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Batman: The Dark Knight is so far the best film I’ve seen this year. It was even better than Batman Begins and I loved that.

Rather than just being a very good superhero film, Batman: The Dark Knight feels like a crime thriller, like The Departed or Heat. It’s deep, dark, gritty, complicated and sophisticated.

Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker should win him an Oscar; there is no question of that in my mind. He made that part come alive, the Joker’s madness is evident in his brilliance.

Rather than the Joker just being an eccentric nutter, like in Jack Nicholson’s Joker (Batman, 1989), Heath Ledger’s Joker truly thrives in chaos and destruction, completely lacking any moral compass or concern even for his own life. Heath Ledger’s Joker is a true Anti-hero.

Heath Ledger cited A Clockwork Orange and Sid Vicious as early influences for his portrayal of the Joker. I thought the Joker’s tag line was beautifully sinister and simplistic:

Why so serious?!

The plot of Batman: The Dark Knight is a roller coaster ride, I thought it was going to end three times before it actually did, the Joker’s foresight was just pure genius.

Batman: The Dark Knight really got inside the characters of District Attorney Harvey Dent and Police Lieutenant Gordon; the characterisation was fantastic.

Christian Bale reprised the roles of Bruce Wayne/Batman, playing both parts well; excellent duality. Except for that bloody stupid voice Batman was constantly putting on. His voice sounded like he’s smoked 40 fags a day for the last decade and gargles with whiskey and vinegar every morning. Give it a break Batman, we know you’re hard, you don’t have to growl!

At times Batman’s voice was so gruff it was unintelligible. How’s anyone meant to understand him with a voice like that? Apparently Batman’s voice was made gruffer in post-production; in filming Christian Bale did Batman’s voice exactly as he did before, normally.

I enjoyed the fact that there is still no BatCave, no Wayne Mansion, no Robin and best of all, that the BatMobile looks like it really was built for the military. Also, Batman going to Hong Kong to apprehend a criminal wanted in Gotham was great. Extradition is obviously just another legal process Batman has no respect for, nor should he.

I have yet to see Batman - Gotham Knight however.

Batman - Gotham Knight is an anthology of six animated short films set between Batman Begins and Batman: The Dark Knight.

A lot of the animators are Japanese so I think Batman - Gotham Knight is going to have a slightly Manga feel to it, like some of the stories in The Animatrix, which I also really enjoyed.

Batman - Gotham Knight is a 15 certificate, so I imagine it could be pretty brutal.

Batman Resources:

• Batman: The Dark Knight | Official Website
• Batman: The Dark Knight | Wikipedia
• Batman Begins | Wikipedia
• Batman: Gotham Knight | Wikipedia
• Joker - Why So Serious | Wallpaper
• Why So Serious | Joker Viral Site

A new Search Engine was launched recently, Cuil, which intends to rival Google and claims to have indexed over 120 billion webpages.

Cuil is a product from some of Google’s finest former minds and is attracting alot of interest. Although we really shouldn’t draw comparisons between Cuil and Google this early after launch, we will. And by the way, Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge.

Give Cuil a try at http://www.cuil.com

Cuil Features

Cuil looks quite good, but doesnt feel like a search engine to me. Infact Cuil feels more than a magazine. Cuil’s features include drilldown searching, roll-over definitions, tabbed searching and Google-style search suggestions. Tabbed searching in particular could be very useful for doing research.

This kind of excellant front-end innovation could allow Cuil to get a foothold in the highly competitive search industry providing the results from Cuil’s back-end are relevant.

Cuil Crawler: Twiceler

Cuil claims to have indexed 120 billion web pages, compared to Google’s 40 billion. Cuil crawls the web using Twiceler, it’s own custom built crawler which respects the robots.txt standard and even the crawl-delay directive which is a non-standard extension to reduce the crawler’s drain on your site’s bandwidth.

Cuil’s crawler, Twiceler, has indexed my site 63 times since Nov 2007 (8 months). Thats not alot.

Google on the otherhand has visited me 19,704 times in the same period. Google also has a variety of different crawlers ranging from the original Googlebot to Feedfetcher. So not only does Google appear alot more thorough than Cuil, but it also appears to be fresher with indexing being done on many different levels than Cuil.

It’s not clear to me at this time whether Cuil/Twiceler read sitemaps.

Cuil/Twiceler User Agent

Here’s the user agent string for Cuil’s crawler, Twiceler:

Cuil Results

The proof of the pudding lies in how accurate Cuil’s results are. Just because Cuil crawls something doesn’t mean they can make good sense of it.

So lets play around with Cuil and Google and try to find out about that episode of Seinfeld when George lies to a girl to impress her by saying he’s a Marine Biologist.

Googling ‘marine biology seinfeld’ will correctly bring up articles on the episode of Seinfeld ‘The Marine Biologist‘.

Cuil for ‘marine biology seinfeld’ and you get results about Marine Biologists, photos and profiles of Marine Biologists and a profile of Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld. So that first click gave us nothing.

The Cuil Explore By Category box has some links to Seinfeld Episodes and the episode is listed there. But when you click that, the search string now just gets longer and the Cuil results are in no way any more accurate to what we wanted. So that second click gave us nothing either. I’m sure on one of the subsequent pages the information we want is there, but I would’ve lost interest and Googled it by now.

So personally I think Cuil’s result relevancy right now is utter rubbish.

Cuil Management

Cuil’s Senior Management all seem to have long and prestigious careers in Silicon Valley; having been involved in major advances in search techniques. Most Cuil management have worked for Google at some point and have skills in Computer Science, Mathematics and/or AI.

Cuil claim to have written their search algorithms from scratch with the philosophy that all pages should be indexed and available for search, not just the popular pages. This is an interesting idea, but to be honest, pages that no-one reads, that few people link to and that probably havent been relevant for years are of little interest.

Maybe it would be good to use Cuil in the event that Google fails to find what you’re looking for. But then, how often does that happen? Its quite rare for me!

Most people who can’t find something using Google simply aren’t using it properly, so unless Cuil’s search and ranking algorithms are more intuitive and user-friendly, I don’t see the advantage.

Cuil vs. Google

Google have a long history of being very open and responsible with regard to competition, collaboration and the internet in general. But how do they feel about so many of their former employees launching Cuil in direct competition with them? Google said with regard to Cuil:

“[we welcome] competition that stimulates innovation and provides users with more choice.”

That seems very fair and sporting.

So, have any of you guys used Cuil? What do you think?

Another amazing freebie courtesy of Mish; tonight I saw InMe and Pendulum at Koko; part of the iTunes festival.

I havent heard the name InMe for years, they got big around 2002 but after that I had just assumed they’d fizzled out; I was never a fan at all. But tonight InMe were tight, they had passion and they were great to watch. InMe really impressed me.

The crowd at the Koko was alot older this time and as such it wasnt too hard to get a good mosh-pit going from the outset.

However, the crowning glory was seeing Pendulum. I’ve previously been told that Pendulum often play live with simply the DJ, tonight however the entire bad were there and they put on a fantastic show. I heard a few minor errors from time to time, but generally very tight and the light show was wicked.

Once again I took on the role of Mosh-Pit General and kicked off proceedings, with some excellant guys and girls in the pit, we had a great time. Somehow we managed to organise a Girls Only Mosh-Pit during Pendulum, the perimeter of which was maintained by a ring of guys drooling over the sight of a dozen girls fighting with each other. Genius.

I don’t know any of these people, but they are all legends.
Are you in this photo?

So, did you guys enjoy it?

Global Gathering 2008 was absolutely awesome; we had an amazing time.

My highlights of Global Gathering 2008 were seeing Tiësto, Kanye West, Davd Guetta, Lisa Lashes, Armin Van Buuren and ATB.

I’ve posted some Global Gathering photos up already but I have dozens more to do.

• Global Gathering | Flickr

I met a lovely girl on the Friday night called Emily, from Stafford. But I lost Emily in the crowd and we were getting on well. So if you know Emily from Stafford or her mates Tash and James (also from Stafford), please get in touch, would be great to here from you.