r3dux.org

I fired up Tiger Woods 07 the other day on the 360 (yes, that old!) because I hadn’t played any golf games for ages, and I’ve been really enjoying it! Even got a double-eagle (which I thought was more correctly termed an albatross) from about 190+ yards… Anyways, this song is in the EA Trax in the game, and I’d forgotten all about it. No more!

Awesome, awesome tune. Makes me feel all psyched up to work and get some good things done =D

Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge:

By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little:

By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more:

With a bachelor’s degree, you gain a specialty:

A master’s degree deepens that specialty:

Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge:

Once you’re at the boundary, you focus:

You push at the boundary for a few years:

Until one day, the boundary gives way:

And, that dent you’ve made is called a Ph.D.:

Of course, the world looks different to you now:

So, don’t forget the bigger picture:

Keep pushing!

Source: The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D by Matt Might.

If you find that people are hotlinking to images on your site, and assuming you have mod_rewrite enabled and working, then just add the following to your root level (i.e. /var/www or such) .htaccess file to cut that crazyness right out:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?the-name-of-your-site\.the-top-level-domain-of-your-site/.*$ [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^.*\.(bmp|tif|gif|jpg|jpe?g|png)$ - [F]

So, for example, on this site, I’m using:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?r3dux\.org/.*$ [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^.*\.(bmp|tif|gif|jpg|jpe?g|png)$ - [F]

I’m just returning a [F] (forbidden) message to the hotlinking web server (so they don’t get an image returned to them), but you can always send them alternate images if you’re feeling vindictive… In fact, there’s lots of neat stuff you can do with mod_rewrite =D

P.S. For a full list of rewrite flags (i.e. [R,L,NC] etc.) and what they do, try this.,

…so he made this.

Truly beautiful.

Update – Nov 2011: I’ve refactored this code into something significantly easier to work with, modify and extend – so you should probably try this instead: http://r3dux.org/2011/11/a-simple-csdl_net-chat-server-client-rewritten/.

I was due to be teaching some network programming in the new term, so I thought I’d try to find the simplest library for cross-platform socket programming and knock up some examples that I could teach from. The trouble is, there are lots of different socket libraries… Lots and lots. So I did a bit of investigating and came up with the following:

In the end I chose SDL_net as teh winnah, as I’d already done some SDL stuff with the class previously (before switching to GLFW to minimise code-bloat), and I managed to get SDL_net up and communicating pretty easily. So, for the next couple of days I put together some simple client/server examples, culminating in the code you’ll find below, which is a (very) simple IRC-esque chat server.

Have a look – you can tell what it’s doing from the output in the windows:

The server is in the middle, the clients connect in, and chat commences (click for larger, more legible version)

Although I’ve written this code in Linux, as SDL_net is cross-platform, this code should be cross platform – only there are two tweaks you’ll need to make for it to work in Windows: I’ve used some custom kbhit and getch functions to check for a keypress and read what key was pressed, if one was. These functions come natively with Windows, so you should use the native versions and strip the custom ones out.

With those small changes made this should work fine in Windows – but if it doesn’t please feel free to fix it yourself and send me the changes you made

As the code for all this is a couple of hundred lines for each for the client and server I’ve put all the source after the jump. Part of the reason it’s so large is that I’ve commented it to the hilt (no really, I’ve gone to town on it – even by my exceptionally verbose standards) as it was originally meant to be a teaching aid. Also, I’ve also left a lot of commented-out debug code in there, so you can uncomment it if you’d like to see exactly what’s going on behind the scenes.

Anyways, I hope this is of use to someone starting off socket programming with SDL_net – and if you have any issues or such please feel free to sling a comment in the article and I’ll do my best to help out.

Cheers!

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