One turkey of a movie review

Regarding David Edelstein's review of Mel Gibson's 'The Passion' on slate (Jesus H. Christ - The Passion, Mel Gibson's bloody mess. By David�Edelstein)

That has to be one of the most ignorant reviews I've yet seen on this film. Really. I don't mean this as a flame. I can understand an "I don't get it" in response to many a film. This isn't one of them. Last Days of Marienbad? Sure. Eraserhead? Youbetcha. But even Roger Ebert didn't need to share Gibson's theology to be able to "get" this film.

I'm sorry, but this is cultural laziness pure and simple, and David Edelstein owes the audience more as a reviewer. By investing so little effort in seeing beyond his personal biases, Edelstein tells the reader much about himself, and precious little about the movie.

Blogger.com enables Atom feeds

What Atom Means to Developers: AtomEnabled.org proclaims: "AtomEnabled finally makes it possible for developers to have a consistent, tightly specified, well-documented XML format for both syndication and authoring of content. Using one data format for both reading and writing, with a growing library of components supporting Atom development in almost any major scripting or programming language, means your application, site, or device can benefit from the network effect of a large community while spending less time developing core data exchange functionality." More... http://atomenabled.org

Microsoft plans to release a software update that modifies the default behavior of Internet Explorer for handling user information in HTTP and HTTPS URLs

Remember that earlier post about Internet Explorer URLs not always pointing where they seem? MS is taking an interesting approach to closing up this security hole: they plan on disabling support for URLs containing user information. To me, this seems likely to add confusion, especially for users who don't really have an in-depth understanding of the world of protocols, URIs, domains and logons.

If this had been my hot potato to handle, I would have opted for a different solution: Make IE launch a warning dialog by default when navigating to a username:password@server/page.ext -style URL. The warning dialog would clearly show the server/domain name, the resource name, etc. Ideally, spam-blocking databases could be extended to store information on Phishing scams and the domains used to host illegitimate logon pages. IE could connect to such a database over a web service and show a different (more alarming looking) warning in response.

Nah... that would be too elegant.

MSKB Reference: Microsoft plans to release a software update that modifies the default behavior of Internet Explorer for handling user information in HTTP and HTTPS URLs