Splinter Cell: Double Agent on Wine Update

Here's a tiny update.  I managed to muck around and get the auto updater to work for this game.

I installed these packages via winetricks: vcrun2003, vcrun2005, and vcrun2008 to get the dlls that the program needed.

Then you run:
/path/to/splinter/cell/da/support/UpdateLauncher/SC4UpdateLauncher.exe

This will download and install the 1.02a patch.  Did it fix Sam though?  Nope.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent on Wine

I got this game off a free promo and for the most part the game installation was extraordinarily smooth! I tried to launch the game from the desktop icon and didn't get much success.  I ran SCDALauncher.exe from the installed path to launch it.  It looked like it was working well until I got to the actual tutorial.

Poor Sam!  I have no idea why this is happening, but I'll keep trying.  So close yet so far!

Strange Wine Scratchy Audio Issue

I had a game that I run on Wine that kept exhibiting scratchy audio and after a few relaunches, it didn't seem to go away like I hope.  I then shut off pidgin and suddenly the scratchy audio went away.  Not sure what the correlation is with how both apps are using Pulse Audio, but it certainly is worth posting for possible further investigation.

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!