Tsukasa no Hibi

I dare to say that this combination can be quite interesting. I know that in our busy times companies have to push out products fast. And believe me, I understand that. Pinky promise!

But why, oh why, can’t you just spend a little more time in quality assurance. I had the doubtly honor to setup a hp laptop that somehow refused to let me use the ethernet port. Now why could that be? The machine is a shiny new product so I was a little confused. No one should’ve tampered with the BIOS settings (besides me, that is) so I was stuck.

The wise intertubes revealed to me the secret of my miserable performance: The notebook’s preloaded BIOS was faulty, flashing it resolved all issues with Intel’s drivers and hp’s… well… machine.

Now, if you could just explain to me why a consumer has to flash the brand new (and not too cheap) product on it’s arrival in order to get it to work? I mean, I’m not even talking about some other-than-Windows OS, but Windows XP.

Hardware, much like software, seems to ripen in/on the consumer’s machine lately. And with lately I mean “ever since Vista came out”. What a lousy trend… At least hp had the decency to *not* preload the notebook with one of Microsofts godsends. Chapeau, at least for that.

Windows an sich ist furchtbar nutzlos. Nach der Grundinstallation hat man nur ein relativ ärmliches Betriebssystem mit minimaler Shell und kaum Konntektivitätstools wie SSH. Keine schönen Programmierereditoren wie VIm oder E, keine Office Suite (okay, brauchen viele Leute eh nicht). Mit anderen Worten: Alles was über Solitaire und Minesweeper hinausgeht erfordert die Installation von 3rd Party Software.

Heute daher zwei Tools, die ich sehr schön finde. Es handelt sich dabei jeweils um Terminalemulatoren (davon kann man nie genug haben!).

Zum Einen natürlich die großartige Console, ein hervorragender Terminalemulator (ja, ich weiß, das Wort ist hier eigentlich fehlplatziert), der per sé die cmd.exe als Shell benutzt. Erst mit Einbezug der Microsoft Powershell jedoch erhält das Tool meiner Ansicht nach das nötige Momentum; Skripten und das über mehrere Tabs – fast so schön wie auf Unix… wenn man kein Cygwin will/darf 🙂 .

Apropos Unix, da gibts noch Poderosa. Das Programm ist ein SSH/Telnet Client und bietet ebenfalls Tabs und schöne Features, die das Leben eines Administrators angenehmer machen. So lässt sich z.B. der Bildschirm beliebig splitten, Passwörter im Keychain verwalten und whatnot. Wer wie ich oftmals 3-4 PuTTy Fenster offen hat, wird dieses Programm evtl. zu schätzen wissen.

Beide Programme sind übrigens kostenlos, was angesichts des Nutzenfaktors doch sehr angenehm ist.

FeedDemon, one of the very best RSS readers is now available for free.

Everyone in search of a very nice RSS reader for Windows should definetively take a look.

What’s very nice about FeedDemon is the capability to sync up with a number of services including NewsGator or Bloglines. This makes it a perfect tool for usage on a laptop 🙂 .

I’m pretty sure most people that have worked with a Macintosh know of a nifty editor called TextMate. You can best compare it to, for instance, Vim. Both editors are quite extendable, fun to use and feature an almost infinite amount of stuff that makes life a little bit easier. I finally found a great editor for Windows that is, in large portions, compatible with TextMate and it’s bundles. That’s great news because it makes the editor a usability goldmine (I like the word usability, as you probably noticed). The editor is called “e” and is free to try for 30 days. After that period, similar to WinRAR, you’ll get nagscreens. If you don’t know why you would/should/could use this editor, there’s a neat screencast on the homepage that demonstrates some of the features. Okay, Vim does pretty much the same, but not as nice as TextMate or e. As a matter of fact I’m posting this blog entry from the editor. On Vista you need to run e as Administrator the first time you use it in order to install Cygwin (if you need Cygwin).

A topic of hot discussion has been changing the language in Crysis. Although the install disc comes in several languages the official response from Crytek is “it is possible, but we can’t tell you how to do it for legal reasons”.

Well, guess what. Tsukasa can.

It is very easy, actually. Simply replace the \Game\Localized\Default.lng with an alternate one (i.e. German.lng, English.lng or Russian.lng) that come with the game. You could probably also use language files (*.pak and *.lng) from foreign discs to add additional languages to your game, although this is a pure guess.

Das Jahr 2007 bewegt sich dem Ende entgegen. Für mich war dieses Jahr ein recht interessantes, ich habe viele interessante Leute getroffen, viel mit Technik spielen können und mir viel Wissen aneignen können.

Leider konnte ich nicht alles bloggen, was ich gerne gezeigt hätte, sei es aus beruflichen Gründen oder weil die Artikel meine Aufmerksamkeitsspanne einfach überschreiten (ich hasse es Artikel nachzubearbeiten 😉 ). Ich konnte leider nicht so viel an meine Lieblingsprojekte zurückgeben, wie ich wollte. Ich bin dieses Jahr zwar durch ganz Deutschland gereist, war aber leider nicht bei Veranstaltungen, die mich interessiert hätten (und im sonnigen Süden war ich auch nicht!).

Aber 2008 wird bestimmt besser 🙂 .

Vorsätze gibt es, wie immer, reichlich; sei es mehr interessante technische Dinge zu bloggen, tsundere deru endlich zu fixen und an den Start zu bringen… weiß der Henker.

Was 2008 ansteht, und es wird sicherlich kein Weg daran vorbeiführen, ist eine sensiblere Planung meiner Datensicherung. Mir geht nicht nur der Speicherplatz aus, sondern ich habe auch keine weiteren Möglichkeiten zur Expansion. Mit Schlagworten wie NAS oder Fileserver werfe ich schon länger um mich, 2008 werden wohl Nägel mit Köpfen gemacht werden müssen.

Ich hoffe, dass jeder, der dieses Blog liest, eine schöne Zeit in den verbleibenden Stunden des Jahres haben wird — sei es mit Familie, Freunden oder allein. Ebenso hoffe ich, dass der Start in das neue Jahr für jeden hier angenehm sein wird.

In diesem Sinne,

happy 2008 (hoch soll er leben!)

Much to my regret I have a lot of battery-powered devices at home. It starts with a simple clock and goes all the way up to my laptop.

The fact that batteries aren’t really the eco-friendliest thing in the world is not news. So you can do alot to ensure, even though you may be using a lot of battery-powered devices, that you don’t use more than necessary…

My gamepad for instance is a wireless RumblePad 2 (Logitech). I don’t use it that much but the device keeps on draining it’s batteries. Simple solution: Kick the batteries out of the device when you don’t need it.

Also from Logitech: The MX Revolution mouse that I’m using with my laptop. Unfortunately I can’t just remove the batteries from the device but I can at least switch it off completely when I don’t need it.

When I’m at home I’m using my laptop on AC. That means I can safely remove the battery from it. I know many people who don’t do that, mainly because it’s a hassle. If you should ever bother to read the manual you’ll see that removing the battery is indeed the preferred way.

We’re wasting a lot of energy and resources with little crap like that. Maybe think about it a little and count the batteries in your devices. Stack them up and be amazed by the number.

Zum dritten oder vierten Mal schlägt die Migration von Old-Home auf Linux fehl. Es lag wie immer daran, dass das Umschreiben der Brückenprogramme zuviel Zeit in Anspruch nimmt. Der Nutzen steht in keinem Verhältnis zu dem Aufwand.

Vielleicht ja 2008 😉 .

Having to work with software you hate on systems you dislike is bad already.

Getting software you hate to work on systems you like that are not designed to handle specific bad-written software is a torture.

To make it short: If you want to use dev-pascal on linux (why would you?) you have to resort to Wine, the Dev-Pascal setup and some “Tool” configurations that launch wineconsole with the parameters cmd and .

That’s just fricking great, isn’t it? You could, of course, also use the native FreePascal compiler and generate native executables that will run native on your desktop instead of the somewhat broken wineconsole (it doesn’t handle textBackground + clrScr properly, expected is that the background gets repainted in the color your specified, wineconsole doesn’t do that 🙂 ).

But again… why would you?

I didn’t notice until today but Aptana IDE has reached it’s 1.0 release. That’s great news because the IDE is perfect for web development.

Aptana is based on Eclipse so you can easily integrate it into your existing installation. It makes a great companion for those who don’t want to shell out hundreds of bucks for an great, graphical IDE ala Zend Studio.

It is really nice to see the people around slowly trying alternative operating systems.

While koschmar is using Linux for about half a year now on a more or less frequent basis (or so I think 🙂 ), Lupin just gave Ubuntu another go on his beloved, yet somewhat dated notebook. Perfect choice, it makes a great learning environment and thanks to Ubuntu’s big library of shipped firmware and drivers the standard kernel apparently works very good for him.

The world must be coming to it’s end because of that.

Talking about odds and ends: KDE 4 has been postponed. New release date will be 11th of January 2008. December was a dillusion anyway 🙂 . Take your time and make it a good release instead of a speedy one.

Most of the time when I’m working on my desktop machine I’m using KDE. I think it is the best choice when it comes to flexibility and features.

On my laptop though, I’m using GNOME. Reason’s simple, I don’t want to spend time on customizing applications and startups when GNOME has it all from the start.

I did copy parts of my home partition to my new laptop, obviously some KDE related stuff aswell. It didn’t bother me, until now.

I compiled a new GTK engine for a much darker theme and couldn’t help but notice that all elements except the window backgrounds were correct. The backgrounds were silver. Not so ideal for a dark theme, eh?

I pondered, why would it do that? My usual suspect is Ubuntu. Sorry, I’m like that. I had some funny bunny experience in the past with Ubuntu so I’m tempted to blame it for each and every of my problems on the notebook 🙂 .

In this particular case though Ubuntu wasn’t at fault. My KDE settings were. As lady luck wanted it I had the custom configurations of the qt-pixmap engine left on my home partition which interfered with the GTK theme settings.

A quick rm -rf .gtkrc* resolved the issue.

Excuse me while I smack my head against a wall now.

Seit Montag “darf” ich wieder zur Berufsschule pilgern (oh Freude…).

Und es scheint so, als dürften wir dieses Mal sogar programmieren. Oder? I don’t know weil das stumpfe Abtippen von Quelltexten für mich keinen sonderlichen Reiz hat. Das die verwendete Programmiersprache Pascal ist und das als IDE angepriesene Ding nur ein Editor ohne vernünftiges Syntax Highlighting ist (VIM rockt das Ding weg!) tut sein übriges.

Thema heute übrigens Dezimal- und Binärzahlensystem. Wow. Dazu hab ich mal fix was zusammengehackt, was den Inhalt der vier Unterrichtsstunden gut zusammenfasst. Das haben wir übrigens nicht programmiert, alles über Addieren und Subtrahieren ist ja offensichtlich Blasphemie…

Gott sei Dank ist bald wieder Wochenende und dann geht der Terz nur noch eine Woche.

It’s here and it rocks.

I guess this is a golden opportunity to finally get into WPF, using my laptop’s Vista installation 🙂 .

In the endless grief that is Vista I just have to report on a more joyful thing that came from the Microsoft world: Visual Studio 2008 is finally ready for download in the MSDN to subscribers.

Although I neither have an MSDN subscription nor the money to afford an upgrade from my beloved Express editions I just wanted to give note.

Some developers I think very high of praise VS2008 as quite a leap forward. Hopefully Microsoft will give us peasants a bite from that aswell 🙂 .