Ain’t It Cool News has the six new one-sheets for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Five of the posters feature the young Golden Ticket winners, while the final one has a new image of Willy Wonka, with the appropriate tagline, “semi-sweet and nuts.”
I hadn’t seen any of these one-sheets before this morning, but I strongly suspected these single-character portraits were on their way, given the somewhat-iconic characters of Veruca Salt and company.
This is hugely off-topic, so feel free to skip to the next article, which will likely have something to do with screenwriting and/or filmmaking.
My assistant Chad and I use Apple’s iCal to keep track of appointments. It’s nowhere near as sophisticated as Exchange or a real professional calendar system, but for the most part, it works. He maintains “John’s Work” calendar, and I maintain “John’s Personal” calendar. We both use the built-in publish-and-subscribe feature, so we see the same things on each computer.
After doing this for several years, however, some problems have arisen — mostly stemming from syncing with various Palm devices. Calendar events get duplicated, often six or seven times. Multiply that by several years, and the files get huge, and slow: my Work.ics file ballooned to 1.7 megabytes.
After searching the internet for a program that would fix this, I finally had to write my own. In the interest of paying-it-forward to the next guy with the same problem, here’s what I wrote. Continue on only if you’re truly geeky, or desperate.
UPDATE: Changes with OS 10.4 (Tiger), and specifically iCal 2.0, means that the script as written won’t work anymore. Sorry. But the underlying concept still holds. With an hour and a little ambition, it should be possible to eliminate duplicates in the same way. Just be sure to always work on a backup of the calendar file.
The Archives link, which has been broken ever since switching hosts, is now un-broken — which is not to say fixed.
In its previous incarnation, the Archives section could be sorted by category and date, in a variation on the familiar Sortable Nicer Archives kludge for WP. However, the database gods must have been angered, for all supplication cannot coax them to offer up their insight. Translation: something got broken, and damned if I can fix it.
So in the spirit of Something is better than Nothing, a click on the Archives section will show you every article in the system, from most recent to oldest. It’s not very user-friendly, but the Googlebots will love it.
The Show by Category buttons, incidentally, still work great. So that’s a better choice if you’re interested in reading just the Q and A’s, for example.
So far, I’ve worked on one movie in which the Earth is destroyed. In Titan A.E., a mysterious alien race called the Drej show up one day and blow up the Earth because…
…well, I don’t actually remember the motive. Plot wasn’t the strongest aspect of that movie.
What’s important is this: aliens did it. So if scientifically-minded viewers questioned the physics of how exactly the Earth was obliterated, I could simply point to the semi-transparent Drej and say, “With their superior technology, far beyond anything we can imagine!”
It’s a lucky thing that Titan A.E. had villainous aliens, because it turns out that destroying the Earth is extraordinarily difficult. With this site, Sam Hughes examines 18 possible methods for “geocide” — a terrific word that you just don’t get to use very often. His conclusion? Aspiring supervillains need to be patient, or very lucky, because mere mega-wealth won’t guarantee you the chance to smash the Earth to smithereens.
Keep in mind that Sam focuses strictly on physically destroying the planet. Merely making it uninhabitable is several orders of magnitude easier — and we’re already well on our way!
(Via Cruel.)