Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Funnels and Buckets

Way back when, I played this educational game called "Funnels and Buckets". I remember this being kind of fun when I was a kid, so I thought Ben might like playing it. Tonight I decided to code my own version from memory and with the help of a screenshot of the original version. I've never coded a game in Java, but I had some ideas of how to separate the update/model logic from the actual display. In about two hours this is what I came up with:
Right now it doesn't increase your level and it only gives you one point for each correct answer. This will most likely change to some scoring based on level.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Router Fun

So with Lisa gone tonight out with a friend, and me home with the kids, I decided to take a look at some weird issues I started having with web browsing. So for a while now, sometime I would try to go to a website and I would get a 403 from some proxy server. It was always the same proxy server. I figured that my ISP must have some proxy server that was messing up. Today, however, I tried to go to a website http://dislike.doweb.fr and I got redirected to a searchportal.information.com address (http://searchportal.information.com/?o_id=94081&domainname=dislike.doweb.fr). After much searching and frustration, I found that in my DNS settings I had 'no-ip.org' as a search domain and this was set through DHCP. Now DHCP was being served by my old Netgear WGT624v3 router. I searched all through the web configuration and there was nothing that had that set. I then told the router to backup the configuration to a file and took a look at the file. The setting was there, but not in the web interface. I remembered that a while back I updated the firmware and that many options had been removed. It turns out this was one of them. I ended up having to reset the configuration to the default and then manually change everything back through the web interface. Looks like everything is working properly now, and I can finally say goodbye to those 403 proxy pages. :)