Gamescom

Ryan1 Comment on GamescomGames, Games Convention, Gamescom

Last weekend was full of stuff. Saturday we took a train up to the Gamescom in Cologne. Even though the media has been hyping it in the news and says how great it is now that it moved from Leipzig to Cologne this year, I was pretty disappointed by the convention. Even if it is closer (to me) and easier to reach now, the fact the half the games there were clones of Singstar or Rock Band didn’t make things better.

Anyway, after the convention we headed over to the Hard Rock cafe and had some good food before we took the train home.

Virtualbox

Ryan

I’ve been playing around with Virtualbox here at work the last few days (all our MMO games have windows clients, I have a Linux at work), and I must say I am pretty impressed. Before someone comes around the bend and yells “but my favorite virtualisation software XZY can do that too”: I’ve tried a few and Virtualbox is: free, stable, easy to setup and use, has a good performance. The latest version supports Direct3d, so now I can run games that caused problems with wine. Creating snapshots are a breeze too, so I can revert the whole system back to a “clean” version without any problems if I want to test something.

A tip: boot the windows guest into the “safe mode” (press F8 after the BIOS sceen and before windows start to boot) and install the “Guest additions” while in safe mode, had trouble with direct3d if installing in the “normal” windows.

Blog <-> Facebook

Ryanblog, email, facebook, hetzner, Server, web

So I finally got around to getting Facebook to automatically impoort my blog entries. Was easily done technically, all I had to do was decide if I wanted them to end up in the news feed or as status updates. Both had their advantages, but I decided going with news feeds because they provide better formating.

Now I’m back to moving my website and email server to new hardware (websites are easy, email is a bit of a pain).

bash foo

Ryanbash, scripting

Instead of writing tons and tons of small scripts < 10 lines that all depend on each other I have the habbit of writing them as functions and throwing them into one file (easier to edit, less worries about them depending on each other). To be able to use the functions from the bash shell, just add $(basename $0) “$@” to the END of the file, and add symlinks function_name -> file.

Example:
$ ln -s foo.sh foobar

$ cat foo.sh


mobile and online

Ryanbluetooth, online, umts, vodafone, websessions

I just finished setting up my laptop and cell phone so that I can go online from anywhere.  It’s not comparable to DSL speed, but it is fast enough to surf around and use SSH/VNC/Rdesktop. The hardest part was actually not the technical part, but finding specific information what I need to do from my cell phone provider!

After doing a bit of searching I finally found out that what I wanted (surf the internet with my netbook using my cell phone as a modem) seemd to be the “websessions” option at Vodafone. Now you can either buy dedicated hardware that you plug into your usb port (costs money, need to remember to bring netbook and adapter, needs strange software), oder sou use your cell phone and special software from vodafone (which didn’t work at all for me, couldn’t find my phone even though other software has no problems synchronizing my google calendar to my cell phone), OR you just set up a  internet connection in your cell phone with the APN event.vodafone.de and hook it up as a modem in windows via bluetooth. Unsusprisingly I use the last option since it requires neither additional hard- nor software. Just grab the netbook, connect to the cell phone in my pocket via bluetooth, and go online.

Depending on how often I use this I may even have a look into a flatrate. Only problem I’ve had so far, is that my cell phone (a sony ericsson w880i) sometimes seems to hang up the bluetooth connection, and refuse to reconnect until I turn bluetooth off and on again. I’ll have to check if there is a firmware update available.