Archive for February, 2007

Automatic Year in the site’s Copyright notice

If you happen to deal with a website template having the copyright year (the four digits at the bottom of virtually every www page on earth) hardcoded as a number in its PHP files, replace it with the following string:

<?=date("Y")?>

and you’ll be surprising your visitors with great immediacy every year in its very first minutes!

(requires “short tags” enabled in PHP configuration)

Why they Colorize old Black-and-white Movies

The Three Musketeers (1948)The excellent “The Three Musketeers” by George Sidney (1948) on TCM reminded me of numerous disputes of colorizing old movies.

And I thought I got the idea, at least with the old movies depicting even older epochs - like in the case with the Musketeers.

See, the idea is that a color movie of 40’s is as much unusual as a B&W movie of a more recent period, like “Schindler’s List” (1993)

What is common in these two situations - the events portrayed are greatly divided from the times they are played by actors. So the purpose of the artificial addition (”colorization”) or removing (b&w shooting) of the color might very likely be an attempt of amplifying a dramatic impact on a viewer with the improbable connection of the Unconnectable (subsets of Time in this case)