Author: tsukasa

The fool's herald.

GTA IV for PC

I think I just spent more time in Windows than the last 2 years together. GTA IV is fun, easy as that.

I don’t know why people keep nagging at the game, it’s great and just what I’d expect of a new title of the franchise.

The only thing I can really get mad about are the horrible DRM-esque copy protection, the need to register at least 2 accounts (1x Rockstar Social, 1x Windows Live) and the massive memory leak that brings down the performance after a few hours of play.

So, come on Rockstar… Instead of spending thousands and thousands of dollars to keep the game copy-protected, spend a few thousands on debugging the PC version – for Pete’s sake. It really isn’t funny and the fact that the game doesn’t even start with ATi graphic cards is… ok, that’s to be expected 😉 .

Public SVN access is back

Okay, I admit… it’s not quite “back” but more like “resurrected”.

I re-setup the entire server and suddenly it works again. Currently there’s not much for guest users to checkout, though. The Wuala API Wrapper sourcecode can be obtained from there, since I won’t post the entire code for every little stable — I guess that’s interesting for some people. Address for checkout: //svn.tsukasa.eu:8443/svn/<repository>

The server’s now running with VisualSVN, routed through tsukasa.eu’s main Apache. It works reasonably well and the admin console is quite slick.

As you can see, WebSVN has been updated to the newest version, OHAB and other old projects have been removed from SVN.

Also new: Automated build/unit tests through CruiseControl .NET. Not that I’d ever commit non-working code 😉

Stopping Sweetcron from breaking with too long posts

Okay, now this is really really bad, starting with MySQL 5 there is a strict mode. What does that mean? The strict mode will not silently swallow all your data and just cut off what’s left but throw an exception back at you when you try to insert more data than the field type allows.

Sweetcron is really vulnerable for this kind of problem. It always stopped fetching the feeds to complain about a single post. Now, while fixing the problem on the software side would be preferrable I opted for a simple configuration change on the server side this time.

All you really need to do is altering the my.ini line that activates the strict mode:

sql-mode=”STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION”

will either become

#sql-mode=”STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION”

or

sql-mode=”MYSQL40″

Simply restart the MySQL service afterwards and sweetcron should eat the posts without complaining (I don’t even want to think about the loss of data here, but who cares?).

WordPress 2.7

Gee, there I am, not updating my installation for ages and now I’m wandering the path of nightly-builds again.

WordPress 2.7 is amazing. The new interface not only looks great but also offers a lot: You can collapse your toolbar to save space, the auto-updater has been improved and now supports updating WordPress’ core as well.

Quite slick, can’t wait for the final 🙂 .

How to deactivate (revoke) Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 comes with a nasty copy protection. Actually, it’s more like a strict DRM variant that needs to be activated online and can only be used X times when not properly deactivating it.

You can manually revoke an activation without uninstalling the game by simply calling:

FarCry2.exe /revoke

Easy, huh? I’d prefer Ubisoft to not use any of these bugger DRM crap at all, but then again we all know the story of software piracy (note: pirates probably have a better version without this crap, so this whole thing is totally beyond the point anyway!).

Daylight Savings Time

“It’s officially autumn/winter now”, Tsukasa said and sighed.

There’s a new header reflecting the change of seasons, for those who are blind or just subscribed to the feed. Personally I think it’s a warm and calming picture (and I’m not saying this because of the panty-get in this picture!), but as usual people will disagree. At least the Apple crowd will.

Wrapper Release

Gee. I didn’t get around to post this but the stable wrapper v. 0.0.1.0 has been released onto Wuala.

Changes include the latest adjustments to the API (doesn’t include the changes to the thumbnail method, as this came later) and a little cleanup/documentation in the sourcecode itself.

I think it’s a nice, easy-going wrapper to work with that doesn’t make a big deal out of every little event (as a matter of fact, it doesn’t throw any exceptions whatsoever $me thinks).

Since there isn’t much demand for fast-paced development and I’m kind of absorbed into FarCry 2 at the moment, I probably won’t bother working on the Wuala Browser Sample (the application that should succeed ToyBox at one point) for a while — that doesn’t mean I won’t play around with it, though.

Wrapper for Wuala’s API

As many Wuala users have probably noticed, there is an official group for the upcoming Wuala API available. Yes, the documentation for the alpha API is out and I’ve been busy implementing the specs into an easy-to-use .net assembly for the last two days.

Basically I’ve all the calls plugged in and wired together, all that’s left before a first public test version (watch the group, people!) is to clean up some ugly sections and start basic documentation on how to work with the calls and classes, although the included ToyBox application should show this.

So, when will there be a public download and will the sourcecode for the assembly be freely available? A first public version is to be expected to hit the Wuala API group in the middle of the week, I’d prefer to release earlier but I want to make sure I have a somewhat solid base for further improvements. The sourcecode will be made available later on, the people from Caleido’s staff already do have access to it though.

A basic set of features:

  • Complete implementation of the current Wuala API.
  • Uses basic datatypes and generics only
  • Full proxy support
  • Many function overloads (yet more to come!)

Some things that won’t make the cut for the first test version:

  • Better integration/naming of the properties to be more .net like
  • A somewhat more dynamic way of implementing certain calls

I hope that this work will encourage people to play and experiment more with Wuala and it’s capabilities, even though the current API is somewhat limited.

Update: I released a binary version of the DLL as well as the sourcecode for ToyBox into the Wuala API group. Feel free to test it and give me your feedback either directly via the group or by comment 🙂 .

Lecker Links (delicious links)

You may have noticed that I don’t post that much stuff anymore – I think that’s fine as long as the posts do hold some kind of standard. Often I have something interesting but don’t find the pretext to write about it.

So, without further ado: You should keep an eye on my del.icio.us links (yeah, I neglect the new domain!), they contain a lot of cool tools and articles. The linklist gets it’s fair share of updates so you shouldn’t be bored 🙂 .

Moving old data to new disks

As I wrote earlier this week one of my disks kept dying on me. The solution – of course – is to replace the faulty device with a brand-new one and move the data to the new disk.

While I had great success in doing so with Acronis True Image’s “Clone Disk” feature I had a little hickup while mounting the disk into the storage cage of my case. So for the time being I had to use the broken drive for another 2 days (don’t do this at home, kids!). As you can imagine the data became desynchronized and since I didn’t really have the time to clone the disk again I opted for another, more time saving method.

Everyone knows how to pack an entire system, store it somewhere in the network and restore it – all thanks to Linux live CDs and my good ol’ friend tar. tar is great for a lot of reasons: It processes .files, it keeps permissions and ownership intact… oh yeah, and it packs things.

So, this time I didn’t need to pack my entire system but only a few selected folders. And I didn’t really need to pack them either. But tar makes a great companion for moving sensitive data between disks, no less. Just start your machine in single user mode (or with a Live CD if you plan on moving your root partition around), mount target/destination, cd into the directory you want to move and use this nifty little command:

tar cd - . | (cd /my/new/home; tar xvpf -)

Yep, that’s all that is to it. Keeps all properties intact, which is important for, well, just about any kind of file/folder.

Omgwtfhp

I had the unfortunate pleasure (?) to setup a HP Compaq dx2450, one of those machines that come with 3 operating system discs but no media containing the drivers (I can’t help but to wonder why?). So if you want to/have to install a corporate, custom version of Windows you’re basically stuck with hp’s website which offers a lot of downloads — unfortunately you can scrap all of them.

With the notable exception of the audio driver all other downloads on that page are utterly useless. Thanks to this blog post (similar story, I heart you, mate!) I was able to make it through the process without any major hickups, though.

Still, what the hell, hp? I thought we’re talking about business line products here?

Adobe AIR Beta for Linux

Wowzers, finally there’s a version of AIR available that has an (almost) equal set of features to it’s Windows and Mac counterparts.

Before you can install this new version you do have to uninstall your old AIR applications (as they won’t work with the new version anymore) as well as the AIR runtime itself. Both can be done through your package manager.

Features now include working trayicon support, kwallet integration and some other goodies.