Messages

http://www.php.net is really the only thing you need. PHP's documentation is for the most part excellent.

Am reading:

Gormenghast (the one actually called that, i.e. the middle book), by Mervyn Peake. Very much recommended, though the edition I have is filled with printer's errors (edit: such as bad bbcode). I've never seen so many of them in one book before.

Control Theory And Its Applications, by E. O. Roxin. As is obvious from the title, this is a charming fairy tale about a village of gnomes, deep in a magical forest.

Read recently:

Monstrous Regiment, which I think is still the newest Pratchett.
Various other Discworld books I have lying around.
Volume 8 of History of Middle-Earth, "The War of the Ring".
Der Wettlauf zum Jahre 2000 ("The race to the year 2000"), by Fritz Baade. Hilarious futurology thing from 1960.
Various stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, from a ~1910 complete edition we have at home.

No offense, but mainly my opinion is that you ought to learn English first. Judging from this and your previous posts, I really don't think your skills are up to much beyond basic communication yet. Writing is one way of improving them, I guess, but I rather recommend keeping that to yourself until you reach a certain level (at which point you'll notice when you make simple mistakes such as "digged"). As it is now, the way you're writing makes it hard to read much of your story without losing one's patience. Again, no offense meant.

I don't like to ruin Oranges' fun, but in case you missed it when it was in the news, here is one link for what he's talking about.

The Virgin thing very faintly rings a bell, but I can't think of anything either.

Edit: and in music, Lyrics & Music are seperate copyrights

And recordings of the music are yet another pair of shoes. For example. grabbing a CD off the top of one of my stacks at random - "Hail to the Thief" by Radiohead, as it happens - I can see that the recording's copyright is owned by EMI (Parlophone), while the publisher (who often owns the copyrights relating to the songs themselves and their lyrics) is Warner Chappell, which belongs to Time Warner.
The recording industry giants tend to be music publishers as well - EMI claims to be "the world's largest music publisher in terms of copyrights owned, controlled or administered".

I am an insane ravening foamy-mouthed Tolkien fan, so I have reasons both to like and dislike the LotR films. I won't bore you all to death with details.
Also, I rather liked Donnie Darko.

Some movies I've seen or seen partially that I really don't like:

The Digimon movie. My brother gave me this on DVD for Christmas to annoy me. It's amusing to watch this and enjoy the stupid, though.
Titanic.
Jurassic Park 2 or 3. I don't really remember, I only saw the last 20 minutes or so.
Also, various German movies most of you probably haven't heard of. (e.g. Die Supernasen)

Sorry. I wanted to participate, but time and all that...

Many words in English are from Latin, but the actual language itself is Germanic.

Swan Lake. (the introduction, I think)
I'm assuming the game was Loom.

Yes, the latency is awful, and unlike some other problems with today's satellite Internet connections this one can't be fixed because the signal will still have to travel to the satellite and back no matter what you do.

By the way, I've noticed DSL generally seems to be cheaper than dialup for people who can get it. It is for me, for example.

Back to the topic - if you want all of the special edition letters used by ALL the various wacky languages that use the (sort of) Roman alphabet, you're going to run out of room quickly. For example, you'd need another 16 characters for Polish and Czech each. (not entirely sure, but it certainly is about that much)

It seems that the only way would be to do this for each language separately, as it's done now. Maybe write a tool to let people order the available symbols to their satisfaction without any generic font editing nonsense getting in the way.

Doing this properly might involve mapping codepages (ISO/IEC 8859) to control characters - maybe the best option would be a plugin. There's an event hook (AGSE_TRANSLATETEXT) that could be used for it.

Edh (àð) and Thorn (þàž) are only used in Icelandic nowadays, I think.

edit: according to Wikipedia, Edh is also used in Faroese. You had better include it if you don't want to insult the thousands of AGSers on the Faroe Islands.

The fancy-pants OMG ultra-special difficultosity factor of embedding music in video is zero - unless the video is in a horrible heavily patent-encumbered proprietary format that can't be used freely and therefore shouldn't be used, such as WMV or Real. For the moment, MPEG is probably the best choice - though it's not completely free and so forth it can at least be read and written by any software that isn't stupid. Down with those capitalist swine and swineherds etc.

I do think this topic is a very good idea, though, and I'll see if I can cook something up. I'll be looking for something to convert the video into a reasonable format first (that isn't vaguely seedy shareware, which everything I've found so far is).

The only one of these that I've played is Toonstruck, which annoyed the hell out of me. I don't completely remember why, but unless my memory cheats me there were two main reasons: it seemed shoddily made, and it tried MUCH too hard to be funny. Might just have been due to the excruciatingly terrible German translation and voice acting (the only kind there ever is in translations of anything, for some reason), though.

They do it for internet notoriety. People should be striving for regular notoriety instead.

Is there really a difference, though? It's people knowing you and looking up to you versus... people knowing you and looking up to you, except they're distributed all over the world.

Not that I don't think paying for Habbo furniture, MMORPG characters, MMORPG items and what have you is ridiculous. I doubt it really is for notoriety, though. It's more of a status symbol thing. People do it for the same reason that they tend to buy the most impressive car they can afford, even if a rather smaller, less expensive one would actually serve their needs just as well or better. They don't expect to become famous for it, but they do want to impress their peers. The only thing new about it, as with many phenomena of our time, is the "...on the INTERNET!" part.

I agree that modgeulator's selection of factoids was a little weird, but he does have a point.

However, some research using Google (on that note: reliable worldwide statistics of this kind are annoyingly hard to find) tells me that the three most important causes of death today (in the so-called "Western world", that is) are heart diseases, cancer, and cerebrovascular diseases (mostly ending in strokes, I assume), followed by respiratory diseases, diabetes and accidents (not necessarily in this order). Many of these cases may be alcohol-related but there's no way it's anywhere near one of the top three causes. Not that I don't think alcoholism isn't a problem.

Also, it looks like you're getting crack (cocaine) and cannabis-based drugs (active substance: THC) mixed up. Don't. These are two rather different pairs of shoes.

Sully - avoid the "prestigious people in the past did it, so it MUST be good!" argument. Though I personally have never tried it, nor plan to, I have nothing at all against adults using cannabis recreationally (unless they overdo it, of course), but people in the past generally knew less than we do now. They had the zaniest ideas about these things.

Welcome back to the universe!

No, but your average mail virus is quite fond of spoofing headers using any addresses they find, meaning that people tend to receive virus mails "from" people who aren't in fact infected. Some antivirus programs, unfortunately, ignore this and spam those whose addresses have been abused in this way with rejection messages ("Hey, you should update your antivirus software! SIGNED: Some virus scanner or other, wink wink nudge nudge"). It's quite annoying.

XP does not have the ability to somehow magically render programs unable to read certain files simply because the extension is unknown to it. As TK pointed out, these extensions simply signify files used by AGS for certain purposes, and should not bother you at all.
Unless CJ has changed that at some point, however, AGS refers to rooms by number, not name. Your room files have to be named "room1.crm", "room57.crm" and so forth in order to work in-game. That might well be your problem.

1. AGS' script language is very C-like, but it isn't exactly C - there are a few C++isms in the syntax, and of course it's full of limits and idiosyncrasies due to its specialised nature.

2. The % operator (it's not a command) exists in AGS scripting since 2.61 beta 1. In older versions, you'll have to work around it - a%b is the same as a-(a/b)*b.

I like soundclick.com. There's also mp3.com.au, zebox.com, wire.fm and a few more. If you want to just casually upload stuff, your best choice is probably paying for hosting somewhere (ipowerweb are supposed to be good, if you're interested - this site, as well as e.g. AGA's and Chrille's, is hosted there). It's not that expensive.