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Sunday, 30 September 2012 - 7:47pm
I find myself at a very unsettling stage of life. Hair is growing in peculiar places, like my earlobes. And I am feeling strange, powerful urges, like the one to say deliberately provocative things to and/or about pompous idiots who can probably do me considerable harm.
Sunday, 30 September 2012 - 5:22pm
Researchers have discovered a 34-year-old man in the Republic of Estonia who doesn't look like a total dweeb when wearing a track suit, leading to hopes that sequencing the genome of this individual could lead to a cure that would revive the fortunes of the global garment industry.
Sunday, 30 September 2012 - 12:14pm
Another neat summing up from a Boinger:
"[...] this episodic bubbling (and so soon after the first .com bubble, no less), leads one either to the depressing conclusion that 'the market' is a damn moron, or that it consists largely of cynics who are in on the joke, and morons who provide a food supply for the cynics. Neither option seems terribly healthy."
Friday, 28 September 2012 - 5:49pm
Couldn't have put it better myself:
"For advertising to be effective, information has to be expensive to produce and expensive to distribute. Under such conditions, a brilliant product can indefinitely languish in obscurity despite its brilliance, simply because there is no way of getting word out about it. On the other hand, when it becomes trivial for pretty much anyone to produce and broadcast any sort of information, the notoriety of a product becomes much more a function of the brilliance of the product and much less a function of the size of the centralised marketing push."
Sunday, 23 September 2012 - 8:51pm
I have in front of me an egg carton that bears the inscription "For great recipe ideas, visit our website."
At whom is this suggestion aimed? Are people wandering into the supermarket and thinking "Oh look, eggs! I like the ovoid shape; that suits my modern lifestyle. But what do I do with them once I get them home? Oh, thank heavens - they have a website."
Thursday, 20 September 2012 - 9:09pm
I've learned that I should be pleased that I'm not a Rhodes scholar, but I also have to take issue with this claim by Pilger:
Liberal hysteria that the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is more extreme than Obama is no more than a familiar promotion of "lesser evilism" and changes nothing. Ironically, the election of Romney to the White House is likely to reawaken mass dissent in the US, whose demise is Obama's singular achievement.
I'm of an age where pretty much everything seems to have occurred relatively recently (9/11, the fall of the Berlin wall, George Formby, the French revolution, etc.), but I'm reasonably confident that a little stir called Occupy happened during Obama's presidency, and was a generally splendid affair whose ripples are - as ripples are wont to do - spreading outwards at this very moment.
Despite the fact that I think calling Obama a spineless weasel is an unforgivable calumny upon weasel invertebrates of every stripe, the suggestion that "worse evilism" would awaken the masses to finally recognise the brilliance of our natural vanguard intellectual leaders is utterly monstrous. To support my position, I'll go for a trite cite: the extraordinary social/political progress in the second half of the 20th century which took place in the affluent post-war west, where a generation looked at their inheritance of shallow materialism courtesy of institutionalised injustice and said, to quote Abbie Hoffman, "Yuck!" Compare this to the results of the mass dissent in Russia and Germany in the first half of the 20th century awakened by the dubious blessings of the Tsar and the Treaty of Versailles.
Lest you think I am being flippant, I am second to nobody in awareness of the terrible harm that prog rock (arguably a consequense of the counter-culture) has done to our civilisation, but I prefer it to the KGB or the SS. It's much easier to do good if you're contending with a lesser evil.
Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
My ethnically windmillphilic friend Paul van Campenhout didn't ask me what I thought of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, but I told him all the same. Here's what I said:
Ruben said he loved it, but he admits it may be because he was watching it vicariously through his ten year old who was bouncing around on the sofa with delight the whole way through.
Without the same advantage I was mostly disappointed at the waste of a couple of good actors in Rupert what-his-name and that bloke what used to be in Red Dwarf and the Fast Show ("This week I 'ave been mostly eatin'..." "You ain't seen me, roight?") oh and some films about a teenage wizard or something.
Also the "Neffi" thing struck me as a bit Bill and Ted, especially after re-reading the novelisation of the Crusaders over the christmas hols (the local book liquidators had the new 2011 BBC Books editions of Target novelisations for $5 each!). If in 1964 you can manage, with wobbly sets, to depict well-known historical figures as fully-rounded human beings - with the Arabs no more or less barbaric than their English invaders, mind you (again: 1964!) - Nefertiti as a sexy ass-kicker with attitude is pretty poor.
And of course if you know your large plodding herbivores, based on Douglas Adams' marvelous description of what it's like to be a rhinoceros in Last Chance to See, you can't buy the idea of a triceratops even noticing - much less being excited by - a bouncing golf ball. Herbivores don't need to chase things; plants don't move that much, at least not on Earth. Except for the occasional Krynoid.
Writer Chris Chibnall (Hungry Earth, and previously nominally head writer for Torchwood, at least while RTD was still working on Who) appears to be for Steven Moffat what Helen Raynor (Daleks in Manhattan, Sontaran Strategem) was for RTD. Give him a list of characters and set pieces, and he'll turn out a workmanlike but forgettable script.
But what do I know? I'm a grumpy old man, not a ten year old boy bouncing around on the sofa waving his sonic screwdriver. This episode was for the ten year olds, and that's fine.
Asylum of the Daleks
My old school chum (our parents were poor and couldn't afford to send us to a new school) Paul van Campenhout asked me what I thought of Asylum of the Daleks, and this is what I said:
My first reaction was wow, this is a really blatant two fingers up to George Lucas, with a few clear stylistic nods to Star Wars that seemed to say "This is how you do it, George. Remember when you used to not suck?"
I tend not to like Dalek stories. Daleks are not sparkling conversationalists, which makes them rather dreary antagonists. Failing to get dullards to listen to reason is my day job*, not my entertainment of choice.
However there is no such thing as a bad Steven Moffat script, and he's wisely left the Daleks with little dialogue and lots of being very scary, as well keeping the horror over the idea of what it is to be a Dalek on the simmer.
Speaking of which, I didn't see the twist coming and was honestly befuddled for quite a while right up to the reveal. A twist which is obvious in retrospect, and makes perfect sense in terms of all the little details that have been clearly laid out for you, but startles you all the same, is a bloody good twist.
Don't care about where this all fits into Dalek lore, nor the misgivings others have had about the plausibility of the Pond's matrimonial problems. Doctor Who is neither serious science fiction nor serious drama, which is why it's so good.
I'm hoping the forgetting of "the Predator" or "the Oncoming Storm", as well as various statements Moffat has made recently, means the Doctor is no longer a Colossus bestriding the universe, and returning to being a wanderer intrigued and delighted by the universe. Mind you, I thought that was what RTD was doing by destroying Gallifrey and the Daleks with his Time War, and we all know how tiresome that turned out.
* A joke. Not entirely true.
Saturday, 1 September 2012 - 3:25pm
"Make no mistake, council is one of the biggest businesses in the region and the community is the stakeholder."
[...]
"The honey pot of funding for local government is simply not flowing as freely as it once was and the new council needs to stimulate economic development, in order to raise funds to improve and offer more services and facilities," she added.
Oh, for f**'s sake. Where does one go to learn to talk such bollocks? You can't even begin to satirise that; by itself it's a perpetual motion self-piss-taking machine. There is a name for people who talk like that. To be more polite, you could call them honey pot self-stimulators.