Reneé de Groot I would like to use this space to share and exhibit some the fun I had figuring stuff out and the resulting outcome.

UTF-8 encoding validation utf8validation.xml media/utf8validation.png I have noticed that too often texts are incorrectly encoded. Sometimes texts are falsely marked as encoded in UTF-8 and sometimes random garbage bytes are included in texts. The later I encountered when reading strings from the MPD deamon with my MPDplayer. The former is common practice. Having read and agreeing with Joel on The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets, I set out to weed out wrong encodings in UTF-8. For this I build a small Java program that validates the UTF-8 encoding in a file by weeding out and reporting the erros. XML and XSLT as a website xml-xslt.xml media/xml-xslt.png As you might see this website is build with static content. The problem with static content is the amount of HTML and specificly the repeating HTML code that is involved in creating an uniform website. The dynamic solution is to add the HTML to the content on the server with some serverside scripting. A static solution is to store the content in an XML datafile and provide an XLTS transformation to specify how to render the data as XHTML. That way the focus can be on the content and the website can be made uniformly without repeating HTML. MPDplayer mpd.xml media/mpd-small.png MPDplayer is a php-javascript webpage to control a Music Player Daemon (MPD). Music stored on a remote machine can be played by sending commands to MPD running on that remote machine. MPDplayer runs on a webserver with PHP and sents the commands to MPD when you search, play and browses songs on the MPDplayer webpage. Latest: Release 4.2 fixes javascript 1 bug and adds multiple search fields. Bandwidth management tc.xml media/tc.png With increased usage of an Internet connection the bandwidth is contested for by multiple programs. Each program takes what it can. This can really slow down the experienced speed of a connection. Bandwidth management can solve this problem by setting boundaries and prioritising the bandwidth usage for different sorts of traffic. The tc, iproute2 and iptables programs can do that so that your connection stays fast even under heavy load. Staying online online.xml media/online.png Over the years I have had Internet connections hooked up to computers serving as gateway. From the first cable connections to the current ADSL and cable modems one problem persisted. That problem is that the connections do not stay up as long as the machine. It got even worse when I first noticed connections being active (a PPP connection for instance) but it being defunct. Everything seemed to work except a redail was necessary before I could start surfing the net. Nowadays I use a little script to test the ability to use to connection to determine if the connection is up. Linux firewall firewall.xml media/firewall.png From the Linux IP Masquerade HOWTO by David A. Ranch and the manual of iptables I have compiled my own firewall rule set for iptables. It is build to provide transparent Internet access to machines on a local network, stop all but desired connections, forward some connections into the local network and count what comes down the line from the Internet.