Category: General

I’ve been hard at work writing up a review and comparison of the nokia n95-3 and the nokia N95 ‘classic’. I’ve been in contact with the great folk over at all about symbian who have graciously agreed to publish my review of the device. Head over there to check it out!

New patch for ITask going in as soon as the author gives me commit access to the SVN :).

Commit message: Fixed bug where applying a config for one itask affected all itasks
Added new option, “only show items from current desktop”

So i’ve a newfound respect for Symbian S60 as of today.

The other day I got a new N95-3. Why? Because I’m obsessed with my cell phone, that aside this thing is amazing. If I felt my readers (I count maybe 1 or 2) would benefit from a full review I’de post one but meh. Summary: 3G is 2 orders of magnitude better than edge and makes the overall experience vastly better, bigger battery is nice and holy cow 80 megs of RAM?

I was able to open 30, count ’em THIRTY applications before even getting close to low on ram. The kicker? Switching to any one of them and it was still running at full speed.

My suspicion? Symbian sends some sort of SIG_PAUSE to the processes when you switch, so its not completly fair to say it was managing 30 applications at once, but it certainly was doing so in memory. Some applications as well were definetly still processing (notably the browser. If i told it to go to some large website then went off to some application, and came back the page was fully downloaded and rendered).

Other cool observations? Its really hard to get this CPU to hit 100%. During java apps its in the teens, most games also don’t really peak past 40%. Something that did hit 100%? Opening that pesky multimedia menu.

After closing all 30 apps (which took a while) Device was still perfectly responsive, and free memory back up in the mid 70s. Try doing that on windows.

So, in light of the fact that I got both Psychonauts and Oblivion to work well under wine I feel like I should add a bit more to the below post.

So, previously I suggested that the ideal would be to have windows virtualized and accelerated under linux. The question becomes can wine, the ‘proper’ solution (implementing windows on linux) keep up with the ever changing windows and windows gaming worlds? Apparently they’re doing pretty well, with Oblivion working 99.99% (oblivion also being one of the most recent and high power games).

So, given the choice between a perfect wine and virtualized windows obviously wine would win. The question is how frequently will we be faced with a scenario where we actually have an application working perfectly with wine vs. how much of a pain is it to buy/virtualize windows.

For now, i’m happy 🙂

In my nightly travels across the internet tonight i stumbled upon to an article about EA Games praying for one day just one platform to develop games for. The article goes on to point out how Sony and Microsoft would never allow such a thing to happen etc. insert boring mumbojumbo here.

I’ve also been pondering a similar issue recently. I got the itch to play Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion the other day, so I go into my closet, dust out the dvd throw it into linux and try and WINE it; why I would try this before checking online to see if its compatible I don’t know. Needless to say it didn’t work the first time, I do some research online and eventually get the game to load up.

Two issues. 1) It was annoying to get the game to work. Despite the fairly simple and thorough walkthrough I had little quirks causing this problem or that problem which were unforseen and took time.
2) Even once the game loaded, I had bad sound-static problems and visual artifacts in the menus and no HDR.

I rebooted into windows (which i hate doing), game played perfectly the first time; of course.

So… (and to my purpose in this post) we’re left with a conundrum. There are a couple ways to play games on Linux
1: The game creators released a linux version which most likely installs with no issues and works well.
Pros: It works!!!
Cons: It cost the developers extra time; very few games have this option

2: WINE
Pros: Pseudo-works for many many games.
Cons: Almost never works the first time, almost never works flawlessly. Theres always some glitch you either have to ‘just live with’ or find a workaround.

3: Reboot to windows. Not a good option as it doesn’t satisfy ‘gaming on linux’.
Pros: It works
Cons: Rebooting sucks, hard core.

So we’re obviously stuck between a rock and a hard place: native games are hard to find, and implementations on windows, while making great progress, are far from perfect and rightly so; developers make games FOR WINDOWS and its thus ridiculous to assume we can be clever enough to make them work perfectly on an entirely different OS, that they work at all is simply outstanding.

What would be a better solution?

Virtualization. I think that if some company produced a _fully_ accelerated X86 emulator that could run games even at 80 or 90% native speed virtualized, this problem would be solved. Yes, if the world were perfect for consumers developers would have infinite time and resources and release every game natively for every platform and operating system. The world isn’t; in fact its far from it.

So my prayer to the world: Lets bite the bullet so to speak, and accept what would be a fully working solution (if not the most ‘proper’). So, if you’re listening oh mightly philanthropist looking to throw lots of money at a project (or somebody like vmware already): please make a virtualizer (preferably free/open source) that allows for quality opengl/direct X accelerating. Developers could then focus their time on making games work well on windows, and Linux(solaris bsd etc.) users could be happy and simply virtualize windows to play the games.

Yes this requires buying windows, but it doesn’t require rebooting; which is my principle problem with the typical dual boot system. Its a price i’de pay to not have to reboot to play games. Booting a suspended OS in vmware takes about 3 seconds at the moment; meaning playing games is just one or two clicks away; perfectly reasonable considering they would be on their native environment and work 100% with no ifs ands or buts.

Update: Turns out im a fool and was using an old version of wine in working with Oblivion recently. With the most recent version the game runs nearly perfectly (with very very few of those ‘just live with it’ bugs). So many many kudos to the wine folks; as my frustration with wine has subsided a lot as of today.

So, i’m currently on a train heading to Manhattan moving at about 60-70MPH. I’m connected via usb to my Nokia N95 at the moment, using it as a wireless broadband modem. Now, of course its nothing like wifi/landline 100MBit but darn if this isn’t usable. Not only can I aim/SSH wherever from the comfort of a full laptop keyboard and screen but I was also able to VNC into my home computer (on very low setting but it worked nonetheless) and actually accomplish some tasks using a graphical interface remotely.

Take that apple fans.

Update: I’m now at penn station and I’m guessing theres a tower nearby. Latency and bandwidth here are excellent: I’m browsing the net and its barely noticeably different from home wifi. Pages load in a low-single digit number of seconds.

Excuse the French: Holy smokes! I’ve just been flat out blown away. Alright, preface:

I like video games, I used to play a lot more than I do now, I get at most 2-3 hours a week now-a-days. Recently i’ve been playing a quick match of “onslaught” in UT2004, takes about 20 minutes its good times. Anyway, to the point

The Unreal Tournament 3 Demo was released a few days ago, yet somehow I only found the link today. I’m at home, so no BlueSata to really put this game to its test. So I played the game on the following setup:

Laptop. Core Duo (not Core II Duo, this is a Yonah not Merom) 1.6Ghz
1GB Ram
60GB HD (I abuse this poor hard disc)
x1400 Mobile (Gimpy gimpy gimpy)

So… I download the 700MB demo, my computer crys for about 20 minutes extracting the game / installing aegia drivers (software emulation i guess) / installing the game. I then proceed to turn the CPU to max performance and crank the GPU to disable power saving in every way shape and form, i’m going to need it.

I load the game (bearable load times) and immediatly log in and dive into video options. Now, I’m fairly accustomed to playing at low FPS for the sake of superior graphical quality (i’ve usually had a midrange graphics card which does well at _good_ quality with _mediocre_ fps). But this graphics card, for a brand new game, is not “midrange”. No, it sucks. Anyway, to the point: I go from 640×480 to 800×600 simply because I’m not that masochistic. Crank up the texture values a bit and leave everything else alone — figuring i’ll be lucky if this plays at all

To my surprise, I got a (for me) manageable 15-18FPS and G-d Damn if this isn’t the most Beautiful Game Ever. This is on a crappy resolution, small crappy screen, ‘last gen’ DX9/Windows XP system with a ‘behind the times’ graphics card. And i’m blown away.

You know all those screen shots comparing DX9 to DX10? Get over it, its just an API. UT3 demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that DX9 is fully capable of looking absolutely amazing. Now I’m sure theres alot im missing in just the DX9 experience alone due to this system, and I’m sure the DX10 variant has even more detail and awesomeness but just pure first experience: this was outstanding.

The textures were amazingly detailed, the lighting (in ‘sunlight’) was superb (looked like some really really really good HDR). The models for the guns were fantastic, vehicles had a really new and appreciable bad-ass look to them. Heck, even the sound effects seemed to be more realistic and just more enjoyable than UT2004.

Verdict? I’m anxious to see what this looks like on my 7900GS when I get back to BlueSata. Even then its still a DX9 experience but if im this impressed at 800×600 x 15FPS I expect i’ll enjoy.

Conclusion? Modern game artists and creators have gotten really, really good. Even if you’re not a gamer, but somebody who can appreciate graphic art, attempt to bootup this 700MB Demo. It’s worth it for eye-candy value alone.

Oh, right. Gameplay. After about 20 minutes of exploring the Vehicle-CTF level for its graphical majesty I tried actually playing, needless to say it was a great time.

So its been more than a year since I’ve made Gentoo Linux my main operating system of choice (win-xp was previous). Needless to say I am extremely happy with my system now. I would like to share some of the tips and tricks i’ve discovered which have a particularly large ‘wow’ factor for an audience:

Screen is fantastic. A bit of screen -rx magic (perhaps with some Screenie) is not only very useful when SSHing in remotely but it makes a great tool when you want to mess with the guys head who is currently on your box while your sitting across the room on his laptop.

X11Vnc – For similar reasons as why screen -rx is so cool you can have somebody working on your machine while you ssh in, start x11vnc, then (tight)vnc in and again, make some heads spin.

MPD — If you’re on linux and still using a standard music playing application like xmms2 or audacious you should really think about switching to MPD. Its a fantastic little thing because you can bind keys to MPC via your window manager (i use the 3 buttons on the side of my Logitech MX 1000 (RF version, i’m not a fan of bluetooth mice) to control your music, always. 100% of the time. Not when the window is open, but always. Another perk? If your gaming and for some reason your hotkeys no longer work, SSH in via another box and use MPC straight from the command line!

Tint. Tint Is Not Tetris. Because who doesn’t love playing tetris in a virtual terminal?

StumbleUpon has struck again with this curiously interesting article on Black Holes. While I have some quantum physics background (okay, so even ‘some’ may be an exaggeration) I found this article easy to read and written for the lay person. So fret not, clicking on the above link will not turn your brain to musch with strange greek symbols galore.

Instead it opens up with a story and proceeds to go through the history of what we know of black holes. Then your stuck in the modern world of how information actually can leave or ‘evaporate’ from a black hole. I know perhaps my writing skills are not as formidable as the author’s however I encourage you nonetheless to have a read. Good stuff

There were a handful of updates to the gadcon in E17 recently and one of my favorite modules, my taskbar, called itask was broken by it. Because itask isn’t in E CVS it wasn’t updated. The official maintainer is far busier with itask-ng, which i don’t particularly love. So i guess it came to me to update it. Patch was sent to the ML tonight.