Game programming
Another long weekend for me.. I finished my work on c0demonkey.com today and started redesigning my first website: software1987.de.
A few years ago I was fascinated by game programming and started writing my own small games in QBasic and Visual Basic 3. It took only 9 months and a game I created was published on a DVD of the GameStar magazine in Germany.
Since 2006 I am visiting the DUSmania, a meeting of free game developers. A part of my page will be solely dedicated to this event. The rest will be about programming and game development in general.
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Playing with VirtualBox
Now that virtualization becomes more and more important for a developer I decided to test VMware, VirtualBox and Xen. Today I'd like to report about VirtualBox, which is an open source virtualization solution by Sun Microsystems. It's available for Windows, Linux, MacOS X and OpenSolaris hosts and virtualizes x86 hardware for desktop, server and embedded use. After two days of testing I've got 3 virtual machines running Arch Linux, FreeBSD and Windows XP. Setting up a box is really easy.. You select the operating system you'd like to install, create a disk with either fixed or dynamically growing size. Installing the OS is simply done by mounting an ISO file or your hosts default CD-ROM drive.
If you need to do major updates on your virtual machine you can create snapshots to save the current state of the machine. In case your machine crashes, you can just revert to the last snapshot.
Similar to the VMware Player you have to compile a kernel module to make VirtualBox run under linux. All in all it's a nice and quick solution for developers to set-up a VM for test purposes like cross-browser validation of a website.
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liteCount vs. Google Analytics
Today I was writing an admin interface for my websites. For a few minutes I killed my blog here because of an SQL-Update statement.. I forgot to add the WHERE part, so by editing only one post I accidentally changed all entries. Of course, I do have backups of all my data.. but the latest backup was already 2 weeks old. Thanks to the google cache I could restore all data :)
Over the week I wrote a user-counter script named liteCount - and yeah I know Google Analytics, but I wanted something small, something easy to install and to integrate into my website. I absolutely don't claim liteCount to be better than Google Analytics, but it's nice to have..
Weekend stories..
Some of you may have heard of the IOCCC - the International Obfuscated C Code Contest.. as of this weekend I mirror their website under www2.de.ioccc.org.
I also extended geekmonkey.org with two new features. First one, an Atom 1.0 Feed, which is a "must-have" for a blog (what this is intended to be :D), and second "nice-to-have" a special box showing up when a user finds it's way to geekmonkey.org using a search engine like google.
Next thing to complete would be the the "Snippets" section.. next weekend.
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LibIDN and iputils-ping
"Cool" I thought after I'd registered my first top-level-domain containing a special character. But why the heck does it take so long to set it up? Even after 24 hours the DNS wasn't working, but.. oh wait! Firefox was able to resolve my adress. Why then, wasn't I able to ping the host? The answer is simple: The ping program installed on my system doesn't make use of libidn, which is required to turn domain names containing special characters to ascii-strings.
What can you do when the developers of the iputils don't want to use this library? Correct! Do it yourself. :-) After writing 5 lines of code I had my own Version of "ping" with libidn support. You can download the source here (orignal taken from a debian repository using apt-get source). When compiling the package you need to have the libidn library installed on your system (on debian you can use the version available over the package system).
The compiled version of ping has to be owned by root and in order to make users able to start ICMP request you also have to chmod u+s the binary. Have fun! :D
ganymed~:$ ping nördhus.se
PING xn--nrdhus-wxa.se (217.11.63.111) 56(84) bytes of data.