Craig Mayhew’s Blog

I’ve setup a Freelancer server for anyone to use. Here’s how to use it:

For the moment we are running Freelancer without any mods, so feel free to skip steps 2 and 3.

1. Install freelancer
2. Install mod manager (1.31)
3. Install Discovery Mod (4.85) (http://www.moddb.com/mods/discovery-freelancer/downloads)
4. Run “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Freelancer\EXE\fldirect.exe” and when asked enter the IP 93.97.160.59 and leave the port as 2302.
5. At the bottom it asks if you want to boot freelancer… you do!
6. DO NOT UPDATE.
7. Once freelancer is booted, go into multiplayer and then LAN.
8. Select our server “Liberty”.
9. Play!

If you get tired of the low resolution here is an article on how to increase freelancer’s resolution.

Beth found this in the change of the BBQ takings at the Cowfold fair.

It’s one of the 2009 mismatched coins that has no date and we are auctioning it for charity.

The ebay auction can be found here http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130316755681

I was driving through Kent today with Theo as a passenger. Luckily he had his shiny new HD camera to record this burning lorry we passed.

Microsoft took a step to far recently when they installed an add-on into Firefox in a recent Windows update “Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1“. As you can see in the following image I have disabled but not been able to uninstall the add-on.

The reason it can’t be removed is that Microsoft installed the add-on for all users but the Firefox GUI can only handle uninstalling add-ons for the current user. Microsoft have released a further update that installs the addon on a per user basis rather than for all users which enables you to uninstall it via the previously inactive uninstall button in the Firefox GUI. The download can be found here.

This in my opinion, is very cool. As it’s got pretty silly recently that people are being given fines for not putting their bin in the exact right place or at the required angle as this makes it more difficult for the dustmen. So forget all that, let a robot do it! Reading their official site they are planning on creating a large network across towns to not only collect rubbish but do litter picking and general hygiene management. Very cool, when can we all get some?

A link to the BBC article can be found here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8072619.stm

And the official website is:
http://www.dustbot.org/

Felix has been uploaded to youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXajA5MBFOM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTCOkdyeW1k

Wow, that was worth the wait. I don’t think I’ve ever picked up so much knowledge in one day since college. Great organization and an all round brilliant day!

Here’s a summary of the talks I attended but I unfortunately had to miss talks by Scott MacVicar, David Axmark, Staurt Herbert and Stefan Koopmanschap. But I will be watching them when they are made available on the PHPUK website.

Talk 1: “Keynote” by Aral Balkan

Aral kicked the talks off by going through the history of computing and some of the more humorous sides of where programming began with the “ancient” punch card programs of the early 1900’s. He showed parallax scrolling with HTML/CSS, an augmented reality program in flash and talked about the new swx format. He also offered his solution “Gaebar” to the issue of Google not allowing you to save or backup your database from their cloud network. He also reminded us all about the Game of Life which was first created in the 1970’s and then showed us how he had used it within his companies logo. He really wanted to press the point that programming should be fun, really fun and if it’s not then you should stop and figure out how to make it fun again.

Talk 2: “Sharding Architecures” by David Soria Parra

I really didn’t take much away from this talk. It’s possible that I missed the point but others that I spoke to felt the same. David talked about the problems of splitting a database across multiple servers and then needing to know what data is on what computer by use of an algorithm or lookup. This is a very real problem for companies which have a large database and have hundreds or more disk writes as to split a database across multiple computers. However he did have some good points and shared his experience on designing a system that would know where to look for user data by simply knowing the user id.

Talk 3: “Of Lambda Function Closures And Traits” by Sabastian Bergmann

I was intrigued by the traits and the magic method/interceptor “invoke”. I will definitely be installing PHP 5.3 and having a play with these new features. Unfortunately many of the questions that audience members asked about closures such as how to access global variables and closure recursion were not fully answered due to these still being in the development stage.

Talk 4: “PHP on Windows – The Undiscovered Country” by Hank Janssen

I really wasn’t sure what to expect from this talk. Hank spoke about the division of Microsoft he was from, the “Open Source Technology Center”. I was amazed to hear just how much money Microsoft were pouring into open source projects and improving the open source software in the windows platform. Hank explained how his divison of Microsoft have been busy rewriting, patching and optimizing PHP on the Windows platform in a bid to make it run faster than on Linux. I have to say that if it made economic sense to change to a windows server rather than buy two linux servers, I would! It would cost less each month after the inital cost of the windows install and would pruduce much less carbon.

Talk 5: “Flex and Air for PHP Programmers” by Mihai Corlan

Even though I’m not a big user of adobe products and their languages, I could see some immediate applications for Flex + Air. Mihai showed some code examples and showed several real world applications. I was especially interested in AMF and will be looking at this in detail.

Talk 6: “Security Centered Design – exploring the impact of human behavior” by Chris Shiflett

This was a really entertaining talk on how humans interact with web sites. He showed several example videos and images of the effects of “change blindness” which cemented a “best practice” that we’ve been using for a while. He explained the use of login seals to help prevent phishing attacks (Which I thought was an awesome idea and really want to know why my bank hasn’t got this facility!?). He gave some good examples of mislabeled/misleading option names in software and on websites. One in particular was Apples air port that has the option for a “closed network” which just stops broadcasting the SSID. Many people could mistake this for securing the network which would infact be adding strong encryption.

Conclusions:

An excellent conference and will be booking my ticket for php2010 as soon as they become available!

Another milestone reached! Folding@home is now processing at over 5 petaflops! For anyone who doesn’t participate in folding@home please have a look and see if you can donate computer processing time by running one of their applications on your computer.

I took these photos early this morning. Click the photos to view in high resolution. It’s not very often we get snow like this here!