April, 4, 2003 archives

this report about the war in iraq struck me as funny, coming from as it does from cuba. i found it on the the google news front page.

signs is the latest movie to pop off the top of my netflix queue. i'm in the camp of people who like m. night shyamalan's films, so it shouldn't be too shocking that i enjoyed this one. night's films just have a measure of confidence and craftmanship to them that i really appreciate. (i would compare his films to those of the coen brothers, in that regard.)

one thing in particular that struck me as unauthentic about the film was the television news coverage within the film. while it served the story, it was simply too staid to compare to the sort of coverage that happens for major events. in particular, you'd have anchors babbling endlessly over everything.

and the culkin kid (rory) in the film was a little too distracting in his resemblance to his older brother (macauley). he did a great job, really, it was just disconcerting seeing what looked to be the kid from home alone.

(you might get the impression from all these mini-reviews that i like every movie i watch. that's probably true, in large part, because i go into most films with a certain expectation, and only really dislike a film when it falls short of that. that's why i can call a movie like bubble boy great. i just don't derive a great deal of satisfaction from dumping on a movie. and i probably avoid some real clunkers just by having the sense not to watch them in the first place.)

i know the by-date archiving needs to use the time that the mail actually arrived to the server, or you get the sort of oddities that mailman archives get. by-month, threaded archives don't scale particularly well for busy lists. i'm not a big fan of the ezmlm-cgi-style list of threads with links to the latest post. do you want a single message at a time, or multiple posts from a thread at a time, google news-style? (with frames?) i think there's something to be said for a simple list of the most recent posts, with no threading. (but perhaps sorted with the newest at the top is better?) i think displaying the message thread with each message is a must-have feature. i think doing some intelligent coloring of quoted passages is a really neat feature. so is intelligent handling of attachments. using jwz's threading algorithm is probably a good idea (although i would probably use a database to store the results). obviously encoding or obscuring or omitting email addresses in message headers is a good idea, and it's probably a good thing to do in message bodies, too. being able to get the list of messages from a particular author is a nice feature. closing the loop by making it possible to reply to messages using the web interface could satisfy desires for web-based forums. setting up a nntp server is obviously a good thing to do, too.

(yes, this is obviously a work-related musing. don't get too excited, it's not a high-priority item right now.)

no, not that war. first. second.