Has anyone else tried to use phpOpenTracker with Wordpress? Whenever I do I get strange DB error messages. If you have used the two together, either unsuccessfully or not, please let me know.

I guess every blog owner posts an entry like this sooner or later. I just had my first serious bout of comment spam. About 50 or so pointless messages about mortgages and refinancing. But since the spammer used the same IP it was really easy to delete them all using Wordpress. Of course other blog software probably has the same features…

I picked up the “World Citizen” edition of Pimsleur’s Dutch. Two lessons in and I sound like I’m from bloody Liverpool. Quite how that happened I don’t know…

Twice in a row I’ve posted a link to another blog… I doubt this is a trend.

Apparently there are no viruses for Macs. Disagree? Then get some money…

http://www.macobsession.com/2005/09/27/make-500-by-proving-your-mac-was-hit-by-a-virus/

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.”

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…

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.

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. :)

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.

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…