Cloudy Sky. Occasional Rain.
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 🙂 .
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!).
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.
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.
There are many things vi can do, for instance invoke other commands to process files. That’s pretty cool.
Since installing Okteta isn’t always an option, here’s a small snippet on how to work simple capabilities into vi:
vi -b myfile
[in vi]: %!xxd
[to return to previous view]: %!xxd -r
Pretty easy, pretty handy. Something to keep in mind. Another thing to keep in mind: Always open binary files with the -b switch, otherwise you’ll damage the files when saving them with vi.
NX is great. I’m deeply in love with it. Sometimes it’s acting like a real jerk, though. The NX Web Companion is installing a lot of crap into the active user’s profile. The NX client writes stuff in the active user’s profile. Both isn’t really convenient for me.
I prefer to have all my settings with me on a USB thumbdrive. So, in the spirit of PortableApps I’ll show you how to simply turn NX into a portable application.
First thing to do is installing NX client on a machine, if you have installed already – that’s fine. Copy the entire program folder to a new directory structure like NxClientPortable\App (I’ll follow the PortableApps schema here). In NxClientPortable create a new directory named “Data” and a batch file with the following contents:
@echo off
set USERPROFILE=%CD%\Data
App\nxclient.exe %*
reg delete /f /va "HKCU\Software\Cygnus Solutions"
reg delete /f /va "HKLM\Software\Cygnus Solutions"
That’s it. Start the batch file and you’ll be fine. No need for installations, no files in some stranger’s profile. Everything goes back to your thumbdrive neatly.
This example also demonstrates why batch still isn’t dead: The USERPROFILE variable will be changed just within the scope of our batch file, all other applications will still use the path specified in the “global” instance of the variable.
The end of the world must be near: nVidia released a new version of their GNU/Linux driver that fixes some of the annoyances regarding RENDER performance. Given you apply some manual adjustments to the configuration the new driver performs in a somewhat usable manner.
It is still far from the beauty that ATI users can enjoy (in terms of performance) but it’s an immense improvement over the old, totally unusable slideshow.
If you’ve been a constant reader of my blog (and of course I know you are 😉 ) you could hardly have missed the ugly “0” date in the archives. Turns out that this 0 date was caused by all the old drafts I had saved but never published. Deleting the drafts would help, but simply assigning them a date seemed like a more sane solution. Voila, problem solved.
As Michael points out there’s a slight problem with the CoreAVC For Linux patchset that enable Mplayer to take advantage of CoreCodec’s h.264 decoder — with recent changes in the sourcecode the old build_patch.pl script doesn’t produce usable output anymore.
There still is a way to compile Mplayer with the modification, though: Mithun Diwakar altered a patch to work against current subversion checkouts. How long this one will hold… we don’t know. But I think it would be preferable to fix up the patchbuilder. Maybe I’ll hack around on it during the weekend (no promise 🙂 ).
Along with the public beta of Wuala there’s also a new website.
Aside from the plethora of new information, a feature to install/launch Wuala straight from the browser and mucho polished bling, Caleido offers a few badges to advertise Wuala and link to your own shared files (very welcome indeed!)
Unfortunately all of those badges are… big. Many people (including myself) use the common 80×15 badges with the common layout icon on the left, text on the right.
That’s why I quickly threw together two small badges in the standard form-factor. Use them as you like 😉 .
Without any doubt twhirl is the greatest twitter client available. It’s an Air-based application – meaning you can even use it on Linux.
Now, as you may know KDE 4.1 comes with a handy little twitter client plasmoid itself but the functionality is really limited, the plasmoid is a little buggy and overall can’t compete with twhirl. So, let’s install twhirl then, eh?
First thing you have to do is installing the Adobe Air for Linux alpha. Since the installation is pretty straightforward and the package is an RPM I’ll skip the details.
After installing Air just navigate to the twirl website, look for the “manual installation” paragraph on the right handside and click “Download and install the latest twhirl release”. The installation will start and you’ll be able to start the application afterwards by executing (if you installed it to /opt) /opt/twhirl/twhirl.
You probably want to get rid of the pesky taskbar entry now: With KWin all you’ve to do is press ALT+F3, select Configure Window Behaviour and choose “Window Specific” in the dialog. Create a new rule by clicking New, click “Detect Window Properties” and select the twirl window. Just accept the settings in the upcoming dialog, and close it. Time to edit the rules a bit: Double click the new rule in the list, go to the Preferences tab and select “Keep below”, “Skip taskbar”, select “Force” for each item and don’t forget to enable the checkbox at the end. Apply the settings and voila – a nice, widget-like twirl on your Linux desktop.
The nice thing about twhirl is that it comes with different color schemes and the “Black Magic” colorset matches the dark Oxygen plasma theme almost perfectly.
Yeah, this post is pretty sketchy, I wish I could upload media to illustrate it – but that functionality is still broken.
Update 08-28-2008: This post has moved to it’s own subpage. There you’ll find an updated version that should fix the wake issue.
Woot woot. Good things do happen 🙂
Now it’s time to do some regression tests. Without implying bad things here, but people should be very strict with applications before giving out platinum status.
Things like “does work perfectly fine as long as you don’t click button X” or “works perfectly fine but has some visual glitches” usually mean the application does not work perfectly fine and therefore doesn’t really deserve platinum status. Feels a bit like cheating on yourself if you give out platinum too easily. Just my two cents, though.
A test version of Adobe’s Air for Linux is available for public consumption now. Tweet-r as well as the Pownce client work fine, there are some visual problems with alpha channels, though.
It is great to see that Adobe does release a Linux version, this should help adoption of this technology a bit. Even better, of course, would be a simultanous release on all platforms.
Composing music can be a very fruitless and hard thing to do.
Especially so when all your music talent lies in being able to play the pianica a bit, but that’s about it then. Thankfully there are several programs out there that will cheerfully make up for one’s own misses and provide easy and intuitive tools.
In the past I’ve been using Myriad’s Melody Assistant. It’s a very capable program for writing and rendering music. You can import Midis, change their notation, the instruments and render your stuff out to an MP3 if you want to.
Recently I started tinkering with music creation again after a long recess, I’ve been using FLStudio and it’s absolutely great. It has all the features of Melody Assistant plus a some real stuff for quickly producing and editing songs. There’s a waveform editor that allows you to do slicing, looping and sampling from within the program, a bunch of drumkits, VSTi support and support for soundfonts. It’s a real treat to be able to do work so swiftly, especially when you’ve got a basic knowledge only. There are several versions of the program out there starting from about 50$ up to 300$. Still, that’s pretty cheap if you consider the costs of applications like Reason.
And things get better from here on: FLStudio works fine with Wine on Unix. It does have the expected amount of visual glitches and minimizing is a no-no but apart from that the application works flawlessly. That’s not only cool for FLStudio and Wine but also for Linux 🙂 .
