Random Thoughts: New Super Mario Bros. U and other stuff

Last night, I used the Luigi Guide on the Final Battle and I could not wait to get through this agonizing experience.  All through my time playing this game, I've felt more and more angered by this game.  It's drudgery.  It's a total drag to play.  It's unfortunately the game my nephew wants me to play.  Whoever thought of the Luigi Guide should be shot.  The idea of making players progress by seeing some scripted play through just downright sucks.  Allowing players to take control right after the segment they got stuck only partially alleviates my grievances of this concept.  I would have preferred a level having dynamically set difficulty configurations than this.  Make the player go through the level and feel like they accomplished something.  I hope never to have to play this game ever again.

Sleeping Dogs seems OK.  The game's mission structure is quite unimaginative and sometimes, just downright lousy.  It's unforgiving difficulty setting also makes for a crazy time for players, but so far, it's been kinder to me for some reason.  Unfortunately, the story just doesn't feel like a Hong Kong film.  The lines and writing feels more like Western games like GTA and Mafia than something from an Ekin Cheng triad movie.

Saints Row IV is HILARIOUS!!!  Enough said.

Mass Effect 3 has been an awesome, awesome ride.  Somehow, playing the Wii U version doesn't feel less or lacking.  Sure there are some small bits and pieces that aren't there, but they aren't significant enough to make me angry.  Great game on Wii U.  Please BioWare.  Please put Mass Effect 1, 2 and all the DLCs on Wii U.  Please.

Saints Row IV Crash!!!

I experienced what seems to be a very common problem with Saints Row IV on Steam.  There are countless complaints about crashes that happen at start up right after the company logos and stuff.  I managed to find a thread that helped me get my game working.  Basically, it involves looking for the display.ini file in the SteamApps copy of SR4 and setting "fullscreen = false" and "Preset = 1".  The game launched afterwards but switching to full screen would crash the game.  Setting it to borderless though doesn't, which works pretty much the same way!

More Tablet Details

So, looking at the Thomson M6 made me curious to see what the SoC is.  Finding the means to unearth that information lead me to look for apps that do that.  There's lots available on Google Play and on SlideMe (for the unfortunate Coby Kyros).  I read the findings and here was what I found.

Thomson M6 Android Tablet

I've been figuring this one out.  It says I have a TF Card which normally means Micro SD cards.  Does it support Micro SDHC?  The manual says it supports it up to 32 GB.  Another thing that bugs me is the processor.  It says it's a Cortex A-5 1.2 GHz but there's nothing on the GPU.  Any guesses?

Random Thoughts: Wii U and the Thomson Tablet

I find myself surprised at how addictive Mass Effect 3's multiplayer is.  The singleplayer story has been a great ride, but I had no plans on ever dabbling on the multiplayer part.  It seems to be very well designed in that it makes the game very hard to put down.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about New Super Mario Bros. U.

For a Mario game, I found myself slowly loathing the game the farther I got into the game.  The levels turn into a total drag to play and the Luigi Super Guide is just not a fun way of pushing the game forward when you've hit your limit.  Alas, my nephew loves the game, so I am forced to tolerate this drivel of a game.

Just got a new Android tablet called Thomson M6.  Here's some pics of the box.

Specifications

Thomson M6

It seems to be a Chinese OEM tablet released in Australia and New Zealand.  After all, how else can the NZ Herald Times app be preinstalled in this?  For a cheap 7" tablet, I found the fact it was dual core very attractive.  The tablet is plenty zippy and it also comes with Google Play Store.  Strangely, it didn't have Google Play Services which seems to be required for apps like Youtube.  You can install it via Play Store though so it shouldn't be much of an issue.

There are two main downsides to this tablet.  First is the screen.  The touch is just plain weird as it sometimes registers incorrect gestures.  Dragging icons seems to be very difficult on this tablet.  The LCD screen also suffers from colour loss when viewed from an angle.  Truly not one of its shining moments.  The second is the battery life which really sucks up fast.

Over all, it seems to be okay.  Doesn't hit all the bells, but for a cheap price tag, that is to be expected.

ORA-01873

Well, I came across some curious issue with Oracle where in I had to increment a timestamp by a certain number of days.  At first, I thought it would be as simple as something like:

SQL> select systimestamp + 2 from dual;

I quickly realized though that the result of this would effectively drop the time component.  Makes sense though as Oracle implicitly converts values so perhaps it was being converted into date (without the time data) before the addition operation.

After some research, I found that preserving dates means using interval in this fashion:

SQL> select systimestamp + interval '2' day from dual;

Well, while this seems to work, the timestamp column I have on my table doesn't work.  Instead, I get this error!

ERROR at line 1:

ORA-01873: the leading precision of the interval is too small

Good grief.  After mucking around with Oracle and reading some stuff up, I came across a rather helpful article by Philip Greenspun.  What I ended up doing was roughly like this:

SQL> select some_timestamp + interval '2' day(3) from (...)

Damn Oracle and their implicit datatype conversions!

PlayStation 3 keeps restarting my router!

I'll keep this post brief.  The Linksys router keeps restarting when the PS3 attempts to log into PSN.  I couldn't get any updates going reliably.  The simple fix happens to be to go to the Network Settings on XMB and disable Media Connection.  The connection became stable right after.

Thoughts on Wii U

First thing I noticed is the constant updates that streamed into the machine.  It was annoying, but it seems to have tamed down.

The Wii U Gamepad was sweet but I couldn't step out of the room and keep the connection to the console.  Pitiful.

Nintendo seems to be in the spot where third party developers just don't care about the console.  Maybe they should instead do everything like them producing games like NBA Courtside, the canned project NFL Retro Football, 1080 Snowboarding and Wave Race.

Old Youtube Doesn't Work Anymore

I'll keep this brief.  Awhile back, I had issues with the Youtube android app as it always had the "An error occurred" error, making me downgrade back to 4.1.23.  Now, the old Youtube version doesn't work at all because it cannot seem to connect to the network.  So, I looked for a replacement and found TubeMate.  It works really well though beware of fake apps!  I have a new post regarding this issue, please look into that one!

Fun with EXCON

I took a bit of time to revisit a fun script I wrote some time back.  I felt it was time to improve on this and build a full parser and encoder using TCL.  Scripting is such a great way of manipulating and playing around with strings.  TCL is my natural choice at the moment.  So the final script I ended up is this.

This will accept a file path and attempt to read the contents.  It will print the output on stdout and can read a long list of EXCON instructions or encode ASCII text into EXCON.  One note on the parser code (which is just the old script).  It will always clear the binary buffer after every line.  The script also does not support the fancy ! instruction call to simply print out the binary value in the buffer by the previous command.

Open Source Radeon Drivers and Power Management

Just a quick note here.  I switched to the open source drivers for the multiple monitors but along with that, my battery life had been slashed by one half.  I used to get approximately 4 hours of life from the fglrx driver and now I have barely 2 hours.  Sad, but the big desktop is more important to me at the moment.

Error 207 (net::ERR_CERT_INVALID): Unknown error

Last night, I came across a curious issue with secure http connections to Google products on Chrome using my Vista laptop.  I could surf normally, but it would always go crazy when it'd go secure.  Researching online a bit for the issue, I've found that there are various causes for this.

The most common cause of this issue is the system date/time.  People advise to configure your date/time and timezone and sync it to time.windows.com.  I checked mine but it was already correct, so I kept looking.

Some of the other solutions being thrown around were clearing browser cache, playing with the SSL/TLS options on Google Chrome (via Under the Hood).  One serious suggestion was virus infections and a tampered hosts file (e.g. C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts), but I checked and there was nothing wrong with the file.

At the end of it, I found that Google, at one point, posted a note saying they fixed a browser bug, so I decided to update my browser.  Lo and behold, it fixed my issues.  But that doesn't mean it's the be all and all solution.

Done! Goodbye fglrx!

In short, I've given up on AMD's drivers.  I waited as long as I could but there is just no improvement.  The notes here details on how I got rid of the fglrx and switched to open source.

Basically, I followed the instructions from this article for removing.  I did not however perform the steps to reinstall the open source drivers from there.  I ran the software sources application and clicked on the open source drivers, applying the changes and letting it reinstall the packages.  Then, I deleted xorg.conf and rebooted.

Voila!  Multiple monitors are back!

I'm ditching fglrx

After months and months of using this piece of sh*t driver.  I've decided that when I do get a bulk of time to sort this out.  I'm going to switch back to the open source drivers.  Having a big desktop is more important than the power saving stupidity I'll suffer from with the open source radeon drivers.

Revisiting fglrx and multi-monitor setup on Ubuntu 13.04

I really hate that multi-monitor is broken for muxless AMD/Intel hybrid laptops on 13.04.  I've gotten all the way to the latest 13.11 beta and the problems remain.  However, I did uncover some interesting things.

The desktop display options have always been conspicuously absent on amdcccle.  It seems to have been caused by the RandR 1.2 extensions being enabled.  According to this link and this link, it seems I have to disable RandR from xorg and amd's own config file.  One day, I will get to try it on my own.

1. Edit /etc/ati/amdpcsdb and add EnableRandR12=Sfalse on the [AMDPCSROOT/SYSTEM/DDX] section.
2. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add Option "EnableRandR12" "false" on "Device" section.

Playing Sims 3 on Origin Offline

I'll keep this brief.  I lost my internet connectivity all morning and thought it was a good time to test Origin and Sims 3.  All that I've seen online suggests that Sims 3 will only work online due to Origin's insistence of logging in when running the game.  So when I ran Origin, it gave me a login window and a note that Origin was not available (due to the internet).  I logged in anyway, and then Origin went to my library but also setting the client to Offline mode.  I was able to launch Sims 3 and Mass Effect 2 like this without issues.

A small note on Mass Effect... you will not be able to connect to the Cerberus Network.  You will get an error message but you'll be able to load your save just fine.

F You EA...

Once upon a time, I chuckled over the news that Electronic Arts was named 'Worst Company' by Consumerist Readers for a second year in a row. Over blown? At the time, I would think so, yes. My first hand experience leads me to believe that there's more truth to this than I originally expected.

This all started with me downloading Mass Effect 2 on Origin Games. The game started without much issues but when I attempted to register the product code to BioWare's social community website, the code was rejected. Not much of a big deal, but I figured I could slip in a ticket to see if EA could lend some assistance while I plow through the game. Looking back, I probably should never have.

EA did come back with a response and after a few back and forth response and some verification questions answered, they supplied me with a new product code that BioWare's site happily accepted. What I did not realize was that they had added another copy of Mass Effect 2 in my Origin account. What's the big deal? Lots.

This new copy was wrecking havoc with the license activation in my laptop. When I launch the game, I am greeted with this "Invalid License Reason Code = Invalid Cipher (0x0006)". Well, isn't that nice?

I scoured the web for solutions. I also reopened my ticket with EA pertaining to this issue and the only thing they did was delete the ticket. Yes. Delete. Gone. Needless to say, I was infuriated by their actions and submitted another ticket. That one did not fare any better as EA just decided to close the ticket with an empty promise of coming back to me with 'expert' assistance.

I've found out that EA holds its license files at C:\ProgramData\Electronic Arts\EA Services\License\*.dlf.  I've tried deleting the dlf file and repairing install but to no avail.  I also went through the trouble of redownloading the game which failed to make any difference.  Finally, I had a eureka moment when I realized I was doing all this hullabaloo with the new and faulty Mass Effect 2 copy.

I shut down Origin.  I deleted the dlf file.  Turned Origin back on and then used the old Mass Effect 2 game and repaired the install.  It threw a couple of errors a couple of times before finally working.  The game downloaded an additional 60 MB of which I have no idea what they are.  Then, the game started.

No thanks, EA.  Your help site is convoluted and crappy.  Your assistance broke more than fixed things.  I... FIXED my problem.

LA Noire - Poor Performance and Possible Solution

I had suffered through more than half of the game with such appalling performance on LA Noire on my aging Vista laptop.  I'm not one to complain so I chucked it off as just less than low performance.  It's almost like my Witcher 2 days coming back to haunt me.  On one particular case, the frame rate woes were really starting to get grating so I just had to dig up information on this.

All my graphical settings were set to low and I was playing on an 800x600 window and it was still stuttering.  The only option I didn't touch was 'Threading' which I left at Multi.  It seems like my research has lead me to believe that the game has issues with the threading on specific hardware (e.g. dual core processors) so I took a leap of faith.

Changing the Threading to Single was the kind of performance change I needed.  The improvements were dramatic and the game was playing fairly smoothly now.  I feel like a fool for even tolerating such poor performance.  Now it's time once again to find where the performance threshold is on my Intel Core 2 Duo laptop.  I hope this helps others who are suffering from performance woes.

Random Thoughts: 39 Steps and Rhythmbox

I've been playing a lot of Story Mechanics' 39 Steps which is a digital adaptation of the book of the same name (I presume).  Ever since I played Sega's 428, I've always thought that that presentation nails what a story adventure could be.  Story Mechanics takes the presentation style almost exactly the way I would have hoped.  I don't like so much the pixel hunting that happens in a few of the sections, but generally, this is bang on.  Good job on the game as I'm enjoying a lot of the experience.

Also downloaded their soundtrack for free but, it's a bit strange as the formats aiff and wav seem to play tricks on Rhythmbox.  Rhythmbox would not allow me to set the album details, and I had mistakenly set the album art for all "Unknown" works.  Bah.  I went to look at ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml to see if I could figure it out but there were no details on the album art.  

Turns out the album art is stored in a trivial database format in ~/.cache/rhythmbox/album-art/ and I just used the file timestamp to find the latest one and erased the file.  Album art gone and then I used audacity to re-convert the music files into mp3.  Love the soundtrack chaps!  Love the game too!

Brütal...

These past few days, I've been playing more and more of Brütal Legend and while I have enjoyed the action bits immensely, I am starting to see more and more flaws on this game.  When the game focuses on Eddie alone, things are fine.  When I got those idiot hair bangers, things get a bit more management heavy and overbearing with the constant use of guitar solos and troop management while being there in the battlefield with them.  After some failures, I got a bit of experience and pressed on.  Then... stage battles.

Boy, these blasted stage battles.  Now, instead of being an action game, I have resource management, commanding hordes of idiots, use the guitar solos and then figure out which of those fan geysers to get.  I absolutely did not enjoy them.  I thought they were a chore.  Guess what?  I play to have fun.  When it becomes an absolute drudgery to play?  I quit.  That Tim Schafer has to write an open letter to explain how this game is supposed to be played just underscores how out of place it is in this game.

Shame because the soundtrack is awesome.  The writing is silly and awesome as well.  I cannot tolerate the stage battles.  I just can't.  Uninstalled.

Public Service Announcement: Do not upgrade FGLRX to 13.9 STABLE

I've been on the fence on upgrading to 13.9 after reading that it's possibly based on an older driver.  Right now, there seems to be a clear sign that that is indeed the case.  Hang on till October, 2013 for the new driver release.  I hope they actually FIX the dual screen issues though managing code for 2 different graphics manufacturers (muxless hybrids) is quite a tall order.

Brütal Legend and Steam

So, after going through some really disappointing Indie games, I get to Brütal Legend which was a great surprise.  It works on Linux and it plays really well.  I had minor problems figuring out the controller support but this Steam thread should be helpful.  First thing is first though, you should configure the gamepad on Big Picture.  The shell script needs some Linux reworking to get rid of the dos \r stuff, but once you've cleaned it up, it will grab the SDL configuration for you.  The script is modified for Costume Quest (which funnily enough is modified from The Cave), but it's easy to change the paths for your install of Brütal Legend.

Good luck and save that SDL config file!

Random Thoughts: Dragon Age, LA Noire, and more...

Another edition of the Random Thoughts for me and it kicks off with Dragon Age: Origins.  I've finally gone through all the extra content the game had to offer.  I had played through Awakening, Golem of Amgarrak, Witch Hunt as the last pieces of unfinished business on that game.  So, here I am to ramble a bit.

Blasted Dragon Age Bugs!

My experience with Dragon Age Awakening sure is deteriorating.  First off, I got slammed by a damn bug that prevented Sigrun from taking the joining.  After reading wiki pages about the quest, I had to repeat the last part just so I could trigger another bug that would get her to do the joining before the conversation ever comes up to convince her to join the Grey Wardens.  After that, I thought it was going to be smooth sailing, but then, here comes another one!  Mischa is inexplicably missing in Amaranthine!  Damn it!  Damn it!  Damn it!

Random Thoughts: Google Hangouts and Dragon Age

Google forced the switch, abandoning Google talk in favour of this new Google Hangouts.  All I can say is that this app absolutely blows.  Suddenly, my chat list is populated by:

1. Acquaintances I don't chat with;
2. Mailing list e-mail addresses;
3. People I've only reached out via e-mail once or twice.

To make matters worse, the only way to fiddle the list is to go to another Google service and basically delete people you don't want to chat with.  The UI to get to the contact I want to chat with is also incredibly cumbersome.  Google?  This software is a piece of shit.  That is all.  Moving on.

Rune crafting sucks.  Don't like crafting.  Never did in any RPG.  To see that Dragon Age: Awakening doesn't have any vendors that sell armour runes better than novice ones suck.  Abso-freaking-lutely sucks.

While I'm at the 'This thing sucks' mode, I would like to say I never liked Dragon Age: Origins' cute puzzle to get the Sacred Ashes.  Awakening has a few optional ones, and I don't like any of them.  Still, BioWare did a heck of a game series and I'm still looking forward to Dragon Age 2 (despite the complaints of everyone who has played it).

Downgrading from 13.04 to 12.10?

Generally, 13.04 is fine for my nVIDIA desktop, but on my HP laptop, I'm very unhappy with it.  The lack of a dual head setup is seriously killing me (Thank you, AMD...) and after the recent updates, my touchpad click button is now playing tricks on me.  What do I do?  Do I downgrade to 12.10?  Will the next Ubuntu release fix all of these issues?  Hmmm...

I intentionally upgraded my PC first and give 13.04 a week on that machine to make sure everything was spiffy.  This grace period was for me to decide whether or not to upgrade my work laptop.  I see now that I should probably not be upgrade happy with my work laptop but that will mean I will get stuck with the same problem I had before, which is getting stuck on old releases forever.

It's been a rough week...

TCL and the Blasted Dates!

So, I've had a programming task to do on TCL that involves things that I don't normally use.  This one was basically to take the first Sunday of a specific Month and Year.  After some time of researching and testing, I figured it out.  This entry is just for archival purposes.

% clock format [clock scan {Sunday} -base [clock scan "2013-05-01" -format {%Y-%m-%d}] -format {%A}] -format {%Y-%m-%d}

Base sets the base time for clock and the format for the return can be tweaked to whatever you want.  It's also worth taking note that -format parameter on clock scan only works on TCL 8.5 and above.

Random Thoughts: Linux, and Dragon Age

First thing is the important part.  I don't normally do message sending on Linux, but lately, having to maintain servers, it's been a critical way of communicating with another user logged in so both of you can coordinate while on that server.  So, I will just leave this note.

Use the wall command which broadcasts messages to everyone logged in.  It's an extension of the mesg command (use man pages, mate!).  Type wall, then hit enter.  Then write your message (20 lines maximum).  EOF (typically CTRL+D) ends and transmits the message.

Second point.  Dragon Age Origins: Awakening which so far has been a cruel drag to play.  Something about the writing is absolutely uninteresting and the game really gets a bit more fun to play for me when I'm not having to deal with the main plot quests.  Ugh.  Plus, why is BioWare so keen on stripping my Warden of his gear to make me lose inventory items?  This happened twice now.  First with the damned Sacred Ashes quest and then on the Silverite Mines.  Bah!  Dragon Age Origins is great.  Awakening is teetering on the not-so-good area.

My Autodesk Sketchbook Express Workflow

This entry is primarily for archiving my techniques for finger painting on my Android device using Autodesk Sketchbook Express which I have learned to really like.  It is a shame that my WIP files are lost with my tablet's demise, but I still have a few of my works saved.  More of the guide after the jump.

Dead Iconia Tab

So I got the stuck Acer logo on startup after the tablet froze on me while playing Magic 2014 (awesome game, by the way).  From the looks of it, for whatever reason, the boot loader cannot get ICS running so it's always stuck on the Acer logo.  I've read dozens of articles for resetting the tablet using the Volume Button +, Power button and then flicking the flip lock screen and the first time, it got through just fine but I still ended up with the stuck logo (strangely enough, I used the Volume Button - for my device).  Second time resetting only got stuck with the "Bootloader v0.03.12-ICS: Starting Fastboot USB download Protocol".  Well, ain't that nice?

I'm bracing myself for a busted NAND memory.  It sort of makes sense that if the data is truly corrupted because of hardware faults, then the machine is toast.  It also doesn't look like I'm the only one suffering from this.  I love my A500.  It's a splendid tablet, but this just has to be grating to experience.

Sad day.

Fighting games and Wine

I have 2 fighting games that I have gotten working on Wine.  First is Guilty Gears Isuka from the Gamers Gate release.  The controller support is a bit wonky when you start the game, but pressing any arrow key stops that.  You can also reconfigure the game though I don't quite remember anymore what I setup.

Second game is Street Fighter Alpha 2 from GOG release which is reported as garbage on WineHQ but actually works.  The shortcut the game creates is to the GOGLauncher.exe which doesn't work.  You have to run ALPHA2.EXE directly from the install folder.  The game will then run fine.

Dark Age Chronicles: The Wolf of the North

It took a while, but I finally finished another installment in this series.  It's called The Wolf of the North and is hosted on scribd.  Hope you enjoy it.

Here's a link to the rest of the collection.

ORA-29861: domain index is marked LOADING/FAILED/UNUSABLE

I ran into this issue today and thought it was worth blogging about to keep track of things.  Basically, this just means that the Oracle index is unusable, broken, loading, whatever.  To resolve this, you might need to rebuild the index or drop the index and create a new one.

Some useful SQL:

select owner, index_name 

  from all_indexes 

where domidx_status != 'VALID' or domidx_opstatus !='VALID';

This will list down the bad Oracle indices for you to fix.

drop index [index_name];

alter index [index_name] rebuild;

create index [index_name] on [expression];

I think these are self-explanatory.

EA Origin Store Client on Wine

I have had some issues with Origin beginning last year where the client would just crash and crash.  No matter what version of Wine I used, it wouldn't run at all.  I moved through different Ubuntu distro versions and still no luck.  The crash point is C:\Program Files\Origin\Origin.exe: double free or corruption (!prev) and it seems to happen sporadically. After poking through the wine bug entries here and here, I figured out how to get the client to run reliably.

Since I installed my Origin client on a 32-bit Wine prefix, the commandline you'll see here is specifically for that.

WINEPREFIX="/path/to/wineprefix/of/origin" WINEARCH=win32 taskset -c 0 Origin.exe

Try it and see if it works!

FGLRX Post install do's...

This is a good precaution to do because updating your packages can inadvertently cause you to download bad versions of the fglrx drivers.

$ sudo apt-mark hold fglrx fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-dev

AMD FGLRX 13.8 BETA Driver

So, I updated my drivers to 13.8 Beta today using this guide.  The install is no different from Quantal but it's just to make sure I don't make any foolish errors.  I also took the liberty to remove the xserver-xorg-video-intel package that was used by a hack.  As it turns out, there is progress.  Now fglrx will load up without having to use bogus outdated intel video drivers.  The bad news?  Using an external monitor still does not work.  It is clearly a regression with fglrx drivers with 13.04.  That's just how it is with AMD, I suppose.

Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition and Wine

I'll keep this brief.  This was a fairly helpful thread on that front.  Tricky getting the options.ini stuff going which seems to cause crashing.

Progress on the fglrx dual monitor issue

Here's a nice little progress.  I think the root cause of my dual screen woes is the solution to get fglrx working in the first place!!!  This is some spectacular failure on AMD's part, but what else is new with AMD with Linux?

AMD did put out 13.8 beta drivers.  Hopefully, I can ditch the stupid solution and get my 2 screens back!

Worth looking into is the seemingly "Official" bug on launchpad.  Someone posted a possible workaround by disabling SNA acceleration.  Certainly worth a try.  I hate apt-marking outdated packages.

Section "Device"
      Identifier "intel"
      Driver "intel"
      Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"
EndSection

Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition: D3D Error 16:10 Not Supported

I'll keep this one brief.  Had a problem with Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition on Steam where the game refuses to start.  This Steam thread helped me get this one sorted.  Basically, open your Windows Explorer and go to %appdata% location and look for MKKE.  You'll find the dxdiag.txt file.  Open it and change the Dedicated Memory to 1024 MB.  Save the file and set it to Read-Only.  This will trick the game into thinking it has enough Video RAM to run the game.  Then watch the game reconfigure the settings.

Youtube Android Woes

So, on that old Eken tablet, the Youtube app started acting up.  I am treated with the "An error occurred" when attempting to sign in with the app.  If I try to play any video, I get the "Unsupported video format" error which doesn't make sense at all.

So, I started looking into a possible fix for it when I found this helpful link.  Turns out, it is the answer!  I used the Youtube 4.1.23 apk off the web and it works like a charm.

Progress on the fglrx dual monitor issue

So, I've been poking around and I'm noticing that xrandr is printing out some very funny things in 13.04.

On 12.10, this is what xrandr tells me:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2390 x 768, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS1 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 309mm x 174mm
VGA1 connected 1024x768+1366+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 267mm x 200mm

On 13.04, notice the difference in resolution:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2390 x 777, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS1 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 309mm x 174mm

VGA1 connected 1024x768+1366+9 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 267mm x 200mm

So, this is why the screen seems pushed to the side and is causing the whole misalignment of my desktop.  There must be a way to set xrandr to how it was in 12.10.  I have to keep looking.

I've tried to reconfigure xrandr:
xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1366x768 --pos 0x0 --output VGA1 --mode 1024x768 --pos 0x0 --right-of LVDS1

This gives me the correct xrandr configuration on 12.10:
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2390 x 768, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS1 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 309mm x 174mm
VGA1 connected 1024x768+1366+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 267mm x 200mm

But this did not fix my error.  The screen would go off just the same.  This feels like a regression on xrandr and/or fglrx.

Unsurprising Failure of being with AMD

Today, I upgraded my HP Pavilion G4-2123TX from 12.10 to 13.04.  I was very leery of the AMD hardware and I expected problems.  Well, I got them alright!

First off, the AMD drivers bombed HARD.  No amount of reinstall and reconfigure would help.  I would two helpful links that helped me get through this (here and here).  It is annoying to see AMD hardware fail so hard at simply working but such is the life of AMD owners.

Next problem was the wifi.  No matter what I did, I could not get my wifi to work with my security even though everything worked perfectly fine on the old 12.10 install.  I changed my security to WPA/TKIP from WPA2/AES and that seemed to help quite a bit (which messed with the wifi connectivity of my phone.  Ah, c'est la vie.)

Lastly, dual monitor is broken in my laptop.  Broken.  Bad.  Still no solution in sight yet.

Where did my workspaces go?

I'll keep this one brief.  Go to Settings and then Appearance.  Under the Behaviour Tab is a checkbox 'Enable Workspaces'.

Upgrade to Ringtail

I must admit, I am impressed that this panned out much more painless than I expected.  Everything looks a-okay but I did have a problem in getting two things to work.

Google Chrome looks for libudev.so.0 which is missing.  I had to do a symlink from libudev.so.1 to make it work.

Steam's apt repository does not seem to have Raring Ringtail versions.  I disabled the repository for now.  Steam itself seems to be working.

Android cpu usage and disk consumption

I came across an interesting topic on the matter of cpu usage being terribly high on Android tablets.  In my experience and via Watchdog Lite's monitoring, I've deduced that the media scanner in Android is a common resource hog.  I, however, didn't know how to deal with it until now.  Browsing through forums, someone pitched the idea of using a storage analyzer.  This will give you an idea which folders in your system hold the most number of files and which are eating up your space.

Using such tools and there are plenty on Google Play, I found that a lot of the Gameloft games have huge number of files and which ones have large disk space consumption.  Since the media scanner is such a darn plonker and has to scan your entire system, we need to make it stop from the insanity.

What I did was place a bunch of .nomedia files on the largest folders that I know shouldn't be scanned at all.  It seems to help with performance quite a bit!  As far as I can tell, the file also kills folder lookup recursion, so it should help the media scanner behave.  Try it!

Thought about the Pavizio X3...

For my mum, I thought of buying her another tablet and saw the low cost Pavizio X3 tablet.  It's this one.

Comparing it with the Eken W70 that we already own, most of the features are identical except for the 4 GB internal storage, which is really tiny.  What caught my eye though was that the processor was a "Boxchip A13 1.0 GHz" compared to the Eken's Cortex A9 1.5 GHz (WM8850), which got me digging deeper into it.

Turns out it's an Allwinner A13 SoC which contains an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU and a Mali 400 GPU.  So for a cheaper price, you get a crappier processor and less storage.  Good to know!

Mono Journey Update

I've been pinging ideas to one guy I know who's knowledgeable in .Net and he brings up a good point. Porting the methods function by function into C# won't do the job because .Net and Win32 API are just very different beasts.  Instead he advised me to look into the code and discard the platform invokes.  I think I may do just that.

Google Chrome and the Auto-Complete Address Bar

This is just to notify how to clear the bad website URLs that show up on auto-complete.  When you type the word and the suggestions come out, highlight it with the arrow keys and then press SHIFT+DEL.  Clear out your text and attempt to type again to verify that the entry is gone.

Grabbing the new Hipchat release on Ubuntu

Thanks to Yuri Sklar for the tip!  There is a new hipchat release and it's mighty fast.

First thing's first.  Uninstall the old stuff.  Hipchat uses a generated deb package so you just have to grep for the name and apt-get remove it.  Uninstalling Adobe AIR is as simple as doing: sudo apt-get remove adobeair.

The new Hipchat client can be installed by following the instructions here.

http://www.ubuntukiller.com/2013/04/how-to-install-hipchat-in-ubuntu.html#.UZQAQUAW2Kk

Essentially, it amounts to adding: deb http://downloads.hipchat.com/linux/apt stable main to the apt-get sources and then installing the apt key.

Official Site

Dabbling on Mono and SyntaxBox

My friend and I were working on a few programming projects on the side and he spoke about his sources being in .Net.  Ugh.  Okay, I guess that makes Mono my only option.  And, unfortunately, SyntaxBox, the control he's using, isn't really 100% managed code.

So, what I did was pull in the mono packages that I would use.  I didn't know what to apt-get, so I just got these:

sudo apt-get install mono-xbuild

sudo apt-get install monodevelop

sudo apt-get install mono-gmcs

These seem to get most of the stuff including the soft debugger.  Then I installed subversion to checkout the source.  I also poked at previous efforts on getting it to run on Mono.  Correcting the cases is just the start of it and I got to the exact same crash point.

Looking at the source code for this crash: System.EntryPointNotFoundException: GetDC made me realize that the code was depending on a bunch of Windows dlls for its Native functions.  There's a slew of them, but all of them can be found on NativeMethods.cs.  If I'm going to have any chance of porting this, I'd need to write the code for these.  (Wonder if Wine's implementation gives clues...)

There's a first time for everything, and I always wanted to dabble in Mono.  Should be interesting.

Using chmod

Just bumped into an issue with chmod.  I tried to put setuid permissions in a file by doing chmod g+s but instead of giving me the small 's' permission.  It was giving me a capital 'S' permission.

Turns out, capital 'S' means the underlying 'x' permission is not set.  So, doing chmod g+x fixes this so the capital 'S' turns into a small 's'.

Random Thoughts

I discovered that Cheese crashes on my HP laptop.  The good news is that guvc works just fine.  I'm happy with it so bye bye, Cheese!

I just got the AMD Catalyst 13.4 stable.  Unlike the beta releases, the fglrx deb packages have the version numbers, so that's a good thing!

Ubuntu 13.04 upgrade prompts is showing up now.  I'll keep waiting till they get their issues sorted.

WPA Conclusion

After fooling around with this piece of crap WPA support on my usb wifi connector.  I decide it wasn't worth the hassle and set WEP right back up.  I decided to just setup a more secure 128-bit pass key and be done with it.  My connection was still locked at 54 Mbps anyway, so... whatever.

Update: WPA, Ubuntu, and my Linksys WUSB54GC

I've been analyzing the logs from syslog and kern.log and I can see no real errors happening during the instance of the failure.  I can further confirm that reconnecting will not fix the connection stability.  Also, I can clearly see that rekeying does not bring down the internet connection.

What seems to stabilize the connection is if I re-apply my router settings on WiFi.  Then, it will run without issues for a while and then run into the connection drops.  It doesn't totally disconnect from my access point.  It just seems to lose packets.  But since there's no errors in the logs, it is unclear why this error happens at all.  I did read some person saying that when the device would scan for 802.11 n access points, the connection would momentarily fail.  I doubt that is the case, but I've reconfigured my router to be 802.11 b and 802.11 g for the outside chance that my router causes weird problems with 802.11 n.

WPA and the Ralink RT73 USB driver

After many years of using WEP security with MAC address filters so I could accommodate my old DS and my (dead) Zaurus to use online connectivity, I decided to make the switch to WPA-Personal with the same MAC address filters.  This is when I discovered that the Ralink RT73 USB drivers has an issue when the router does the WPA group rekey.  It seems that as soon as the router switches the secret keys, the device has trouble coping with the connection.  The connection becomes unstable and it seems that I have to disconnect and reconnect to my access point to get a stable connection.  I am still digging information on what to do about this and I want to avoid ndiswrapper as much as possible.

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 13b1:0020 Linksys WUSB54GC v1 802.11g Adapter [Ralink RT73]

and here's the entry in my /var/log/syslog

wpa_supplicant[1060]: wlan0: WPA: Group rekeying completed [mac address] [GTK=TKIP]

Eken W70 Tablet Boot Issues

Last night, the Eken tablet would get stuck in the ICS boot splash and refused to go to the actual tablet login screen.  It made me look to see how to get this thing into system recovery mode.  A little bit of Google helped, but documentation on this piece of machinery is hard to come by.  I did find it though so, here's how.

1. Make sure the tablet is off.
2. Hold down volume + button and the volume - button and then press the power button (to boot up the tablet).
3. Keep the volume buttons held down until you see the red text appear on the screen asking for confirmation.
4. Release the volume buttons and hit the power button to confirm.
5. The Android bot should appear with a revolving object.
6. The machine will automatically restart and boot to the restored settings.
7. All your apps are gone so you'll have to reconfigure everything.

Update on Street Racing Syndicate

My last test on Wine with Street Racing Syndicate was to disable winegstreamer.dll using winecfg.  It cleared out some of the clutter of the errors and I got this one:

MPEG-1 system streams not yet supported

Simple enough, I downloaded quartz via winetricks to see if it would clear out the issue.  As it turns out it didn't.  The game still crashed.  I suppose it's back to Windows as far as this game is concerned.

Wine and Gstreamer woes?

I stumbled upon this bug report on winegstreamer noting that it's broken on 64-bit distros.  I wonder if this is related to my issues with Street Racing Syndicate.   Hmm...

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Ubuntu, MultiArch, and Wine

I've been attempting to install Street Racing Syndicate using Wine which should have been relatively straightforward to do, I reckon.  Running the game however, I am constantly treated with a crash and I suspect it is caused by this error dump.

(wine:3543): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstxvid.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstxvid.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:3543): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstpython.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstpython.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:3543): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmplex.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmplex.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:3543): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmpeg2enc.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmpeg2enc.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:3543): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstfaac.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstfaac.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

This got me researching into Ubuntu's state of multiarch support, figuring out that packages like 

gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad:i386 and python-gst0.10:i386 were conspicuously missing even though I had installed ia32-libs.  As it turns out, I have conflicting library packages and Ubuntu hasn't really fixed this particular issue.  Sad to say that it looks like I will have to dig up ole Vista to play this one.

Making gamepads work

Thought I'd drop this little link here for those who need help with getting gamepads to work on Steam.  Here's another link based on Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection.

/boot ran out of space!

I realize that installing new updates filled up my /boot with unused kernels.  I managed to get rid of the old kernels by doing:

sudo apt-get purge linux-image-3.5.0-1{7-generic,8-generic,9-generic}

This will get rid of the linux-image-3.5.0-17-generic, 3.5.0-18-generic, and 3.5.0-19-generic images.

Python scripts crashing with setLocale?

There are instances when I get Linux servers that have misconfigured locales and I don't have time to really fiddle around and fix these issues.  So I get these python scripts crashing out on me like with this locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,'') and going locale.Error: unsupported locale setting with no real solution in sight.

One way to move forward is to do:

export LC_ALL=C

Fake USB Pen Drive Update

A teeny tiny update to this counterfeit flash drive.  I had ChipGenius scan the thing and also was able to open up the case to dig up some substantial information on it.  All that after the jump!

Fake USB Pen Drive

My brother was having trouble with a Transcend 8 GB flash drive and brought it to my attention so I could take a closer look.  I could never get the drive to work on Linux, but I never knew why.  I also didn't ever get a chance to take a closer look at it.

Once I began digging into it, I started to see something interesting with this drive.  According to Linux, it bore the Vendor ID: 0011 and the Product ID: 7788 and all over the internet, I saw plenty of references to point to me that it is a fake flash disk.  They also recommended to use ChipGenius to see just what the actual disk was.  Here is what it yielded me:

So ChipGenius says it's... 

VID: 058F PID: 1234.  

Chip Vendor: Alcor Micro 

Chip Part-Number: SC708 (FC8708)/AU6987/AU6990 - F/W 2EDD

Flash ID Code: 98D59432 - Toshiba - ICE/Single Channel [MLC-8k] -> Total Capacity = 2 GB

I will look for the FC8708 MP Tool to see if it's the one that will resurrect this.

Windows 7 Remote Desktop Connection Display Resolution

I don't use Windows a lot, so every time I have to meddle with Windows, half the time I can't find options and settings to what I want to happen.  This is one of those moments.

On my Virtual Box install of Windows 7, sometimes, I mistakenly change the resolution and force Windows to set a specific resolution for the remote desktop inside Windows 7.  This article answers how to change it back to full screen.

Run Remote desktop connection without connecting to any of the IPs and click on Options and Diplay.  Then change the slider to large.

Problem with MergeList on Ubuntu

Today, I got this strange error from my laptop on apt-get where the package lists could not be opened.  I found an article that basically says:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf
sudo apt-get update

Should about remove the bad files and regenerate them.

Lessons on Android and Multimedia files

First off, if you're looking to skip folders from being scanned, put the .nomedia file inside the folder.  Second, using my A500 for music has lead to several particularly annoying issues.  Putting music in the micro SD card is just bad news.  Very, bad news.  My music players would pick up duplicate entries of the music files which is reminiscent to my problems with the original Google gallery.  That app would pick up and duplicate entries in its cache when the micro SD card needed to be reloaded.

Lesson learned.  Do not put music in the micro SD Card.

Cleaning up the crap takes a bit of time and effort, but if you've isolated your files in a folder, that's good.  Rename your folder and put the .nomedia file on it to keep Android from re-scanning and grabbing those poor files.  I then used Winamp to purge all the music in the library which just removes Android's internal mapping.  To be sure, load up each of your music players and make sure none of the music gets picked up.  Move your music folder to /sdcard and remove the .nomedia file.  Reboot your device and then run a music app which should begin re-scanning your device for media.

Hopefully, that will tidy up your music player.

Catalyst beta drivers update

Hell yeah!  AMD's 13.2 beta 6 drivers work.  Finally!

Finally some answers...

I've been, on occasion, scouring the net for answers on my AMD hardware on Ubuntu.  Support has been incredibly awful but I wasn't surprised.

lspci describes my hardware as: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Thames XT/GL [Radeon HD 7600M Series]

This provided me with an interesting article that seems to explain a possible solution to this problem.  Essentially, it looks like you need to install the latest beta driver from AMD to get things pseudo working.  Specifically, the post mentions that the 13.2 Beta 3 version works on the laptop.  Ubuntu distributes the 12.6 Catalyst which is virtually unusable here.

One has to wonder when Ubuntu plans to put the aforementioned driver in the repository.

Update:
An additional article that discusses this on Ubuntu.

Here is the launchpad link for Ubuntu's fglrx stuff.

VIM tip

Coding using vim?  Once the syntax highlighting goes bonkers, type in... :e

Ubuntu 12.10 and FGLRX

Regarding the AMD crap driver on Ubuntu, this write up seems like a good one to keep handy on this blog.  I am going to wait for some dkms deb packages to arrive because there's no way I'm doing those custom driver installs now.  Still, the article is a good resource to have.

HP Pavilion G4-2123TX and the Realtek Card Reader Update

So, I saw a kernel update come in today from Ubuntu and I noticed that the rts5229 module wasn't being loaded.  I checked the driver being used and its: rtsx_pci.  I uninstalled the rts5229-dkms deb package and tried my SD card reader and Ubuntu loads it up without issues.  So I'm lead to believe that the new kernel update includes the drivers for these.  Good job, Canonical.

My current kernel is linux-image-3.5.0-24-generic.

Some thoughts...

Next time you install graphics drivers, check with the manufacturer's website before grabbing the driver directly from nVIDIA or AMD.

Saints Row The Third is insane!

Updating Vista...

Vista has been utterly slow and it's taking days to update it.  This just references the issue I had with installing SP1.  It first won't show up in the Windows Update but apparently it's a matter of installing all the updates it needs.  When it did show up on Windows Update, it kept trying to install and it wasn't happening.  This article helped out.  I downloaded SP1 and SP2 from the article and am going through installing them via safe mode (F8 on startup).

It works!

The dkms deb package from the previous post works... or so it seems!  This is good!

More on the Card Reader

This blog post managed to explain much of the situation.  I also may try his kernel module deb package to see if it works.

HP Pavilion G4-2123TX and the Realtek Card Reader

So, it looks like I found a missing driver on Ubuntu 12.10 for the Realtek card reader that came with my new laptop.  lspci identifies the device as Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5229 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01).

Apparently there are quite a few bug tickets (here and here) that talk about that.  Furthermore, it looks like Realtek has already released the drivers and one forum thread discusses how to install it.  Apparently even linux-next has the drivers already.  So when is this support finally coming??

I know how to compile drivers, but I ain't doing it.  It's a headache considering that Ubuntu keeps changing drivers and I have to recompile them to make them work.  No thank you.  Maybe it's about time I read up how dkms works though...

Plan B

Over all, I'm not particularly worried about the data on my laptop.  Gotta say, it makes playing around with it easier.  Fiddling around with the letters didn't work so now I'm reading up this blog post to set the Acer Recovery partition as active.  Let's see how it goes.

Goodbye Gutsy... or not.

Sometimes, when you're tired, you do something really, really dumb.  So I decided to clean out the Linux partition on my old Acer laptop.  I had also discovered that the DVD drive can't read anything and the Acer recovery partition is throwing a fit on me by complaining about the dreaded missing GUI (*.WSI) files and it was giving me the error reason 0xa0000001.  Before it had dawned upon me too, I had made GRUB totally useless by purging the Linux partition (Way to go, idiot!).

To boot up my Windows Vista partition, I downloaded unetbootin and setup my 1 GB usb stick with Super Grub Disk.  Allow unetbootin to install the SGD because SGD2 doesn't work with it.

From SGD, the first thing I tried is to fix the Windows boot which would effectively kill GRUB on the mbr, but this did not work.  Using the Boot & Tools menu got me to select Boot Partition and start up my old Vista install.  At least I got to boot it!  Now to make my recovery partition work!

For resource, I'm going with this forum thread.  This reminded me that the way the partitions where setup when I got them was that I had an C: partition with the label ACER and a D: partition with the label DATA.  Since all the drive letters were mucked up badly, and Acer doesn't do a good job to make their recovery routines robust, I think I'll try to get my laptop partitions setup to resemble the way it did back when it was new.  Hopefully then I get finally get the factory reset stuff to work.

Annoying stuff on my HP laptop

First of all, the dual head stuff with the radeon driver is just crap.  One time, it went to hell and dropped my resolution to like 640x480 except it was all in a corner of the screen.  Second time it went crazy, the settings auto-reverted to mirror mode.  Dumb stuff.

Wifi isn't as good as I hoped it would be.  After a while, it would stop seeing my router and connect to a different hot spot.  I have to perform QPC on my router to make it connect again.  ARG!

Final Post on Star Wars: The Old Republic (Probably)

I just checked the Winehq Appdb entry and it looks like people have been able to get it to work on vanilla wine.  Check out here and here.  I used Play on Linux all this time so I was stuck with 1.5.0 forever.  Hope it helps whoever wants to run the game on Linux.

Random thoughts...

Dug up a bit of the fglrx woes with my laptop and I figured that this was caused partially by bad code on AMD's part (what else is new?) and the regressions on the intel driver.  Truth be told, I don't know whether my laptop uses the hybrid method of Intel HD and Radeon 7670m but that seems to be the case judging by the Xorg logs.

I saw on the logs "screen 1 deleted because of no matching config section" and seemed to ramble on about some intel stuff that I was not aware of.  This launchpad bug seemed to corroborate with the evidence thus far.  From what I gather, fglrx is 12.9 which doesn't seem to support the Xorg version that my Ubuntu install came with.  

At the end of it, it really comes down to simply being happy with the open source radeon drivers.  I know never to trust AMD cards on Linux.  This just proves me right once more.

Moving on, a few days ago I quit Star Wars: The Old Republic.  The grindy gameplay and the overly negative community accelerated my exit.  Part of me felt like I wasted the months of play away.  Part of me felt sad to leave the splendid story unfinished.  When I moved to Walking Dead however, all that evaporated.  Walking Dead was a refreshing change to that game and provided me with what I thought was a great representation of modern point and click adventures.  Telltale has finally redeemed themselves after the utterly boring Monkey Island games and the insulting Back to the Future game.  Good job, guys!

Setting up my new laptop...

I bought the HP Pavilion G4-2123TX and so far, it's been great.  Most of the hardware seem to work out of the box.  The only sticking point thus far has been AMD which continues to be an absolute failure of a company in the Linux world.  I half-expected AMD graphics drivers to suck on Linux, but had hoped that Valve's Linux push would mean decent fglrx releases.  I was wrong.  So wrong.

When I installed my Ubuntu 12.10 on my desktop running nVIDIA hardware, the process was relatively painless.  There's a few hoops for sure, but everything worked fine afterwards.  Well, AMD is a truly a POS when it comes to Linux support.  I've tried to install the kernel headers, and configured their fglrx drivers repeatedly and it only produced issues.  Way to go Ubuntu and AMD.  It's apparently a known issue, and one that hasn't been solved until now.  Seriously.

Keyboard going haywire after remote desktop...

For the past few months, I have, on occasion, experienced my keyboard being non-responsive after disconnecting from a remote desktop session from my Android tablet.  It seems to be intermittent and is usually detectable by the numlock light flashing intensely.  Now, I have narrowed down the cause as having the remote desktop session and Wine running.

I had Steam for Windows running so I could download a Windows game, and using the remote desktop session with it would cause the keyboard to go nuts.  The only way I could type after was reconnecting remotely and using the soft keyboard of the tablet.  Disconnecting and reconnecting the keyboard will not work, so it might be an X.org issue going on here.

Prepping for War: Laptop Compatibility List

Been digging up the Ubuntu forums and finding as much information as I can to make the most informed choice.  I found this thread which seems to be very informative.

Prepping for War

I had asked around for other laptops I could get without the wretched Microsoft Tax and they are: HP G4-2123TX and G4-2129TX.  Overall, the specifications look good except for the fact that they use AMD Radeon cards, which I have vowed never to ever buy again, and that Ubuntu support is rather mysterious.

To me, it looks like the Lenovo G480 has comparable specs to the G4-2123TX laptop but looks and sounds like it'll work better.  The nVIDIA graphics chip is also a neat bonus on top of it.  So, I've begun digging up as much as I can over its hardware compatibility woes.  The only one I've seen is the lack of the alx driver for the network interface card.  Here are the additional details on the issue and the solution from the Ubuntu launchpad ticket.

A few thoughts...

My DSi XL suddenly refused to connect to my WiFi even though it works on all my devices including my old banged up DS (circa 2004).  After a short check with Nintendo's site, they recommended a Quick Power Cycle (QPC) of the router.  I unplugged my DSL modem (disconnected while playing SWTOR!!!) and my router (for 30 seconds) and hooked everything back.  My DSi XL connected once again fine.

Been slowly pushing my graphics detail on SWTOR while still playing on Wine and am noticing a few things.  Unlike Witcher 2 where I played on horribly low resolutions, I couldn't take 800x600 on SWTOR.  Adding Bloom and High Shader Complexity slowed the game down too much, but setting the Shader Complexity to low gave the game a nice layer of polish while not compromising too much in terms of performance.  Still managed to play the game at 1024x768 on Wine.  So, nice!

A New Laptop for a New Year

The Great Hunt is on.  With my old faithful Acer Aspire on its last breaths, I felt that I needed to look for a new laptop that provided me with some performance and portability plus comes with a blank OS or Ubuntu pre-installed.   This is a tough order as most machines here come with Microsoft stuff tacked on.  I found a reasonably priced Lenovo G480 that comes with no OS and while I feel like I could roll the dice for this machine, I've read threads about its compatibility woes with Ubuntu, at least with 12.04.

All this has made me go through Ubuntu's rather useless site of certified hardware.  The website is rather useless when it comes to searching for performance equipment, so I had to do some Google magic on it.  My preliminary list of target hardware are:

i7 CPUs

• Lenovo V480
• Lenovo V580
• Lenovo Thinkpad W530
• Lenovo Thinkpad W510
• Lenovo Thinkpad T510

i5 CPU Laptop
Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E530

Ubuntu friendly just don't cut the mustard anymore for me.  I'm looking to zip and go so I'm hoping to see what the machine specs are.  Hopefully they are sold here without an OS too!

Reading Oracle Exception Errors

Something I've never really been accustomed to is deciphering Oracle's cryptic feedback.  Those OCI_NO_DATA errors are downright frustrating, but at least I know better now.  Always have exception handlers (exception when no_data_found) your blast triggers.  And learn how to read Oracle's line numbering!