These things are so amazing!  There are several different models, This one being in the middle-low area.   All of these use solid state drives, and most of them come pre-installed with linux.  Most of us would of course wipe this and put a different flavor of linux.  These little guys start at around 299 for a 2gb model, and 399 for the 4g.  You can expand these with SD cards.  USB 2.0 ports, wireless… what more could you want.

I made it through the first hour and break, up to around 8k in chips.  When we came back, the blinds were 200/400 with a 25 ante.  I started leaking chips around this point, folding to a couple short stack all ins, etc.  So toward the end of this level I’m sitting at around 5k in chips in the big blind.  There are two folds, and the next to act is one of those two 2/5 NL regulars, these guys had been stealing very often.  He makes it 1200 to go, and it folds back around to me.  I look down at AKo and insta push, hoping to get the guy to fold.

He thinks about it for about a minute, says call, and says “I hope you have high cards”, and flips pocket 6’s.  The flop comes K 10 J Rainbow.  The turn is a 6, and the river a blank.  So I get up, say nice game to everyone, and leave.  I could have folded there, waited on a different spot, but I felt like I had good FE against that guy b/c of how often he had been stealing, and I really don’t feel bad about taking a coin flip in that spot.

Poker can be compared to life in many ways, because we must make decisions based on incomplete and often innacurate information.  Life is not like chess where you can see every angle, every position on the board, and the player with the most skill wins.  I have been reading StevesBets blog  because I want to get more insight into what it is really like to be a professional poker player.  For many of us part time poker players, this is our ultimate goal.

I wonder if that really is the best route for most of the people who claim the title.  Playing poker for fun on the weekends and a few hours a day online for extra income is fun.  Grinding out a living playing 8-10 hours a day may not be so much fun.  Imagine working for a month and losing money.  Even people with commission only jobs don’t get paid negative money.  But it is a common occurance for a poker player to have a negative month.

My biggest fear if I ever tried to play full time would be killing the pleasure that I currently get from taking down a monster pot or making a few thousand dollars on a saturday.

I know many players who try to go pro end up going bust instead, but I wonder how many more just can’t take the grind.  I know that to be successful long term, you have to stop seeing winning and losing pots, and see only +EV and - EV moves.  If you win a 10K pot with a hugely negative EV, you should be mad at yourself for making a bad play, not congratulating yourself for winning the money.

Sure enough, 30 minutes later the local UPS office called to tell me the package would be held once the driver finished his rounds and that I could pick it up between 7:30pm and 8:00pm. Now that’s a crazy window, right? Anyway, leaving out in a bit to get my hardware, will catch back up with everyone once I get everything going.

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This is the beginning of my future MAME cabinet. I have a friend in my town who owns a large billiard hall, and he had this old Neo-Geo game that the screen has gone out on, so I was able to pick this baby up for less than 100 bucks and have it brought to my house. The inside part works perfectly, so I’m sure I can sell that on E-bay.

I am thinking that I will repaint the entire thing, put a regular TV inside and mount it, and I have not decided if I will buy the controller set from x-arcade or if I will build my own.

I also plan to make a custom marque, stickers, and lighting. I will be mounting speaker inside also. I am not sure what I will use as the system, as I have a few to choose from.

I have a working old p4 setup that I can use, and I also have an older laptop with S-Video out that I could use. I will update further when I make some decisions in that area. Shane is supposed to be checking on a Knoppix bootable linux iso with MAME and a gui interface already installed, but if that doesn’t work out, I can always boot windows and use MAME and build my own front end or use one that I can find out there already.

If anyone else needs one of these sweet cabinets, I think I have access to two or three more. I will update this post later, when I have more time to re-write everything, and update with some more info.

I believe that many of us that come from a traditional university computer science background find designing UI difficult.  I learned all my college programming via command line, and the only “windows” I designed were for my own personal projects, or toward the end of my university stay when we were given more freedom on projects.

What many of us fail to realize is that to the user, the UI is the program.  That is a very simple but important thing for a developer to understand.  I feel that because of this, it is important to not wait until the end to design the UI.

Some people will tell you that you should design the UI first, and some will say not to.  I think both ways can be appropriate given specific conditions.  The important key as I see it is not to wait until the end.  I like to design a basic UI, and let it grow with the program development, and then at the end I like to clean it up, and beautify it.

Anyway, there are resources a plenty on UI design, from far more brilliant minds than mine, but I just want to share the point that I made earlier, to the end user, the UI is the program.  I think that as developers, if we all keep that in mind, we will make better programs.

The reason that this type of thing happens is that the actual pdf file itself resides within web space for that site, and someone out there has a link pointing to it.  Google follows the link to the file and indexes the file.

To prevent this from happening, you should store the files you want to restrict outside of web space (IE a folder ABOVE your web root) and allow PHP (or ASP or whatever) to serve the file.

FilePath could be something like “C:\Web\PDF\FileName.pdf” Where your webroot is “C:\Web\wwwroot” for example. The important thing is that the file resides outside of the web space.

In PHP you can do something like this:

<?php
if logged_in() {
header(’Content-type: application/pdf’);
print file_get_contents(”FilePath”);
} else {
# forward to login code here
}
?>

As always, If anyone has a better solution or a different one, please post a comment.