Well, it seems I am never satis­fied with my foo­bar designs, so I spent some time last night refi­ning it some more.

I deci­ded to alter my SCPL to make things clea­rer. The code is here (note, this is a work in pro­gress and the code still looks messy), row height = 17, group rows = 4: GROUP | ITEMS

Some things to note, the album art resi­zes to an opti­mum dis­play size, so that albums of three tracks only can have art work dis­pla­yed without all the other albums suf­fe­ring from a small dis­play size. The maxi­mum image size is also easily defi­nea­ble, so with one change I can make all the art­work scale up to 300px. The second image shows how Various Artist albums are handled. 

I built the play­counts into a form of hot­ness rating, so that the more a track is pla­yed the dee­per orange and brigh­ter the track beco­mes. The ratings sys­tem is sepa­rate to this.

I caught this last night without any prior know­ledge of the story­line, pre­mise or Cédric Kla­pisch except that I recog­ni­sed the title “L’Auberge espag­nole”, a phrase that comes in refe­rence to Klapisch’s pre­vious film. The trai­ler doesn’t paint the per­fect pic­ture; it is a love story that tells us to avoid clichés in wri­ting before thro­wing them back at us in a delight­fully unpre­dic­ta­ble fashion. Xavier Rous­seau remin­ded me of Tomas in The Unbea­ra­ble Light­ness of Being adap­ta­tion, maybe he just bears a like­ness to Daniel Day Lewis, but I could see Rous­seau calmly echoing that “Take off your clothes” catchph­rase. Kelly Reilly is delight­ful to watch. Dolls is an effu­sive trans-culture love tale that main­tains a heart­war­ming ques­tio­ning out­look on the great mys­tery without having to resort to mind­less sic­ke­ning sweet­ness akin to the colour pink. Such is, a self res­pec­ting movie goer can hap­pily watch a roman­tic comedy without nee­ding a buc­ket, and this is a sig­ni­fi­cant achie­ve­ment in its own right.

Now offi­cially my favou­rite film of 2006, I thought I would post this trai­ler con­si­de­ring Abi­gail Bres­lin has been nomi­na­ted for an oscar in this years short­list, by the way… she is only 10 years old. I sin­ce­rely hope this fea­ture per­forms well at the aca­demy awards (which has snub­bed The Pres­tige in my opi­nion). I shall also note that Bres­lin is the little girl in the film “Keane” that I com­men­ted on a few weeks back, where her per­for­mance is once again ste­llar yet the films are starkly different.

If you’ve not yet seen Little Miss Sunshine I urge you to buy the DVD or rent it, it is one that can­not be mis­sed. The DVD came out last mon­day here in the UK.

Just pos­ting to inform peo­ple of some upda­tes to my newly announ­ced site http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org. The main lan­ding page when you search for an artist has been spru­ced up and a fully fled­ged browse fea­ture which allows you to spe­cify the num­ber of ima­ges per page, oldest ima­ges, newest ima­ges and ran­dom ima­ges has been imple­men­ted here: http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​b​r​o​w​s​e​.​php

Also large ima­ges are now avai­la­ble if you append an artist image url with &imgs=large