Mass Effect 3, Origin Cloud and Wine

So, I had installed Mass Effect 3 on my Windows Vista laptop and also on my Wine Linux box and I decided to use Origin cloud to sync up everything so I could play on the go on the laptop and at the Linux box when I'm around.  On Vista, it picked up my Mass Effect 3 saves from Wine, no problem.  Apparently, I had issues when I was syncing my saves back to the Wine box.  At first, I simply chalked it up to Wine's own deficiencies and moved on.  When I went around to copying my saves from the Vista laptop to my Wine box however, I noticed that all the files touched by Origin's cloud save on Wine had 000 file permissions.  I also checked that the files were of the same size as the Vista files I copied.

I infer that this means the cloud sync actually worked but only the file permissions were goofed up.  Next time, I will try to simply chmod this.  As an additional side note, cloud syncing on Wine only works when launching Mass Effect 3 since Origin in Wine cannot detect when the game is finished running to sync back the progress.  The only way around this is to exit Origin, then restart again.

Nintendo DS Shoulder Button Unresponsive

I have to slap my head on this as I used to do these sort of cleaning tasks back in the day with the Famicom and the Megadrive.  The old DS I have started having issues with the R button.  It was responding at random and so I thought the button was just busted.  In fairness, the system is really old, and literally glued together due to numerous abuses from other people.  I decided to do a quick Google search for possible solution and the simplest solution to give the button a good and hard blow should do the trick.  There was probably way too much dirt on the contacts and this was apparently all I needed.  Phew.

Random Thoughts: Youtube Channel App on Wii

Yes, I still use my Wii on some occasions.  Usually, it's just to browse the web or use the Youtube app and its hapless streaming and buffering insanity.  I remember long ago before the html5 video days that Youtube videos used to stream at 240p reliably on the Internet Channel but those days are long gone.  While the Youtube app plays videos at crisp visual detail, the buffering insanity means you'll barely ever get to watch anything.

Last night, I had an idea to improve my usage experience of this horrible app.  This is to play only videos with smaller resolution when encoded on Youtube.  You'll spot video preview images that sport a letterbox-like black borders versus those that have the full screen when you search for videos.  I think that these imply the video source uploaded to Youtube was not ideal and the server encoding ended up producing odd borders.  Less video image information per packet, should mean better buffering, hopefully.  I tried it on one video and got reasonable streaming performance.  I will look for other videos and see if this theory works.

As a funny extra random thought.  Try browsing the Nintendo Miiverse using the Internet Channel and laugh at Nintendo.

Fglrx on Ubuntu 12.10

After my excursion with the wifi, I went to AMD's site and downloaded Catalyst 14.9 for Linux.  I also had to do more apt-getting for fglrx.

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential cdbs dh-make dkms execstack dh-modaliases linux-headers-generic fakeroot xserver-xorg-dev lib32gcc1

Then follow the steps here.

Going back to Ubuntu 12.10

So, installing Ubuntu 12.10 on my HP laptop came with some unforeseen issues, but I think they are mostly sorted at this point.

After install, I had to go to /etc/apt/sources.lst to change all references to old-releases.ubuntu.com which is to be expected from an OS that is no longer supported.  I also decided to grab all the updates which took a bit of time to do.  It asked me to reboot which turned out to be a bad decision as I forgot to install the kernel headers and source which meant I had no wifi when I rebooted.  Why on earth did Ubuntu not auto-install the kernel source when these dkms dependent packages need them is beyond me.

So, to solve the lack of wifi from my Broadcom Wifi Card (4313, if I'm not mistaken), I had to boot back to the old kernel.  Right after the laptop's POST and just before booting Ubuntu I hit the shift key to get the grub menu.  The old kernel is at the advance option.  This allowed me to get my wifi back.  Then, I did some serious apt-getting.

$  sudo apt-get install linux linux-headers-generic kernel-package

After that, I loaded Software Sources and disabled and re-enabled the Broadcom drivers which did some apt-getting and dkms work on its own.  Reboot after and voila, wifi on a new kernel.  Now for fglrx.

Fedora Core 20 and Virtualbox

I liked Fedora Core 20's interface.  I think it's right up there with Ubuntu's unity.  Unfortunately, it seems as my HP laptop cannot really run what I need to run from my backed up Virtualbox install.  So, I will be purging this and installing Ubuntu 12.10 which was the last Ubuntu release that was very problem free on this laptop.  Anyway, this blog post details the issues I came across while getting my backed up Virtualbox image to work.  More after the jump!

Backing Up and Restoring Oracle dbf

I had a brief excursion into installing Oracle and playing around with dbf files and figured to understand how to move the actual dbf file as a backup of the database and then restore it in a completely new installation.  These are notes I made using default parameters on Oracle and I'm not crazy enough to go into detail on what the hundreds of customized Oracle installs are available out there.

An important step before copying is to shutdown your Oracle instance and database.  So use your sysdba privileges and shut it down.  Then, basically, I copied the entire oradata folder from my ORACLE_BASE path into an external hard drive.  Along with that, I also copied the flash_recovery_area which contained the RMAN information as well as the revision of the database.  NOTE: the database from oradata must match the control.ctl file from flash_recovery_area.  If you startup the database again, the ctl file will be different and the backup won't work.

After reinstalling Oracle, I moved the oradata and flash_recovery_area from the fresh install into another folder (as precaution) and copied over the ones from my hard drive.  Then, I did:

SQL> startup mount;

SQL> recover database until cancel;

SQL> alter databse open resetlogs;

Then you can log into SQL*Plus and verify that the data is intact.  Afterwards, shut the database down.  This seems to take a long while to do but it will finish eventually.