots at O'Reilly's upcoming Emerging Technology Conference."

Interesting stuff….

intradink is back online

:laugh Seems like it’s been a bad month or so for me… a network card died on my smoothwall which meant the DMZ has been down and so web and mail servers. Well it’s all sorted now and i n t r a d i n k is now back online.