Playing Descent 3 on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10)

In the tribe5 pre-release of Ubuntu Linux 7.10 I managed to get the nvidia drivers working after a few updates.

Make sure to run

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Regularly when you are in pre-release, as changes are happening all the time.

So, here I am at 1:45 in the morning, bored again, and I break out my Descent 3 CD. Actually it's an ISO backup, but I do have the CD in the bookshelf, so don't sue me. I mount the ISO to make it look like a cd drive, then do the following in the root of the CD.

sudo bash setup.sh

It asks me if I want to run the installer, and it also asks me if I want to install the mission data. Say yes to both.

After you finish the install, say no when it asks you if you want to launch d3 now. Then do the following

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 /usr/lib/libGL.so


You have to do this, because if you dont, you will get the following error:

jonnyro@jonnyro-desktop:~$ descent3
Failed to load library [libGL.so].

Descent 3 Message(Error: Failed to load library [libGL.so].
)

System Error


Happy gaming. If you have any problems running d3, just comment here in the blog and i'll be happy to help you out.

P.S. If you use the --nointro argument to descent3, you wont have to insert the second CD. it just skips those pesky intro movies.

Get your linux gaming on :)



P.S. There are very few places, if any to buy the linux version of the game. If you send me a picture of you holding up the windows CD, i'll hook you up with an ISO of the linux CD. Even better, an MD5sum of the first of the two windows CD's.

md5sum /dev/cdrom # or whatever you happen to be using

Suzuki X-Head

Head on over to autoblog.com and check out this insane concept vehicle from Suzuki. It's like those VW vehicles that are like the bus, but with an insanely long truck bed.

Autoblog: Suzuki X-Head

I freaking love this thing. I hope they make and release it here. Full size pic after the link.

learning how to skateboard

I had about an hour introductory lesson on skateboarding from a co-worker after work let out on Friday.

I think I really enjoyed it. I completely dig the whole jump off when things go bad ability that I do not have when rollerblading.

I was thinking about getting a BMX bike after some shenanigans with mountain bikes at my former university (UCF). I think skateboarding will be more fun to start though.

Books: A sequel to Spin, awesome! Axis

Axis - a sequel to the amazing Hugo award winning Spin.

I love sci fi stories that span a lifetime. They start with kids, who grow up looking at the stars, and then takes them through adulthood on epic tales. Spin was like that. I cant wait to read Axis, to get a background on the mysterious universe started in Spin.

I'm a sucker for just about any book that's won the Hugo award. I read Spin almost completely in one plane flight. My eyes were about to bleed but it was worth it.

Oh yea, and PS, my library is delivering the book to my home when it becomes available next. I love the library so freaking much.

Books: The Accidental Time Machine

I loved this book. It's a very easy sci-fi read. More like a sci-fi adventure book. I am loving Joe Haldeman's writing. I have not had this much fun reading sci fi in a long time.

The Accidental Time Machine

I got my copy from the library. I freaking love the Orange County Public Library System.

I found this book, and others by the same author just randomly strolling through the aisles. This is my favorite way to find new stuff to read. I used to do that all the time in high school while I waited for my mom to get off work to carpool home. It's been about 10 years since I've just wandered a library, and it's good to be back!

Hahahaha

Visit the source: here

I love the lolcat.

Amazing photos of birds at sunset hosted on a mac flowerpot

A gallery of amazing photos of birds at sunset. Hosted on a friend's web server, which happens to be both a flower pot and a mac.

read more | digg story

Microsoft should abandon vista

Best article i've read all day: Microsoft Should Abandon Vista

ilovejeeps forum

I have to check this site out later.

Found it through google.

http://www.ilovejeeps.com/forums/index.php

PHP Code to display ATOM feed

I had been wanting to create a portal page that displays the headlines of several of my blogs that are currently hosted on blogger.com. The code I have found at the following link should make that possible.

http://www.the-art-of-web.com/php/atom/

Note, if you are using the Gentoo Linux operating system, you will need to enable the nls, and unicode use flags. As per this post on the Gentoo Forums. If you do this, you will need to recompile php and restart apache.

Insane wheeling video, via orlandojeepchat and pirate

Corn Smuggler posted this insane wheeling video on Orlando Jeep Chat

Direct link to post

Awesome test suite, check how your page looks on a mobile device

ready.mobi lets you see how your page will look on a mobile device, and provides warnings and tips about possible gotchas in your site layout.

I cant wait to test this out with my offroad forum OrlandoJeepchat.com and streamline how it looks for mobile users. A lot of site visitors use treos to check posts from the road, and while ready.mobi does not explicitly list the treo, i'm sure that checking it against the mobile devices that it does support will provide benifits to all mobile users visiting the site.

Dare we go for a 500GB Tivo Series 2? I think we may

Was looking at this very cheap 500GB IDE hard drive from WD on Newegg

I already have a 120GB drive in my series 2 tivo, but I think I might go bigger. I used to have two 200GB drives in my series 2, but the heat from both drives made the tivo a bit unstable. This would give me increased capacity, and still keep me in a single drive!

Remote Assistance Helper - if this is what I think it is

If this is what I think it is, I cant wait to try it out. I spent a lot of time searching for a tool like this last week. It seems to be code for generating remote assistance requests in a single click. Something i've wanted to do for a while to set up an easy way for users to generate a remote assistance request targeted to the IT staff at work.


Remote Assistance Helper on Codeplex.com

By the way, their site layout is really clean and cool. I like it when code sharing sites dont have the "5000 links per page look."

Update: The site is run by Microsoft, and even I, the consummate microsoft hater, will admit, it looks damn good. Description from the site:

CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. You can use CodePlex to create new projects to share with the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site and provide feedback. A word about Microsoft’s role: Microsoft does not control, review, revise, endorse or distribute the third party projects on this site. Microsoft is hosting the CodePlex site solely as a web storage site as a service to the developer community.

I'm hoping to find lots of good .NET source code here.

Yahoo vs Gmail

Yahoo vs Gmail

I want to read more about the gmail macros that they talk about here. I think some of these already work, since i use the j/k keyboard shortcuts all the time.

Got the link originally from doggdot.us, a news aggregator site I use often.

Zimbra Toaster is Awesome!

The Zimbra toaster is awesome. It lets you launch zimbra to send an e-mail from mailto links in web pages. This saves me so much hastle. Plus it polls for new e-mail all the time and loads outlook style toaster popups from the task tray.

Go Zimbra Go!

I will be truly happy when the Toaster can check for installed software versions, like the current version of Outlook, as well as any relevant windows MAPI files, and the Zimbra Connector for Outlook version. This way, support personnel can get a snapshot of what's going on in the system, which would be very helpful for troubleshooting problems with the connector.

Zimbra Toaster Announcement

TuxType - typing tutor for kids

"Tux Typing" is an educational typing tutor for children. It features several different types of gameplay, at a variety of difficulty levels.

http://tuxtype.sourceforge.net/


Summary: it's a game, and a learning tool. Get the kids on it now :)

Note if you are on windows, you will need to download the win32 binary. If you get stuck, just let me know and i'll help you out.

Some reading for me

Windows software update service

Using Group policy to deploy applications

Multiple monitor control panel: Ultramon

Remote Desktop vs VNC

Windows Desktop Sharing API

Terminal Services Team Blog - WDS API Introduction - bummer, only available on windows vista or above.

Offering remote assistance API - "Summary: This whitepaper details the information necessary to build a customized solution based on the Offer Remote Assistance feature of Remote Assistance. The objects and sample code provided below may be used to integrate the Offer Remote Assistance solution into the workflow of a help desk organization. (23 printed pages)"

Access add/remove programs information

Get list of installed programs via registry

Wrapping the windows installer API in C#

Working with Delegates in C#

Terminology:
Static method handlers
instance method handlers
delegates
factory method

Other random info:
Tivo HME Development Kit - developing custom applications for Tivo, to be run on your home network.

What you see is what you get editor for mediawiki

Apparently, some others have been wanting the same things as me. My users complain all the time that mediawiki pages are hard to edit.
Admittedly they are not IT folks, but they are my target audience for my company intranet.

http://www.parand.com/say/index.php/2005/07/27/wysiwyg-editor-for-mediawiki/

Zimbra Aquired by Yahoo

Congrats to the Zimbra team! All your hard work has paid off.

http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2007/09/yahoo_acquires_zimbra.html

insane break dance video

Windows socket error with pidgin when using AIM?

This worked for me,when I was experiencing Windows socket error #10060 errors. I dont know why it worked, but it did. The info came from a forum post in one of the tek tips style sites.

Open pidgin
Click on accounts near the top
Go to "Add/Edit"
Find your AIM account in here. Highlight it
Click Modify at the bottom of the Accounts window
In the modify account screen, click on the Advanced tab
Change the server to login.messaging.aol.com
Change the port to 80

Save your settings.

Apparently the default server entry is actually a DNS alias to login.messaging.aol.com, so rather than put that, I just entered login.messaging.aol.com directly. It may or may not work for you, please post if it does.

Update: Just changing the server name did not fix my problem. This thread on LinksysInfo.org (What's wrong with WRV200 now) gave me some tips that make me think the problem lies with my router. Dossy on #pidgin on irc.freenode.net also suggested changing the port to 80, which I have added to the instructions above.

Go Onion Go: Parents outsourcing child care overseas

Report: Many U.S. Parents Outsourcing Child Care Overseas

bored saturday, ffmpeg and audacity rule!

Using Audacity, FFmpeg, and Fast Video Download (Firefox Addon), I recombined two youtube clips into one. All of this was done in Ubuntu Linux. Note that since the source videos contained mp3 audio data, you will need to add the MP3 codecs to your system. You can do this via Automatix, a GUI tool for adding all the extra codecs and programs that don't come by default in Ubuntu.

I didn't do it using a video editor. Details at the bottom.

Combined Video first.



Source video one.



Used the audio from this one.



Use Fast Video Download to download the videos from YouTube. They come down as FLV files.

ffmpeg -i source.flv -vn source_no_video.wav
ffmpeg -i source.flv -an source_no_audio.avi

Then open up audacity, and mix up the audio however you want, but keep the length the same. I just add another audio track in audacity, import the extra audio file, then trim, generate silence, cut, paste, etc.

Once you are done with audacity, export the file as a WAV file, with the same number of channels as the original. And use ffmpeg to put your monstrosity back together!

ffmpeg -i source_no_audio.avi -i new_audio.wav output_special.avi

And there you go!

every treo should come with a bottle of crown for the admins

For close to $600, every treo should come with a bottle of crown to give to the IT staff.


And who the hell is ACCESS. If they ever start making cars, RUN! This logo pops up every time the phone reboots. Apparently pressing the e-mail button causes this.

attempting to freeze the suck out of the treo.

Watch as the treo is threatened with a toxic CO2 cloud.

Show 71 is already out on Ramdom Thoughts, but i'm a few days behind schedule, as K just notified me that there was a real gem in show 70. Here's a link to the file off of divshare:

http://www.divshare.com/download/1698158-1c0

The player below if you like.




Check out this almost completely unrelated article in the Torontoist: Zombie Dance Dance Revolution

And the reason the Torontoist is now part of my subscribed RSS feeds, the beautiful gem found there. The ballywood Thriller:



The video below, random find on youtube, gets the FLAWLESS VICTORY AWARD!

Carmageddon 2 plays fine using wine.

FYI, if you can find a copy of carmageddon, either online or in the stores, it plays fine using the Wine emulation software in linux. It even supports direct3d through wine's direct3d/opengl wrapper.

This is a great alternative for retro gamers who have had serious problems getting Carmageddon 2 to work on Windows XP or Vista.

BurnMyTreo Blog

As a testement to the most hated device in my arsenal, I have created a blog called Burn My Treo.

The theme of it is, "this device not only hates you, it makes you hate yourself".

Converting a web page to plain text, like code samples that are in HTML

I came across a very interesting article on using Lynx or Linemode console web browsers to convert a HTML formatted page to plain text. This comes up more often than I would like since I often find code snippets online in HTML form that have been syntax highlighted. However if I just copy these items to the clipboard, then try to paste in vim in a terminal, the spacing gets all messed up. I'm not sure if i'm doing something wrong there, but this seems to be a good alternative.

For example, this page PHP_GNUPlot.htm shows some PHP code I want to use internally. It's syntax highlighted. I'd prefer to have a plain text version that I can scp to my web development box and just start testing.

This is where lynx comes in. Right on my web development box. I run the command

lynx -dump "some-URL" > my-text

Update: I forgot that in Firefox, IE, and Mosaic you can just go to File/Save As to save the page as plain text, which solves your problem right there. Either way, it's still nice to have a way to do this strictly from the terminal, so I'll leave this article up.



Resources:

http://www.w3.org/Tools/html2things.html

The hated firefox session restore feature

I do a lot of work on the web, including dealing with some pretty javascript intensive applications.

This means that firefox crashes, a LOT. And when it comes up I get that stupid irritating "would you like to restore your previous session message". I hate clicking through it, because generally I dont want every tab I had open before to come up. So I googled around and found this page.

Browser.sessionstore.enabled. It details how to turn off the session store feature using the about:config URL in firefox.

If you like me are not a big fan of the session store feature, I highly recommend that you disable it.

I'm in your torrents

Hilarious and depressing article. Love the lolcat

Comcast blocks torrents