March 2007 Archives

A friend invited me to see Shooter yesterday.  It earned some very mixed feelings from me.

On the good side, the shooting was interesting.  There was a lot of talk about shooting from a mile away, and the difficulties with accuracy at that range.  I found it fascinating.

Also good were the multiple preparation scenes.  By that I mean, when the main character (Bob Lee Swagger – played by Mark Wahlberg) needed to do something extraordinary, the movie went out of its way to show you how he did it.  We had multiple shopping scenes, where he'd buy everyday products and combine them to make a medical kit, a pipe bomb, or other goodies.  And we had multiple scenes of him scoping out an area – researching to see what he was getting into.  This helped me immensely, so that when the movie ended, I found myself thinking, "maybe he really could beat 25 soldiers, he sure planned it out carefully enough."

It was a different vibe from movies like the James Bond films.  In those movies, Bond can spontaneously win any attack, getting out of every bad situation through sheer luck.  But in Shooter, Bob Lee Swagger survives by having friends who snipe bad guys, by planting land mines, and by holding off combat until he's assessed the situation.  Nice.

But now, let's look at the bad side of the movie.

Read more...

As I was importing my old content into the new site design, I found this article under the "software" section.  It didn't seem right there, as it's not a software product.  It's a comparison chart of phpBB RSS mods.  So I decided to give it a second life as a blog entry.  But before we get into it, a disclaimer.  This article is getting "published" on March 7, 2007, but I actually wrote it in 2006.  So it's possible that some things have changed.  If so, I'll rely on your comments to set things straight.

Onward.  Basically, all these RSS mods enable you to turn forum posts into feeds for syndication.  I wanted to do that (syndicate some content), but I wasn't sure which mod was best.  So I created this chart.  I settled on RSS Feed 2.2.4, but then I released some mods of my own to make it stronger.  You can find my RSS Feed mods on my phpBB mini mods page.  In particular, you'll want to try "Trim RSS Mod Posts" if you want your feed to contain snippets instead of the whole post.  And you'll want to try "Autodiscovery Plus" to enhance the XML features.

If you don't think RSS Feed is for you, check out the other two.  They also have some strengths.  Here is the chart.

Read more...

It took longer than expected, but I have finally torn down and rebuilt almost my entire site.  I have this new blog, and a content management system for all the other pages – things are looking good!

There are a few things still undone.  The contact form isn't working yet.  And my RSS comparison article is M.I.A. for a little while longer.

But you don't care about that!  You just want to know what you can do here.  So, simply put, use the navigation links to check out my software products (mostly for use with phpBB forums) as well as other goodies.

I've been writing for other sites for so long, it's probably time I set up my own soapbox.  Hopefully this is the first of many good entries here at outshine.com.  Thanks for stopping by!

-Tony