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Looking for a new HTPC setup
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Loading ...I love my HTPC, which I build over 5 years ago. Much to my surprise it is still very capable of playing full HD and to some extend even 3D movies. But alas it is time to start thinking about a new smaller setup. Right now I have the Antec Fusion case with a mATX board in it. Which served well over the years.
Unfortunately the design of the mATX in combination with my ATX does not allow me to use the SATA ports properly (they are sorta sticking out to the side and into the case). So the hunt is on again for a new HTPC setup. Well not everything has to be brand new, I have a working digital tuner card as well as a relatively new graphics card for hardware acceleration. So this was my current setup, which I loved:
- Antec Fusion V2 case
- Gigabyte MA69GM-S2H motherboard, a bit old but working (could use replacing maybe?)
- AMD Athlon XP2 6000+
- Asus EAH5750 Formula
- 6 GB Dual channel DDR3 memory
- Harmony Remote
- SATA 160 GB Samsung HD
- FloppyDTV digital tuner card
- LG Blu-Ray player
So I’m not looking for anything fancy any more. I will be moving at least the FloppyDTV an LG Blu-ray player over to the new case. And preferably the graphics card unless I can find an onboard one with equal performance and HD decoding skills. So what are my new requirements:
- The case has to be smaller then my current one (I like the Fusion but it is to big for my likings)
- The system has to be as quite as possible (so minimal fans or big fans moving at low speed)
- It has to have an IR port to receive the Harmony signal
I’m sorta already stuck, and I’m only looking for a new case so far. Am I the only one looking for a small case for a HTPC that is at least a bit stylish, that does not need to have a display.
Complicated password policy failure
In most bigger companies, and for some commercial websites, you have to create what they like to call a strong password. Normally this will mean your password has to be at least 5 characters long and contain at least one number. Nothing wrong with that, and I can usually make a password that I can remember.
However lately I believe companies are pushing us to reach new levels of our brain or something. I’ve been seeing more policies where you have to have numbers, letters, special characters and capitalized letters in it. Oh and to top it of it can’t be a password you had in the past, or a incremental version of that (eg: test1 to test10).
Now lets examine how usefull such a policy is. I used to have pretty strong passwords, hard to guess and difficult to crack. Now that my passwords have to be so complicated I’m resorting to putting post-its on my screen with the passwords again. Very insecure and very easy to hack.
PHP autoloader issues
Since PHP 5.x we are encouraged to develop in a more object oriented way. This is why they developed class support for us 
. Now to make our web applications even more modular you might consider putting each class in a seperate PHP file, just like Java and C++ developers have been doing for years now. But here is where it becomes tricky, how does PHP know which files to load automatically.
Of course you could include every single file that you might need manually at the top of your index.php. But what if you don't need every single class every time a page is loaded, do you really want to create that kind of an overhead in loading un-needed files? I didn't, so I started looking into the autoloader functionality of PHP. What this feature does is allow you to scan through files in the predefined include directories and attempts to locate the class.
So what I did was build a simple autoloader function to scan each file in predefined directories to find the classes, and if found to stop. To my surprise this was working rather well. All classes that where needed would automatically get loaded by my little autoloader function. However somehow one particular class was not able to be loaded for some reason. The setup was something simple, something like:
- A predefined class A
- A class B which extended class A
- A class C which extended class B
- A class D which extended class C, and was located in a separate directory as it was specific for the website
All of the classes loaded beautifully, except for class D. For some reason when I tried using it I got exceptions that class C was undefined. When I added some debugging to find out which files where loaded I did see every file for classes A, B and C being loaded, but the actual classes defined inside where not added to PHP. Somehow I have magically created a black whole in PHP that would include files and then forget to create the class definitions internally. To this day I still haven't figured out why PHP refused to store the actual classes in its memory.
The quick fix I applied was ugly and stupid, just manually load the classes and build a big if statement around them to prevent duplicate declarations using the class_exists function.
The failing Blackberry, Apple and X-Box
Normally I don’t post any youtube movies here, but this one is funny and IT related. Hope you like it as much as I did. It’s about a Blackberry, Apple and X-Box.
Update on UML Designer
In a previous post a couple of weeks back I stated that I started on developing a UML designer. Mostly because I couldn’t find any recent releases that are free and work decent any more. Since some time has past and a lot of work has been done its time for a quick update.
Initially the idea was to develop the application in C++.Net which was a challenge to say the least. I was disappointed when I couldn’t integrate older C++ libraries I had already written with the .Net application. So as all angry people I abandoned this course of action all together and switched over to C#. Lets just say this put the work back a couple of weeks, as I have no knowledge what so ever on C# development 
.
So what have I been up to since this idea popped into my head:
- A basic GUI has been build, which is pretty close to final (it may not be the nicest interface but it works)
- Some basic validation system has been build to verify the model against rules of UML (eg: which type of members are allowed in objects)
- A lot of research into delegates, log4net, resource embedding and multi language support
It is unfortunately still way to early to release anything useful that can be played with. Mainly because much of the interface is not even working yet. Even so I have included a screenshot of what it looks like. There is still a lot of work to be done, just a short list would be:
- Completing the UML model powering the tool, including all validation rules
- Building a drawing system to display the classes in an UML design
- Adding UI dialogs for all the various options supported
- Adding more language to the tool, currently only Java rules are included
- Build a drag and drop pane for the various type of objects that can be dropped in the UML design
And of course the nice to haves way down the line, all based upon an existing UML design:
- Add sequence diagram support
- Add data flow diagram support
- Add event state diagram support
