So I think it’s about time I give a general update as to where I am with my various personal projects…

Snapr Photo Gallery

I had Snapr running on my local server for quite a while, however it being there meant I couldn’t really show my photos to the world as it depends on my ADSL being stable/fast. This also put a burden on the Internet connection which I can’t really afford since when I’m not coding, I’m usually playing games or hosting games, and to randomly have my upload disappear wasn’t great. So about 8 months ago it got turned off, however, as my holiday is quickly making an appearance I might resurrect it’s code base, but with whats going on at the moment I doubt I’ll be able to get it working again in time.

GOW Take 2

I’ve been meaning to move away from Wordpress for a while, not for any particular reason, but other than I’d like to have coded my own; especially since the closest I’ve gotten to coding a blog in rails was a very simple one for part of a big website. I want it to support all the basics such as trackbacks/pingbacks so that there is no major blog downside from using it over Wordpress. This is coming together quite quickly at the moment, it isn’t going to be a Wordpress clone, as I have no intention to support multiple themes/users. I think I’ll release the code base when its finished, but with no intention of supporting/maintaining it beyond security issues.

I Watched That

This is a project I’ve had on back burners for nearly 2 years now, it’s basically last.fm for the TV world. So you can mark which shows you watch, comment on episodes, and mark specific seasons/episodes as watched so that you can keep track of what your yet to view. This would also include a recommendation/suggestion engine, along with the usual social networking side of things. Initially started on a really old version of Rails, it’s currently being upgraded to the latest Rails 2.3.2. Taking much longer than I initially thought as most of the code I wrote back in the day is well… not so good. So big chunks are being re-written to make them more efficient and to satisfy the part of my brain that’s a perfectionist.

Host Controller

This was originally a XP only utility that I used to use while developing on Windows. It allows you to toggle entries in the Windows host file on and off whenever you like. After I switched to developing on Ubuntu I had no real use for this application, and since then it remained in a working state for XP. Since now I have a Vista machine I decided to give it a little go just to make sure it still works. Had to make some small tweaks to get it operational again, however it’s now in a working state for how my machine is setup. (So chances are, it probably won’t work on your Vista machine). I need to support UAC, which currently it doesn’t. But beyond that, it’s a small cheerful program that does its job. If you want it, you can find the source code on github and a download of the application can be found here.

So quite a quick round up on whats going on, will hopefully post some more around the Rails blog, since that’s what I’m working on at the moment in my free time. A post on default_scope is definitely on the horizon.

How didn’t you know? Every mother and his dog is on the train to flogging gamers for all their worth, so why aren’t you? Soon you can be making the millions from this clearly untapped market!

Honestly, there’s been loads of attempts that clearly worked, just look at these websites for ideas on how to run your own games for cash website!

• BattleFrag
• Prizefight
• Gamelio
• GoBlam!
• Tournament.com
• Kwari

Now all these sites have one thing in common, and its not that they are all making lots of money, it’s that they’re all shutdown.

If you have been in the gaming scene in the past 5 years you should have heard of at least one of the above mentioned companies, and you know that they weren’t successful. Which is a shame, but that’s just the way it goes.

They all have fallen into this same trap…

Step 1
The top players make money from beating the less skilled players.

Step 2
The top players rake in the cash, while the low skill players leave and don’t come back and don’t recommend your site.

Step 3
You attempt to attract new players by giving them free money to play with since all but the top skilled players have left.

Step 4
See Step 1.

I do hope that one day, the new budding entrepreneurs out there will look at the past efforts of this and go…

“Oh, look, there’s been other people who tried this, and from the looks of their websites it didn’t work out too well for them as none succeeded, perhaps we should try another area in gaming instead”

…and then leave it at that and try something else. Instead it seems to go like this…

“These other people failed at this, so let’s copy them, put a different spin on it, and then get the gaming sites to post news for us about how this time, it’ll work”

So why this post? There’s a new bunch of people on the street who think that they have the answer on how to make money from cash gaming (needless to say; whatever it is, it won’t work). They are called PlayAll; bets anyone on how long they’ll last?

Right, as we all know back in the days of old Napster ruled supreme. There was no contest about that and everyone I knew who was on-line was using it, however it obviously was highly illegal. Since then many companies have tried to ressurect Napster in many different forms from Kazaa to LimeWire. However they all still fall in the pitfall of being illegal. So what would happen if a legal alternative occured? Well, it’s no longer what would happen, as its now happening with Spotify.

So how does Spotify work?

Well, it’s simply a Windows/Mac on-demand streaming audio. There’s no waiting, and it’s so quick there’s no buffering either. You can scan through the tracks at will without having to wait for it to catch up with your track.

How do they make money?

Every 10 odd tracks you play you have to listen to an advert thats about 20seconds long. It then goes back to playing what it told you too.  If you don’t want to ever listen to the adverts you can get a subscription, one is just for a day, the other for a month and during that time you won’t hear any adverts at all. If you stick to free, it’s a bit like listening to a real radio station, just they always play good tracks

How good is it?

Well ive only been using it for about an hour, but from initial impressions, it looks and feels great. All the artists I searched for were available for play, along with massive back catalogues for all artists. You have the ability to queue up music to play, and you can also create playlists.

One thing that pleasantly surprized me about it was the fact it has last.fm scrobbling built in, just simply put in your username and password and off it goes…

Listening now using Spotify

You also have the option to listen to generic radio stations of which you can tell it what you like. So for example you can tell it you want to listen to music from the 90’s pop, or 80’s disco and pop.

How do I get it?

Ah the most important one of all. Currently Spotify is in an invite only stage, however it seems that if you visit this cunning link, you can by-pass all that! However no guarentees on this working for too long!

https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/

- Ninja Edit -

Just found a rather useful Greasemonkey script that adds little notes next to artist names and track names on last.fm, and when you click them it will search in Spotify for playable tracks. More information over here.

Getting VOIP phones working through a SpeedTouch 780 can be somewhat… frustrating. They seem to have a talent for wanting the NAT config option enabled, then decided that it doesn’t want it enabled at a random interval. The easiest fix is just to toggle the NAT options on and off in your phone configuration.

However, if this fails to work it might be that your SpeedTouch has some SIP options enabled and is technically blocking your phone from being able to receive data from your phone provider.

We have found 2 fixes, and if one doesn’t work, the other should, but we’ll apply both just to make sure. So let’s start off shall we!

Connect to your SpeedTouch over Telnet and type the following…

:connection unbind application=SIP port=5060
:saveall

connection
appconfig application=SIP SIP_ALG=disabled
:saveall

After you’ve done that, if the phone isn’t already working, give it a quick reboot and try again. If it’s still not working, toggle the NAT options to whatever they aren’t already on and try then.

Hopefully this gets someone else’s VOIP phone working correctly, as it seems to be one of the most annoying fixes I’ve had to do to get them working again.

As announced on the official Google Blog, tomorrow will see the initial release of Google Chrome. This is Google’s next step forward on the web. Instead of just creating what you interact with in their web applications, you will now end up using Google’s own web browser to access them instead.

But why would you switch to Chrome when we already have great browsers like Firefox and Safari? Here’s what Google have to say feature set wise, lets go through them shall we…

The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features called “omnibox.”

Well, hopefully this will be much like Firefox’s 3 “awesome bar”, which provides users with a lot more interaction with their search history and their most used web-sites. Especially with the new bookmarking support.

The browser includes an open-source JavaScript Virtual Machine implementation called V8.

Ahh, a new JavaScript engine, hopefully this one has vast improvements in speed, as currently that seems to be the on-going problems with most browsers. We can only but hope!

Chrome has a privacy mode, disabling all logging for a certain window.

It seems everyone has finally reaslised that porn is a big deal on the internet, and that it’s big money, so why not help out the porn sites keep everyone viewing them without being caught? (You could of course use this mode for things like buying presents for people and you don’t want them finding out, but honestly, what do you think its going to get used for most?)

Web applications can be launched in their own browser window without an address bar and toolbar.

This is going to be used quite obviously for Google’s own applications like Google Mail, Documents, Calendar etc, and should be quite useful and be a space saver. Again, its a step from taking the web and putting it on your desktop, rather than it being within your browser.

Chrome includes an automatically updated blacklist for malicious sites.

Ahh the security, hopefully with an actively updated blacklist this could help improve browsers for the overall community, especially for those users without high technical know how. Although, if this isn’t by-passable, and false positives go through which has been seen in Google’s search results. It may annoy some people who class themselves as clever enough to know what they are doing, but does Google know better?

Supports third-party plug-ins.

I think if a new browser didn’t support these, it might as well just stop developement all together. Let’s hope that it’s as easy as Firefox for extension development and that its powerful enough to be useful. If we don’t get things like Firebug (not just the JS in-page version) then it might shoot itself in the foot. Let’s hope not!

Uses the WebKit Rendering Engine.

This is the same rendering engine that Safari uses, and its been proven over time that it’s very good and very compatiable across operating systems. Let’s hope they don’t mess with it too much. This also means that if your site already works in Safari, it’ll work in Google Chrome. Which is always a bonus when there’s already quite a few browsers out there right now.

As much as I love Firefox for development right now, im slowly beginning to shift over to Safari as I like the way it renders pages and makes them look more soft than usual. However, there are some things about both of these browsers which I don’t partiuclarly like, so here’s hoping that Google Chrome gets rid of those for me, and that Chrome can be my new browser for everything, rather than for one specific task.

After finally giving in I decided to work out how to get Firefox 2.0.0.11 and 3.0.1 running side by side. It turned out to be much easier than I thought, so I thought I’d share this with the world (although its probably posted on about 5million other blogs), either way…

• Download Firefox 2.0.0.11 from OldVersion
• Change the installation directory to something other than the default

That’s the easy part, now for the more complex bit…

• Make sure all your Firefox windows are closed (yes, this one too)
• Start -> Run -> “firefox -ProfileManager“
• Press “Create Profile” and call the new profile “ff2“
• Once it’s created the profile press “Exit”

Now navigate to the folder you just installed Firefox 2 into, and create a shortcut to the firefox.exe

firefox.exe -P ff2 -no-remote

Put that wherever you please and then you can load Firefox 2 and 3 at the same time!

If you’ve ever worked with Firebug you’ll know its possibly the best tool out there for aiding in web development within Firefox; thankfully there are some really handy extensions for it to make it even more indispensable!

Firecookie

Allows the same controls that you get with HTML to apply to cookies, so far I had been using the Web Developer toolbar to view/change cookies, however this allows for much easier editing. It also has a feature to show you when cookies are changed, which is great for debugging.

YSlow

This is useful to work out either why your site is running slow, or for you to make improvements to make it faster. It has various rule sets which can be found here which define what exceptions it allows.

It seems that today in Paris it was decided that TLD’s are no longer to be regulated as much as they are anymore. This means that the internet as of sometime next year is going to change forever more. No longer will you see things like www.hotmail.com, itll probbaly change to something like www.hotmail.msn or some other random variants. There is also currently no length restriction, so .smith will be able to exist. This will change the internet for the worse, no longer will .com be the international recognised domain, but soon anything could be. Not only does this incite confusion for standard users who can’t even remember .com, .net, .org and .co.uk, but it will become .<anything>.

The security implications are astronomic, phishers will have a field day, and I expect the amount of internet fraud will go through the roof. www.secure.hsbc anyone? Not that the problem with them was bad enough, this will make it infinitely worse, banks will have to come up with more inventive ways to protect their users.

Cyber squatters will go round snapping every domain name and variation known to man as well.

ICANN you have let me, and anyone else who uses the internet seriously, down.