Category: Blog

Let’s face it: Upgrading a perfectly fine PC every year sucks. I’m still playing on my 4-year old gaming rig (not on high details and not the AAA titles, of course) but I do the rest of my daily routine on a small eeeBox running GNU/Linux. However, sometimes I’d like to play without booting up my gaming rig, searching for DVDs or waiting for Steam to finish a download. And I want to play on high detail, of course.

With OnLive and Gaikai this could become very much a choice. These services allow players to “stream” live games without installing them, without having to have the necessary graphic cards – all you need is a broadband internet connection.

While OnLive has had a very bad start with me (me being European and therefore undeserving of their service), Gaikai Inc.’s Gaikai service does allow European players to stream games live from the web.

Yesterday I got my beta pass to play the demos of Dead Space 2 and Mass Effect 2. The demos are limited to 30 minutes each – more than enough time to get a good view on the games and the cool technology Gaikai uses.

Remember that I’m on GNU/Linux here? Good. All you really need is a browser, the Flash plugin and Java.

The graphic quality is very good. I couldn’t get full-screen mode to work but expect this to be fixed before Gaikai goes gold. Sound is great, the response times for the controls are somewhat mushy – however that could also be due to the nature of the games. I remember Dead Space being fucking annoying in terms of controls and Mass Effect certainly wasn’t much better. So I guess I’d have to see Team Fortress II or some other adrenaline-loaded shooter to really make a call here.

So is this a service I’d use? Currently it’s hard to say. If Gaikai Inc. manages to get an all-genre catalogue of the cool & hip stuff from the publishers and translates their subscription model to a Crunchyroll-like “season pass” model, I certainly see myself tempted to use it. I’m already buying digital content from Steam, so why not skip the “upgrade, download, patch” cycle and go with Gaikai? At least for single-player games this is probably a good choice.

As for multi-player games… I think Steam is and will always be the platform of choice. People don’t want to be at disadvantage with even a few more milliseconds of input latency, so I don’t see cloud-gaming services in this sector.

I hope publishers will see the advantage of Gaikai’s services. Deploying demo versions of current generation games is nearly impossible (due to the size and complexity of the games) – so Gaikai is an attractive option. It also reduces the problem of piracy and ensures that people will always have the latest patches available.

The next year will be interesting. OnLive will finally start it’s European service (apparently), Gaikai may go live – it will be interesting to see which one of these services will make it easier to play on every platform and operating system. The games catalogue will be an interesting criteria as well. Let’s wait and see.

So, as posativ pointed out the infamous Jugendmedienzensurstaatsvertrag is off the table (at least for now, although we all know proposals like this never die) – so let’s stick it to the man and keep the posts rolling.

What’s new?

If you’ve been wondering why tray icons in Ubuntu aren’t transparent, the answer is simple: The maintainers compile the applets with the wrong flags. To get your transparent tray icons back, do this:

– Grab the build-dependencies and the source for gnome-panel through apt-get
– Edit the debian/rules file and add the flag ”–with-in-process-applets=notification-area” to DEB_CONFIGURE_EXTRA_FLAGS
– Rebuild the package, install and enjoy.

Kind of sad that this problem seems to exist for a long time now and no one seems to care.

Thanks to the ingenuity of German politicians I am required to either tag every article of this page for age restrictions and child protection  (an impossible task) or would have to authenticate you to make sure you are indeed over 18 years old (also an impossible task).

Another possibility would be to restrict access to this weblog based on the current time. But since I am not the administrator of this server and the FTP access is defunct for quite some time this is the only way I see right now.

So that’s why every article and every page on this blog are now offline.

Enjoy Tsukasa no Hibi (child-friendly version) in a clean, pure manner.

I recently purchased a PC Weasel PCI card off eBay. While I’m having trouble getting the thing to run as I wish in my fileserver it does indeed work fine on my bare-metal test computer. One thing that bugged me a lot was the process of flashing firmware onto the PC Weasel. It supports up to 7 different firmware partitions but flashing them from command line is a real pain and with my limited knowledge of kermit and minicom I was totally dumbfounded.

Thankfully SecureCRT is always a viable option for one’s console needs (when using Windows, that is). PuTTY is cool but SecureCRT is great – it allows for massive scripting and is even recommended in the PC Weasel manual. So I did some scripting and this is the result:

[code language=”vb”]
# $language = "VBScript"
# $interface = "1.0"

‘ ****************************************************
‘ * *
‘ * PC WEASEL PCI FLASH HELPER FOR SECURECRT *
‘ * *
‘ * written by Tsukasa *
‘ * for SecureCRT 6.6.0 *
‘ * *
‘ * INSTRUCTIONS: Set the jumper for safeboot, open *
‘ * a serial connection through SCRT, *
‘ * run the script and power on the *
‘ * target machine. *
‘ * Cancel the script as soon as the *
‘ * S19-line input is done and set the *
‘ * remaining options manually. *
‘ * *
‘ ****************************************************

‘ ##### Edit the 3 values below ##### ‘

Const FirmwareFile = "PCIweasel_2.07_s19"
Const FirmwareName = "PC Weasel v2.07"
Const FirmwareSlot = "2"

‘ ##### DO NOT EDIT ANYTHING FROM HERE ON #####

Const ForReading = 1
Const ForWriting = 2

Sub Main
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set file = fso.OpenTextFile(FirmwareFile, ForReading, False)

‘ Wait for boot menu input
crt.Screen.WaitForString "[x]–>"

‘ Enter flasher…
crt.Screen.Send "l"

‘ Select partition to flash…
crt.Screen.WaitForString "Partition number for image [1-7]:"
crt.Screen.Send FirmwareSlot

‘ Give the new firmware a name…
crt.Screen.WaitForString "Image name"
crt.Screen.Send FirmwareName & Chr(13)

‘ Erase partition…
crt.Screen.WaitForString "Erase this flash partition?"
crt.Screen.Send "Y"

‘ Wait until PC Weasel is ready to receive the S19 lines…
crt.Screen.WaitForString vbNewLine & ">"

‘ Send the S19 lines until finished
Do While file.AtEndOfStream <> True
str = file.Readline
crt.Screen.Send str & Chr(13)
crt.Screen.WaitForString ">"
Loop
End Sub
[/code]

This simple script will do most of the handiwork for you. It works well for me so I’m fine with it being somewhat incomplete 🙂 .

Since I got a Xbox 360 Universal Remote quite some time ago (actually: when a friend of mine decided that the Xbox 360 is a terrible console and not worth having – a sentiment I can only share) I was always keen on getting the little bugger to work with XBMC. Lady Luck smiled at me when I finally found a cheap RC6-compatible USB IR-receiver on eBay. Just to get you some idea what I bought:

Bus 003 Device 002: ID 147a:e017 Formosa Industrial Computing, Inc. eHome Infrared Receiver

Yep, it’s one of the run-of-the-mill Formosa SnowFlakeEmulation thingies you find in just about anything from Acer laptops to small projector addons. I don’t know about you but that’s more than I could ever ask for (at least for the 2€ I paid) and the device works flawlessly with Lirc and the Xbox 360 remote (as long as the batteries don’t die on you). So, easy peasy to get all the stuff I already hacked together wired into XBMC, eh? Not at all. You see, XBMC does try – and I’m not doing anything wrong methinks – to use /dev/lircd as an endpoint for Lirc. The commandline –lircdev gets ignored completely. Maybe I’m missing a link here. The solution is pretty simple: Create a symlink to /var/run/lirc/lircd, start XBMC and rejoice – it verks!

One of the more common questions is how to run Wuala as a Windows service. There is a thread describing how to run Wuala as a scheduled task which may satisfy some people – but let’s face it: You probably want a real service, you know, one you can control through “net start” and “net stop”.

Setting up your own services on Windows is pretty easy these days. You either shell out squid for FireDaemon or go the free way with srvany. If you don’t like fiddling around with software this piece of software may interest you. It is a simple service wrapper for Wuala written in C# that installs a new service called wuasrv and starts/stops the client software accordingly.

Installation is dead simple:

– Configure Wuala (i.e. check the “remember password” box)
– Unpack WualaService
– Edit WuaSrv.xml and alter path to point to your wuala.exe
– Run ServiceInstaller.exe
– Open the Windows service manager, select the Wuala service, go to it’s properties and change the account it runs under (running Wuala under SYSTEM account may not be such a great idea)
– Start the service and rejoice.

Configure Wuala to auto-login and enable the Dokan integration to get your W: drive right at boot 🙂 .

I’ll post the source-code to the programs later on, so enjoy 🙂 .

So, I decided to re-install my laptop today.

One thing that got me curious: The NX Client and Sandboxie started showing strange phenomenons.

Sandboxie couldn’t quick-restore files from the sandbox (permission denied error) and the NX Client couldn’t find the default key.

Turns out that both problems have the same root: Cygwin.

After some tries with Try & Decide I pinned down the problem to E Texteditor’s integrated Cygwin installation. Even using the official Cygwin setup and standard install wouldn’t help.

The quick fix for this is to not use an external Cygwin installation in conjunction with these two programs.

Quite a bummer. If anyone has a better fix, feel free to leave me a comment 🙂 .

As you might be aware, I’m a big fan of programs like Fraps or Gamecam. Especially Fraps is a great tool, it works as a FPS benchmark, video capturing program and… no, that’s it.

Gamecam has a similar set of features including an in-game overlay UI that always warns me to not use Steam overlay and Gamecam.

My biggest gripe is that both tools drag down the FPS so much when recording. Of course, a little loss is to be expected. There is a lot of I/O work being done behind the scenes. That’s no excuse for limiting my FPS to the set frame-rate of the video, though.

Fraps has somewhat acknowledged this as a “not-so-nice” thingy and thus you can allow higher frame-rates with newer versions of the software. Now it is debatable whether this really works as intended, the internet is a vast place and many forum posts state that there is no change (my sentiments exactly); recording at 30fps still drags down the game to 30fps, recoding at 60fps keeps the game at 60fps. So there’s no performance issue but… well, I don’t know.

That’s where the Japanese (but available in English) program Dxtory comes in: Dxtory does screenshots, videos, benchmarks and has a broad set of great features many people long wanted for Fraps. You can define multiple save locations and measure their speed, you have the possibility to select two distinct audio recording sources and – most importantly – you have a broad range of options for configuring the video capture. Of course, you’re not very impressed yet.

Well, while Fraps and Gamecam drag down the in-game frame-rate, Dxtory keeps the rate stable while recording. Yep, enjoy your Pangya at whooping 200fps while recording a 30fps video.

Which brings me to another great point: You can create profiles for specific applications. All the settings are configurable per application.

If you don’t know whether Dxtory is for you or not you can grab the free trial from the homepage. There is no time restriction for trial recordings (another great thing over Fraps), so test it to your heart’s content. A license costs 3600 Yen which is about 30 Euros.

Yesterday I mucked about MonoDevelop, part of my reasoning being MonoDevelop presumably failing while compiling my perfect, non-errorous Vala code.

Shame on me, though: The blame is entirely mine, respectively my inability to check first and whine later.

So, what happened? Build yourself a nice crashing Vala application that should send something out to the console before biting the dust. Now build it on Debian Squeeze. Run and check. Well, it certainly does print it’s dying message.

Now repeat the same experiment on Ubuntu 10.4, lo and behold: You won’t see the message.

This is the point where reasonable people would simply check the strings in the produced binary. Didn’t think of doing that, mea culpa; you’ll see the strings are present in the file but not being displayed (ergo: There’s no problem at all, just some unexpected behaviour).