I'm finally in the right direction at school, I'm now having about ten hours of informatics weekly, including five hours of programming and database management and three hours aimed at operating systems (including Linux) and the technical parts of a computer. It's fun that I'm finally learning some useful things instead of the economics crap I used to follow.
I'm a Google junkie and so are you, the masses always go crazy for new big releases of the big search engine and this time I think I'll join them.
This time, Google announced a new project named Google Chrome and it is a new open-source browser, with a lot of innovations and some typical search engine related functions. You can read more about it here.
edit: Chrome is released, get it here. It is so damn fast but I miss the huge database of Firefox plugins...
This is a known issue, and there is a known solution, but it's hard to find when you really need it.
When you're sending an e-mail from php mail() to a Hotmail account, most of the times it will a) never arrive or b) get marked as spam. There is a fix though: you need to send some extra headers with the request, make it look like it was sent from a real mail client.
<?php
$to = "I Ron <iron@hotmail.com>";
$subject = "It arrived on Hotmail?";
$message = "Yes it did! :o";
$headers = "From: RandomBase <iron@randombase.com>\n";
$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: RandomBase <iron@randombase.com>\n";
$headers .= "X-Priority: 1\n";
$headers .= "X-MSMail-Priority: High\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: RandomBaseMailer";
mail ($to, $subject, $message, $headers)?>
It's that simple. It would be even more simple if people stopped using this piece of AJAX based spyware that filters everything but spam messages.
Seriously, what the hell is the point of having this on a registration form for a game website:
What is the use of this? Even for marketing purposes I can't see the difference between selling something to someone of a specific skin colour (racist "watermelon" jokes aside) or to all ethnic groups. Know that a few forms before they asked my country, so this is not a method for guessing your continent, they just want to know your skin colour, scary.
The people I had testing it shared the same question: "what the hell is its purpose?". Well; surprise, it doesn't have one. The idea was born when r0bin and me were playing Bomberman (sweet game by the way), and I wondered if it was possible to recreate such a thing in Javascript (+AJAX for multiplayer).
The problem with Javascript is the lag you automatically have, you can't get around the headers you're sending each time. At the best moment until now, I noted down a latency around 200. That means you would be able to send five actions each second. In a normal multiplayer game you should have a latency < 75 to keep it playable and fair for the other players.
So, the plan on recreating Bomberman faded but a new one was born, creating something where you can walk around and chat, that's it, nothing more. It is working now (but can be very buggy), but will most likely stay where in the stage it is now, I don't see any bright future for it.
The code isn't magical either, it is the typical result of working on it in seperated sessions spread over a couple of days, not commenting the code and my extreme lack of knowledge from Javascript. I only know the very basics which seems to be leading to a lot of bugs in attempts to advanced applications. The serverside synchronisation is managed through a PHP script that returns an array to the Javascript application of the location of the different players. The game supports virtually an unlimited amount of players.
Even though I'm not going to "finish" this code, doesn't mean I'm not going to create more of these things in the future, I actually quite enjoyed creating this.
Details
http://iron.randombase.com/multi/
Arrow keys to move, "enter" (return) to chat.
I know nothing to write about, I have nothing currently running from projects, only a few ideas but for some reason I don't think I will ever complete them. So, time to share an idea I had in mind.
On my Windows box, my desktop is quite messy, but I barely use it, only to dump files sometimes, I never use the shortcuts, that's why I have a start menu. My current desktop is this:
Of course I see the problem with that, it's messed up as hell but when I "align them to grid", they are miles off my screen and I never can decide what I should keep or not. My icons are arranged loosely according to file type, you can clearly see directories and archive files being arranged together. Now I had the idea of creating a new type of desktop shortcut, (I am unable to, I know nothing about integrating things into the Windows shell), something with anchor points.
The idea is you have only a few icons on your desktop, for example, one is named "Archive files". The moment you click it, some awesome-Vista-or-Compiz-style-animation makes a few files pop out of it, connected with lines to the original thing. Then you can select the file you want and the menu closes itself, leaving a clean desktop again.
This is nothing for the average computer user though, who doesn't fill his desktop, but for programmers who constantly have to download new files for their clients etc, it can get quite handy.
I'll try to create an example in Javascript to illustrate what I mean, don't expect too much of it.
Gmail has a function that really hasn't been advertised enough, so I'll do the work for them. Google allows you to add as many stuff behind a + in your e-mail, for example if your Gmail address is:
john.doe@gmail.com
Well, then you can transform it into:
john.doe+mailinglists@gmail.com
Any mail you send to that address still arrives at john.doe@gmail.com, so you only have to register that one. Here comes the fun part: the "sent to" header has changed, so now you can add a filter that automatically applies a label or marks the message as spam, all you need to do is click "Add filter" and write in the second form (To:): john.doe+mailinglists@gmail.com. No more need for registering additonal addresses, unless the smarter spam senders realise this and automatically delete the part between + and @, only a small change in the code.
Solver is invalid actually, guesser is more correct. It just randomly puts words in place of the letters.
For example, it "solved" laser into:
lack anniversary slave enormous regard
And /dev/iron became:
/ distribution experiment vehicle / insist racism overnight nation
I wrote this code for fun but it has turned out to be maybe the most efficient piece of code I have ever written, which is kind of annoying since it doesn't have any real purpose. The magic link:
My second political entry in a row, oh my god!
So, it's all about this thing: Deep Packet Inspection. Quoting from Torrentfreak:
An innocuous sounding name for a technology that basically means ‘Internet monitoring’. Deep packet inspection is a technology that some companies are salivating over, including advertisers and entertainment lobby groups like the MPAA. With it, their dreams can come true, some of them anyway.
Enough said, no?
Funny, yesterday Tom and me were talking about the impossibility of creating a webpage that doesn't log a thing, thus being the only page on the internet that doesn't invade your privacy. But apparently the capital city of my country, Brussels, decided there is still too much privacy, by signing an agreement with the most privacy invading country in the world: the United States of America, you might have heard of it.
This agreement currently affects only people in Great Britain, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the whole European Union is affected too, soon enough. The actual law in short:
American authorities will be able to obtain greater access to private information such as credit card transactions, internet browsing habits and travel histories of people in Britain under a deal being finalised by European Union officials.
According to the agreement, it's only accessible if you are handling with a specific purpose, but that doesn't mean shit. They will still search through all your data you have generated in their logs.
Original article: link