fTelnet

Someone on DOVE-Net recently mentioned they liked the RIP support in the old fTelnet, but one day it stopped working (I fixed the problem after that, so it should be working again).

This made me think about all the effort that went into adding support for RIP (it was probably close to as much effort as all the other features combined...and that's only for partial support, full support likely would require more effort than all the other features combined), and what a waste it would be since I'm not supporting the old fTelnet anymore. 

But ActionScript and TypeScript/JavaScript are pretty similar languages, so I figured it probably wouldn't be too difficult to take the RIP support out of the old fTelnet and transplant it into the new fTelnet.  And it turns out it wasn't!  The screenshot below shows the experimental RIP support in the new fTelnet:

It's only partially ported, there are a few things I skipped to get it up and running, and then of course the original code wasn't a full implementation to begin with, so it's not ready for prime time.  But a small number of the RIP screens from the sixteen colors archive render quite nicely, feel free to log into my demo system and check them out for yourself.

As the title says, my.ftelnet.ca and embed.ftelnet.ca have been updated.  They're now both powered by fTelnet instead of HtmlTerm.  No, not fTelnet the old Flash based telnet client, but fTelnet the the new HTML5 based telnet client.

If that's a little confusing, here's a bit of history:

• In 2010  I developed a Flash based telnet client and called it fTelnet
• A month later I also developed an HTML5 based telnet client and called it HtmlTerm
• In 2012 I stopped working on both clients.  fTelnet because it worked pretty good, HtmlTerm because fTelnet was better
• In 2013 I started working on HtmlTerm again.  It quickly surpassed fTelnet in features and compatibility
• In early 2014 I officially abandoned the Flash based fTelnet to focus on HtmlTerm instead
• Now I've decided that since I have the fTelnet.ca domain, and no product called fTelnet, I might as well rename HtmlTerm to fTelnet

So the new fTelnet is just HtmlTerm under a new name.  I also ported it to TypeScript and added some new features in the process, but basically it's just a renamed HtmlTerm.

Saw lots of connections to proxy-us-ga after I switched it to FleckProxy, and there haven't been any complaints, so I've now rolled FleckProxy out to all 9 of the proxies.

So owners of the original iPad (or any other Apple device stuck on iOS 5, or owners of the HP TouchPad) should now be able to connect via any of the proxies!

If you run into any problems with any of the proxies, just let me know via the contact page.

I'm using websockify on all my public proxies because my public proxies are all running Linux, and I thought websockify was the only proxy that would run on Linux.  Turns out FleckProxy runs just fine, and since it also supports some of the legacy versions of the WebSocket protocol, I'm testing it out to see if I can switch to it. 

It would probably be best to test with one of the less popular proxies, but that would take awhile to get enough usage to know if it's going to work, so I've just gone ahead and fired it up on the most popular proxy, proxy-us-ga (aka proxy-us-atl)!

So if you run into any problems using that proxy, or the my.ftelnet.ca site, let me know and I'll switch back to websockify.

The first donation since March came in last week, so I figured I'd use it to open up a few more public proxies.  Jacksonville, Florida and Los Angeles, California are the second and third for North America, and the sixth and seventh overall.  Here's the updated list:

• United States (California): proxy-us-ca.ftelnet.ca port 1123
• United States (Georgia): proxy-us-ga.ftelnet.ca port 1123
• United States (Florida): proxy-us-fl.ftelnet.ca port 1123
• United States (New Jersey): proxy-us-nj.ftelnet.ca port 1123
• Australia (Sydney): proxy-au.ftelnet.ca port 8410
• France (Roubaix): proxy-fr.ftelnet.ca port 18910
• Japan (Tokyo): proxy-jp.ftelnet.ca port 2710
• Netherlands (Rotterdam): proxy-nl.ftelnet.ca port 9010
• United Kingdom (Newcastle): proxy-uk.ftelnet.ca port 2910

None of these particularly close to you?  Let me know where you are and I'll see if I can find something in your area.  I've only spent half the donation so far, so there's enough for another 1-3 depending on the cost of each VPS.

I've added several new options to the My fTelnet embed wizard, so if you've set it up on your site have a look and see if there's anything new you'd like to customize. If so, just replace the old embed code with the new one and you'll be good to go.

My fTelnet has been updated with a cool new embed feature that will allow you to easily embed the client into any website of your choosing.  It'll do this via an iframe that you generate and copy/paste into whatever page you want on your website.

Why would you want to do this?  Because it's about 1000x times easier than the traditional method of using fTelnet/HtmlTerm, where you have to download it, put it on your web server, configure it, and then upgrade it every time I make a new release.  Now you just add the iframe wherever you want it, and that's all there is to it!

It's still a work in progress, so I'm not sure that I'd throw out your existing setup just yet, but I'd definitely appreciate it if you try it out and let me know what you think.

Check out My fTelnet and let me know what you think!

(Just ignore the TODO markers, it's still a work-in-progress -- and being a work in progress it'll be prone to breaking unexpectedly, although hopefully that won't happen too often!)