The latest news from babybean!

It has been quite a while since this has been updated. The plan was to keep you up to date with the game, but really, who cares?... and progress is extremly slow. Thankfully XNA itself seems to be resonably straight fordward. The problems come into play when it comes to using the physics engine farseer. Dont get me wrong, it is a very powerfull engine and I am guessing that it is actually quite straight fordward if you have some experiance with other physics engine's. Unfortunatly for me, I dont. Combining learning C#, with XNA and farseer is quite a challange for my limited level of programming. Hopefully I can plough on through it and come out the other side with a playable game.

In other news: Despite this not being updated, the site is been seen on google more than ever. This is mainly because of the picture used below of the "all the things" meme which is displayed in a google result more than a hundred times per day. This hasnt been converted to traffic unfortulatly (probably because of the rubbish use of the meme but anyway). The most popular post tends to be the one with the pictures of the elonex webbook, which really should be easier to take apart. You will soon be seeing lots of rambeling on mobile applications on this site whilst I practice for an essay writing assignment...pfft the cheek of giving us an essay, don't get me started. Apart from that, maybe a bit on text API's and some more pretty pictures? Who knows, lets see how much work is left to do first!

When installing a new IDE it is generally a good idea to know what you will be using it for. In this case I kind of know what I wanted visual studio for but it still didnt stop me from just installing it with the things that I wanted. Instead...

This caused the slight problem, Trying to install a 7GB file when your computer only has 6GB lest is not a great idea, so some stuff had to be cleared out. I really cant tell if this program is serously bloted or just has loads of great features with it. Shall update tomorrow.

So I have finally gotten Visual Studio downloaded and on my computer. I am about to attempt to try to make a game with XNA using the apparntly quite nice Farseer Physics Engine. 

I will be letting you all know how it goes. The file downloaded form MSDN AA is an iso image and I have no DVD's to put it on. I dont have any mounting software or feel like getting some. Hopeing that 7z will extract it and will go from there. Wish me luck!

What better way to test out your shiney new cloud service than by having millions of customers downloading a massive file from said cloud. Ok I havnt really researched it but as far as I can remember, Apple announced a good while back now that they are building themselves a shiney new datacenter to be used for sycing all your documents together. So I am assuming that to distribute iOS 5, the operating system that all the cloud aps will run off, apple would use said datacenter. 

Well it seems that this test has failed. There are reports all over the internets of these updates failing and the problem seems to be that the servers just can not keep up with the demand. Of course this initself is not suprising. From a techicnal standpoint serving out millions of 900MB files is no mean feat. I just have to think that Apple have not made things easy on themselves. They could easily have staggered updates over timezones, different i devices, people who Apple have credit cards on record for etc. Another option could be sending it out on disk but lets not go into that.

But fair enough, maybe they did want to test out their new hardware, what fun is staggering releases? Maybe they calculated that that they should be able to cope and were wrong. One thing which I noticed on the BBC News page,  and is really what I wanted to write this article about.

"Many users complained on Apple forums that the download was taking time, with some having to retry many times...

'I tried about 5 times and I got it finally. It sounds like a server issue. It has nothing to do with security. Just keep trying,' advised one frustrated iPhone owner.

'The only thing to do, retry, retry, retry... Worked here too after 30 times or more,' said another." - BBC

DDOeS anyone else see a slight problem with this? It seems to me like Apples unique, supposidly tech aware following, does not seem to be helping the problem at all.  Retrying, while maybe getting you your new iOS, will not help this whole situation. Millions of users making 1 huge request is bad, Millions of user making "many" huge requests is possibly what caused so many problems today. I am sure you can live without for a couple of days when you will be able to update with ease and without any of the other worries like bricking your machine.

Google webmasters tools has been complaining to me that I have duplicate title tags on this site.

Whilst probably not a massive problem, I thought it better to change. The problem is my news manager plugin. Every new post I make is not actually given its own page. When you click on one of the articles you are actually just given the homepage again with a GET request being used to find and display the content. A mod_rewrite is then used to mask this and give out a "pretty URL." With the CMS and theme the title is always just the page name. Which defaulted to "The latest news from babybean!" for all the blog posts. Fixing this is easy, or would have been if I aunderstood how the CMS works at all. What I have is one way of doing it. It may not be a very efficent way of doing things. What I have done is added this function to the "functions.php" page in the "inc" directory of the news manager.

function nm_get_title($slug, $excerpt=false) {
  $file = NMPOSTPATH . "$slug.xml";
  $post = @getXML($file);
  if (!empty($post) && $post->private != 'Y') {
    $title   = strip_tags(strip_decode($post->title));
       return $title;
  }
} 

This was just taken from the function which generaets the article in "site.php" in the same directory. I then use an "if" statement in the theme to call the function for the title if it is a news manager page, or just use the normal output if not which looks a bit like this:

  <title><?php
   if (isset($_GET['post'])) {
     echo nm_get_title($_GET['post']) . ' - '; get_site_name();
   } else {
       get_page_clean_title(); echo ' - '; get_site_name();
   } ?></title>

I dont think that this is a huge security issue or resource hog but you never know. I will update this is this becomes a problem. Hope this helps someone.

Playing arround with the css inside of the admin area of GetSimple I have made some minor changes to the style of the website. The main change is that there is now no "Maximum size" Therotically you can view the page on any size of screen and the site will scale to fit. Unfortunatly it does not handle small sizes any better than the older layout but I may add a mobile interface soon to account for the small screenies!

I have recentally being experimenting with setting up a second website from this vps. More just to see how it is done than anything.  I am pleased to report it is extremly simple. Point the dns to the ip of the server and add 4 lines in the vhosts file. Impressive. I was under the inpression that a seperate port was needed for each website or something which is clearly wrong.

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName Domain
DocumentRoot /Folder/Files
</VirtualHost>

A nice quick note which will hopefully help some people out there who are trying to take apart an elonex webbook. It is mostly a standerd procedure , remove all the screws and "extrenal components," go arround the rim and undo all the clips.The tricky part with this particular model is the keyboard. It is stuck down with double sided sticky tape and several small clps. There are two screws underneath the keyboard which both need to be removed to open the rest of the case. It is quite tricky doing this without damaging the keyboard, so be carefull! I was able to prise it up using one of the metal loops used to hold the "Enter" key in place. Click on the pictures below for a closer view of the screws.