It seems that Brazil’s copyright reforms are planning to include parts that not only allow breaking DRM for fair use but also penalize people who put DRM on a work that restrict rights of users accorded to them by law.

Link: Brazil’s Approach on Anti-Circumvention: Penalties For Hindering Fair Dealing (via Boing Boing)

Get missile launcher to work with pymissile.

Run pymissile with the –network option. This will allow you to connect to it using UDP on port 20000 and send commands at it.

To test this use the netcat command on the same machine:

nc -u 127.0.0.1 20000

Commands are typed as “<command>:<enter>”

w or up - move up
x or down - move down
a or left - move left
d or right - move right
f or space - fire
s - stop moving
q - move diagonally up-left
e - move diagonally up-right
z - move diagonally down-left
k - move diagonally down-right
r - fire all missiles sequentially
v - fire randomly
esc - close daemon

Available commands can be found in the class MissileNetwork class in the source code

Then I set up a web server (lighttpd because it’s only a netbook) on the local machine and forwarded port 80 through the NAT. The webserver runs a PHP script that sends UDP packets. The sample code was grabbed from the fsockopen documentation and modified to fit.

The web frontend uses the function below and some AJAX to send requests.

<?php
function send_command($command)
{
    $fp = fsockopen("udp://127.0.0.1", 20000, $errno, $errstr);
    if (!$fp) {
        echo "ERROR: $errno - $errstr\n";
    } else {
        fwrite($fp, "{$command}:\n");
        fclose($fp);
    }
}
?>

Then I set up the webcam to stream live on UStream so people could see where they were aiming.

Here is one of the questions I came across.

Which of the following functions are part of PHP's internal Iterator interface?

Answers: (choose 5)
    rewind()
    valid()
    next()
    key()
    current()

Maybe they had problems passing candidates that couldn’t count to five.

This was the code:

settings.php

$mail_settings = array(
    'server' => 'mail.example.com',
    'port' => 25
);

index.php

function send_email($recipient, $message)
{
    include_once('settings.php');
    $foo = new MailSender($mail_settings);
    $foo->send($message, $recipient); //this was line number in the error message
}
 
send_email('admin@example.com', 'Admin message');
send_email('user@example.com', 'User message');

The tricky part was debugging it, it threw an error on the second call of the send_email function. That’s odd it ran fine the first time and the only thing I could see that had changed was the input to the function, surely that must be the problem? I commented out the second function call error went away, commented it back in and the error was back. This fitted with my hypothesis that the input on the second one was causing the error. But after looking inside the MailSender class I couldn’t see any reason why the function would error there.

I called Kev to give the problem a fresh set of eyes because sometimes when you are working on things like this you end up not being able to see the thing you’re looking for if you stare at the code for too long.

We took apart the function. We created a new file and replaced each function call with the code which was inside the function and were surprised when it worked perfectly. We were confused as to how the exact same code when placed inside a function would have any different effect.

After looking in the wrong places for a while we finally decided to re-examine our assumptions about what the commenting out was telling us. It wasn’t telling us that the problem is in how we were calling the function the second time around, it was the fact that we were calling the function twice.

After realising that it was obvious what was causing the error.

• Mailsender needs $mail_settings to work
• variables from settings.php were included with an include once
• include once will not include a file that has already been included
• the second function call will not have access to variables from settings.php since they are a) out of scope from first function call b) won’t be included again due to the include once

After changing the include_once to an include the function worked as expected.

This made me think of some questions. How would I unit test this? Should I create a unit test that runs each function n times? How could I ensure that the test wouldn’t fail at n+1 times? How can I be sure my test will be accurate without running the function an infinite amount of times?

Of course the real solution would be to remove the hidden dependencies caused by creating variables in an included file but to do that to this particular inherited project would require a complete rewrite.

I spent a while playing it then I came across got stuck in the Level Puppet No Longer in the last room with the ceiling ring where I couldn’t progress in the game because the switch to open the door had vanished (see forum posts here and here).

I restarted the game and treked back to that point. This time the switch was there and I was able to complete the level.

Later on in the Mexico level I came across another similar bug. One of the switches needed to operate the giant cogs in the floor was missing, instead only a yellow cuboid floated in mid air where it should have been. Fortunately I had a save at the beginning of the level and when I reloaded and got to that point again the switch was there.

Also later there was a bit by where you stop the Archimedes screw from moving the blue glowing liquid into the pool in the main chamber. The column that you’re supposed to shoot down, initially it did not allow me to shoot it, I could aim and fire at it but it had no effect and I couldn’t get the red crosshairs on it as is normally the case with shootable objects.

In conclusion BUGGIEST. TOMB RAIDER. EVAR. I hope I don’t run into any more.