Sean’s blog

Small, free country flag icons / images for download

Flags from famfamfam.com

I hope this saves someone a little bit of work. I wanted to find some small country flag icons to use on a project that shows a flag next to where a particular data item (a datum on my lawn). I searched through a lot of sites offering downloadable sets of pictures of country flags. A lot of them were either no good for me due to licensing restrictions or being too ‘fat’ (file size too large) for what I want. A further problem with the small icons was that many artists seem to add flourishes such as shading to show ‘flutter’ and rounded. ‘raised’ edges. Some of these flourishes almost completely obscure the small image. I finally found a set that’s perfect for what I want on famfamfam.com – it’s apparently totally free, the images are tiny (the PNGs can be reduced by about half by indexing them in GIMP with an 8-colour palette, with some attendant loss of clarity), but a good compromise between size and clarity.

Download small free country flag icons with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code names here

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Power cut near Port Dickson, Sunday 1st August 2010

Mid-way through showering the kids (lazy Sunday!) the power went again. It’s a bit easier during the day, we can still see and the kids are quite happy to be hosed down with cold (the tank in the attic must be nearly blood temperature!) water. I can’t check with the streetlights to know that the power cut affects the rest of the neighbourhood. This time the diagnostic is the list of accessible Wireless Access Points. Usually 3 to 6, the list is completely empty.

Start time of power cut was around 10:45am.

Update 13:45 – Power back after almost exactly 3 hours.

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Proxy web browser for XHTML Strict and non port-80 hosts

While I’m developing projects I run a webserver on my own PC on a high-numbered port such as 22795. I use a little local proxy that I wrote myself for mapping entries in /etc/hosts back to localhost, and the proxy maps the request onto the web service running on the appropriate port. I typically run more than one web service at once, so I might have test.example.com and api.example.com mapped to localhost in /etc/hosts and run two webservers serving test.example.com on port 22795 and api.example.com on port 22796. The local proxy service is run as root and listens on localhost port 80. When it receives a request for ‘test.example.com’ it opens port 22795 and pipes input and output forth and back. All well and good.

I occasionally connect to the coffee-shop AP across the street to check code that uses the client IP address. I don’t expose port 80 on my development PC through port-mapping on my ADSL router, I just map the high-numbered port for the specific service I want to test. I use an URL like “http://123.456.789.321:22795/” to test access from the coffee-shop’s network, and that works a treat too – although I have to remember to turn off Host: header field checking or set it to allow the WAN IP + port combination.

Today I hit a snag. I wanted to test a service that does IP address to country mapping. I downloaded an IP range to Country Code database from ZaiGadgets.com and added it into a project. It worked a treat from a PC (another PC – my workstation has to stay connected to my own router to provide the service!) connected to the coffee-shop’s AP. But of course, both APs are located in Malaysia, so it’s not much of a test. So I used a Web Proxy Browser I habitually use as a first attempt at debugging HTTP problems at an Italian university – it didn’t work, claimed to be unable to connect.

I searched for “proxy browser” and must have tried 10-20 before I found one that did actually work. Many had problems connecting, some explicitly complained about the URL (remember I’m using IP  address + port). Many just seemed lame. I’ve been using XHTML Strict in my recent projects, and many proxy browsers don’t seem to be able to cope properly with XHTML source pages, producing bad XHTML output that my browser quite reasonably refuses to render. Since it took me a while to find it, here it is:

A web proxy that copes with XHTML, IP addresses and non-standard ports in URLs properly: Browser Unblocker at BrowserUnblocker.com

I should probably mention that Browser Unblocker claims to use a proprietary web proxy written in PHP called ‘glype’, just in case you’re looking for the software rather than the service.

Posted in Broken, Fixed, software | No Comments »

Haiwan (‘Animals’ in Bahasa Malaysia) at wossis.com

Haiwan - 'Animals' in Bahasa Malaysia

Haiwan is a copy of the Animals flashcards with Bahasa Malaysia sound clips and flashcard captions. It has been a very long time since I touched wossis.com, and I can’t help thinking that it shows! I’ve been doing a lot of work on the Spinneret Java web server, including API changes – so the next update to wossis.com will be hard work.

Watch this space! And be very, very patient…

Posted in Breaktime, Life | No Comments »

Power cut near Port Dickson from midnight 12th July 2010

I was in the shower, covered in soap! It wasn’t so bad without the heater, but the lack of a pump meant that there was only a dribble coming out of the upstairs shower head. It was pitch black in the small wash room so that I struggled to find the door!

I’d been fiddling about with some inverters recently with the idea of selling them online. That was lucky, because there was a car battery and small inverter on the office worktop. I could at least plug in a desklamp. The streetlights have gone off outside, so it really is ‘darkest PD’ at the moment.

The thing that bothers me most about the services failing here is that they all seem to depend on each other. The phone is also dead. I can’t help thinking there must be people having a bad time somewhere in the pitch black and needing to call an ambulance or something. They can’t!

Oh well, I’d better tidy up and go to bed before that battery runs flat – it’s not fully charged. I’m not looking forward to joining the rest of the family in the bedroom, without ceiling fan and aircon, that’s going to be sweaty! I hope you have light, power, fan and aircon wherever you are. My Dell Mini9 was charged, and DiGi’s network is still up, so at least  I got my message in a bottle off!

… that’ll teach me to keep the battery charged, just got beeped by the inverter. No light until the morning then. Night!

Update 13th July – power came back just before 2am, according to one of my computers that was set to automatically boot when power is restored. I’m a heavy sleeper, so I was dimly aware of the aircon, ceiling fan, kids’ night-light coming back on, and the street-lights streaming through the open windows and curtains – in a “Wassat? Oh power’s ba…zzzzz” kind of way.

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