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I don't get this "may be the single greatest games controller ever" hype. People have been doing this stuff for *years* with flight simulators. http://users.senet.com.au/~dunkleyj/flight.htm is a page I first saw 5 years ago; it shows a 747 simulator made out of an old car. Last year I was lucky enough to 'fly' a 767, complete with full console, 2 actual 767 pilot seats, and all the rest. What's the big deal about this car simulator?

You're talking about the FIF format. Another fine example of patents stiffling inovation and development. That's a patented format, so it never really took flight. Sure it's way better than JPG, but the royalties are insane, so nobody cares for it industry-wise, even though it's technologically superior.

Who comes to loss? Us users, stuck with inferior technology. And yes, they patented the whole idea of using fractal algorithms to describe an image - even though it's similar to JPG in spirit. Yay for patents. :)

• One from OZ built into a Ford chassis
  
• An F/A 18 Hornet simulator made from wood, also in OZ
  
• A Boeing 767 in London that "flies" around the world
  
• A "multi-mission simulator" by an avionics engineer in the US
• An F-15 in Washington

> The US did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for Australia in
>WW2. Not one damn thing. In fact, if it weren't
>for Australia, you would never have defeated Japan.

Is that what they're teaching in Australian schools these days? The statement that the US did nothing for Australia is 100% wrong. I won't deny Australia was a valuable ally, but vital? Don't know about that. Anyway, here are items for your further research:

- "Battle for Australia" - Australian forces fail to stop Japan's advance. Prime Minister Curtin asks US for help. link
- Battle of Coral Sea. Japan wants to invade Australia, must take Port Moresby (an Australian air base) first. US stops Japan (also in above link). link
- Aircraft operated by Australia in WWII. How many are of Australian design and manufacture and how many are from the US and UK? link

Thanks for playing.

Here are some links that you may find helpful and/or interesting:

The JoyRider Virtual Flyer

Homebrew Flight Sim Cockpit

Full Motion Flight Simulation Platform

Homemade Flight Simulator

3 Axis Flight Simulator

Also, look for something called the "Rock-N-Ride" - it was a commercial low-cost motion platform, that interfaced to a serial port and used a airbrush compressor for power. It wasn't cheap, but it was cheaper than a real 3 axis platform. I have also seen real 3 axis platforms sold on eBay, but be prepared for hydraulic behemoths (in weight, if not size) that will set you back some.

Now, granted, none of these sites will probably answer your question about what to do in regards to all of the lights, switches, etc. For that, I would suggest looking into PIC or BASIC Stamp interfacing over a "single-wire" serial interface or similar. You could probably also do it with logic circuits and shift register-based systems (to effect a parallel to serial to parallel interface), or use a MAX232 for comm. There is also a guy out there that sells an ethernet -> uPU interface (people have used it to hook old C64's to ethernet, etc).

You could also hook up to the joystick port - in theory you could hook resistors up to get input from both axis's, a different resistor per switch, two joysticks - plus all of the buttons - that is a lot of buttons!

There is also the possibility of using the joystick port as a MIDI port, and comm'ing over that. Also, look up joystick info, there is a method of toggling a bit or so on the joystick port to actually gain a certain low-speed output over the joystick port to allow you to "clock" data from the port - supposedly some "digital" joysticks have done this.

There is always USB - check out Nuts and Volts magazine - there have been articles in the past on the chipsets, etc needed to interface using USB.

I hope this helps...

Perhaps the ideal choice if site blocking is your primary concern is Squid Guard with the freely available block list available from the Squid Guard site.

http://www.squidguard.org

Squid Guard is a redirector that works with Squid to provide a wide array of blocking and access control features. Pretty much anything you can envision doing (short of filtering the actual content) can be done with Squid and Squid Guard.

You provide it with a list of regular expressions or distinct URL's and it will block them according to rules you provide (i.e. executives have unlimited access, employess have no porn or games access, janitors only have acces to intranet sites, etc.).

Squid alone can provide URL based blocking and it works quite well. It's the method we recommend for most of our clients who need blocking simply because it's so easy. It's already built in, and you can download a pretty good blocklist called SquidBlock from here:

http://www.hklc.com/squidblock/

It's a little rough and the list requires a little hand tuning to make it really effective, but generally just plugs right in using the directions provided on the site.

Another option is Squirm, which is another redirector. I don't have any direct experience with it, but I assume it works pretty similar to Squid Guard above.

http://www.senet.com.au/squirm/

Any one of these should do the job. If it's the most important part of your proxies job, go the extra mile and install Squid Guard and hand tune the black list (or better still create a second user defined list, so you can install new downloaded blacklists periodically). It will do the job admirably.

If it's just a matter of being able to say to management, "Yes, we've got porn blocking in place...it works pretty well, and we're logging all accesses anyway...blah, blah, blah" you could use Squid alone with the SquidBlock list and keep an eye on your logs. This requires you to inform your users they may be watched though. But generally, we've found that a policy that clearly states the permissable uses (and the promise of log analysis) works better in most environments than blocking. Block lists just can't keep up with the number of porn sites. And it tends to keep the internet use more strictly focused on work rather than seeing what sites can be found that aren't yet blocked.

I guess I should point out that even if you use the better method (Squid Guard) and find it satisfactory, you will still need to monitor logs (although you can do so without caring about who is accessing what) to find any new sites that are being accessed that aren't yet blocked. Babysitting internet access is a pretty big job. You should do what you can to prevent users from even trying to circumvent the blocking to minimize you own labor.

Hope this helps. I'm available for questioning on this stuff (it's my job, so I know my way around Squid pretty good).