Monthly Archives: November 2005

Automated Downloading

On Patrick‘s insistent encouragement, I’ve finished my “downloading system”. I use it to easily and quickly queue files on a remote machine for downloading (or starting (Bit-)torrent downloads). It consists of two scripts, one written in PHP and running on a web-server which presents a very basic (login protected) interface: A text-area where links to files or torrents are pasted, and a “send” button. The script then creates a cryptographically signed email-message which is sent via the web-server to a POP3 account.
The 2nd scripts runs my actual server at home and is written in Ruby (and it should work on Windows as well as Unix). This polls the POP3 box for mails, verifies their signature to check that it’s authentic, and then processes the URLs contained in the message: “.torrent” files are downloaded and passed to Azureus (which can in theory work from just the URLs, but then Azureus requires a manual intervention by pressing OK in the “Open URL” window), everything else is downloaded with wget.

P.N.03 — Redux

After a bit more than two years, I’ve finally got the Papillion Suit. 😀 About three months ago, I accidentally stumbled upon the “Official Brady Games Strategy Guide” for P.N.03 and decided to order it as it was fairly cheap. So all this time I’ve been steadily doing the Trial Missions on Normal (where the strategy guide of course doesn’t help at all as the missions are randomly generated, but now that I spent the money on the guide, I better finish the game properly).
The last few trial missions (i.e. 9-3 to 9-5 and 10-3 to 10-5) are actually quite hard to get a professional ranking on as no-one knows exactly how the ranks are handed out for the trials (it’s not just “No Damage Cleared Rooms” as I’ve obtained “Professional” on 10-4 with only 02 of them).
Anyway, I beat Alraune (the final boss) using only a single continue (compared to ~30 when I first finished the game on normal back all those years).
Although P.N. 03 has found a spiritual successor in the “Mercenaries” mode of Resident Evil 4 (including remixes of the soundtrack), it is not quite the same and I would definitely like to see a proper sequel with the same combo-system and the same feminine graphical style.