Battleangel

HALO ::: Still doing what I was doing two days ago. I.e. fiddling with the mp3 database and playing HALO. The latter became a lot more fun after the public server patch was released. I need to brush up on my fps skills though. It’s been a very long time since I played such games actively. Not since Quake 1 more or less. The detours I took with Planetside and others don’t really count. This could be the way I’ve been looking for to kill time and make this dull term just disappear. I felt so inspired I even thought about teaming up again. Still, the game itself could need a couple of patches. And the server lounge was like the wild west. But all in all I’m beginning to like this game. Lets face it, no one would buy it for the single player mission.

DATABASE ::: Well, well. The database isn’t nearly going as well. After extensive work I was able to include parts of the code into [link removed]. All of a sudden I can’t get the script to access the damn database via the keyword function. I must have broken it somehow while playing around with the code. [link removed] is an example of what a typical CD entry could look like. I’m thinking of handling the track information as popup windows to save some bandwidth. None of this is of course working at the moment.

Another problem is the size of the database tables. I added about 1000 mp3 files just to try out the design and the table for mp3 data takes up about 600 kb. On average 100 files / cd times 80 discs would take up almost 5 MB of raw database storage. By dropping the file path fields I was able decrease that by almost a factor of two. Of course I could save more space if I skipped the album information altogether. But it’s kind of fun to have a complete song listing and not just albums and artists.

STATS ::: Seems this month will stop at about 16000 unique vistors. A big upswing since last month and at the same time bandwidth usage is down by almost 200 MB. Neat. Most visitors come here looking for information on Halo xor various BitTorrent links.