Playlists in Windows Media Player

September 12, 2005 by Oliver · 5 Comments
Filed under: Languages, PHP, Programming, Technology, Web Programming 

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 playlistsinside 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 seperated by newlines…

music, Pimsleur, Finnish, Windows Media Player, playlists, m3u

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Code generator update

September 8, 2005 by Oliver · 4 Comments
Filed under: PHP 

The PHP Code Generator now handles docblock style comments properly as well as method keywords.

For static, abstract and final keywords, if one is present in any definition of a method it will in the output. For visibility keywords the mthod will have the “most public” specified.

See my previous code generator post for more info.

PHP5, OOP, code generation, design patterns, Singleton

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Pimsleur Russian

September 7, 2005 by Oliver · 2 Comments
Filed under: Languages 

Pimsleur really does rule. After trying the first lesson of Russian, a language I have no previous experience in, I can confidently say Pimsleur is great. If you want to learn another language find out if your local library has the Pimsleur course in it first.

Actually I think Pimsleur should make the first lesson of all the courses freely available on their website or something. I really think that people are skeptical about how useful they could be and a lot would be convinced after trying them.

On a rather insignificant note, I think Russian is easier to pronounce in general than German.

Russian, Pimsleur

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Antique SNES?

September 6, 2005 by Oliver · 3 Comments
Filed under: Games 

I was in a computer game shop today. It’s own of those places that does trades and has a lot of preowned stock. Much to my surprise they have a second hand Super Nintendo with one game for the same price as a GameCube with 4 games! Admittedly the one game was Legend of Zelda but still…

Zelda, Nintendo, SNES, GameCube, games, video games

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PHP code generator online

September 5, 2005 by Oliver · 3 Comments
Filed under: PHP 

I’ve just finished a very early version of the PHP code generator I mentioned a while ago. The code for it is rather messy at the moment so I’m not releasing it, but a web form is available to demonstrate it:

PHP Code Generator

At a simple level it takes class fragments you define and includes them in the file. The only fragment defined at the moment is Singleton. To include it you would use:

//cg fragment=Singleton&className=MyClass

Running the generator on just that basically just returns the Singleton fragment with the specified class name. The clever part is it correctly assembles code based on multiple fragments as well as using the code in the file itself. This means if you define MyClass in the file and give it some other methods, these will remain in the generated code.

You can also add code to methods defined in fragments and they still remain, providing you follow a few rules. Only certain fragments will allow code to be added to their methods – they will have //Code Start and //Code End lines. Anything you add between these will remain – all other code will be stripped when the code regenerated.

Issues

Any comments between methods will be removed – with the exception of docblock comments. Comments inside methods are treated like any normal line – they must be inside //Code Start ... //Code End.

At the moment support of visibility keywords and static is a little dodgy. The method should have the properties in it’s first definition.

A methods parameters however will be the same as the last definition. For example the Singleton defines a constructor with no parameters. If you then give it parameters it will keep them.

At the moment the opening brace for a method must be on the same line as the function declaration (i.e. it doesn’t support “one true brace”). This should be easy to fix, but it means methods must be defined like:

function myFunction() {
}

A little bit of cleverness

Although I’m not going to reveal exactly how just yet, there is a small bit of markup supported in the fragments allowing bits to be dynamically defined. To see this generate a Singleton and then add a parameter to it’s constructor (and regenerate). The Init method magically has the same parameters.

Finally…

This is very early and very untested with regards to complicated scripts. Any odd behaviour, feel free to let me know. :)

PHP5, OOP, code generation

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