Oops! Black Screen of Death!

I didn't realize how much my build-dep istall messed up my system until after a reboot when I was greeted by a black screen with a mouse pointer after logging in from GDM. It took a while to figure out what exactly happened and I've also read people blaming PulseAudio for their cases.

Mine, as it turns out, is a different issue. It seems that after all the installing and backporting of Wine, Compiz broke down and everytime I try to start it up, it goes to a black screen. I was ever a huge fan of Compiz/Beryl because the desktop effects just seems useless to me. I was able to fix it by going to Failsafe Gnome Session and then selecting the appearance not to use any desktop effects. I may go around to looking at why Compiz broke, but as for now, I'm just happy to get my desktop back.

Update:
It seems that it's much more serious than I thought. My nvidia drivers, even though they are loading up fine, is not giving me direct rendering. Going to try and install the latest nvidia-glx to see if it helps...

Wine and Pulse Audio Update

Backporting a newer version of wine right now... and I bumped into a problem with mpg123 because of the 32-bit vs 64-bit references on /usr/include/mpg123.h.

I'm using the patch from this thread to get around that and I'm using the packages provided by Rune Svendsen to build this.

UPDATE:

It works! Running a game without having to use the Pulse Audio wrapper is a good thing. Begs to question why Ubuntu did not include the WinePulse patches in their releases.

Fixing Wine and Pulse Audio

Well, I'm pretty much fed up with Pulse Audio. I'm not sure why Ubuntu ever went this route when it has caused so much audio incompatibilities with applications and games. Hacker Evolution: Untold and Trine are just a few games that lose all sound with this audio system and there's pretty much nothing I can do about it. (Side note: Cogs works splendidly well and it's a very good indie game).

After reading about winepulse, I'm about ready to backport some newer Wine versions with WinePulse integrated in it. We'll see how it goes, and hopefully everything works fine.

Steam Servers Are Too Busy...

Recently, I received a guest pass for a game on Steam which is certainly a welcome surprise (Thanks Anton!). As you may or may not know, Steam's guest pass allows recipients to play the full retail game for a couple of days. In this case, I have 3 days (I think!) to play this new title.

Fire up Steam, and I immediately jumped into this deal, but as I tried to download the game, I noticed something woeful. Each time I tried to install it, I get Steam Servers are too busy. Okay, so maybe after a few minutes. Again, I get this problem. Hmm...

As it turned out, I had spent the entire morning trying to grab the game, compounded by:

1. Steam Servers are too busy errors...
2. Steam freezing on me...
3. My internet disconnecting.

Steam was kind enough to explain to me that the license expiration begins the moment I enable the guest pass key. Splendid. Now, I get to try and download this game and if I'm lucky, I might get a minute of play out of it. What a great deal!

Programming 101 Note

I've had the displeasure of having to sift through someone else's code and trying to fix some really serious kinds of bugs that has spawned from very, very poor programming practices. I've dealt with this code structure many times in the source and I just really want to vent out.

Code like the one below should not be tolerated at all times.

try {

//some code here.

} catch { }

Please, if you're a programmer, DO NOT DO THIS!

Don King's Prizefighter: Joe Calzaghe vs Buster Dog

For a couple of times, I've played as Joe Calzaghe on Don King's Prizefighter and fought some boxers like Chris Eubanks and Andre Berto, for the most part without encountering much trouble nor resistance. I then began to think about seeing how I'd do against my overpowered boxers. Naturally, that meant Joe Calzaghe vs Buster Dog at hard difficulty.

I brought everything I learned from the Andrew Golota fight into this bout, defending smart and moving away when I get in trouble. Also, I decided to give my game plan a little tweak here and there. Normally I'd throw plenty of body jabs to hurt and stiffle the opponent's offensive, but that did not work well in stopping Buster's assault. For this fight, I decided to try and throw more body hooks instead as they are more damaging than the jabs and straights.

At the first round, the speed and power that Buster brought to the table was immediately felt. He got some good combinations in but I kept moving and throwing body hooks. As the round went on, I realized that the hooks were good weapons in stopping his punches. It allowed me to stun him on multiple occasions and really wear him out. It was at this moment that I thought that the fight was pretty much it.

When round two started, Buster quickly reminded me this wasn't the end yet, with him losing none of that speed and power that made him dangerous. I could not put together a better offense here and was at one point, in trouble of getting knocked down. Fortunately, I was able to knock him down to get an otherwise closely contested round.

After that scare, I wasn't going to ease up on him. I made sure to stay diligently on offense and defense. Everytime I put him down however, he just got up, showing no signs of ever slowing down.

By round seven, I was contemplating that the fight was going to go all twelve rounds, as Buster just kept at it and I kept chipping at him, hurting him as much as I could. When the knockdown came, I realized that Buster was finished. The ten count came and I had finally knocked him out.

It was still a tough fight but nowhere on edge like the Golota fight was. Buster is always dangerous if you give him a chance to hit you. This time, I was more than prepared to face him.

Fahrenheit Post-Install stuff...

Well, after playing around with the game, I noticed a couple of things. First is that the dialog cuts like five or six seconds too early. This seems to be something to do with the game's internal timer because the conversations are spoken at a normal pace. Second is that at 1024x768, the game does slow down, making things pretty annoying when trying to interact with objects in the game. I bumped down the resolution to 800x600 which makes the game run perfectly. The last thing is that I changed the Fahrenheit bottle to be the default bottle and that has made the Desktop emulation option on winecfg take effect.

I'm pretty much set and have gone through a couple of chapters so it's been fun overall.