Caboose

I got round to changing the main index page template, so now you can see the music I’ve been listening to recently in the column on the right.

It’s working more or less properly but XMMS seems to have trouble with some of my MP3s. For example for Gorillaz album (also called Gorillaz) the track title is shown but not the artist, even though the ID3 info is correct.

Things still to do:

• work out how to upload listening information from my portable MP3 player (could be tricky)
• Upgrade to Movable Type 2.62

Saw the trailer for this last week and thought it looked interesting. The trailer was very bitty and disconnected and it was difficult to work out what was going on, but you expect that from a trailer.

The film was pretty much the same, random and disconnected with only a very thin thread of plot.

Some of the individual scenes were absorbing, ridiculous or funny but overall the film was disappointing. It seemed like the director was trying too hard to make a point.

Mark Pilgrim (of dive into mark) has an interesting app that looks at your weblog and recommands other things you might want to read: Recommended Reading.

I’ve been playing about with a display of what I’m listening to on my PC, like everyone else has. I picked up some PHP code for doing this.

The server end works fine but the PHP script that runs on my PC was inserting lots of NUL characters in the list of songs, not good. As my knowledge of PHP is minimal I had a quick go at working out the problem before giving up in horror when I discovered there’s no built-in debugger in PHP.

I rewrote the script in Perl, I’m not going to publish it because it’s a quick hack and pretty ugly.

Until I get round to rewriting my main index template the only place you can see what I’m listening to is here.

Update: My server seems to be suffering from problems, almost lost this post…

An interesting article on the sociology of schools: Why Nerds are Unpopular.

It’s a little bitter in parts, but worth reading.

dive into mark has an online version of those magnetic poetry kits you often see on fridge doors. It even works with Opera (v7 for Windows).

You can find it here, or using words from this site.

Let me know what you come up with.

Just noticed that I got a link in Metafilter back in January, look under January 28 here (shame they don’t have internal IDs so I could link to the right bit of the page).

I spent the weekend with my Grandparents in Norfolk again but this time my little sister Eleanor was able to make it through.

This morning we went for a walk down to Wroxham Broad, in order to walk off one of Granny’s wonderful breakfasts.

If you’re not from the UK you probably have no idea what the Norfolk Broads are, the Broads Authority site will educate you. (Executive summary: they’re shallow lakes formed when peat cuttings flooded)

It’s been ages since I last went to the cinema, so it was just as well tonight’s film was a good one.

I saw Revengers Tragedy, which seems to be missing from the IMDB. It’s an adaptation of a play written in 1607 but now set slightly in the future and revolves around the main character’s revenge for the murder of his wife.

More information can be found on the film’s website and in director Alex Cox’s blog.

I liked the contrast between the modern (more run-down present than sci-fi future) setting and the archaic English dialog. Chumbawamba’s soundtrack also worked well. Go and see it, it’s fun.

Update: It seems Revengers Tragedy is in the IMDB, here, but their search engine couldn’t find it earlier. Odd.

The UK’s National Statistics website has published some of the results of the 2001 census. This includes figures for the number of people who claimed “Jedi” as their religion:“390,000 Jedis There Are”

Nice to see some evidence of a sense of humour within the Civil Service…

[via The Register]

Update 13:31 The Scottish census site is much less informative, looks like some results may appear online after March.