Controversial statement? Well that’s the point. There is a hilarious article over at XML.com about the traffic advantages of controversy on blogs.

The funniest part of course is the number of comments from people who read the title of the post but not the content and just threw a normal anti-anti Linux rant. Unfortunately these things only work if you have a fair amount of traffic in the first place and I probably don’t quite qualify.

I’ve started writing the page to actually play the audio clips in my language learning app.

At the moment it loads the Windows Media Play plug in. This obviously won’t work on Linux so I have to ask, how do you play media files in a web browser when not on Windows? Flash would be the obvious answer I suppose but I have an uncommon requirement - I need to be able to access the object via Javascript. Specifically, I need to know when a track is finished and the next one begins (from a play list) and none of the freely available Flash media players do that.

Any advice from anyone?

A large part of EVE Online is the player driven economy. Nearly everything can be crafted by players and then sold. To create items all you need is the materials and a blueprint. The blueprints are where the scientists come in. Just to clarify, when I say scientists I mean R&D people. R&D involves “working” with an NPC agent to produce Tech-2 blueprints. The way it’s implemented isn’t ideal but it certainly makes the Tech-2 blueprints rare.

Basically once you start R&D with an agent you accumulate research points. Blueprints are awarded to players randomly in a lottery based on the number of research points you have. The better the agent, the more research points you accumulate. This means that while you’re waiting to train the skills it’s a good idea to do normal agent missions to increase your standing with the NPC’s corp. Unfortunately the requirements are quite high. You need Science level 5 as well as specific science skill for the agent you want to work with (Quantum Physics for instance). Unfortunately every scientific skill requires another skill at level 5 (Electronics, Engineering, Mechanics for instance). And if you want to operate more than one agent you need Research Project Management which of course has it’s own requirements. You can make your life easier by training your relevant learning skills to level 5 first. These are Learning (+2% to all attributes per level), Analytical Mind (+1 Intelligence per level) and Instant Recall (+1 Memory per level). Higher attributes make skills train faster.

If you really want to go all the way (and have the ISK spare) each attribute has a second learning skill that does exactly the same thing, but takes longer to train and requires the previous skill at level 5 first (Eidetic Memory for instance). Since I don’t have all of these I cant’ give you any more info yet. But stay tuned.

As I was looking at the website I suddenly realised they’d dropped the price by £1 a month if you don’t take the free international calls.

Odd move since I doubt it will increase sign ups much. Before you jump ship you may want to read about some of the TalkTalk problems or look at the alternatives such as Orange Broadband or Sky Broadband.

My first blatantly personal post for a while - I now have a new Cahoot credit card. My main reason for getting one is to get an extra month’s interest on most of my income. And that idea is even easier to implement than I thought since you can set up a direct debit to pay off your balance automatically.

And a day after activating the card I got an email saying their default charges (for exceeding spending limit or late payment) have been reduced from £25 to £12.

So all is well in the world.

As well as another article, the Metro also carried a double page ad today about Sky broadband. There will be three levels available:

2GB a month for free. 40GB a month for £5. Unlimited for £10.

The “unlimited” part is subject to a fair use policy but it’s presumably higher than 40GB a month.

I can’t remember what the speeds are except for the highest one which is “up to 16MB”.

Hurrah! Someone signed up to EVE Online following an affiliate link from my site (like the banner above if you’re reading this on the actual post page).

Seems like a perfect opportunity to encourage more. EVE Online is a persistent universe MMORPG. This means it’s a multiplayer game played over the Internet with thousands of other people. Since “thousands” is vague, I’ll be more specific. There are over 100,000 players subscribed as well as many other free accounts. When I go on (about 18:00 GMT) there are between 15,000 and 20,000 logged on.

As you can hopefully tell from the banners (again if you’re reading from the actual post page) it’s space-based sci-fi. Sort of like a modern day Elite. You can trade, fight, research, manufacture and lots of other cool things. Nearly everything in the game is player crafted (and is at least able to be player crafted) and it’s even possible to build stations and official control systems. If that sounds like fun then sign up for a free trial account now :)

I read in the Metro that Sky may be offering free broadband to it’s “top subscribers” in a move similar to Orange’s. Personally a shame for me since we probably qualify as a top subscriber (with all the Movies and Sports).

Zend, the commercial endeavour of the people who brought you PHP have a produced a framework, cleverly called the “Zend Framework”.

It’s basically a lightweight MVC framework for PHP. Lightweight in this case is good. It doesn’t do as much as Rails does for Ruby (although it is significantly younger) - the most notable hole is a object-relational-mapping system. But it does provide URL rewriting for Rails-esque view/controller access. I started writing my clever language thingy in it.

The biggest problem I had was getting it to work with IIS. Which I couldn’t. I decided since I had IIS installed I’d give it a go. Unfortunately you require mod_rewrite which IIS doesn’t have. So I installed ISAPI_rewrite, a version for IIS. After an hour of trying to get it to work I went and downloaded Apache 2.2. Which was my second mistake You see it seems PHP doesn’t work with Apache 2.2. Not sure why but I found a vague mention of it on a forum after trying for another hour to get it to work. So I got Apache 2.0 and everything worked. Of course there are reasons not to use PHP 5 with Apache 2, but meh.

There is one little problem with the Zend Framework, I think. It seems to be printing a space somewhere before any other output. It wouldn’t be a problem except I need it to output XML and a space at the beginning makes Firefox (and probably Internet Explorer) explode.

After spending a couple of weeks dealing with foreign text and Unicode at work, my interest in foreign language learning with the aid of a computer has returned.

My main goal is a Pimsleur style system but with the repetition handled by computer - i.e. with just the individual phrases (and words and syllables for earlier lessons) as audio files, the program should generate complete conversations with sensible parts repeated and useful instructor comments in between. That sounds like it requires some sort of script in some sort of markup language. Since it needs to be highly structured I guess that only leaves XML as a sensible possibility. So I marked up a conversation from Pimsleur’s German I.

There was an unexpected result. It’s fairly straight forward to have multiple source languages in one script file. Although there are certain things that would not work best this way, a lot of things in German (for instance) would be taught the same regardless of what language you are learning from. Ultimately source-language-specific scripts would have to be supported though.