The process uncovered bugs in pygame and python, including one which is fixed in 2.6b3, although there's no Windows builds of that version yet. Also, you can't currently rebuild Python under mingw. Still some patches to go: pygame tries to build a safe version number for bdist_msi however it gets it wrong in release, I suspect the rules have shifted slightly in 2.6...; and whatever else I've modified in my build trees that needs to be sent upstream.
Mingw64 was able to build stuff now (thanks to @NightStrike on the #mingw-w64 IRC channel) but Python's pretty insistent that I build against msvcr90 and mingw64 doesn't have an import library for that yet (mingw32 does, but mingw64's runtime collection is only up to 3.11 or so). @NightStrike informed me that pexports has been ported to amd64 on the mailing list, but I haven't dug it up yet, but that should allow me to link to msvcr90 from mingw.
Either way, I now have a modified win32/Makefile.gcc for zlib which doesn't use dllwrap (deprecated since 2002) and works with mingw64 nicely.
After mingw64 worked but I hit the requirement of msvcr90, I grabbed the Windows SDK and the DirectX SDK. Once you know to run dx_setenv.cmd in the Windows SDK cmd window and to use vcbuild /useenv (otherwise it'll ignore the results of dx_setenv.cmd) things seem to just work. You need to set DISTUTILS_USE_SDK in your environment for Python to trust your compiler version choice, too.
Converting SDL's Visual C projects and solutions was easy. Change platform from win32 to x64, change any /MACHINE: entries from I386 to AMD64. I should submit that change to SDL, once I convert and test the examples as well. SDL also builds with mingw64, but I suspect it doesn't produce a DLL at the end right now.
The Windows SDK 6.1 includes msvcr90 and the Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 toolchain, so that works for Python extensions.
However, after building everything fine, initialising pygame fails:
Microsoft Windows [Version 5.2.3790]
(C) Copyright 1985-2003 Microsoft Corp.
C:\Documents and Settings\root>python
Python 2.6b2 (r26b2:65106, Jul 18 2008, 18:24:10) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pygame
>>> pygame.init()
(3, 1)
>>> pygame.get_error()
'DirectInputDevice::SetDataFormat: Invalid parameters'
>>>
The Internet knows nothing about that particular error in reference to pygame. Since I had to install the DirectX SDK to get this far anyway, I'll see what that produces in terms of debugging output, when I get back to it.
As for pyglet, which started me on this whole mess? Upstream says it's not supported under x64, don't bother submitting bugs. Before I found that, I tried to work through their hello_world.py but pyglet.window.Window() came back from OpenGL with "invalid operation" calling glGetString(GL_VENDOR). The whole exercise with pygame came about from me trying to find a way to test if PyOpenGL was having similar problems as both PyOpenGL and pyglet use opengl via ctypes.
OpenGL on windows is hard. There's a huge amount of setup needed to get a context to be able to call openGL commands, and PyOpenGL doesn't provide that code. PyOpenGL's sample code relies on pygame to do this... -_-
And to think this all started because I wanted to prototype a game idea I had rather than just telling my work colleagues about it and hoping for the best. Oh well, maybe next weekend.
It does warm my heart to know that despite being a professional video games programmer I can still come home and spend a weekend doodling around programming.
I started watching Cheap Love, only two episodes in but I'm pleased to see that already the main love pairing have already met and realised they've feelings for each other. Most J-dramas I watch make us wait until half way through the season to let the characters know what's been painfully obvious to the audience since the opening titles rolled.
And in further good news, I'm down below 136kg. ^_^
My task for this week is to turn my barcode scans of my book collection into something I can access while I'm in Melbourne next weekend so I don't have to call home from Melbourne book stores again to get Mick to look at my shelves for me. I've also given my mother the book-barcode-scanning bug, but I imagine she'll buy some software off the Internet to manage the collection. Recommendations appreciated. ^_^ (Obviously, if you want to recommend such software for me, go ahead as well. But my requirements are somewhat pathological)
Oh, and I'm in Melbourne next weekend for Medleys. Taking younger sister (they're both younger, I'm talking about younger younger. Elder younger will be on stage) and hopefully catching up with Phil.
Been eating "Instant Stew" this week. Finally refined recipe down to:
~1.2kg of mixed heart-smart meat, diced
1kg bag of Home Brand mixed frozen vegetables
1 tin (400g) diced tomatoes
Random spices as I find them in the cupboard
Combine all ingredients in crock pot. Put on before work, arrive home after work. Makes 6 lunch servings or 3 dinner servings, ~350 calories per lunch serving. I blame recent weight-loss success on this stuff.
Turns out that making stew, unlike Python games under Windows x64, doesn't involve first creating the universe.
Posted in General at 1:34 am by TBBle (Visited times)
Much as I dislike the song itself, there's a reasonable chance I'm an asshole.
Some links follow, relevant to the above. No commentary, and don't expect many posts about this sort of thing. You'll notice there's no relevant category. ^_^
People who read this and actually know me offline, you are requested to call me out if you observe me doing any of the shit that may appear in the links that follow. Or at least the bad stuff. There's good stuff mixed in there, I hope it's obvious which is which.
On a positive note, I'm down to around 140kg. Four and a half months to lose another 20kg. That looks unrealistic, but it's actually 20 weeks so it's only on the high side of healthy, as I understand it, not in the danger zone, especially given where I'm coming from.
My mother pointed me at CaloreKing Australia which is a web site for helping with weight loss.
I'll be using this to track my food intake and what little exercise I do. I'm quite hopeful, given its large-looking food database. So far there's not much I've had to add (the kangaroo meat I've been eating the main thing missing, and their Home Brand range seems rather small. In the latter case, I'm picking the things I believe are the branded equivalents.
I'll see how it goes, anyway. One of my weight-loss complaints was that it was all too hard to manage. This site has a menu-suggesting thing, and has an option to exclude all dairy items, so once I'm organised a bit and have gotten through the stuff in my cupboard, I might see how the suggested meals turn out.
It also lets you input nutritional targets and such, and provides some defaults, so I can get a good idea of my fat and protein intake (keeping them down) and my calcium intake (keeping it up). I was disappointed to see that the goat's cheese I get doesn't have a calcium value on the packet or the site, and it also about half my daily fat intake. So I'll be drinking more of the chocolate VitaSoy drink, which turns out to be a healthier way of getting my 1g of calcium a day. (That's a whole litre. I'll have to start taking it to work again. Horrors! ^_^)
The only issue I have with it so far is that I have to add a food to my daily record to see its statistics. So when trying to work out what to have for dinner tonight, I had to keep throwing combinations at it until something came up that balance out well. That's mainly because I had a pretty awful lunch though. ^_^
The site has a built-in blog system, but I don't see an option to just auto-publish my meals. I'd like to do that... I'm not sure why.
Edit: Carefully hidden away in the account options, my meal diary is now online.
I'm not going to discuss the idea of a nanny state, childhood violence and/or destructive influences of video games, 'cause I'm actually at work, and don't have the brain-space for it.
I will try and get the actual text of the law and its eventual fate if I remember to.
I also will have to remember not to go skimming rocks across any trafficked waterways in Sydney
Looking back over some of mine, FreeRADIUS from a long time ago, and openjpeg more recently, it appears that my preference is to actually write them as untensed fragments. I think I'm answering the question "What does this change do?" from the perspective of the change. This would make sense, mirroring somewhat the comments I put in dpatches (and the overly verbose names that have been known to occur) which are usually the patch talking about itself in the plural. Unless that's the patch _and_ I talking about ourselves in the plural?
As I documented in one of my much earlier blog posts, Where are they now?, I lost tbble.com nearly four years ago, and Google hits and archived links have been slowing dying/updating every since.
On the weekend just past I got an email from someone telling me they had recently come into possession of tbble.com, and as the owner of tbble.net, please click the included link to purchase it. (I only read the email tonight. That's how far behind I am at life.)
Barely restraining my hopes, I immediately clicked on the link fired up an ssh session to my fileserver and whoised tbble.com, discovering it to be apparently unregistered.
Continuing to restrain my now burgeoning glee, I went to do my Bubblesworth domain renewals, and idly popped tbble.com onto the shopping list, almost as if by accident. (No point tempting fate at this point. I've had tbble.com disappear from whois before but be snapped up before I could reclaim it).
$15 later (reseller price. ^_^) I'm the proud once-again owner of tbble.com, your source for all things TBBle. Although since I'd managed to migrate to tbble.net and tbble.org over the past four years, there's nothing good there. I really need to sort this stuff out.
I stopped restraining my glee at this point, and cheered near my housemate until he woke up and heard about my glee.
And now so have the rest of you. Sans cheering, unless you're using some kind of Text-To-Speech software which takes a fairly imaginative interpretation of the phrase "Text-To-Speech". If you are using such a program, let me know. I'll try and work some more amusing noises into my blog posts.
Anyway, that's TBBle 1, Evil Domain Registrars Who Jump On Expired .com Domains And Try To Sell Them Back To The Original Owners For $1500 Through A Shell Company In South Africa -$20 (or whatever a registrar pays Verisign for four years squatting).
Also on 0, but having had a bye this round, are Evil Domain Resellers Who Refuse To Process My Credit Card And Refuse To Release My Domain For Transfer Without Some Kind Of Fee They Added To The User Agreement Post Purchase Using One Of Those "We Reserve The Right To Modify This Agreement As We See Fit" Clauses. Recapping the earlier round, it was a draw. I lost one domain, and rescued five others without charge.
I'm gonna need a wider scoreboard...
Edit: That's not how you spell "amusing" or "restrain". "Gonna" on the other hand is correct.
Posted in Linguistics, Mew at 12:15 am by TBBle (Visited times)
Went to see Race tonight. It's actually not marked on the Hoyts site, but it's Hindi/English blend with English/nonsense blend subtitles. It's mentioned on the IMDB front page, but I missed it looking for the comments on the plot. The front page comment was satisfyingly spoiler free, and very positive. Had I noticed that the commenter was Indian, I might have clicked. Ah, hindsight. >_<
As an aside, the Hindi/English mix was interesting. I haven't seen enough Bollywood films to know if it's particular to this film or is part of the style (a friend suggested it was the latter) although I noticed while researching this post that one of the actresses doesn't speak Hindi. I need to learn more languages, at least reaching the point where I can watch movies in Japanese, Cantonese and now Hindi. And of course I wonder if I can possibly swing a research project into a Hindi/English pidgin. A university-funded Bollywood movie collection would be a thing of beauty...
So I took a few friends, all of us completely unprepared. I really should have clicked to it being Bollywood, given I'd noted the Indian director, actors, etc...
On the plus side it's really good. Turns out that the best way to improve a twisty, turny, windy plot, double-plot, cross and recross fest (ala Wild Things, which I've raved about here before) is to have the actors stop to sing and dance about what they're feeling every so often.
I also want to get married in Cape Town, at the registry office.
If you haven't seen Wild Things or Race, go do so.
Now Playing: Wild Things. My housemate hadn't seen it! This is a revelation akin to discovering another friend of mine hadn't seen The Princess Bride. There's also a Princess Bride Game coming, although I'm a little concerned, after seeing the trailer.
And just in case you didn't twig, this post's title is of course related to revelations. I'm not harbingering the end of Bollywood...
Posted in Debian, LCA08, Linux at 9:00 pm by TBBle (Visited times)
OK, so I made it to LCA08 in Melbourne, eventually.
However, I managed to have the following happen on the way:
Got the time of my flight to Melbourne wrong, arrived at 5:30pm for a flight that left at 5pm.
Caught the wrong tram from Melbourne CBD to uni accomodation, had to walk from Royal Melbourne Hospital back to the university. This was precipitated by me misreading the tram t
imetable thingy.
Failed to wave at a traim outside the uni, meaning it sailed right on past me.
Locked myself out of my room, the third time I left it. (They've got those dumb swipe-card locks which are always locked except when you've just swiped from the outside, but are open from the inside.)
Asked on #linux.conf.au about the URL for Planet LCA 2008 while it was in the topic. (Unlike on #debian, not only was I not mocked for this, no one noticed before I did, a while later)
On the other hand, I caught up with Brad, Evelyn, Bek, Jason, Phil, Naoko, Geoff and Ange, all in the one day. That was fun, we had dinner, I stuck my sore feet in the ocean and felt better, and I manged to catch the right trams from the university _to_ the city. Well, lunch with Naoko, the rest with the others. (Actually, that's in reverse chronological order)
The actual conference first day was interesting. I was at the Debian Mini-conf all day, seeing a neat thing about using git for managing packges sensibly, which is something I was trying to figure out when I was packaging Second Life last year, as well as some cool stuff coming into Debian over the next year or so.
After the Debian Mini-conf all went over to the keysigning (I didn't go again this year, I wasn't organised in time) I went to see a presentation about Ingex which is something the BBC have developed to try and take Digital Betamax out of the video production process (since Digital Betamax only works in real-time, as I understand it) with some success so far, and it's pretty interesting.
Speaking of not being organised in time, I only thought today to look at the Tutorials, and both Wednesday's tutorial about hooking up hardware to Second Life and Thursday's tutorial about hacking on lguest require preperation. I was able to grab Jon Oxer at the Debian Mini-conf and get my name put on the one remaining spare development kit, and so now I'm down in the Junior Common Room of Trinity College (no wireless in the rooms yet) updating my blog instead of trying to get lguest running under qemu. I'll have to go dig up Rusty's and Robert Love's instructions from LCA05 preparing for their kernel hacking tutorial that year. Wow. Archiving the old LCA websites kicks ass!
Edit: I actually was dumb on #linux.conf.au, not #debian. As an aside, I managed to lock myself out of my room again later that week.
For those of you who don't already realise, my dream job since age six was to be a video games programmer. Having now achieved that, you'd figure I was now in for karmic mortgage payments for a while. And sure enough, having an umbilical hernia become quite painful on Friday night, 28th of December (I was working that day) would certainly seem to be within reach. I'd actually had the hernia for a couple of months, I reckon, but hadn't known what it was or what to do with it. (I thought I was just getting fatter. -_-) Anyway, a mix of mentos, Coca-cola, lifting a heavy TV that week and who knows what else ended up with me spending the night in hospital on morphine. (Well, I dunno if I was on morphine all night. They gave me some) Thankfully, the surgeon registrar was able to push the bits of bowels sticking out back in (before the morphine. -_-) without problem, and no problems appeared overnight, so I'm now waiting for the letter to let me join the waiting list for surgery, and occasionally stopping to push bits of my bowel back through my belly-button.
This means I'm no longer a hospital virgin (not that I really was. I went to hospital when I was three years old or so, to get my forehead stitched up after falling off the wall above our driveway in Oyster Bay, Sydney) but it was a scare that I wouldn't be able to go to LCA this year, having already booked and paid for it, and LCA being my main actual holiday each year.
Also, it was lucky my sister was in town, since when I told her where and how it hurt, her mind went straight to hernia, so she and my mother came over to check me out and took me to hospital, hours earlier than I would have gone myself.
Anyway, early last week I saw the surgeon consultant, and he said I'd be fine to travel, since the surgery was fairly far off in the future anyway ("several months" I believe) and as long as I don't put sustained lateral strain on my abdomen, I'll be fine.
He also said to lose weight, of course.
So yeah, I reckon that the hernia prolly balances out LCA, GDC, my job, and maybe even my paying off of the ATO this year. I hope the universe agrees, 'cause if I'm still in the red for those good things, I'll have to be sure to backup my new laptop before I travel.
Posted in Linux, Programming at 8:06 pm by TBBle (Visited times)
I recently was linked to CCG Workshop which is a site where you can play collectable card games (CCGs) online. It's interesting because they have this gatlingEngine software, which apparently runs the game for you using a set of rules in a gatlingML file.
I thought this would be a wonderful chance to document the rules for the developer documentation requires that you sign an NDA and suchlike.
Discussions on the forum (the developers talk openly on the public forum, so I have an idea what's not under NDA ^_^) indicated the gatlingML files were XML, but when I got one while trying to play a game, it was quite clearly binary.
The first four bytes are !HZL which I thought looked really familiar, but it took a fair while before I clicked that that was "LZH!" backwards, LZH being the compression algorithm used in the LHA family of archivers. Of course, research indicated that none of the LHA family of archivers actually wrote a file with !HZL at the front.
Poking about some more, I noticed that the gatlingEngine is written in Delphi (and is legacy code anyway) and went looking for Delphi compression libraries. Thankfully, the vast majority do PKZIP-compatible compression, and the first one I tried that supported LZH compression was Tlzrw1. (Apologies for the quality of the link, the 1998 link in the read file is dead, and the Wayback machine record for it indicates that the author's page didn't mention the library anyway) So I note that the library in question attributes its LZH code to LZHUF.C which Google duly turns up for me. I change the code a bit to stop assuming a 16-bit word, handle the header at the front, and suddenly I have a utility which can encode and decode files compressed with the LZH mode of Tlzrw1. (Which has been ported to C# and Delphi.NET, Google tells me.)
Now of course someone needs the interest, gumption and skills needed to produce an open-source program that can process gatlingML files and run games from them. ^_^
Posted in General at 9:13 pm by TBBle (Visited times)
Via Krefey, I'm not part of one of those weird pass-it-on things that shows up in the blogoblong on occasion.
Rules of the game:
Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song. Or your favorite kind of sandwich. Something random. Whatever you like.
I respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better.
You update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
When others comment asking to be asked, ask them five questions.
And the questions I was asked:
If you had the chocie to remove either Star Wars or Star Trek form existence, which would you choose to discard to the eether?
If you could have any single (ie just one, not single as in not taken) woman be with you for life, who would you choose and why?
Dumb but attractive, or intelligent but plain?
If you could be anyone that has ever existed who would you be?
If you could alter the principle laws of physiscs as we know them, what would you change?
OK, here goes:
Tough call. I'm gonna go with Star Wars, much as I personally prefer it, because I think Star Trek has done more for us in terms of introducing and exploring new concepts, while Star Wars was kind of a samurai VS Nazis funfest. Of course, if this subsequently removed Indiana Jones from existence, I'd have to change my mind. And whichever one lets Red Dwarf stay, stays. Erk. This is why I've abstained from time travel.
Suzie Marie Toller. Spoiler for Wild Things... She's wealthy, attractive, intelligent, doesn't let the rules and mores of society hamstring her ambitions, without being amoral.
I'm definately intelligent but plain. Then again, given free reign I can also be dumb, and attractive in a gravitational sense. If you doubt that, lie next to me on a waterbed. ^_^
I'm tempted to say Andrew Tridgell, but I'm not sure I'd do as good a job of being him as he does, and that's not something I'd wish on the world. This also applies to most of the other names of existent or formerly existent that come to mind. The more I think about it, the more I realise that not only am I prolly the best at being me, I'm also currently the me I'm happiest with, or all the mes that have existed. Sure, there are mes I'd rather be (ie. exactly now, but ~50kgs lighter) but they haven't existed, so they don't count. Yes, it's a cop-out. If you insist I pick someone, go with Tridge. He seems to have been doing (and still is doing) the sort of thing I love doing, for a long time now. Although, right now I'm at the start of that process (I hope) so I don't think I'd gain much.
Posted in General at 12:28 am by TBBle (Visited times)
Firstly, a vast majority of people who read this, won't actually know the context of "Why I don't read weblogs". This is deliberate. I still know people involved in that incident, so no details will be released. If you're one of the lucky ones to know the story, don't pass the link around. ^_^ (It's embarrassing to me, just to be clear, so don't let the paranoia get you down.)
Anyway, LiveJournal slipped me back into weblogs by stealth, so I guess it's time to face it. I started out just looking at my housemate's LJ. Then one bored Saturday afternoon, I had a look at his friends list and realised I knew some of the people on it (through him) and so, having already managed to get OpenID working between LiveJournal and my Wordpress site (Using OpenID Comments For Wordpress, which despite the name is also an OpenID Server) I added them to my 'friends' page.
And then from a comment on a blog there, I recognised a long-unseen friend's nick, and then from that person's friends list, I recognised a whole bunch of other friends.
I accidentally connected my little island of long-winded to the blogosphere. O_O (I wish they'd called it the blogoblong. It's so much more fun to say...)
Anyway, as much as anything else, this post is also to explain if anyone doesn't recognise the username at the end of the befriending, well, now you know how I found you.
This is also to prevent me starting another disk of Babylon 5, given when I started this it was too early to go to bed, but three hours more watching Babylon 5 would have left me going to bed too late instead. This way it's, in the words of Goldilocks, "Holy shit, talking bears!"
Now, my Japanese is not exactly spectacular, and rikaichan proved unhelpful as well, but this appears to be to be a 3-month exercise cartridge for women to increase their 女ヂカラ. As the joke goes, you fuck just one goat...
(Japanese is my best non-native language, too. My knowledge of Modern Standard Chinese currently extends only to 你有好乳房 "You have excellent breasts" and 你的妹妹有十六歲嗎 "Is your sister 16?", although if pressed occasional other words, interspersed with Japanese and the occasional mumble will emerge. ^_^)
Now of course I need to go assert my masculinity by buying something like this: (The infamouswitch touching game)
Granted, I'd have bought this game whether Amazon was trying to make me buy girly things or not and I realise that my other purchases (Kakitorikun, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon DVDs, for example) may have given Amazon the impression that I was a female Japanese primary-school student, but seriously, who gives a credit card to an eight-year-old girl named Paul?
Of course, my last AmazonJP shipment went to a female friend who was in Japan, maybe they assume I've been pretending to be a foreigner all this time to avoid sales tax? (Which is the opposite of online games, where I usually claim to be from very very south Okinawa, on the grounds that they don't actually ask what country you're from, just which prefecture of Japan.... This isn't a problem, both because I am roughly south of Okinawa, and because Japanese MMOs lost their appeal to me once I realised that the Japanese seem to produce nothing but grinding MMOs.)
On that topic, I was disappointed to see that the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms MMO, at least from the two gameplayvideos posted on YouTube, looks like another grinder. A translation of a beta test announcement however suggests that some level of facitonality will enter into it. Shame, really. ROTK would have been an excellent setting for the MMO I've been dreaming of creating. And sadly, the link to Dynasty Warriors Wave on the Wii is still not actually a link, at the Koei site. They showed this at the Tokyo Games show in 2005. And after the wonder experience The Godfather turned out to be, I was so looking forward to uniting China under the kingdom of Wu with nought but a pair of chakrams, a Wiimote, and the sweat of my brow (and other body parts). I guess I'll just have to grab Dynasty Warriors DS: Fighter's Battle when it ships somewhere in English.
I just now finished watching Dexter, (Warning, Wikipedia article contains unmarked spoilers) which I enjoyed quite a lot. I have to say though, I'd have been frustrated to be watching it week by week. And the second half of the season involved me yelling at him a lot for being an idiot.
Oh, and I joined Mensa the other day. I've spent all week telling people I'm a card-carrying genius, which is a bit of an exaggeration, as I don't know if I get a card (I've been too busy to check my post office box.)
Just to reinforce my genius status, I tonight completed all the character writing and drills for the grade 1 of Kakitorikun. That's 80 kanji, and technically I've got an academic transcript that says I know several hundred, but... yeah. That's not as impressive when I write it down, it turns out my level of Japanese approaches that of an particularly uncommunicative six-year-old. But I have gotten a stamp for every day this month so far. ^_^
I get proud about completely the wrong things, sometimes.
In somewhat more age-appropriate educational news, I'm finally getting back to uni this coming semester, taking Morphology part-time. Work's pretty good about flexible hours and stuff, so this will hopefully only consume time from my life, rather than life from my veins, as per my previous attempts at part-time study. It helps that this time I'm not travelling interstate to work and further again to study. However, I think I'm going to have to withdraw from the ANUAS comittee, as I'm going to be even more pressed for time than I am now.
If anyone from the ANUAS exec is reading this, sorry. I'll prolly make an official announcement this week, although given the way things are going, that's about as reliable as everything else I've promised I'd do for the exec.
Assuming 8 equals 6, it takes the Milky way most of a day to travel as far as light does in a minute.
Just in case you were wondering...
Oh, and server upgrades mean the blog's back online and working. ^_^
I've recently become quite entertained by Nodame Cantabile, having been flicking through a donated volume of English-language manga and then quite co-incidentally seen the first episode of the anime at an ANUAS executive show-selection screening.
At this point unsurprisingly, but still very pleasingly, there turns out to be a live-action series too (predating the anime) which I'll be looking long and hard at including in next semester's ANUAS drama screenings.
I also bought SSX Blur for the Wii on the weekend, as well as borrowing the work copy of Need For Speed: Carbon. Both games are by EA, and both suffered the same control problem, namely that the nunchuck-rolling movement only registers properly if you hold the nunchuck with your wrist fully extended on top. (ie stick your thumb out as far as you can, and then make it parallel to your forearm, palm facing inwards. That sort of wrst position.) This of course works fine when you think about it, but it's not the natural position for the nunchuck, nor is it particularly comfortable.
That of course was not the only problem I hit. NFS: Carbon I found very very very frustrating to play, as the cars would tend to get stuck to a wall, and then come off only to hit the other side at an even sharper angle. Shifting into reverse with an auto gearbox also seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, leading to the situation where if I hit any wall on the course, I couldn't win. Granted, I'm not that good at driving games, so I wasn't exactly expecting the gaming experience of a lifetime, but even so I enjoyed NFS: Underground 2 on the Xbox a lot more.
SSX Blur, on the other hand, was a sharp disappointment. As well as the nunchuck issue, the other problem was that the Ubertricks seemed to be unwarrantedly difficult to pull off. I only managed to get the movement recognised in-game twice, and only once was I far enough off the ground by that point to actually be able to hit the button to end the trick and land. Seriously, this game element could have been saved by simply dimming the screen the button was held down, slowing time, and showing the player the movement the Wii was reporting, rather than continuing to hurtle downhill at breakneck pace while trying to draw Zs and love-hearts in the air.
However, the biggest gameplay disappointment in SSX Blur (Compared to the last one I played, SSX Tricky, against on the Xbox) is the loss of the character chat. It was a great gaping hole in the game that I could no longer enjoy the continuous mutterings of the character (Kaori, in my case, who used to chatter away in Japanese) and was in fact hearing nothing but the sound of board on snow and the inane pseudo-surfer sound of the DJ.
Also, the DJ was very annoying. >_<
The other major loss in SSX Blur was the rider customisation options. In SSX Tricky, I worked repeatedly over the various competitions and challenges, trying to save up enough money to buy the many many many neat, cool and downright weird rider outfit components available. There was something about unlocking peaks and whatnot, but seriously, I don't care that much about snowboarding that I'd take the game as its own reward.
Fast-forward to SSX Blur, and after winning three races and one 1 on 1 challenge, I was first on the leaderboard, and had unlocked the second of 25 sets of skis/boards and 0 extra outfits. That's 0 extra, I still had the one I started with. Out of four! Seriously. Four outfits? And they were whole outfits, not the mix-and-match fun of SSX Tricky.
I will concede that snowballs were an interesting new feature in SSX Blur. But there's only so many snowballs you can throw at your opponents before you miss the ability to board into the shop and buy a cuter and fluffier backpack.
Speaking of video games, a friend of mine will be in Japan next month, so I'll be taking the opportunity to score some NDS games to help with my Japanese.
I've attached AmazonJP links to the DS games I'm considering... I'd love to hear some thoughts and feedback on these or other suggestions... I'm particularly keen on some kind of fairly simple kanji learning/memorisation game, and something I can scribble kanji into and get dictionary lookups from.
I'll be modchipping my Wii soon, so any suggestions on Japanese-released Wii games that'll be playable with my remarkably poor command of the language would be appreicated too. ^_^
(Side note: Due to 410549, some kind of PHP4/Apache2 bug in Debian/Stable that WordPress 2.1 has triggered, this site's not loading fully. It's apparently only happening on Debian, and upgrading PHP4 to the Dotdeb 4.4 build fixes it, apparently. >_<)
Anyway, here's an entry in my "Why everything that isn't apt sucks" category.
[root@bookcase ~]# yum info kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Available Packages
Name : kernel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 16 M
Repo : updates
Summary: The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)
Description:
The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of any
Linux operating system. The kernel handles the basic functions
of the operating system: memory allocation, process allocation, device
input and output, etc.
Name : kernel-devel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 4.7 M
Repo : updates
Summary: Development package for building kernel modules to match the kernel.
Description:
This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel package.
[root@bookcase ~]# yum install kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 set to be installed
--> Running transaction check
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 set to be erased
--> Running transaction check
Dependencies Resolved
=============================================================================
Package Arch Version Repository Size
=============================================================================
Installing:
kernel-devel i686 2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 updates 4.7 M
Removing:
kernel-devel i686 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 installed 14 M
Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install 1 Package(s)
Update 0 Package(s)
Remove 1 Package(s)
Total download size: 4.7 M
Is this ok [y/N]: Y
Downloading Packages:
(1/1): kernel-devel-2.6.1 100% |=========================| 4.7 MB 00:21
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing: kernel-devel ######################### [1/2]
Cleanup : kernel-devel ######################### [2/2]
Removed: kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6
Installed: kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.19-1.2911.fc6
Complete!
[root@bookcase ~]# yum install kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Nothing to do
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -q kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
package kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 is not installed
[root@bookcase ~]# wget http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/i386/kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm
...
11:36:50 (141 KB/s) - `kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm' saved [17169362/17169362]
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -i kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -q kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6
[root@bookcase ~]# yum info kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Installed Packages
Name : kernel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 46 M
Repo : installed
Summary: The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)
Description:
The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of any
Linux operating system. The kernel handles the basic functions
of the operating system: memory allocation, process allocation, device
input and output, etc.
Name : kernel-devel
Arch : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size : 14 M
Repo : installed
Summary: Development package for building kernel modules to match the kernel.
Description:
This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel package.
This all started when I tried to build a kernel module for the default Fedora Core 6 kernel on a fileserver at MF, only to find that the version magic didn't match, as I had an i586 kernel but i686 headers. No matter the cajoling, I couldn't get it to install an i586 set of headers, or an i686 version of the running kernel. I gave in and figured that due to a security issue, the old 2.6.19 kernel had been retired and the new kernel (2911) was the only one in the repositories.
Which led me to try the above. Clearly, yum agrees there's a kernel image RPM and kernel headers RPM available, both i686, but bizarrely is completely ignoring any requests to install it. And I mean ignoring, no error, no failure, it's as if I haven't listed the pacakge.
Sure enough, grabbing the RPM directly from the mirror and installing it with rpm worked fine.
And just to keep the hate flowing, the default setup of Yum is awful. There's no Australian mirrors in the mirror rotation, so I was getting 20kB/s before thinking to take away its mirror list and force it to use mirror.aarnet and suddenly getting the full effect of our two-megabit-per-second link. And before I did that, if I changed my mind about an operation that was busy fetching things from the network, control-c would kill the fetcher, and yum would then proceed to try the next mirror in the list. The default installation contains a huge list of mirrors (fetched from the Fedora website) which now I look at it, does start with mirror.aarnet, although it also then tells me it couldn't find any mirrors to match AU, despite having just given me one, and lists mirrors all over the shop. And it certainly never seemed to be using one when told to fetch something.
In Yum's defense, I will say that it survived being backgrounded and kill -9d on several occations. ^_^
Speaking of changing mirrors, it doesn't notice when you tell it to use a different mirror, and won't invalidate its cached metadata, meaning it'll reject the downloaded primary.xml.gz. When this happens, it still doesn't clear its metadata, meaning if you try it again, it'll fail again.
I feel better, having vented that. And I can hardly wait until we can whack this server and make it a nice Debian box, like all the rest of the systems in here (bar one FC4 box which only has one task, but happens to be in the DMZ...).
OK, one more thing. The Yum instructions say you can upgrade Fedora Core using Yum, but don't. And it'll only go one version at a time, and the box was an FC4 box in need of serious love. So I loved having to grab a four-gigabyte DVD to upgrade a server which is actually less than four gigabytes of system... It would have been quicker to image everything but our data, and FTP that to someone who already had the DVD. Except that it had to come back too. And it turned out to have, for a server, an incredible amount of crap on it. (I've this afternoon removed kde, gnome, metacity, cups, evolution, firefox...) This machine is Raided, backed up and was never ever going to be someone's desktop machine. (I hope).
Although I now understand why there are people who want to upgrade Sarge to Etch, and start by downloading the 8-CD weekly Etch image. And in fact I had someone two weeks ago who was going to install Sarge, didn't have a good Internet connection, and was asking if there was a better way than grabbing two DVD images.
In case you're wondering, the kernel module I wanted to build was ppscsi, for a HP ScanJet 5100C. I wouldn't have had this problem under Debian. ^_^
Posted in LCA07, Linguistics at 6:43 pm by TBBle (Visited 167 times)
Oh you lucky things, today this blog becomes a photoblog!
Anyway, walking back from LCA07 to International House...
An unusual sign was seen in a UNSW parking area
This is probably what they actually meant...
They are of course referring to the same parking lot. But at least they're not in the parking lot of a department which has a large amount of contact with cars and the like...
Posted in Debian, Japanese at 12:34 am by TBBle (Visited 132 times)
Just a quick note, Reviewing the Kanji uses a little flash applet for testing/reviewing flashcards. I'm pleased to announce that it works fine with Gnash 0.7.2 on my Debian/unstable PowerPC laptop. ^_^
Well, now that I'm back on the 'net fairly reliably, I can post on what I've been doing for the past few days.
Firstly, I was off the Internet because I was flat-out busy on Saturday, in transit on Sunday, and wireless did not arrive at International House until about 11pm Monday night. That time I did spend on the 'net today, at the conference, was spent in a combination of processing CBIT emails since Friday, and wrestling with my wireless network card.
My local build of the d80211 version of the bcm43xx driver got signal, would even get traffic through, but when it tried to reassociate to a different AP (all the APs here are running on channel 11... Although I was sitting next to someone who saw one on channel 1, which I'm guessing was rouge... I also saw some IBSS networks on the same SSID....) it would corrupt something nasty, kick the screen brightness up to full and oops with slab errors in short order.
The 2.6.18 (2.6.18-3-powerpc Debian build) bcm43xx softmac driver didn't crash or anything, but generally performed worse, and when the Debian miniconf's theatre (Mathews A) was full, my connection suffered or would completely fail to dhcp. >_<
On the plus side, the presentations were great. AJ gave us a rundown of debian-devel (ie 12 months of flamewars) and other significant Debian going-ons. Keith Packard produced a whole bunch of neat X things slated for X.org 7.3 (input hotplugging, dynamic output selection and modesetting, which is exactly what I need to get the projectors I keep plugging into to work better than 640x480...). Russell Coker talked about the various security gaps still remaining in Linux.
In non-conference goings on, I was talking to someone on IRC who's gotten Second Life Viewer building under Linux/PowerPC (a previously unsupported platform) and I'm going to see if we can get a .deb built. I've already created an ELFIO package, and have the OpenJPEG source to try packaging tomorrow. I've also sent off an email to the person who ITP'd secondlife-client for Debian already, to see if he wants to co-operate, or if I'm just tooling about.
Speaking of tooling about, I decided it'd be a good idea to upgrade my bcm43xx-d80211 build to something more recent than mid December, but it seems the 2.6.20 workqueue changes mean I can't compile it against 2.6.19 anymore. The rt2x00 d80211 stack has backwards compatibility macros for the workqueue stuff, but I don't really feel like hacking those into bcm43xx, it's already a large and unsteady beast.
BTW, cogito's update could handle resuming better. Although it happily detected it was resuming a failed update, it had to keep refetching the packs. I eventually realised it would eventually time-out a fetch if I didn't ^c it and happily try again, presuming I had in the meantime walked outside or reloaded the driver.
Anyway, so I've decided tonight (while I was still off the wireless) that I'd finally bite the bullet and build myself a custom dscape.git kernel, to see if the pain I keep suffering from the bcm43xx-d80211 driver is just my cheap-ass backport. That was still building when the wireless came up, and then barfed because KConfig happily let me include both the PCI and SoC versions of the OHCI USB host driver, which provide the same symbols. I must remember to file a bug report about that, or at least check linus's git tree in case it's already fixed. (Both drivers recommended yes, but are patently incompatible as they require different endianness of the host interface). I've restarted the make-kpkg, hopefully that'll build overnight and I can try it in the morning.
I also put some time into my Remembering the Kanji book. I was going to do an hour, but after about a half-hour (with a break to configure and fire the kernel build off) I was yawning, and figured I'd prolly left the imaginative-memory zone. I was going to watch some Gokusen but thought I'd take a last wander over to the IH whiteboard to see if the wireless was up. Bizarrely, it was.
So I wandered onto the 'net, checked email, volunteered myself to package Thousand Parsec for Debian, added the Kanji I studied to Reviewing the Kanji (a web site for reviewing the stuff you learn in Remembering the Kanji) and updated my blog.
In bad news, the Ryzom.org bid to purchase "The Saga Of Ryzom" from failed developer Nevrax has failed. They were outbid by Gameforge AG. A ray of sunshine is that the project looks like it will continue, and there has already been the suggestion that they instead consider Asheron's Call 2 which closed in 2005 but was apparently quite good.
Co-incidentally, I was in one of the beta tests for Asheron's Call (I don't remember if it was 1 or 2), and today beta-testing applications opened for Tabula Rasa. I don't remember signing up for the mailing list, but I do have a PlayNC account through having purchased Guild Wars, a model I still hold up as being an excellent way to structure a MMOG's income, at least from a payer point of view. Of course, my job here at Micro Forté is as a programmer, not game producer, so my views aren't exactly changing the world... but give it time. ^_^
Poop. Paul Murphy's talk clashes directly with Anthony Town's "State of The Project" address. So there you go, first session of LCA2007 (barring keynotes, which don't conflict...) and I've got a scheduling conflict. >_< Maybe this year the recording will all work...
