 | from David Bolton
Just under 20 years ago I used to play Loopz, a simple PC game where you get pieces coming in at a frenetic pace and you have to use them to create a loop. It seems a good programming challenge so that's Challenge 32, starting in February. Details below. This coming Wednesday (tomorrow) sees Apple announcing a new product that is speculated to be a Tablet computer; basically an iPod Touch but maybe with 3G. If it is, we will be covering development. I'm already working on an iPhone development tutorial. Have a great week!
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In the Spotlight | Phalanger - PHP on .NET
PHP is the most popular scripting language for websites, and runs on Linux hosts primarily but also on Windows and is a major success story for open source. The PHP interpreter is written in C and the language pretty easy to pick up.Just add the $ sign before variables and you are 90% of the way there! I've written a few websites in PHP but it's not my favorite language; I find it somewhat inconsistent and you need to be aware of security issues with filtering user inputs etc. Generally I've found it runs better on Linux; there are fewer issues than on windows. However, Phalanger is a project developed by students of Charles University, Prague to make PHP a .NET language, it's PHP written in C#. This gives possible greater speed of .il, the use of .NET functions for strings etc and of course better security. Of course .NET already has ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC and IIS can run PHP but choice is almost always better.
| | Details of programming Challenge 32
 There's a week to go for challenge 31 (just one entry so far), so still time to get your entries in. I've published Challenge 32 early, though it lacks the input.txt file and sample output which I'll add in a day or two. I've got the idea for this from an old favorite Dos game of mine from 20 years ago called Loopz. In the challenge You read pieces from a file then rotate and place them to create loops that removes all the the pieces in the loop and leave room for more pieces so it continues, the longer the loop the higher the score. Highest score wins! This game has no time element though any entry that takes over 5 minutes to run will get disqualified. There's a Youtube video of the Loopz game being played to give you an idea.
| Adventures in Linux Serverland
Today I installed an SSL certificate in my new TonidoPlug Linux Box. It sounds impressive but was a trivial task compared to the last time I did it, which involved manually generating Certificate Requests, sending them off then installing the SSL certificate plus chain certificates. Now you just upload a zip file containing the certs and then restart the box! While not strictly needed for programming, I think wider knowledge of encryption, public and private key certificates can be very useful. That takes care of remote access security; the plug is now protected by the router's port forwarding/NAT, SSL and a secret question. I've also discovered how to browse the file system and connect in via SSH to run a terminal on it. WinSCP is an excellent open source GUI application written in C++ that lets you transfer files and it's much easier to see the server file system than doing it one folder at a time from the command line. You can also call Putty from it as well to do SSH or login via Putty. The next step is installing GCC and then compiling with it. More to follow...
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