300. No more, no less. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s a fea­ture length trai­ler of epic pro­por­tions by a direc­tor “with a machine gun for a dick”.

Saw this a cou­ple of nights ago. Pretty hard to watch if you are a guy. I’ve heard peo­ple state that this sti­mu­la­tes all sorts of deba­tes about pae­dophi­lia and vigi­lan­tism; per­so­nally it seems like this extreme set­ting is merely jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for a graphic tor­ture film (so is the Lion’s gate way) invol­ving some crazy bitch attac­king some pro­po­sed kiddie-lover. The true menace to society would be illus­tra­ted in a sic­ke­ning role rever­sal, honestly I believe this film achie­ves little more than some light (albeit gritty) enter­tain­ment. Plus I pre­fer soft gums.

I was meant to make this blog post last night but I ended up watching Scrubs ins­tead. Then I couldn’t make it this mor­ning because I had an oh-so fun direc­ted rea­ding dis­ser­ta­tion write-up to con­ti­nue with and a pains­ta­kingly mono­to­nous test pro­ce­dure to carry out on some newly made sam­ple blocks for my pro­ject. Yes­ter­day the results made no sense, today the sen­sor broke half­way through. 

Howe­ver, I have writ­ten my 1800 words today and I am ready to take some time off. So, in-between work and more work I squee­zed a little bit of MySQL PHP coding into a new site spe­ci­fi­cally for my movie collec­tions. The site lists my owned movies and my rated movies (grabs my per­so­nal ratings from IMDB — all 400 of them), using the IMDB cata­lo­gue num­ber it fetches data such as title, year, direc­tor, run­time, rating, plot and pos­ter image auto­ma­ti­cally. I guess I am brin­ging the site out of beta by inc­lu­ding the link here, check it out:

http://​movies​.tri​vial​being​.org/

It is here at last it seems. In fact it is per­fectly clear that it has arri­ved — news­pa­pers are filled with ads shou­ting about the PS3s that they have in stock — get them now! And, on peru­sing the shop­ping cen­tres late on Satur­day, I noti­ced that every elec­tro­nics store out­let from Game-station to HMV and Curry’s Digi­tal had large pro­tru­ding signs announ­cing “Plays­ta­tion 3 in stock… hurry”. Should I have had £500 to lay down on a sys­tem + game I could have bought one from anywhere. Though, if I wan­ted to buy myself a Wii I would be hard pres­sed to find one; HMV, Game, et al. had all sold out and many sto­res still had wai­ting lists. I’ll take my £300 + Wii over a PS3 and Resis­tance Fall of Man any day, in fact, 4 months later I and my house-mates still avidly play Wii Sports. I do plan to purchase a PS3 (ICO 3, Little Big World), though not for a good 18 months. 

I seem to have fai­led to note to ever­yone peru­sing this site for its foobar-ness that all foo­bar rela­ted posts have now been moved to my new site, Fooblog200000. I’ll no lon­ger be pos­ting upda­tes to my con­fi­gu­ra­tions here, which are now up to ver­sion 0.6 with some very nice new fea­tu­res such as ratings panels and a sin­gles SCPL mode. 

With that said, the inte­rim period for the site, i.e. its ope­ning month, has come to an end with quite a razzle dazzle; v0.6 of my con­fi­gu­ra­tion made it to the front page of Digg and foo­blog con­se­quently suc­cum­bed to the effects of lots of visi­tors. Foo­blog uses Dreamhost as its pro­vi­der which offers 2Tb of band­width a month; I had plenty of pre­pa­ra­tion for such an attack, or at least I thought I did. What I was not pre­pa­red for was a catas­trophic fai­lure of Word­press 2.1.2. To save the MySQL data­ba­ses from too much stress I tur­ned on the advan­ced WP caching sys­tem, howe­ver when 2000 peo­ple arri­ved in an hour or so something went wrong and all WP pages fai­led to load. Due to the stres­ses of such high traf­fic volu­mes I assu­med the pro­blem was cau­sed by traf­fic alone and that it would rec­tify itself when things cal­med down, I put up a tem­po­rary page and let it be. Howe­ver seve­ral hours later it was still pla­ying up, it took me a while to track down the pro­blem but in the end dele­ting the cache fixed everything. It’s a shame this hap­pe­ned because the down period of the site occu­rred during the period the site was on the front page of Digg. Oh well, I will know the fix for next time.