No geek
is an island

Went to the cinema yesterday for to see the fillum Aeon Flux. I enjoyed it, but it did demonstrate the gulf between being enjoyable and being particularly good.

It was shot in Europe which probably explains the many Brits in the cast: Jonny Lee Miller, Oscar nominee Sophie Okenedo (off of Scream of the Shalka), Pete Postlethwaite, and the ubiquitous Paterson Joseph (Johnson in Peep Show and Rodrick in Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways). The eponymous character was played by Oscar winner Charlize Theron. Sadly, despite her Academy Award, her flat performance was one of the reasons the film wasn’t as good as it should have been.

Some things were slightly excusable because they presumably came from the source material. The action scenes occasionally overstayed their welcome, but that’s to be expected from an adaptation from Manga. The plot twist was a terrible sci-fi cliché - so much so that it was used in an episode from the second series of Star Trek: TNG. (I only remeber it was second season because Dr Palaski was in it and it was a unintentionally funny episode.) This particularly twist involved a significant suspension of disbelief from anyone with a scientific bent - fair enough if the conceit is presented at the beginning of the film, but harder to accept as a twist introduced two-thirds of the way through.

The film took itself terribly seriously - I can’t remember a moment of humour in it. One scene, which should have been very powerful, involved a group of guards being disarmed by a speech from one of the protagonists. Unfortunately, the script didn’t remotely reach the level of rhetoric required to pull this off and it was therefore unconvincing.

I don’t want to be too down on it tough - I did enjoy the film and it didn’t commit the ultimate sin of being boring.

Via Nick I learn of the glorious site Tom Baker Says. He suggests that the sort of (hypothetical) sad person who’s been spending money sending amusing text messages to their new BT landline (not installed specifically for the purpose. Er, I imagine) might save a few bob by visting the site instead. Or they may just get ideas

I heartily recommend Video Killed the Radio Star. A work of genius.

Apologies for the complete geekery of this post.

I have some data in a file and I would like to manipulate it using PHP to produce an HTML output. Not being very familiar with file-handling, can anyone suggest how I get the data into a usable form?

The input file contains (almost) fixed width data in the form:

texttexttexttexttext	#####
textext	###
texttextext	###

where texttexttext is a string and #### is a number.

I’d like to import the file into a two-dimensional array, the first part containing the text (trimmed of spaces to the right), with the second containing the number (with any whitespace either side trimmed). The text field is 60 wide and the number field is 8 wide.

Does anyone have any handy code to do this, please? I’ve had a Google and can’t find what I’m after. It’s not so much the trimming as getting the two bits of data into different parts of the array. Thanks.

Hughes: “Under my leadership, the laws of statistics will be turned on their head.”

(With apologies to Rob.)

A new blog interlinking tool has landed - BlogCode. See the box in my sidebar for more. (Via.)

If you’re a Scottish blogger or a blogger in Scotland, consider adding yourself to the Scottish blogs directory and/or coming along the next blogmeet in Edinburgh on Saturday 18th February.