My home on the web

Today I have finished the first working version of a pong like game for the iPhone.

It’s still under development, but the basic is there: one ball, two paddles, and moving back and forward. Looks good for a couple hours work as one of the first big experiences

Finally it arrived yesterday. Around 22.00, there it was on my mail box, my copy of Windows 7 Home Premium.

Amazon UK was really fast in delivering these. And at a nice price as well (£44).

It was also nice from Microsoft (for a change) to include both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

This week hopefully will install on my laptop. If it works as good as the release candidate that I tryed (and it will) is was worth every penny.

Well, I’m tired of using cables when I want to send something to the phone, so I decided to get a bluetooth usb dongle.

Got this one from Amazon, cost £1.45, and is the size of a nail. Absolutely amazing!

For quite some time I’ve always had a home server, and to access it, the better way, for the people who have a dynamic IP, like me, is to use a free service like DynDns or no-ip.

The problem with this services is that it only gives you a subdomain, like server.dyndns.org. What if you want to run a couple of virtual hosts in apache at your home server? You would need to pay this free services a fee, so that you could use your own top level domain, like something.com.

Well, if you already have a domain, and have a control panel to edit the DNS entries of it (if you don’t have a control panel, you should, so change your registrar), you could create as many subdomains as you want, and pointing them with a CNAME to the subdomain you created on dyndns or no-ip.

This way, your real subdomains are always up to date with the correct ip of your home server.

To recap:

On dyndns, create a domain: server.dyndns.org

On your domain control panel for something.com, create a subdomain server.something.com and point it with a CNAME registry to server.dyndns.org.

Now, when you use server.something.com, you will be redirected to your home server. If you have different subdomains on something.com pointing to the dyndns subdomain, you can control on apache which websites will be active for each subdomain using virtual hosts.

Hope this was usefull for all of you

Who said Ubuntu isn’t the greatest? I had to make some data recovery from a computer that did not turn on.

Grabbing the hard drive and plugging into another computer did not help, since it did not boot up windows (not even on save mode). But no problem! Just put a Ubuntu cd on the drive, boot from it, and voila, full access to the hard drive contents.

Yes, another solution would be to use a caddy, but you have to pay for a caddy, and Ubuntu is free!