I only went to see Hulk because of Peter Bradshaw's review in the Guardian. Before that I had pretty much dismissed it as cookie cutter action film territory. It wasn't really. Conversely, a lot of the red tops have dismissed with statements like "Lee has tried to create a cerebral action movie" (The Metro), but I don't think that covers it either.

It's difficult to nail it down, but I think the best way to explain it is "sophisticated", a label only really The Matrix (not Reloaded) shares. It's no normal blockbuster, but it has all the raw grunt, more in fact. Hulk's smashing is ace, it really captures the total frustration. We're not asked to contemplate the world as it is/was/might be. Some people think that is the case, but I think it's just standard action plot fill, ignored in every other exploder, so why not this one?

Where X-Men 2 dissappointed my younger sister, this one will succeeded. It has all the childlike cool it could want and that's a good thing. And the ending is pure cheese genius. Absolute genius.

I use Sendmail for SMTP because the current distribution of qmail is subtly broken for some reason on Jaguar. Can't quite work out why and I need outgoing SMTP too much to sit down and play with it. Anyway, Sendmail requires that / not be group writeable. This is understandable as Sendmail is so riddled with security issues it really needs all the help it can get. Still, I don't quite understand why Apple doesn't change the default sendmail.cf to ignore the permissions at least. It's a bit insecure, but who do they think is using Sendmail? Anybody running a big server will use a decent MTA. For that matter, why are they even shipping Sendmail? qmail is simpler to run, faster, better and more secure, especially if it's being supported by the OS vendor. Postfix is also very good I hear. Exim's pretty tight too. What on earth would make anyone choose Sendmail for a new OS? Especially a desktop one.

By the way, I mention this because they issued a software update this week and instead of removing the group writeable permission I accidentally removed group executable permission. Doh! I locked myself out of the machine and it wouldn't even boot until I remembered about single user mode. Phew!

I got my new glasses today. For the first time in a long time I'm very aware of the fact that I'm wearing glasses.

I'd got ever so used to the framing of the world provided by the old pair and the new pair are quite different. They are much wider, which gives some things a crazy movie look. They are also a fairly different prescription on the left side, which is disorienting and a little painful. I can't drive in them yet for this reason.

Stylistically, I haven't gone that far out there. It's just a big modernisation. I've still got rims, but they're deeply rectangular, and they are designer (Calvin Klein of all things) rather than own-brand. They make my old glasses look distinctly shit, which I guess they were after all this time. It's funny, I'd never really thought about it. My sunglasses are much worse and I'd just sort of singled them out. However, now I've upgraded a bit, I'm well aware of how much better I look. Indeed, I'm not planning to leave it so long before I upgrade again.

I haven't upgraded my sunglasses yet, but given the change in the glasses, it will definitely be this weekend. I probably can't actually bring myself to put my current sunglasses on ever again.

So Netscape is gone, that's bad news for them, but not for Mozilla happily. It will continue apace. Their timing couldn't be better almost. The Mozilla site has been redesigned. The new site is very good. It's simple and usable and it's attractive and very business-like. It seems to be eager to take on the mantle of the challenger that PPK would give it. Moz needs to learn a few lessons from Opera about impressing the suits.

The new site is a big step in the right direction if Mozilla is to climb to the top. In addition, I really think that the totally refactored codebases cut from the main trunk, the children of Moz if you like, Firebird, Thunderbird and Camino, represent the way forward for the newly formed foundation. These products fit into the bigger world of the web much better than the monolithic main product. They are more evolved and much fitter challengers to IE.

Netscape goes the way of IE Mac.

Interesting in the context of Peter Paul Koch's recent Evolt article, which positions the current browser crop in a new war, but also really sad. Netscape were a silly company at times, but they also fought the good fight pretty well down the years.

RIP.

← previous page, next page →

Choose another page: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 or return to the most recent entries.

Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

Rate my journal on bloghop.com: