www.giannistsakiris.com

Yeah, I miss them, too...

Since version 8.04 (Hardy Heron) the Ubuntu folks decided to take down the Shared Folders item from the Administration menu. Of course, you can still right-click on specific folders and go to the Sharing Options, or go to the Properties and then to the Share tab, however, it's still good to be able to view all the folders that you share at a glance.

The good news is that, the Shared Folders Manager is still with us, we just have to run it manually, though. Just press Alt-F2 and execute the shares-admin command, and there you have it.

I would like to say "Thanks" to Mohamed for giving me the idea for this post.

Yesterday I tried to upload a Java JAR file in my WordPress-based website, and I was this given this funny error message: "File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another."

The reason for that is that WordPress does not recognize the .jar extension as a known file type. And here is what you have to do to fix this (you are possibly going to need administrator's rights to follow the instructions):

Go into your WordPress installation directory and then go down to the wp-includes directory. In there you should be able to see a file by the name functions.php. Open this file in a text editor.

Use your editor's searching facility to find the text "function wp_check_filetype" (yes, *without* the double quotes, and, yes, *including* the space character between "function" and "wp_check_filetype"). You should be able to see a portion of the file that looks like this:



Add the following line of code as seen in the screenshot below:



The save the file and you are done! You will be now able to upload as many JAR files as you wish without annoying error messages!

This is my first attempt in writing a Java game for mobile devices. I wanted to take advantage of my new cell phone's touchscreen, so I decided to write a simple game that imitates Dactyl, a game I had seen in a friend's iPhone once. Here is a screen shot of my variant:

And here is another crispier screen shot taken directly from the emulator:

And here you can see a demonstration of the game running in my cell phone:

As you may notice, the game consist of a grid of bombs (the size of the grid is customizable). Then the bombs, one by one and in random order start to activate (they go red colored). The player has to point on every activated bomb in order to defuse it before it goes off (the speed of bomb activation as well as how fast the bombs go off are also customizable). The goal is to defuse as many bombs as you can.

Personally I find this game highly addictive, and I believe you can spot very interesting combinations in the Settings section to try on. It's highly likely that the game will look better in 240-pixel wide displays. However, I have only tested the game in my own cell phone, thus, your contribution on beta testing will much appreciated!

Here is the download link:

• candiru-102.jar

Have fun!

(The name Candiru is totally irrelevant with the game's objective. I was striving to find a name and then I remembered that earlier this morning I had been reading some stuff about Candirus, which are actually parasitic fish in the Amazon river; check it out some time.)