Thanks to Mark for reminding me about these, I claim no credit for these, I just use them.
find . -type f -size +100000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'
du --max-depth=1 -h
Category: developing
Mobile phone detection with Varnish – Quick getting started guide
This is a quick reference guide, for a proper understanding of what you are doing use this guide. This solution is easier to implement and has less of a cpu overhead.
yum install libxml2-devel #OR apt-get intall libxml2-dev wget https://gist.github.com/raw/805710/9f34a18e528c20eff1c92672c6f1856ed849f5ea/wurfl.c wget https://gist.github.com/raw/805710/b9272d8a1d32d29034574c88b81fc79eb050e21b/wurfl.h gcc -c -o wurfl.o wurfl.c -I/usr/include/libxml2 -fPIC gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libwurfl.so.1 -o libwurfl.so.1.0.1 wurfl.o -lxml2 wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/wurfl/WURFL/latest/wurfl-latest.zip unzip wurfl-latest.zip mv wurfl.xml /etc/wurfl.xml cp libwurfl.so /usr/lib ln -s /usr/lib/libwurfl.so /usr/lib64/libwurfl.so
Edit your /etc/varnish/mobile.vcl using this as a guide
/etc/init.d/varnish stop /usr/sbin/varnishd -s malloc,32M -a 0.0.0.0:80 -f /etc/varnish/mobile.vcl -p 'cc_command=exec cc -fpic -shared -Wl,-x -lwurfl -o %o %s'
Test by looking in your server heads.. IE in PHP.. print_r ($_SERVER);
Introducing Catch – A multiplayer html game
Today I’m introducing catch, a game we have been developing for the last month or so as a side project.
Catch is like Tag or Tig or whatever you called it in the playground. Basically someone is “it” and you’re job is to avoid that person.. Avoiding the person gives you points.. Could it be any simpler?
Let’s get a few things out of the way:
It isn’t much of a game.. I mean you can win but we haven’t introduced many other game mechanics.
The code isn’t optimized, we wrote it to learn about socket messaging so once we had learned enough we moved onto a proper project and rushed the game out of the door.
You can embed the game and play against other visitors on your blog/whatever.
The game doesn’t require flash.
Embed probably doesn’t work in IE.
The game is built on NodeJS, Socket.IO, jQuery/Javascript. We don’t have any databases, we’re too lazy.
We host the game but we released it open source so go ahead and host your own and/or break/play with the game!
Technical accomplishments:
Slowest user render (see game.html)
Latency detection and sorting (see game.html)
Connectivity type detection and advice (see browser.js)
Strange UI scoreboard based on pixels per points (see game.html)
Here is the game.. Hosted by brightbox.
Web Socket latency tests in Firefox, Chrome and IE9 & Android Webkit
Testing Web Socket.IO(Learnboost) on NodeJS latency
Results: Latency in MS — All results minus mobile taken from same ISP. These aren’t concrete but should make a decent reference point
chrome w/ ws = 30
ff w/ xhr multipart = 60
ff w/ websocket = 30
ie w/ htmlfile= 120
android phone webkit w/ xhr polling on wifi = 200
android phone webkit w/ xhr polling on mobile phone network = N/A
Developing a collaborative game using NodeJS, SocketIO & jQuery
You may remember a few months ago I did an article on Real time mouse activity using NodeJS and Socket, well I wanted to extend that functionality into some sort of game. It was obvious from the demo I made that people enjoyed interacting with each others cursors and I quite enjoyed working on it.
Today was our second day working on the game and our UI design is pretty much done and so are 2 of the 3 minigames designs. The mechanics are coming along with a few cretins as we have to wrestle with Internet Explorer‘s(8+9b) interesting interpretation of how Socket should perform. Firefox and Chrome have been a dream to work with the jQuery implementation of the animations and the scoreboard have gone pretty smoothly..
We’re doing about 10 hours a day on it at the moment however the days only feel 6 hours or so long as it is a labour of love and is a nice change from the mundane PHP bugs I usually deal with. The work we are doing is one of the small steps needed to move away from Abobe Flash based games.
We’re hoping to demo one of the mini games to the LeedsJS folks on the 9th of March so if you want to see then come along! By the 9th of March I will expect about 100 hours or so in total has been spent on the game and you wont be able to tell as nearly all of the work is done on the server/back end as we are writing mechanisms that mean the game can operate as leanly as possible on both desktop browser and mobile browsers.
Here are our goals for the project:
- Scalability
- Completion in time for some competition thingy in April
- Any browser on any device that supports socket
- Hopefully flash fall back on non-socket supporting devices.
- Push all code as Open Source under Apache license in Summer.
Quick thanks to John at Brightbox for providing the hosting for the project 🙂 We’re using their very BETA vm hosting service which I don’t know much about but it is super fast and is speeding up our development somewhat.
