I’ve been watching my way through Kevin Smiths back catalogue of work recently and one of the forgotten highlights of my DVD collection is An Evening with Kevin Smith. Although the format’s pretty simple, Kevin Smith engaging the audience in Q&A sessions in a number of American colleges, the material is polished, the delivery near perfect and the speaker charismatic. Over three hours of footage he fields questions on pretty much everything, his films, loves and life. Read on →

How could I resist a film called Snakes on a Plane, featuring one of the masters of over acting, Samuel L. Jackson, that had some of its scenes re-shot to be funnier, yes, funnier, based on anonymous internet posts on movie forums? Well, obviously I couldn’t. I’m honestly not sure why I bothered. I like good films, I also like REALLY bad films, I have a soft-spot for the old Godzilla movies for instance, but this film wasn’t good and it wasn’t that bad. Read on →

The overly long title has most of the details. I’ve created a print friendly redirect Greasemonkey script for both Developer.com and Scientific American.com. Hope they are useful.

Azumi 2: Death or Love is a pretty standard Japanese sword fighting film with impressive wirework, well choreographed action scenes, very little plot and a pretty lead, in this case Aya Ueto. It follows on directly from the first film, between the continuation of the plot, a number of the same characters and, aside from a few small flashbacks, it makes no attempt to welcome new viewers. Although as a sequel why should it? Read on →

One of my favourite Windows applications is WinDirStat, a great little utility that breaks down disk usage by file and folder and shows it using a treemap. The tree map is possibly the best way of displaying this kind of information, in addition to the obvious “block size is relative to the file size” you also get colour coded file types (you soon learn to spot clusters of mp3s…) and easy right click access to most of the functionality you’ll want to use while investigating disk hogs. Read on →

One of the annoyances of my (working) life is the build up of mail in obscurely named mailboxes on different machines. While the typical aim is to have all hosts sending their local mail to a central point (for mass filtering and deleting^Wlogging) you - firstly - have to actually implement this change (normally on machines with lots of different mailservers - yum!) and then add a check to ensure that it never gets broken in the future. Read on →

What can I say, one of the most intriguing ideas for a ‘vs’ film. Two of the best alien menaces from the 80s. A big budget. A cast of complete unknowns. A really shite film. While the film needed a human element to get the audience involved the director took it too far and ended up with a human / Predator buddy cop feel by the end of the film. The action scenes were dull, no where near the standard of Aliens and mainstream nature of the two namesakes means a lot of the shock and surprise was lost even before this heavy handed attempt to scare the audience. Read on →

The hit: I recently got sent away to the 2006 Exim Course in Cambridge. The main presenter, Dr Philip Hazel, who’s also the author of Exim, was a good presenter. The material seemed well rehearsed, nicely paced and covered a fair amount of ground over the three days - he also knows pretty much everything about Exim so the audience questions were always quickly answered. There were also two guest speakers, who had an hour each. Read on →

Last year I was quite interested in the Description of a Project (DOAP) project. I added DOAP files to all my Sourceforge projects, wrote some little util scripts, contributed DOAP files to a couple of the Free software projects I use that had asked for them… and then promptly forgot all about it. A couple of recent posts about the Python Package index and DOAP interested me enough to dig out one of my half-finished scripts, it’s the (very messy) first pass of a CPAN META. Read on →

“You do not secure the liberty of our country and value of our democracy by undermining them. That’s the road to hell. – Lord Phillips of Sudbury (source: BBC News - “Police decryption powers ‘flawed’“ I don’t normally post on politics or law because I’m not an expert and, to be honest (judging by my apache logs), they’re only interesting to a small fraction of the people that stop by here. Read on →