Android ICS Irritation: Application Not Responding

I started getting some slow downs with my last few days of Honeycomb.  Launching apps had gotten generally slower.  The stock browser paused damn too much.  Everything was becoming a painful experience for me.  With that, I looked up Elixir 2 and Lookup Ad Detection to figure out just what was happening.  No matter how much I inspected the 'top' command output, I couldn't see anything that was really causing a bottleneck.  I then looked up the ad network apps that were in my system.  It was there I realized that there's a chock full of these that come with your freebie games.  Without hesitation, I proceeded to zap away the multitude of freebie apps that were hooked up in these ads.  Truth be told, I don't know which one did it, to be honest, but I could definitely sense a good change in speed.  It wasn't enough though.

EA at Ubuntu Developer Summit!

"We are a platform agnostic company." - Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Ha!

Acer A500 and Ice Cream Sandwich

Ever since the word got out that Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich or simply ICS) started going out, the wait for the update has been infuriating.  Every time I check my device for updates, it has always insisted it didn't have any.  I knew it was already out there though and its inability to find it was aggravating.  People had mentioned that the Iconia Tab Updater needed to be updated but as far as Google was concerned, it was which only made matters more irritating.

Finally I decided to go to Acer's local support website and looked for this apk and bit the bullet.  As soon as the app replaced the one installed by Google, it picked up 4.0.3 right away.  I knew ICS had problems but I was willing to bite the bullet.  After the update went through without a hitch, I've decided to write down my thoughts on this.

Thoughts on Witcher 2

I don't know what to think of when it comes to Witcher 2.  Sometimes, it shines as  such a great game and sometimes I just want to bash my head into a wall.  My experience has been a combination of many things that I really take away from the experience, the first major factor being Wine's own glitches.

Some random stuff...

First off, git sucks again.  For some reason it keeps deleting this file while I'm pulling to update my branch.  Why anyone uses this stupid software I will never know.

Second, one guy in the Witcher forums had been helpful in providing tips to run the game on.  I am advised to try Aspect Ratio scaling to see how that works.

NVIDIA X Server Settings
GPU 0 > DFP-1 > GPU Scaling Method > Aspect Ratio Scaled

Will see how that pans out.

Witcher 2 on Wine Update

Well, the game finally worked!  I installed it and then installed vcrun2010 and d3dx9 after (actually I forgot to do it before install!).  The game wouldn't work so I decided to use the hot fix installer here.  Frame rate was all over the place and starting a new game would just make it load forever.  According to the Witcher forums, it's because the graphics card cannot hack the game, so I was forced to lower the resolution to 800x600.  I'll work my way up from there because it's tiny.  1024x768 also doesn't work.

On a side note, the GOG release includes the Polish voice overs already!

Additional user.reg stuff:
HKCU\\Software\\Wine\\Direct3D
UseGLSL=disabled

Also, mouse warping is an issue.  I remember now that the mouse wouldn't warp back so I had problems navigating and clicking on stuff.  The pains I go through to play Witcher 2...

Mouse warping seems to work??

I ran a test using Tomb Raider Underworld to see if the mouse warping code was working out of the box.  Much to my surprise... it seems to be!  I wonder if it's just because I used 1920x1080 resolution and force mouse overrides.

Cross fingers and hope the findings is true.