On Minecraft

So, minecraft has become a large phenomenon due to the simplicity and ease of the game. It has taken the entirety of 'do-it yourself' to create an unlimited amount of replay value with very little effort on the creator's end. You can even set up servers and play with your friends. But, there are ways to make minecraft even more fun then playing on a server with your friends, playing on a modded server with your friends. This allows you do add mods which enable players to do pretty much anything they want with the server. I recently got commissioned to set up a minecraft mod server. It was not a big job and if I ever do it again it would take me an hour or less if the server computer was already constructed, and I did get a pretty penny. So if you a looking for a quick buck and you are a computer programmer who is familiar with networking, try setting up a server or a mod-server, there is very little documentation on how to do this so it might take you a while the first time.
The worst part about this game is that it runs on Java, this is so it can be portable. As a result of java and programming habits of the developers, users on the minecraft server are expected to have a whopping 133MB of RAM available to them, the server will still work with less but may slow or crawl. A nice old Pentium III or IV computer will probably be able to support two players on a server. You need a pretty beefy computer to run alot of people.
Anyways, if you are looking for a job see if any of your friends want a minecraft server. if you have an extra one laying around charge them setup and a monthly fee if they are using their own, charge a larger setup. And if you don't have a minecraft account make you client pay for it instead of yourself.
I will never spend a dime on minecraft!
-Aeon

Changing The Repository Settings on Debian servers

Whenever I install a new Debian server into my cluster I find that is keeps the top item in the source list as the CD. This makes it very hard for me to install new programs. So in order to change it you go to the file

/etc/apt/sources.list

This will bring up the list of current sources, after which you can simply comment out any and all CD sources using

# because # is a comment out

And that's it
-Aeon

Google Docs on Google Sites

My friend and I are making a game together, but we dont live close by. So mostly we use Google docs to write the storyline and other simple documentation. So because Google made it easy to use we also put together a Google Site Page for our project. But when we wanted to put our documents onto our site we noticed that it felt less profesional (even though using google sites in the first place is less profecssional). Regardless I wanted a way to view specific documents while not leaving the site. So I tried publishing the documents but that was even worse becasue the width of the page was the 100% width of the browser window. From that i wondered if I could embed the document within the site page, and that worked like a charm. the only problem was that we have lots of different documents and we dont want to create a seperate page for all of them. So I created Gdoc Display gadget. It lets you dynamically load published Google docs into your web page, and resized the web page so that the entire document fits without having to put in an extra scroll bar. The way it work is by looking at the url of the page for the document ID number. For example if your site was called "gamesite", the URL would look something like http://sites.google.com/~/gamesite/. so you would make a page called docs and put the gadget on the page, and the url for that page would be ~/gamesite/docs so in order to actually load a document you need to put the ID on the url so in order to do that wherever your hyperlink is you put ~/gamesite/docs?DOCID where DOCID is the ID number of the document. In order to find the document ID number you look at the URL for the published document. At the end of it there is a ?id= and then a long number copy that number and there you go. Now, in order to add the gadget to the page you need to add a gadget by URL and use: http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/116731940771101949147/gdocdisplay1-0.xml once you have done that you are good to go. Any update to the gadget will be automatically applied to your web page as well.

Making a programming Blog

First you need to set up what you want the site to look like. For code it is better to have blocks that are separated from the rest of the text

like this block here

This block can be created by using the following HTML/CSS code

<div style="border: 1px solid rgb(51, 51, 51); background-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 2px; margin: 5px 20px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><tt>
code here
</tt></div>

The <tt> tag is used to make the text inside teletype making it look more like code. By changing the values inside style you can change how the box looks.

Next things are tabs, if you know anything about HTML, tabs and other white space are ignored so you cannot use tabs, what you can do is use div tags with left margins

so you can

do something like this
with multiple indented lines

To do this you use the code

<div style="margin-left: 25px;">
indented code here
</div>

The last thing you need to know is what do do if you are trying to display a tag like <tag> because HTML will think that it is a tag and not something that you want to display

< > &   " ® ©

&lt; &gt; &amp; &nbsp; &quot; &reg; &copy;

less than greater than ampersand non breaking space double quote registered trade mark copyright

Setting a static IP address on Debian 5.0

To give debian a static IP address change the file

/etc/network/interfaces

Find the line that reads

iface eth0 inet dhcp

and change it to

iface eth0 inet static

address 192.168.1.xxx
netmask 255.255.240.0
gateway 192.168.1.xxx

Where the IP addresses are whichever addresses you need to put in. If the computer was hooked up as DHCP and it connected to the server then the DNS server values are already set (they are contained in a different file) when you are done you can restart the network configurations but the cleanest way is just to restart the computer