Shadows Behind a Rising Sun

Added a short story to my Scribd account.  It's a fanfiction of Mace: The Dark Age and is the second entry to the ongoing series.  Read it on the link.

Shadows Behind a Rising Sun

Things to remember with git

I hate git with a passion... and regretfully, I have to keep track of things with git that I always forget.  So, here are stuff I need to remind myself when setting up git:

git config --global user.name "My Name"

git config --global user.email "my@email.com"

git clone username@somehost:~whateverthis/is.git

Two Good VNC/RDP Android Apps

I had an earlier post talking about PocketCloud Remote RDP/VNC and how it was much better than androidVNC.  I have come with the realization that the free app version was restricted to only one connection.  That's not really a deal breaker, but I had an early quirk with the right click from the virtual pointer wasn't really working.  What I began to realize was that the connection was set to operate on Mac environment which meant I didn't have right click.  Switching to Windows environment for my connection setting worked wonders.

The next problem I had was that I had to remote to two machines and I needed another remote access configuration, something that the free PocketCloud app didn't allow.  I began to look for another app that could provide decent remote desktop functionality.  I found Jump Desktop Free which provides the keys I needed (tab, directional keys, etc).  The only usability quirk I had to learn was that right click was tap and hold on the virtual pointer.  To do the mouse drag, you double tap and then drag with your finger.

POSIX Thread Memory Leaks.

For years, I've been hunting down some nasty memory leaks in the applications I've been using.  The code for the most part is inherited and I haven't been able to wrap my head around it.  This latest discovery though after reading some documentation and code has given me something to chase.

Tracking down memory leaks from multi-threaded applications is a nightmare, but I'm seeing some rational logic behind it now based on this IBM article on POSIX threads.

And I quote:

If you create a joinable thread but forget to join it, its resources or private memory are always kept in the process space and never reclaimed. Always join the joinable threads; by not joining them, you risk serious memory leaks.

Well, I'll be damned!

Codemasters' F1 Online Beta

It's a decent browser game but they really need to fix a lot of things.

1. I can tell that this game is going to be a buy to win style.
2. The physical collisions,  shunts and dirty driving really detract from the experience.
3. They should give the option for keyboard controls and the chase camera angle because the game doesn't look bad and some guys want a more conventional driving game.  The mouse is serviceable but it can get disorienting.
4. Penalties for hitting the grass is not severe enough.  Several cars are able to cut corners and actually drive faster than those who honestly go around the circuit.
5. Post race penalties.  Dirty driving needs to be punished.  What better way to do it than applying time penalties after the race?
6. Linux port of Unity Webplayer.  Seriously... it's not even funny.

Location for the Applications Menu of Wine apps?

Here's just to keep track of things.  When wine installs applications, the .desktop files on Wine is dumped in /home/dir/.local/share/applications.  I'm pretty sure it's standard for Gnome desktops, but thought I'd forget about this very quickly.

Densha De Go! Final! and Wine

To get the game working, you need to have winetricks d3d9.  Game works out of the box just fine!

Running with Japanese support on Wine

Wine looks into your system's locale settings to display the fonts for your application.  After installing your language packs from the Language Support window, you can do this to run your app with Japanese font support.

$ WINEPREFIX="/where/ever/is/your/wine/prefix" LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 wine /path/to/your/app.exe

Random thoughts...

I had problems getting Skype video to work on my Ubuntu box.  What I eventually did was to lean back on v4l1.

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so ./skype

I'm moving to Skype 4.0 and wanted to make sure I tracked this change.

Also blogging about my old Acer Aspire 5920g when trying to get the CrystalEye Webcam to work on my old Gutsy Gibbon.  I had a few scripts written and also installed uvcview (I believe).

To get the camera to record, I used this line:

ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s 320x240 -r 24 -i /dev/video0 -f avi filename.avi

Installed luvcview and ran this line to get webcam to capture snapshots.

luvcview -f yuv

You will need libsdl for this to work as well as the uvcvideo drivers.

From lsmod:

uvcvideo, compat_ioctl32, videodev, v4l1_compat, v4l2_common

This blog might help.

$ wget http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Investigation/uvc/luvcview-20070512.tar.gz$ tar zxvf luvcview-20070512.tar.gz$ cd luvcview-20070512$ make$ make install







Configuring Remote Access

A reminder when configuring stuff like ports on remote access.  run gconf-editor then browse through desktop > gnome > remote_access

The Fall into Evil

Just finished a fan fiction of Mace: The Dark Age entitled the Fall into Evil.

Check it out here!