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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Game update...

So, remember that game I mentioned a couple posts ago? Well, my brother and I are still hard at work laying out all of the rules/background information for the game -- but it's definitely in the works. It will end up being a browser-based multiplayer roleplaying game -- yeah, it's a mouthful, but it's probably the most accurate way of describing it. As we continue to work away on it in our spare time (spare time? What's that?) -- I'll provide updates. And then by the time computers and the Internet have been replaced by something else, it should be all ready to go.

Using Terminal Emulation to make Remote Calls...

So, for the longest time, the company I work for has been using Procomm for their Terminal Emulation (it's pretty much on every Windows PC the company owns). However, in order to view pictures from Procomm, at this time, a new X session is spawned on the server (using a program called Reflection) to generate a Unix desktop for the user, which in turn displays pictures.

Well, I was tasked with a way to bring those pictures to the client PC without using X -- ultimately freeing up those resources on the server. Enter AccuTerm: another Terminal Emulator. Except, it has built in Escape sequences that you can send to it (from the server) that will actually execute a command on the client PC as if you were at the command line on that PC. So, now, we'll be able to pass a command back to the PC to open an image viewer with the images as command line arguments and load them remotely on the client PC!

While this is a powerful tool -- that seems kinda scary that you can remotely access a PC and execute whatever you want on it through a terminal emulator... of course, it's completely under our control in this case, but still.