Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Kodu the Visual Programming Language

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Here is an interesting product on XBox Live. Its a games Programing tool with out the coding. If this is a sign of things to come all use Developers will all be out of jobs 😉 Check out the Video!

More Kodu News & Previews

Get here if you want it:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-GB/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d8025855024c/

Secure Email via SSH

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

When I take my laptop out to a unknown wireless network I can never be sure how secure it is. Well after a little bit of a fiddle with ssh and a couple searches on Google I found a way to set up a simple proxy using my own personal server so long as it supported SSH.

It is actually quite a simple principle. SSH will connect you to your server on an encrypted connection. Your server then forwards on your requests for you. What I will do is go through how to setup your mail client using a dynamic SSH tunnel.

The first thing you want to do is to set up your mail client to use a proxy url: “localhost” on port “1081”. (you use that setting for anything you want to secure like messengers, browsers and any any application that will allow u to connect to the Internet via a proxy) Leave the rest of your settings as they are.

The next thing u want to do is to setup the proxy with your server there are many FREE third party apps that will allow u to do this like PUTTY(windows) or SSH Tunnel Manager(OS X). If you are not familiar with a command line then i recommend you use a third party app as apposed to the command line. i will right another post on one of the apps soon. Since I got a mac I have really gotten into the terminal so I will also show you a nice and easy way do it with one shell command see bellow:

ssh -D 1081 yourUsername@yourDomain.co.uk

Breack down:

ssh – is the base for any ssh comunication

-D – sets up the tunnel so that it will DYNAMICALLY forward on the ports as specified in the original applications.

1081 – is the port the proxy listens to on your localhost you can change it as u see fit

yourUsername@yourDomain.co.uk – this is where you specify your user-name to your site and your your server url.

Then it prompts you for your for a password. Enter it and your done. Now as long as that terminal window stays open then your proxy connection will stay up and all your connection will run through it.

Now if you are anything like me you will probably want to go on line to see how u can customize the connection and boy are there loads of things out there. 1 thing I thought I would mention just in-case 😉 if u need to end the connection due to the fact u set the proxy to run in the background in a terminal wind type “kill ” and the connection id you find the connection id by typing “ps” in the command line that will list it. Take the id from there say it was 475 and type “kill 475” and the proxy connection is gone. This may only be relevant if you customize the ssh command I gave you.

MacBook Pro & digital symmetry

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007

Well i went and done it i went out and got a mac. To be honest a mac in and of its self does not come close to fully satisfying my digital requirements, but BootCamp brings it closer. Parallels with BootCamp makes it worth having. Being able to run use windows completely independently of OSX. This means you can run DirectX, games and highly graphicy programs. Plus Parallels using coherence allows the user to run that same instance of windows simultaneously over basically it means u can run windows over OSX. I have it setup so I my windows start bar is on the left and my OSX doc is the left. This means I can run Visual Studio & Blend in Windows wile also running Xcode in OSX.

Now I know a lot of ppl run there mac at the office and at home. Now if u take your mac to the office you have that issue of having to use multiple computers including your mac. Now if ur mac is on a network there is a wonderful app called synergy which allows u to share your keyboard and mouse across the network. So u can use one keyboard and mouse to control as many computers as u want. The beauty of it is that it is platform independent. So one computer can run windows the other can run OSX and a third can run Linux. They will all share the same keyboard and mouse. What a set up works like a dream.

Now that’s what I call digital symmetry.

 

google code search

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

Well as useful as the Google code search is Google simply have not taken the ActionScript community into consideration. U can not simply search for actionscript + a key word which u could do with other languages. There is still hope for all the Google junky flash developers. Cause u can search for file types ‘.as’ basically. I put a request in to recognize ActionScript as a language.

vic 20

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

Well well well yesterday was a fine day indeed we got a vic 20 in the office. We have decided to make all our flash sites vic 20 compliant now. Due to small pockets of ppl not updating there systems it will soon become our standard. NOOOOT. Any how it’s an amazing nostalgic day around the office. One of my colleges wrote 12 lines of code to get one sound out of the darn thing. Try and get an mp3 into that. Well into the 16k of memory, good luck. After seeing some of the games that took the fancy of youths over 20 years ago and what was required to code back then it really makes me appreciate Nintendo, Sony and Microsofts contributions and OO programming. Saying that I am sure I am going to loose many hours to space invaders on the computer with sound AND music. That’s too wicked. A good day indeed.