For some reason MWEB Gaming’s servers do [...]]]> I have been enjoying the new Counter-Strike: Global Offensive servers thoroughly since receiving my beta invite but have unfortunately not been able to play on any South African servers. There are currently only one server you will find in your “Community Server” browser; a gun-game hosted by WAGE.

For some reason MWEB Gaming’s servers do not show in the browser but do not fear, here are the IP’s:

• 197.80.200.34:27015
• 197.80.200.35:27015
• 197.80.200.32:27015
• 197.80.200.30:27015

Simple add these to your favorites and come play!

I thought a Call of Duty announcer would be nice as the people on the hub I run play CoD4 quite often. This bot simply emulates the CoD discovery protocol over the local network and then responds back to the user [...]]]> Firstly, kudos to the guys from ADCH++ for their awesome DC++ hub software.

I thought a Call of Duty announcer would be nice as the people on the hub I run play CoD4 quite often. This bot simply emulates the CoD discovery protocol over the local network and then responds back to the user performing the query. It also checks if there are more than 4 people playing in a specific server and announces in the main channel that a CoD game is in progress.

In future I would want it to check the above automatically but with the addition of a few check to prevent spam.

The code can be found here: https://bitbucket.org/Konsalik/adch-scripts

This script is free to use and improve but most of all I hope it can help others who struggle with ADCH++ plugin development.

The old SVN repository had become terribly slow and the size of the site [...]]]> I recently decided to move a website I am managing from a Subversion VCS to a distributed system such as Git. I decided upon Git since I had used it before and limits imposed by the host machine on software installed.

The old SVN repository had become terribly slow and the size of the site was approaching a few hundred megabytes as the repository included media files and other content. I decided to leave out the content and only created a repository containing the bare files that make up the site. The new Git repository shrunk in size to 36 MB, a great improvement.

To host the repository in one easily manageable location I chose BitBucket. BitBucket offers great collaboration tools such as bug tracking and a project wiki which really suited our team. After proceeding to check the code into BitBucket and setting up repositories on my local and remote machines I could not get Git to push changes to the server.

After much struggling and searching and recreating the repositories a couple of times I came across a post by Abhijit Menon-Sen where he describes how to set up Git for just this purpose. So if you are trying to do the same, do not try to reinvent the wheel, follow this elegant solution!

The topic of mathematics and coding has been long debated with people on either side having [...]]]> I was inspired to write this blog post after reading Elegant Coding: Eleven Equations True Computer Science Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know.

The topic of mathematics and coding has been long debated with people on either side having strong opinions on the subject. To summarize (as the above blog’s comments also show): Programmers with a maths background usually feel that it deepens their understanding of algorithms and their code in general, while programmers without this background usually rant that maths are completely unnecessary and that they have coded for years without any need of advanced mathematics.

Let us consider the programmers without a math background. I fully agree with them that mathematics is not necessary to code. You can teach basic programming to 10 (or even less!) year olds as looping and logic is quite easy to understand. Where these people usually err in their opinions is that most of them have never worked on a truly mathematical problem. Yes! you need to understand Bayes theorem if you want to do conditional probability and you need to understand how to statistically treat random variables. And no, a basic understanding of algorithmic complexity O() is not all that is required to be a good programmer.

I would dare to say that most of our software has some form of mathematics involved that makes it “go”. I must say that this does not mean that all programmers need a CS or maths degree. It is not stupid to even suggest that not having a qualification makes you an inferior coder.

So, to all programmers who do not understand Euler’s identity, you may never need any advanced mathematics and most of you code better than I ever will but don’t hate on the programmers who brought you Google, 3D Graphics engines, Matlab, etc