[Scottish] Internal HTTP server

[William Anderson]

Phil Deane wrote:
> [snip]
>
> The love playing online games on Nick Jr (http://www.nickjr.co.uk) which
> are mainly java based games. They wont have access to the net from their
> room(1. because I dont want them to have access and 2. My computer is
> downstairs and running cables would be a pain the arse and 3. I only
> have a dial up and I ain't for sharing it!).

David's wwwoffle idea is pretty good, I dunno if wwwoffle could be placed
upstream of a local squid cache, then you could perhaps try a) connecting
the girls PC to yours via wireless (s'getting cheaper!), and b) when you're
online, letting them browse with squidguard or dansguardian or <insert
content filtering system here [1]> in the road to make sure they don't
browse stuff they're not supposed to (with your machine obviously having
ultimate control - <click> *hang up!*)

Perhaps more complex to put in place than you require, but IME Java and
intricate Flash stuff are hard to make work well in an offline environment -
applets and movies routinely store data in outboard class/jar/swf files, and
if you don't click on the particular section, listen to a particular
sound/song, or reach a particular level while you're online, it's never
going to work offline.

That does of course mean that if you go for the wwwoffle only solution,
you'll be forced to sit and play games through to their completion so that
the girls can play all the way through too - oh the things people can be
made to do in the sake of parenthood ;)

(incidentally, I just took a look at the playtime section on
www.nickjr.co.uk, and it works exactly how i've described - the flash movie
is self contained, and loads the swf files transparently without a new html
page being shown.  This makes it *tricky as hell* to try and spider.

[1] my employer does of course produce a content filtering system based on
dansguardian (having the author on staff helps!), but something like
SmoothGuardian to protect a couple of kids is almost certainly overkill!

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