Hello again. Robert and I just listened to some more music on Jamendo.com and stumbled upon a few pretty good albums. One of them is L'autre endroit by the band Silence. Enjoy.

Yesterday I received the CD Apparitions of Melody: The Dead Letters Edition by Kids in the Way. This album is so awesome that I just have to share that news with you. Check out their music at PureVolume or their official website.

Super Mario War 1.7 RC2 has just been released so I made an updated installer for this version. The source of the new installer can be found here.

My Online XSPF Validator is online for a few days now. You can use it to verify that a playlist is valid XSPF version 0 or 1 or get a detailed list of errors quite like on www.feedvalidator.org. Please let me know if you find any bugs.

Super Mario War 1.7 RC1 has been released today. One of the mirrors is hosted at hartwork.org. Check out this entertaining game at http://smw.72dpiarmy.com/.

[EDIT] I created an installer for Super Mario War which you can download here: Installer, Source (NSIS Script).

For the last two weeks I have been working on the libSpiff library which brings XSPF playlist support to C++ applications. It is now ready for public eyes and can be downloaded at SourceForge. Example code for reading and writing a playlist is included. Please report any bugs to the SourceForge tracker.

I recently checked out the XSPF Web Music Player. This nice little flash application plays MP3s on your website. I searched for some free and legal promo MP3s and put together a playlist. This one (requires Flash):

I upgraded Visual Studio 2003 to SP1 a few days ago and I am going to uninstall it right after these lines are written. I had more trouble with SP1 during the last few days than with the unpatched version ever before. My experience with SP1 is that:

• It breaks the highlighter. Comments blocks seem to be a problem now.
• It makes the IDE crash very often. Your unsaved code is lost!
• It produces a lot of bullshit link errors. Rebuild the very same code and they are gone.

I even got Unicode garbage from reading an Ansi file using fread once, no joke. Now it's enough: The installation has been a pain already and now I'll kick it off my disk. I highly recommend to not install SP1!

I was quite irritated when I found out yesterday that Emacs is breaking hardlinks: Edit a file with two hard links in Emacs, save it and you will end up with two different files.

$ echo abc >first

$ ln first second

$ ll -i
total 8
401320 -rw-r–r– 2 first first 4 Jul 15 15:04 first
401320 -rw-r–r– 2 first first 4 Jul 15 15:04 second

$ emacs first

$ ll -i
total 12
401322 -rw-r–r– 1 first first 17 Jul 15 15:05 first
401320 -rw-r–r– 2 first first 4 Jul 15 15:04 first~
401320 -rw-r–r– 2 first first 4 Jul 15 15:04 second

$ cat first
abc
another line

$ cat second
abc

The reason for this is Emacs renames the original file to first~ and creates a new file first which is not hard-linked to second anymore. I am not sure if this behaviour is such a good idea...

I had trouble when committing code changes to a subversion repository at SourceForge today. A closer look at their Site Status page reveiled that they "have blocked access to all project resources by password until the user resets their password". They should have sent a mail at least...