A post in a blog

Oliver Brown
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I rarely mention other blog posts, but this one caught my attention:

Just Ideas.

The quote that I specifically liked was: “A kid that dies from a bad case of diarrhea in the third world would pleasure 60 year-olds with heart disease for the chance to become a 60 year-old with heart disease getting pleasured by a young boy.”

Silly Linux

Oliver Brown
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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…

Aber, Aber, Aber…

Oliver Brown
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I went with Julia to Aberystwyth to university on Saturday. Six hour train journey. Aberystwyth is nice except for the one hill the university sits on top of.

Pimsleur’s German steps up a notch…

Oliver Brown
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Well I’m now on unit 3 of German II (i.e. the 33rd lesson in total) and it’s definitely moved up a gear. It has finally mentioned “du” the informal version of you (which even if you never say it you certainly need to recognise) and nearly every thing you say has “interesting” grammar as well as new vocabulary

(By interesting I mean things like subordinate clauses and modal verbs which play with word order).

And of course I have to sing praise to Pimsleur again… which of course I always do since it really is amazing. :)

Sonic Mega Collection Plus

Oliver Brown
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I found a cool little PS2 game recently, Sonic Mega Collection Plus. It’s a collection of Sonic games from the Mega Drive/Genesis and Game Gear, including Sonic The Hedgehog (for each), Sonic 2, Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic Spinball, Sonic Chaos, Sonic Blast, Sonic Drift, Sonic 3D and Dr. Robotonik’s Mean Bean Machine (for both).

For anyone who likes Sonic it is well worth getting. There are a few notes first though.

It does include Knuckles in Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but they must be unlocked. The Game Gear games are single player (emulating two Game Gears that could link up would have been fun). The unlockable non-Sonic games are interesting but not really worth going to the hassle to unlock.

It would have been nice to have the Master System versions of Sonic and Sonic 2, but you can’t have everything.

Playlists in Windows Media Player

Oliver Brown
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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…

Code generator update

Oliver Brown
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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 method will have the “most public” specified. See my previous code generator post for more info.

Pimsleur Russian

Oliver Brown
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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.

Antique SNES?

Oliver Brown
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I was in a computer game shop today.

It was 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…