Wes Anderson's (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) latest work brings together Bill Murray (surprise...) as oceanographer Steve Zissou, who sets out to find the shark that ate his friend, and destroy it, possibly with dynamite. On the way, he has to deal with a man who may or may not be his son (Owen Wilson), the jealousies of first mate Klaus Daimler (Willem Dafoe), a pregnant journalist (Cate Blanchett), his immensely more successful rival (Jeff Goldblum), who is also Zissou's wife's (Anjelica Huston) ex-husband, and of course the dangers of the high seas (pirates, mutiny, unpaid interns, and the bond company stooge).

7 points

My involvement in the Perl community has so far been a purely virtual one (via CPAN and Perlmonks), but I would really like to visit a conference or join a Perl users group. I made a first step into this direction by visiting the Blog Hackers Conference 2005 today, a three-hour event with speeches centred around O'Reilly Japan's Blog Hacks book. There were two longer presentation by the book's two authors and a number of lightning talks, held by people working for companies like Hatena or Livedoor. Everything was in Japanese, of course (the rate of foreigners was at most three in about 150, same as the rate of women), so my understanding was limited to the technical aspects and all the jokes eluded me (there was a lot of laughter, so I guess it was funny).

The conference was organised by O'Reilly, the IT school were it took place (Digital Hollywood, Graduate School of Digital Content) and the Shibuya Perl Mongers, who I am slowly trying to approach, which is difficult, since they do not seem to have regular meetings, and if they do, they announce them on Mixi (an immensely popular example of these silly social network services where you cannot read anything unless you sign up, a concept that I protest by not signing up) rather than on their web-site or mailing list. My mid-term goal here is the YAPC::Asia, which is rumoured to be hosted by Shibuya.pm next year.

JavaScript is the most readily available client-side scripting language for use in web browsers, and a lot of web sites use it to enhance their pages beyond the possibilities of plain HTML. JavaScript allows a lot of interaction between the HTML page and the viewer. This is especially true since you can add your own JavaScript to arbitrary pages to customise them in ways that the page producers did not necessarily intend (removing banner ads is a popular trick).

An easy way to do this are bookmarklets, small snippets of JavaScript that you can install into your web browser by simply adding them as a bookmark (the whole script is contained in a javascript: URL). Once you have done this, they can perform all kinds of useful functions. Just check out Jesse Ruderman's bookmarklet collection. My two favourites are The One That Gives You A JavaScript Shell and The One Where You Can Type CSS (these two apparently only work on Mozilla-based browsers, but there are many that work on Opera or MSIE as well). Amazing what can be done in such a small amount of code.

A way to automate the process of applying user-supplied JavaScript to web pages is Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that matches a library of user scripts to the current page after it is loaded, but before it is displayed. Each such script can specify a list of sites that it wants to be applied to. There are many user scripts available (and of course you can write your own), doing things like removing Google Ads, adding Google Ads, making text area input fields resizable, turning URLs into Hyperlinks, adding download links to embedded movies, removing links that have been visited before, downloading music files directly into iPods, cleansing news sites of Michael Jackson articles, or adding functions to GMail and various blog sites.

Episode III will be released in Japan on July 9th. Sith happens....