• The Wii with Sports Pack
• Extra Wii-mote and Nunchuck (I share the flat with 2 others so would be fun to have multiplayerness)
• Rayman’s Ravin Rabbids (or however it’s spelt), on the grounds that for multiplayer silliness we might get bored with Sports quite quickly. Now, this one I bought from gamestation.co.uk and decided to risk buying a ‘used’ rather than a new copy, as it’s cheaper. Is this a good idea?

I also intend to get Super Mario Galaxy as all reviews I’ve read were positively glowing, and I have had a brief go at it on a friend’s Wii and was quite captivated by the whooshiness of everything.

So, at some point – though not just yet – I will be looking for more games. I’ve been reading around and so far I’m tempted by these:

• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (N.B. I have never played a Zelda game!)
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (hey, I need at least one shooty game…)

Any hints, tips, suggestions?

Perhaps I will chronicle my first console experiences here in the weeks to come.

(By the way, having noticed the last thing I posted publicly here on this blog, I should probably comment that I am single, having broken up with Katy at New Year. London–Glasgow was pretty difficult.)

I’m going to try sleeping again. I think the cup of strong tea I drank just before going to bed actually affected me. Weird.

Admittedly, to do this more “the Ruby way”, I’d write this as a module, or a mixin, or something. But for now, this will do. Call it proof of concept, if you will. I’m very happy with the conversion from a string in base b to an internal integer type, as it uses a beautiful method called “inject”; this is, to a certain extent, very much like the “foldl/foldr” of ML which I learnt in my CompSci course. It’s so elegant! Want to be able to do something similar with the conversion back to string, but I’m pretty sure I can’t.

#!/usr/local/ror/bin/ruby -w
# This works up to base 64. Easily extensible,
# just add more to the $base_ch array.

$base_ch = Array.new [('0'..'9').to_a,
                      ('a'..'z').to_a,
                      '+','/',
                      ('A'..'Z').to_a].flatten

def int_from_base(str,base)
  str.split(//).inject(0) {|v,d| v*base + $base_ch.index(d)}
end

test = int_from_base("7f3ks0g6",36)
puts test

–> 581417181510

def int_to_str_base(num,base)
  result = ""
  while (num > 0) do
    result << $base_ch[num % base]
    num /= base
  end
  result.reverse
end

out = int_to_str_base(test,64)
puts out

–> 8tvay56

Had a lovely time in Cambridge; went up yesterday afternoon, saw friend#1, then met CULES(friends#2-n) on Jesus Green, then went to friend#2′s house with CULES, had BBQ and laughed at people in cold paddling pool, then went to see X-Men III (entertaining). This morning I had a very pleasant wander around town before having breakfast in Café Carrington, then sat on the Paddock in college for a while and friend#n+1 came to chat. Finally had lunch with friend#n+2 and her mum. So, lots of people seen, lots of sunshine enjoyed – a success!

N.B. friends are numbered in the order in which they appear, rather than by importance!

1. I was paying too much.
2. WebFusion only offered me 1 MySQL database; I now get 5, which is plenty.
3. Prime Hosting offers Ruby and Ruby on Rails support. This is a Good Thing™ as Ruby is cool. :-)

I think I have successfully transferred all content from my old site; this took a bit of faffing as I had this blog, a phpBB forum and an SMF forum, plus some random crap.

Unfortunately, in the MySQL unload/reload the character sets of my posts and comments seem to have been munged a bit. Since I like Unicode (well, UTF-8) and I like typing in “special” characters like ellipsis (…), Trademark (™) and en- and em-dashes (– and —), there are a fair few posts with glitches, as they are now apparently Latin-1 in the database. Or something. I can’t figure it out, but if I change them through the WordPress interface, it seems to work.

I want a Theremin. OH WOW! Moog Music is due to release a sort of cut-down Minimoog: the Little Phatty. Yum!

Saw Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit yesterday with Emma and Paul. Was good fun, but unfortunate that circumstances had forced me into going to a 2pm showing, as there were lots of small children in the cinema. Need to bear this in mind next month when I go to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Also this weekend found the trailer for the latter film (on Apple’s site). I still can’t get used to Michael Gambon as Dumbledore; in the trailer he shouts a lot and sounds much scarier than he should. Maybe they’re trying to decrease the fluffiness of it as the books get darker. No idea how they’ll fit in any more than about 20% of the story, though!

I’ve installed Ruby on Rails on my computer; haven’t tried it yet as I discovered my installation of MySQL had gone a bit weird.

I’m disappointed. Partly because I don’t see the point of video on an iPod. The screen’s simply too small to be able to enjoy it. 320 x 240 resolution? Ha! (But then, I thought the same about camera phones.) Spurred on by ThinkSecret’s articles on the announcement, I had been hoping for PowerMacs with dual-core G5s with IBM’s PowerPC 970MP chips, and updated PowerBooks. Perhaps they’ll turn up soon.

Too braindead to write more—an effect of staring at COBOL all day.

Married sisters in Broitwich and unreliable cousins made much more sense in the cold light of morning than Gilbert and Sullivan bearing down on him like a brace of Nazgul.

Intriguing news items on the Mac rss feeds this morning: Apple has announced a “special event” in San Jose in a week’s time, entitled One more thing…. My money’s on either dual-core PowerMacs, or something totally new. But perhaps something totally new would have been announced at a bigger event. I can’t wait to see what it is.