sociallysour.org

Linus Update

hurt — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:18:12 +0000

Its a hard job being Linus

Google Reader Shared Items For August 26, 2010

hurt — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 06:02:09 +0000

Video Chat for Linux Users in GMail

August 20, 2010

Another World released

August 6, 2010

Not even half-naked Asian girls make Kinect look good

July 30, 2010

Locking Down SSH with hosts.allow

hurt — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:20:44 +0000

After installing my new file server I started to notice the large amount of ssh attempts to log into the box. For a very long time I have been using hosts.allow to tighten things up a little. Figured a good place to keep this info and help others might be to make a blog post of how I use this.

edit /etc/hosts.allow

sshd : localhost : allow
sshd : 192.168.2. : allow
sshd : 192.168.3. : allow
sshd : 199.12.12.12 : allow
sshd : ALL : deny

Enter the above info in your hosts.allow file. You can add as many IP address as you want to be allowed. End this all with the last line to deny everything else that is not listed above it. I would suggest setting this up at a time you have physical access to the box. This might not work for everyone since some people might just around from place to place and have random locations. I tend to just be logging in from home and work. Although I have not used it you could also use a range of ips. If you are always on a certain ip range but not the same ip you could do this.

sshd : 199.12 : allow
sshd : ALL : deny

Enjoy and don’t lock yourself out of your own box. ;)

Classic RPG: Dragon Warrior III Gameboy Color

hurt — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:45:38 +0000

I have been in the mood for a classic style RPG to play for the last week. I ended up trying “Lunar: Dragon Song”, and was horribly disappointed in the game. Next I tried Magical Starsign, which seems to have promise, but could not keep me interested for very long. Some small points started to annoy me, but it looks like a decent game to come back to. Thats when the realization set in that for a classic RPG game I would have to look back to the classics. To much 3D and more complicated combat systems get in the way off a good classic RPG feel.

Dragon Warrior III Gameboy Color

Last night I started up a copy of Dragon Warrior III for the gameboy color. I have logged about 2 hours into the game thus far, and still feel like getting more time into it. I am guessing 30 min of that time was just grinding to level up the characters and farm some gold. The story line so far is as basic as it can get… I am a 16 year old boy who is now old enough to go out on a journey. My father died on a journey to defeat The Baramos, when he fell into a volcano and burned to death.. My people are now passing that journey onto me. The game has a classic over head view that we see in most the old RPG’s of the day (Final Fantasy). Graphically the game is prob the best I have ever seen for the gameboy color. Loading times are next to none and going from room to room is instant. I was going to actually play the 3rd remake of it for the SNES (was originally a NES game) but after looking at the comparison of graphics for all three I decided to go for the gameboy color version.

Dragon Warrior III Battle

The battle system is very classic but stripped down more than I expected for easy controls on the gameboy. When you are fighting more than one creature of the same type it will group them as one. An example of this is if you are fighting 3 slimes and 2 ravens it will show up as attack “3 slimes” or “2 ravens”. Once you pick it seems to sort out the attacks on its own to best eliminate the monsters you picked with the characters you used. It would have been nice to have more options when attacking, but it seems to do a pretty good job.

Like I said the story line is not the most exiciting thing I have ever heard, but I am hoping something more will happen in the game and give it a little more direction. In any case is nice to have a large selection of classic RPG’s I can go back to for now till some developers realize that a market for classic 2D RPG’s still exists.

Dragon Warrior III Screenshot

New Laptop Battery

hurt — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:18:50 +0000

So my trusty laptop (Thinkpad T61) that I have been using for the past few years finally gave up the ghost on its battery. I knew the battery was failing cause it would charge less and less. I almost never use it off AC, so it is prob my own fault. Looking around online I found several people that had the flashing orange battery light. Some where saying that the T61 was known to have issues with the battery connector on the mainboard and that it may not be the battery. Having the laptop still under warranty (not the battery) I figured I better get one while I still have less than a year of warranty left.

Well I got the battery today and it is charging as I type this post up. Guess its not the mainboard connector. Other than the pain of having to get it warrantied, it would have been nice to get a new mainboard with less than a year to go.

Enter the AJAX Part 1

hurt — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:17:09 +0000

For a very long while I have been playing with and working in PHP. It has served me well over the years and looking back on things I coded even only a few years ago I can tell how much I have learned. I really like the flow and syntax of PHP. Something to be said for all those “{“, “(” and closes. I did at one point look into Python for a few smaller projects, they worked well and are still working away to this day. Most nothing more than glorified bash scripts that would do a automated task every few minutes. In any case I could not stick to Python for the long haul, but I do hope to come back to it again in the future.

Before I ramble on for too long I will get to the point of this post (Yes it does have a point).

Being someone that tends to use PHP for most all of my coding efforts I decided it was about time I started looking into AJAX more. I have being using snippets I find online, parts someones else already coded, etc. But I have never gotten down to the bare coding pad and created something in AJAX myself. Not being very crazy about JavaScript has also helped to build the wall of AJAX free me. But in 2010 you will be hard pressed to not need it now. Everyone wants all the features it has to offer. In order to start down this path of AJAX I will be reading a book called “Foundations of AJAX By Ryan Asleson and Nathaniel T. Schutta”.

I will try to write a little post about my thoughts on the book as I go, Provided I have the time make up some lessons to show the examples with out using examples from the book.

Changes to the Site

hurt — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 02:33:12 +0000

Spent some time tonight playing around with the new WordPress. I changed up the theme (Not overly happy with it yet), redid the ads and am using some ad plug-ins to server them up randomly. Added side content using widgets so next time I change themes I don’t need to edit the theme files by hand.

I am really impressed with how far WordPress has come over the years. Really you can do everything you want from the admin panel and never have to touch the site files or themes. Updating via the web is not so painless you have no excuse not to be up to date with the current version. I am still using a plug-in to filter out spam comments, but might try disabling it and see if WordPress has anything under the hood by default to deal with spam.

Over the past while I have become a widget and plug-in whore. Everything I think of doing seems to have a plug-in. Installing plug-ins from the admin panel allows you to install, play with, and delete in minutes. I was a little worried about using a plug-in to manage google ads, since it would be easy for someone to make it so they got all the clicks (I think I am safe with my 2 clicks a month).

In searching for the above WordPress logo image I used google images. I really dislike the new google images search page and the loading of the image in the foreground of a AJAX window. I wish you could go back to the old image pages with the top frame.

Google Image Search 2010

New Super Mario Bros DS

hurt — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 23:46:11 +0000

New Super Mario Bros DS

Last weekend Erika started playing New Super Mario Bros on the DS. I have had the game since it came out ages back, but had never really finished it. I spent most of last Sunday playing it, and ended up finishing the game later that week. It really is a great throw back to the classic Super Mario games. Game difficulty was pretty low and it didn’t seem to increase till the final world after the 2nd castle. Most boss battles could be beat in seconds if you saved a flower power for them. Graphics where some of the best on the DS, but I see little to no replay in this game for me.

Over all the game was fun but not very challenging.

Erika and I are planning to hit up some some Super Mario Bros 3 on the Wii since we got the Classic Mario bug.