16:09, Saturday March 8th, 2003 • feeling critical • no comments
First up is the new Spike Jonze/Nicholas Cage/Charlie Kaufman film, Adaptation.
The film follows Kaufman's attempts to adapt The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. Paralysed and unable to write anything good he starts to write himself into the script. The movie comes out of the machine as much more than the book, or Kaufman, and is a cool reflection on writing, movies, stories, characters, the people they relate to, life, the universe and everything. It's great that Kaufman manages to turn the process of writing the script into the adventure itself and still come out of it with the author of the book liking the adaptation! Hardcore.
It was definitely on the bleeding edge of clever-clever, but, for me at least, never quite crossed the line. The cyclic self-reference moved along enough to stay funny and the ending was cool. Often it's the endings that ruin a film, but this one was sweet. It probably had the highest film-quality to ending-quality ratio of any film I've seen for years. The addition of Charlie's fictional brother, Donald, resulted in a nice wobble, as the film was tugged by the screenwriting of both brothers as well all the other creative work that went before them. Cage's performances as Donald and Charlie was excellent and the direction and editing that subsequently brought them together was done extremely well. At no point was my suspension of disbelief broken. It's worth seeing the film for the experience of coming out of the cinema and rationalising the fact that both characters are actually one man.
I didn't think it was super-fantastic, but it was cool and it's always nice to see new things being done well. It made me want to write a screenplay!
13:57, Saturday March 8th, 2003 • feeling critical • no comments
I can never remember what films I've seen. I can do books because they're significantly more of a life investment. But I just keep forgetting the films. I see about three or four a week on TV/DVD and go to the cinema once every two weeks probably.
This flaw has been particuarly highlighted recently by my flatmate Tom. He is a runner at an ad production company and part of his job is to find stuff for mood reels. A mood reel is where you get shots from other films/ads/TV programmes to illustrate the kind of thing you're going to do in a new production. He'll come home and say, "What films have people shooting themselves in?" and stuff like that. Anyway, I can never remember, so now I'm going to try and log what I saw and what I thought. I think I'll do books and records as well. Any media intake really.
The name of the mood refers to the fact that I'm going to play the critic. I won't be uniformly critical in the negative sense. Generally I'm pretty upbeat about things if I even vaguely like them.
For Blanket, adding an URL base would prevent the need to rewrite relative links, which would certainly lighten the load a bit. Also, if this value is carried across to javascript that would mean some semblance of JS support.
In some of my recent projects I've been lamenting PHP's lack of exceptions. I've been writing blocks of code which perform three or four operations but have to clad those ops in 15 lines of error checking armour. I've encapsulated most of my functionality in objects, so if those objects threw exceptions it would make much more sense. However, it may be possible to fudge a try-catch like system using the trigger_error function. A custom error handler could be created that would behave appropriately and clean up and this would be invoked in a similar manner, stepping out of all functions, to a try block. By defining different catcher functions for different scopes, it would be possible to actually do different things when an error comes in. Not that I do that. I always, always just dump the string into a template and push some HTML out of the door.
I found this Zend tip on simulating try-catch-throw. It looks a bit in-depth for my purposes and I'm not sure about the first argument for the try_catch function, but it's a proof of concept and I think I will try deploying this idea in my next project. Possibly with this method of triggering errors employed in some way in the base classes that throw things.
11:00, Wednesday March 5th, 2003 • feeling webmasterly • no comments
If you get links that don't work in Apple Mail it may be because you've put align="left" on the table tag.
Oh god, HTML email is all good but it does mean that I have to go through a slew of new and fairly crappy rendering enginesto make sure that they can all handle what I'm sending them. I'm surprised by the low quality of a lot of the products. Particuarly Apple Mail actually, which does not understand a line of CSS. I hope this situation will change with the whole Safari thing.
By the way, the reason for this and the last post is that I'm developing a direct mail application. It's nearly 5,000 lines of PHP now and has taken me about 110 hours of coding time to produce. It currently lacks a realistic interface (it looks very much like the database it's built around) but it's functionally pretty much there. It will be managed and so should be able to compete with the big boys and undercut them quite a bit.
19:55, Saturday March 1st, 2003 • feeling webmasterly • no comments
If you are having problems when generated MIME emails, specifically that the body of the email appears empty even though the required content is patently there, check the line feeds.
Apple Mail allows you to view the source with the control characters displayed which is very useful. I noticed that my blank emails were using \n where lines had been output by qmail and by my own code but \r\n for headers generated by PEAR's Mail_mime class. The first time \r\n was used was in the content type header, specifying the boundary. The boundary wasn't being found and the email was blank.
define("MAIL_MIME_CRLF", "\n"); was the quick fix. The results work fine in Apple Mail, Eudora, Outlook 2000 and XP, Outlook Express 5 and 6, Hotmail and SquirrelMail.
