Browser MMOG; Ikariam!

Last week I stubled on a online game, Ikariam. It is a complete webbased game, and therefor can be played on every computer with a recent browser. I would summarize it as a slower running version of Settlers. And with slower running, I mean the game time. For instance, upgrading a building takes from twenty minutes to a few hours. Of course for a webbased game this isn't a bad thing, since most people will play this when doing their work etc. So quickly login and start some things, and the go back to work....

Update: Airforce

As posted before, I have applied to join our airforce. Before they let you start the training, the run you through multiple selection rounds. Right now I made it to the last two. They run sort of independant of eachother. This march 6th I will have to go to the Central Military Hospital to get some (X-ray)scans of my skeleton, brains and heart. I will also get an invitation soon to fly a few flights in a real plane. It will be sort of like the flight simulator which I had to do earlier, except that in the flight simulator you'd fly solely on instruments, and in the plane you will fly without instruments.
This will be done during 1 week in Portugal. I am looking forward to go there, and make my first hours in the pilotseat. And to see some nice parts of the town Evora offcourse...

The plane I will be flying is a Slingsby Firefly T67-M200. Looks like quite a nimble plane!

New videocard, but which one?

Recently I finally made the upgrade to the dual-core era, but I decided to use the onboard graphics of the Asus M2A-VM HDMI motherboard. Based on the AMD 690G, with Radeon X1250 graphics, it basically supports everything up to DirectX 9.0c. And I didn't expect to do a lot of gaming.
However, recently I wanted to play a few games again, mostly try Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And doing that on a 690G/X1250 is really not advisable. So I started looking at what videocard might be a viable option for me.

It should not be to expensive (so <= €100,-), preferably passively cooled, and be the fasted possible within those requirements. Now I have been very interested in the new Radeon HD 3400 / 3600 series. But until now I could not find decent benchmarks with both series included. Today I found those at Legitreviews.com.

I will definatelly skip the HD 3400 series, but I think the HD 3650 is really a viable option.

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Alpha

Yesterday I upgrade my Ubuntu Gutsy install to the latest 8.04 Alpha (#4 I believe). First I was planning to do a clean install from a freshly downloaded ISO, but then I decided to see if an upgrade would work.

This turned out te be pretty easy. I haven't worked long on 8.04 yet, but have yet to encounter problems. I guess the upgrade went pretty smooth.

First edit your sourcelist:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
replace gedit with your favorite text editor. I used gedit because I have no idea wether nano has an easy replace function. In the sources.list file, replace every gutsy with hardy. This will make sure that when you do the next apt-get update, it will connect to the hardy repos.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Now it will install everything which is needed to upgrade your current 7.10 install to the 8.04 alpha. After apt-get is finished, reboot et voila! You can now try the latest Ubuntu.

Joining the Airforce

I never finished anything after my high school diploma. I went to University for two years, but decided to take a brake, mostly because of the (almost non-existing) progress I was making. In that time I met my current wife, and by now we have three children.
However, without a proper education, it is quiet hard to find a job that is both satisfying and well-payed.
Last spring I applied as a pilot in our Airforce (again, second time I tried). This time I went trough the selection pretty quickly. Right now, all I have to pass is a physical test and a piloting test.
Who knows, perhaps I will have to stop doing what I'm doing, and start a new career as a military pilot...

Password protect Apache2 server

I have been running an Apache2 server (with MySQL and PHP) since forever, mainly to run MythWeb (a great plugin for MythTV), and the occasional  CMS like Joomla! or Mambo.

Now I am also experimenting with Java, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL, and I would like to be able to do some from my work as well. So I opened port 80 on my connection. However, without any kind of protection, this means that anybody who knows my IP, can just use MythWeb to delete all my recording. 

There are two option in securing your webserver:

1. Use PHP (or equivalent language) to create a login system

2. Put security parameters in the Apache2 configuration.

Since I am still beginning with PHP etc, I opted for the second option. My server is running Ubuntu 7.04. It is possible to use .htaccess files in the root of your webserver to set passwords etc. But I read that it is better to set passwords in httpd.conf. Ubuntu puts this file in /etc/apache2/. Note that by default httpd.conf is not used anymore, right now Apache uses the /etc/apache2/apache2.conf file. But anything that you put in the httpd.conf will be applied by Apache2. And doing so, has the benefit that your apache2.conf stays nice and clean.

Create a password with the htpasswd command:

htpasswd -c <username> /some/location/for/passwordfile

It will ask to give a password, and will then put it in the specified location.

This is what I added to the httpd.conf file:

<Directory>

AuthType Basic

AuthName "Please enter username and password"

AuthUserFile /some/location/for/passwordfile

Require valid-user

</Directory>

The first line sets this policy for /var/www/ and lower directories. The third line is the message shown to users, the fourth line specifies where the created password file is set.

Java + XML

I have a certain text, which is basically an template for our CMS at work. This text needs to be edited and written in notepad or any other texteditor. What I would like to do, is have an nice GUI, where I just select the specifics, and it generates the requiered text from that. So for instance, just fill in the partnumber, after which the program would generate the complete text which I can then just copy/paste in our CMS.

So I would use JTextFields, and maybe Combobox etc. But what to do with those values? The most flexibel option would be to have each change of each value updated seperately in the "template". But I have not found a way to edit a certain text in an JTextArea.

The way to go? Write each value to an XML file, and use that XML file to create the "template" in an JTextArea/Pane/whatever.

So now I have to get into XML, and I am going to start here: http://developerlife.com/tutorials/?p=26 and http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava/.

And some more links: http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/excerpt/netbeans_2/index2.html and http://www.netbeans.org/kb/55/xmltools-openingsample.html