I have not been quiet about my great exodus not so much towards Linux but away from Windows. I used to get phone calls every week from family and friends about how their computers were slow, something stopped working out of the blue, or whatever. I have since moved most of them to 100% free software built by the community and have never hear of any problems since. As a matter of fact my father (who requires Windows-based software for work that mandated he stay with Windows) uses my mother’s Ubuntu-based laptop whenever possible because he is absolutely sick of the headaches. This is a man who does not know a mouse from a trackball and given his inexperience even he is sick of the God-damned horror show that is Microsoft Windows.

Any way, back to the point before I wrap up my short rant. I will now move all of my software development over to other operating systems and cross-compile from now on.

Hey, Microsoft. I am disgusted by you. I have a choice and I no longer choose you.

As of late I have been staring at Gratuitous Space Battles. In this one you design a small fleet of space ships, complete with hulls, engines, weapons, shields, and the like, and then set them against waves of enemies. The beauty of the game is no setup with work equally well against every enemy (at least once you are past the first few levels, that is).

This has re-sparked interest in my idea for something I am currently calling Evolution Battle (yes, yes, it is a dumb name). I envision it as SimLife mixed with something similar to Gratuitous Space Battles. Players wold create the “life” with its basic attributes and then stick them in with other “life” to compete for food and the like. I think it would be a great project for me since it would involves a few technical challenges I am not sure I have encountered before.

Just an honorable mention of a few of my other favorites: Crazy Machines (a near-clone of The Incredible Machine), the classic Conway’s Game of Life, Robocode, Bloons Tower Defense 3, and Lemmings (sort of).

If you wish to check a filesystem you can not mount for whatever reason boot into a live-CD (such as Ubuntu) and run fsck /dev/sdXY where X and Y are your device and partition. Assuming the issue is not with your partition table you can use fdisk -l /dev/sdX to help figure out which partition is which.

These commands may require root privileges depending on your distribution.

• Install the latest Apache 2.2 with OpenSSL: http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi.
• Open the Command Prompt and browse to [apache 2.2 path]/bin.
• Enter openssl req -config ../conf/openssl.cnf -new -out foo.csr -keyout foo.pem. Fill out this information the best you can but you can leave most of it blank. The most notable exceptions are the PEM Pass Phrase fields and the Common Name field (which should be the domain name you will use this certificate on). It is best that you leave the Challenge Password at the end blank.
• Enter openssl rsa -in foo.pem -out foo.key. You will be asked to reenter the password you entered in the last step.
• Enter openssl x509 -in foo.csr -out foo.crt -req -signkey foo.key -days 3650. You can replace 3560 with however long you want to certificate to be valid for.
• You will now wind up with four files: foo.crt, foo.csr, foo.key, and foo.pem. At this point you really only need foo.crt and foo.key and may delete the other two (unless you want to sign more certificates later on).
• Move your two remaining files somewhere safe (not any place where the web server will be able to serve them to clients).
• Open [apache 2.2 path]/conf/httpd.conf in your favorite text editor. Uncomment out the line LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so.
• Open [apache 2.2 path]/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf. Uncomment out the line Listen 443.
• In Windows Explorer browse to [apache 2.2 path]/conf and open up the configuration for the site you want to SSL enable. Make sure you are setup to listen on port 443 if you are running a virtual host. Add the lines SSLEngine on, SSLCertificateFile "[foo.crt path]", and SSLCertificateKeyFile "[foo.key path]".
• Restart Apache 2.2: net stop apache2.2 and net start apache2.2

Some notes:

• Certificates can only be used for whole domains or virtual hosts as opposed to a single directory. However with some clever allows, denies, and redirects in your web root you can do just about anything.
• Only one SSL connection per IP on the same server is allowed. This is by design within SSL.
• These certificates are self-signed. That means that anyone who views your new secure site will most likely be greeted with a warning they must accept before continuing. You setup the certificates yourself so you know there is nothing fishy going on but they might not know that. If you want to avoid this you will have to put out the cash to Verisign or someone else who can offer the same service.
• Check out the SSLCipherSuite and SSLCARevocationFile directives (which you will notice are missing in my instructions) to further lock down your site.
• Remember that if you ever change your certificate in any way the client may need to remove their old certificate before they will be able to view the site again.
• I generally replace foo with the domain name.
• Since this was always meant as a quick-and-dirty howto you can find more information at the Apache site.
• I am running Windows XP SP3, Apache 2.2.14, and the included OpenSSL 0.9.8k.

There is also the option of swappiness included with the 2.6.x kernel. Just edit /etc/sysctl.conf to include the line vm.swappiness=0. Either change the existing value or, if it does not exist, add it (changing this value will require a reboot). vm.swappiness can be between 0 and 100 (inclusive) where 0 will try to never swap anything and 100 will aggressively swap. If you would rather just change the value until next reboot use the line sysctl vm.swappiness=X. You can view the current value with the command cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. Ubuntu 10.04, for example, has a default value of 60.

• Grab and install the latest Droid Drivers: http://www.motorola.com/Support/US-EN/Support-Homepage/Software_and_Drivers/USB-and-PC-Charging-Drivers/
• Grab and install the latest OpenVPN: http://www.openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/downloads.html
• Grab the latest Android SDK and extract it: http://developer.android.com/sdk/
• Create a file called azilink.ovpn file and enter into it:
  

  dev tun
route-method exe
remote 127.0.0.1 41927 tcp-client
ifconfig 192.168.56.2 192.168.56.1
route 0.0.0.0 128.0.0.0
route 128.0.0.0 128.0.0.0
socket-flags TCP_NODELAY
ping 10
dhcp-option DNS 192.168.56.1

• Create a file called azilink.bat and enter into it:
  

  "[path to android sdk]\tools\adb.exe" forward tcp:41927 tcp:41927
openvpn "[path to azilink.ovpn]"

• Set your Droid to debugging mode: Settings -> Applications -> Development -> USB debugging
• Grab and install the latest Azilink .apk file onto your Droid: http://azilink.googlecode.com/ (This can be done by pointing the Droid’s web browser directly to the download link or loading it onto the SD card. Either way you may need to go to Settings -> Applications -> Unknown sources to allow it to be installed.)
• Start up Azilink on your Droid and select Service active.
• Right-click azilink.bat and select Run as Administrator.

If all these steps went well you should be able to access the Internet on your computer via Azilink’s tethering capabilities. Be sure to check out the About screen in the Azilink application on the Droid to see if any of that applies to you.

A few things worth mentioning:

• This method does not require your Droid to be rooted.
• I am under the impression that these steps will also work for Windows Vista but I can not confirm that.
• I am under the impression that these steps will also work for Windows XP with the route-method exe line removed from azilink.ovpn but I can not confirm that.
• I am running Droid firmware 2.1, OpenVPN 2.1.1, Azilink 2.0.2, and MotoConnect 4.6.0.

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic gcc
sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
cp /media/cdrom/VMware*.tar.gz /tmp
sudo umount /media/cdrom
cd /tmp
tar xzvf VMware*.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib/
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

You should now notice your Linux VMs are more responsive and have a few more options.

Enter the following lines at the Terminal:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=X
sudo chown root:root /swap
sudo chmod 600 /swap
sudo mkswap /swap
sudo swapon /swap

Replace “X” in the first line with how many megabytes you want your swap file to be (~1.5 times your amount of RAM is a good rough guess). Now add the line “/swap none swap sw 0 0” to your /etc/fstab file.

If you already have a swap partition you can safely remove the corresponding line from /etc/fstab, reboot, and then remove the swap partition completely with a tool like GParted.

If you get a error from dd indicating you do not have enough RAM you can use sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1G count=X instead.

What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

More of a technical paper

The Floating-Point Guide

More of an every-mans guide

However cool such an interface may be– do not get me wrong, it is very, very cool– I fail to be as taken as the people around me. The reason behind this is probably the fact that I tend to view things as their individual parts rather than the subject as a whole. Take, for example, the Google Sky Map application on my phone. This application allows you to point your phone in any direction and show you what stars, constellations, planets, ect one would see if the Earth was not in their way and in the absence of bright lights. All the required technologies have not only existed for a while but everyone is familiar with them in one form or another. Google Sky Map is just a clever application of nearly static images combined with a compass and GPS; They are old horses with new tricks. A neat application but hardly as amazing as everyone seems to think that it is.

Is everyones head that far in the sand? There seems to be a huge market for companies intentionally underestimating people…

The Future of Shopping

Spider-Man Knows

While pondering this– and considering I have absolutely zero ability when it comes to these things– I decided to propose an image-less site. CSS can do some pretty neat things in a standardised way but not everything works in every browser. On the other hand, if done correctly, the desktop and mobile versions of the site can be one.

Can I pull this off and have something appealing to show these people?

Anyone who likes can view the API for free and start writing code. This availability– plus the large user base– is proving to be a fertile ground for mom ‘n pop-style, web-based applications. Perhaps this is worth a look?

Update 2010.04.10
After spending days researching this I have come to the conclusion that there is virtually no documentation of substance. Even the Facebook-supplied examples do not function as promised. Although there are some great, complex applications out there I do not consider this worth my time right now. My hat (and my pitty) go off to the people who got a job working with these APIs. May your families find another way to eat.

That is all.

SmoothWall Express is a stand-alone, open-source firewall project. It has a large, active community full of helpful people. Some of these helpful people create mods to extend the functionality such as the ultra useful Full Firewall Control mod.

In my experiments I was able to create a very tiny box with two NICs, little RAM (256MB), a spare Pentium 4 I had laying around, and a 2GB Compact Flash card as the local storage. This poor excuse for a machine was able to stand up to some pretty heavy traffic– without ever passing .25 load, mind you– including a few test torrents totaling over 1,000 connected peers.

My ultimate goal is the separation of all traffic according to use. I might have one public, outward-facing interface for the Internet connection and three inward-facing interfaces for the local traffic (private wired, private wireless, and an internal DMZ). I also plan to build a beefy VMware ESXi box so I can sandbox each of my services (vpn, web, SQL, e-mail, ect) and do nearly all of the networking within virtual hardware.

Dungeon Keeper 2 was always one of my personal favorites. Seeing my lovely girl playing it on Windows Vista made me want to play a game so I dug it out from a pile of old discs and installed it on Windows 7. It would not start. I tried compatibility modes, sacrificing a dog, and a third thing. It simply, positively would not start. So I thought “screw this, I am going to Linux.”

These are the steps I took to get Dungeon Keeper 2 1.7 working on Ubuntu 9.10 x64:

• Prepare Apt: In a terminal type sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
• Update Apt: In a terminal type sudo apt-get update
• Update Wine: In a terminal type sudo apt-get upgrade
  (Note that this will upgrade everything. You can use System -> Administration -> Update Manager to upgrade only the related Wine packages.)
• Fire up regedit and set the following keys: In a terminal type wine regedit
  

  HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Bullfrog Productions Ltd -> Dungeon Keeper II -> Configuration -> Video -> EngineID = 4
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Bullfrog Productions Ltd – >Dungeon Keeper II -> Configuration -> Video -> ScreenHardware3D = 0
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Wine -> DirectInput -> MouseWarpOverride = “disable”

  If any of these keys do not exist create them. (MouseWarpOverride had to be created in my case and I set it as a string.)

• Run the game: In a terminal browse to the Dungeon Keeper 2 directory and type wine DKII.exe

One might note that I never actually installed the game. I had it installed on Windows and I simply moved the files over to my EXT4 partition (running them off of my NTFS partition probably would have worked just as well). I also grabbed a no-CD crack so I would not need the disc (buy the game because it is damn well worth it). I have not yet gotten the mouse perfect but I am pretty happy with it right now. All the applications I had open at the time seemed to disappear but were still running. I do not know why this was and I currently have no idea where to look to fix it.

[Source]

Competitors write software that controls a miniature tank that fights other identically-built (but differently programmed) tanks in a playing field. Robots can move, shoot at each other, scan for each other, and hit the walls (or other robots) if they aren’t careful. Though the idea of this “game” may seem simple, the actual strategy needed to win is not. Good robots can have thousands of lines in their code dedicated to strategy. Some of the more successful robots use techniques such as statistical analysis or attempts at neural networks in their designs.

I do go on with my rants about Java however I have gone as far as proposing an in-house tournament between friends. I have even drawn up game types and rules for this tournament. This could prove to be a great introduction to programming for them and a lot of fun for everyone.

Also I get to crush their robots with great prejudice in robo-combat.

This activity makes me want to reboot the project while keeping the already-created user data. The project was never finished and still lacks a decent user management system and proper linking facilities (IE linking to other, already created pages). Plus once it is finished I will feel comfortable releasing the code and whoever wants to will be able to host their own version.

Below are the simple steps I took to fix my issue.

sudo fuser -v /dev/dsp* /dev/snd/* /dev/seq*
sudo killall slmodemd
sudo killall pulseaudio

Note that fuser is only used to confirm the modem is the issue while pulseaudio will restart after killed, thus properly grabbing the sound device.

Since I not using my modem these steps worked for me. Obviously this would cause a problem for you if you were using your modem. If that is the case check out one of the other proposed solutions and see if one of those works for you.

[Source]

If I can keep up this pace up for a few more weeks big things for everyone who wants them are coming.

Upon reading the text on the Help screen is when I realised this is basically the same game. Liking the basic concept– obviously– I started up a quick single player game versus the AI. Turns out it is nearly identical to my vision. Sure, I previously figured out my ideas were not all that original, but how many clones of the same game can the public tolerate? If someone likes my game over the competitions I would like to think it has to do with the features. Not because they simply did not already have alliance to another, similar game.

I still feel my version brings something to the table that the others lack (at least as far as I have seen). However, I need to ask myself if I still want to continue; Time is not something I have a lot of and I might rather work on something a bit more unique. After all, the sub-systems I have already built (login, chat, security mechanisms, ect) could be moved to another project virtually unmodified so it is not like scraping this project would mean I wasted most of my time…

Trimming the whitespace off both sides of a string

function trim(str) {
return str.replace(/^\s\s*/, "").replace(/\s\s*$/, "");
};

Padding the start of a string

function pad(str, len, padding) {
str += "";

if ( str.length <= len ) {
var str_new = "";
for ( i = 0; i < len – str.length; i++ )
str_new += padding;

return str_new + str;
}

return str;
};

Getting the mouse position

var mouse_x = mouse_y = 0;

function mouse_position_update() {
if ( document.all && !window.opera ) {
mouse_x = event.clientX + document.documentElement.scrollLeft;
mouse_y = event.clientY + document.documentElement.scrollTop;
}
else {
mouse_x = e.pageX;
mouse_y = e.pageY;
}
};

Getting an elements absolute position

function element_position(element) {
var x = y = 0;

if ( element.offsetParent ) {
x = element.offsetLeft;
y = element.offsetTop;
while ( element = element.offsetParent ) {
x += element.offsetLeft;
y += element.offsetTop;
}

return [x, y];
};

All of these were tested in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla FireFox 3.5.8, Google Chrome 5.0.307.9 beta, and Apple Safari 4.0.4.

Please note I have not touched JavaScript in years and I am a bit rusty.

Update 2010.03.02
I noticed an extra bracket in element_position() which is now fixed. Sorry about that.

I grew up playing video games a lot more than playing board games. As such while designing board games I brought to the table a lot of odd things; Some were good, some were bad. One of my biggest problem to this day is the limitation of the human brain for computation vs a computer. When I think of the gears of gameplay I think in numbers. Numbers, however useful, are not fun. I need a way to mix these two worlds.

One idea that comes to mind is the web as a gaming platform. I am not necessarily talking about Web 2.0 or AJAX. I am talking about a technology that even mobile phones have access to. The World Wide Web is so ubiquitous and easy to script for that I would be dumb not to at least consider it. A lot of my ideas transfer very well to this platform and I think I may give an old, failed idea a shot in this medium.

#!/bin/sh
# Shell script to install libdvdcss under Debian GNU Linux
# Many DVDs use css for encryption. To play these discs, a special library
# is needed to decode them, libdvdcss. Due to legal problems, Debian and most
# Linux distibutions cannot distribute libdvdcss
# Use this shell script to install the libdvdcss under DEBIN GNU/Linux
# --------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Refer url for more info:
# Copyright info - http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~dvd/
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
# This script is part of nixCraft shell script collection (NSSC)
# Visit http://bash.cyberciti.biz/ for more information.
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------

set -e

site=http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/deb/
arch=$(dpkg --print-installation-architecture)

soname=2
uversion=1.2.5
#available="alpha hppa i386 ia64 powerpc s390 sparc"
available="i386"
version=${uversion}-1

if ! type wget > /dev/null ; then
echo "Install wget and run this script again"
exit 1
fi

for a in $available; do
if [ "$a" = "$arch" ]; then
wget ${site}libdvdcss${soname}_${version}_${arch}.deb -O /tmp/libdvdcss.deb
dpkg -i /tmp/libdvdcss.deb
exit $?
fi
done

echo "No binary deb available. Will try to build and install it."
echo "You need to have debhelper, dpkg-dev and fakeroot installed."
echo "If not, interrupt now, install them and rerun this script."
echo ""
echo "This is higly experimental, look out for what happens below."
echo "If you want to stop, interrupt now (control-c), else press"
echo "return to proceed"
read dum

mkdir -p /tmp/dvd
cd /tmp/dvd
wget ${site}libdvdcss_${uversion}.orig.tar.gz
wget ${site}libdvdcss_${version}.diff.gz
wget ${site}libdvdcss_${version}.dsc
dpkg-source -x libdvdcss_${version}.dsc
cd libdvdcss-${uversion}
fakeroot ./debian/rules binary
echo "Any problems? Interrupt now (control-c) and try to fix"
echo "manually, else go on and install (return)."
dpkg -i ../libdvdcss${soname}_${version}_${arch}.deb

Just stick this into a shell script, make it executable, and run it from the command line as root. Make sure you have the debhelper, dpkg-dev, and fakeroot packages installed as required in the comments. You may also need to change the available variable at the start of the script to whatever architecture you happen to be running (I used i386 in place of amd64 and it worked great but I am not sure if that was because I already had ia32-libs installed).

In some countries this is illegal. Take a look at your local laws to make sure you will not bring the fuzz down on yourself.

[Source]

For now the standard treatment is pharmaceuticals which, like many other classifications of drugs, can have negative side effects. Since it has been said that patients families can suffer more than the patient it would make sense that the patient would opt off said stigmatised pharmaceuticals. If, in the next ~10 years, this turns into a viable treatment it could help to eliminate otherwise avoidable situations due to a refusal to take medications.