Archive for June, 2006

Great sporting events

Posted on in Doctor Who, Sport.

I take it that all the shouting and honking of horns outside means that England did okay in the footie?

Doctor Who – Fear Her last night was an interesting companion piece to The Idiot’s Lantern earlier this season. Both set in London, both take place around a major televised event, both feature a single alien, both feature an abusive father, both have one of the TARDIS crew taken out of the action by the alien.

The differences – East London not North London, set in the near future not the recent past, a lonely alien child not a hungry alien monster, the haunting memory of a dead father not a n everyday living father, the Doctor captured not Rose.

Both stories also have low body counts (especially by DW standards), only the unfortunate Mr Peacock and the Wire itself died in The Idiot’s Lantern and no one dies in Fear Her.

The news reader, Huw Edwards, really hammed up those lines about the torch being a beacon of hope and love and so on. I would have preferred a couple of lines of technobabble over that.

Loved the Doctor lighting the Olympic flame. But I suspect that in reality there would be a back up runner around to take over. Anyone fancy tripping the runner up in seven years time to see?

The plot was predictable and the production seemed a little lifeless apart from the two leads – possibly David Tennant’s best performance yet and a good showing from Billie Piper. Nice to see positive Rose in full swing (literally with the pick-axe), but clingy Rose is really annoying. Oh well, nect two weeks should sort that out. 😉

Overall, another good solid 8/10.

I know I haven’t written much about Love and Monsters. I can’t think of much to write that doesn’t turn into a rant. I can’t believe that some people saw it as a negative portrayal of fans – it was incredibly positive for about fans in general, just negative about the sort of bossy, uber-fan represented by Victor Kennedy. I did enjoy it for the most part but Peter Kay’s performance kind of spoilt it for me. 8/10 for sheer novelty value and Marc Warren’s performance, maybe not something we want every week but let’s have another experiment of some sort next year.

Well, that was different.

Posted on in Doctor Who.

Love and Monsters – instant reaction, no spoilers

That was a very odd episode. I’m not quite sure it worked but I couldn’t help but love it none the less.

Oh, and I was right. Basically, it was the novel Who Killed Kennedy (notice the name? Hmmm.) being played for laughs.

More later.

Not the pits…

Posted on in Doctor Who.

…and certainly not The Pit 😉

I said at the end of my review of the last Doctor Who episode: “I do have a bad feeling about part two though.”

I was right and wrong. Or to put it another it, The Satan Pit was better than I feared but not as good as I hoped.


The one thing that new Doctor Who is bad at is resolving cliffhangers and this season is even worse than last year. After all the tension at the end of last week, what happens? Jefferson shoots the Ood, the power comes back on, and nothing comes out of the pit. Oh dear.

Maybe at some point the contrast between the action in the base and the more philosophical conflict in the caves looked good (and is a reversal of the normal pattern) but it really didn’t work. The two halves needed to be tied together a bit better.

It was good to see proactive, thinking on her feet, Rose, she’s been missing for a while. Shooting the windscreen (or whatever you call that part of a rocket) wasn’t the smartest thing in the world but if you know that you’re going to die would you rather (a) die in a little while with the devil in the chair next to you all the time, or (b) die sooner but after having the statisfaction of killing the devil? I’d go for (b) too.

The Doctor’s leap of faith when he dropped off the end of the cable into the darkeness was logical within the confines of the story (what else could he do?) and in character for the tenth Doctor (who does tend to look before he leaps, and is a hypocrite for pointing out the same flaw in the humans) but still seemed like poor writing. “We have cool descending through the darkness whilst talking philosophy with Ida scene, and we have cool confront the devil scene, but how do we get from one to the other?”

So what do we make of the Doctor’s belief in Rose that allowed him to smash the vase? What exactly does he believe? Looked at coldly, it could only be the belief that Rose would want him to sacrifice her to save the universe. But that doesn’t really fit with the emotional tone of the scene. It was a good line but sadly doesn’t make much sense.

Bad science – I can forgive almost everything except the way the rocket swung round towards the black hole when the gravity funnel collapsed. Why? Yes it would be pulled into the black hole but what caused it to rotate so that it goes nose first rather than tail first?

Design work, performances and directing were all excellent, and the number of old series references raised a smile. If only the script had been just a bit tighter and the resolution made a bit more sense then this would have been an all time classic.

I think this was a very good 9/10

Next week looks like another rummage through the Virgin scrapbook. This time taking Who Killed Kennedy and playing it for laughs.

Web site graphs

Posted on in Work, WWW.
Graphical representation HTML structure of Very True Things

What’s that? That’s the output from a rather nifty applet that draws diagrams of the HTML structure of web pages (technically, it produces a graphical representation of a first order approximation of the DOM tree by examing element nodes only). In this case that’s the front page of Very True Things as of Thursday evening.

The big grey blob at the middle top is the page head, here full of the <link> elements that Word Press generates. The main content of the page is to the left and the side bar is to the right. The red clusters at top left and bottom right are tables – a meme result and the calendar respectively.

Have a look at the examples given by the creator to see how some big name sites compare. And then see the graphs for everyone else’s sites on Flickr. (Via Pharyngula.)

What’s really scary for me is that when I look at the graph for VL I can instantly spot where one extraneous (but harmless) link has been inserted by accident.

The tentacles of cluelessness

Posted on in Spam.

Got a good one today.

Dear Webmaster,

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When you exchange links using our system, you can also exchange links with ALL our members. No more begging for links!

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P/S: link exchange the fast and easy to to boost your web site search engine ranking and get an avalanche of free web traffic!!

There was no attachment for me to download to “visit their site” (i.e. get infected with a nasty virus). Fairless clueless even by spammer standards.

I decided to visit the domain used in the e-mail address, expecting to see either a link farm or something totally innocent and unrelated to the spam. Instead I saw a one page site with broken links and this:

Scary, scary octopus baby thing