I just got the new (well it’s not that new now) Timesplitters game for the PS2, and wow is it cool.
It’s sort of a cross between Timesplitters 2, Halo and the Goldeneye sequel on the N64 (Perfect Dark?). Think Timesplitters 2 but add the ability to get into vehicles and separate grenades and deployable guns. The graphics are improved and are less cartoony but the whacky sense of humour is still there - whenever you kill a monkey it shouts “Chimpicide!”.
For anyone outside the UK, I’m referring to the digital TV broadcast by British Sky Broadcasting (if that is still their name).
They are stuffing far too many channels on there and as a consequence the quality is dropping. Before, you could occasionally see compression artefacts on the images, now they are everywhere. It’s especially noticeable with full screen changes when it’s dark. And once you know what it looks like it is impossible to ignore.
I have a scary theory though. Next year they are going to release SkyHD - basically Sky transmitting a High Definition signal. Now if they compress the channels the way they are now then it really won’t help since compression artefacts look worse at high resolutions. Unless the reason they are compressing channels is to fit higher bandwidth HD signals in. Or they could be doing it intentionally to exaggerate the gains from HDTV…
I’ve started editing more on Wikipedia. Not entirely sure why, but it’s quite fun.
If you don’t know what Wikipedia is, it’s a free online Encyclopedia that is editable by anyone. Also all the content is completely redistributable providing the license is kept with it. It’s theoretically multilingual too but only a handful of languages actually have content to rival print Encyclopedias. But the others are coming along.
I’ve also written a couple of articles that I don’t really know anything about - I just distilled stuff from various online sources. It’s easier than I thought too.
I’ve finally fixed the template. I didn’t realise that the damn thing was switching background images depending on whether this was a single post or not (I added the sidebar to all pages you see).
Sometimes Linux is downright counter-intuitive. I have SSH command line access to my server and I wanted to rename a directory. Now I know that cp is used to copy files so I try rn. No luck. So I think perhaps they are being nice so I try rename. This seems to work. But the file is not actually renamed. When I type the command on its on it says call: rename from to files. Nice but not useful. After a quick search I find out how to do it: you need the move command. Well to be precise the mv command. After a moment’s thought it does make sense but it is not intuitive…
Windows Media Player will only play .m3u playlists two levels deep…
You can include a playlist inside another playlist and it copes fine. If you include a playlists inside a playlist inside a playlist, the innermost one doesn’t get played.
Why do I tell you this? I decided to try and create a Pimsleur-style CD for Finnish. But to save on effort and increase modularity everything is done in bits and joined together with .m3u files. Since Windows Media Player can’t cope with the nesting though, I had to write a PHP to dump them all in one file (I’m expecting to hit a limit on the amount of songs in a playlist soon).
By the way a .m3u (playlist) is really complicated… it’s a list of URLs separated by newlines…
If you didn’t know, Google can do clever unit conversions. Example conversions include:
1 mile in km
4 weeks in days
4.9 lightyears in au
You can even use compound units:
55 mph in m/s 20 N/(m^2) in Pascals
In fact you can use arbitrary compound units. The silliest I managed to find is:
2 great gross speed of light in bakers dozen furlongs per year
A great gross is 12 gross (a gross is 144). A bakers dozen is 13. A furlong is 220 yards.
I’m writing a PHP5 object that extends SimpleXML to automatically add various microformats. So you could do, for instance, the following:
$xml = SimpleXML\_load\_file('test.xml');
foreach ($xml->hEvent as $event) {
print $event->original();
}
This would print the original HTML of every hEvent found in the HTML document. XML, PHP, PHP5, microformats, hCard, hReview, hCalendar
That’s the name I’ve come up with for the game since it’s vaguley based on Cash Wars. Or at least will be. I’ve started adding descriptions to towns. There are a few issues still though, most notably the existence of multiple towns with the same name which I am eliminating (I’m only intending to have the largest 100 towns).
I found a site a while ago that was willing to pay for text links on your site. The wanted them not because they thought they’d get more direct traffic but because they’d get an increase in PageRank.
It’s quite a popular idea these days with a few sites offering text link brokering services. You pay them and they get several high PR sites to link to you. Doesn’t matter if the sites content don’t match, just that Google finds the link. I never had a site with a high enough PageRank until now to actually join. Now I do, I thought I’d give it a spin; I joined Text Link Brokers.
A quick search on Google revealed little information (lots of question on forums with no answers). There was one negative comment but it was apparently about one of the competitors instead that has a very similar name. Anyway a couple of days after signing up I was told I need to reduce the number of external links since they only allow 20 in total and want to be responsible for five of them (that’s why I now have a bit at the bottom of the page counting external links). After sorting that out they sent an email for the rates they are willing to pay. And they’re pretty good. Not marvelous but they don’t actually require people to click like Adsense ads do.
The one problem is I now have to wait for someone to actually buy links.