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.

At least one tabloid newspaper here in the UK is reporting that Materazzi called Zidane the son of a terrorist whore (he has Albanian roots - presumably on his mothers side) to cause the headbutt.

If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, Zinedine Zidane, apparently one of the best footballers in the world ended his career on a low note by getting sent off for headbutting an opponent in the final of the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

Here are some images of the headbutt in all it’s glory. I don’t know where these images come from. If you can reasonably prove they’re yours I’ll give you credit.

I’ve been playing EVE for a few weeks now. I ventured into low sec (0.3, 0.4) space a couple of times and killed some NPC pirates. So I got arrogant and decided to hang around to mine some better ores. I’ve since lost two ships (well four technically - one of them was a freighter with two shuttles) to player pirates and moved back to safer space. Although I didn’t lose my escape pod during either attack.

Some of you may have noticed the blog being down regularly. Well I haven’t fixed it yet. But I finally got the script to work that was supposed to restart it. I eventually diagnosed the problem as an incorrect path setting for the cron daemon. Anyway, it should now never be down for more than a few minutes.