30 November 2005
I’ve been having lots of problems with Linux on my computer. I’m running Ubuntu 5.10 “Breezy Badger” and I’ve been experiencing frequent crashes, segmentation faults, memory corruption, etc. while using the nVidia 3D driver. As most readers would probably know, all good FPS games don’t run without hardware acceleration, thus requiring a 3D driver.
Unfortunately, when the 3D driver is enabled on my Linux system it is terribly unstable and very frustrating when it crashes. Which is a shame, because I get a much higher framerate in Linux: up to 20% improvement in America’s Army! Games also load much faster in Linux, Q3A loading a level in five seconds or less and quitting the game in a split-second. (But why would you want to quit Q3A anyway?)
Well, my Ubuntu system originated from a Hoary install which was done a few months ago. I upgraded it to Breezy (development version at the time) so I could play with GNOME 2.12 and a little bit of compositing. After installing a few games, namely Q3A, UT2004 and ArmyOps, I noticed that it was unstable; crashing after starting or exiting games. Also, sometimes Firefox wouldn’t start after playing games.
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26 November 2005
Well, it looks like summer’s finally arrived.
We’ve been out all afternoon in Sydney as Camille had a violin exam at the Conservatorium. (4th grade and she got an A+)
Before we left, I’d been trying to run a TeamSpeak server on our Linux server which was running Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog (5.04) and TeamSpeak wouldn’t run for some reason, so I got it to upgrade to Breezy (5.10) while we were out.
We were out for a long time, as we went for a long drive around the Rose Bay area 
and we took ages looking for a Pizza Hut eat-in restaurant (no, we didn’t find one and we had McDonald’s instead.)
When we got back (about an hour ago), the dist-upgrade setup had been just sitting there asking me a question so it’s still upgrading now and I’m hoping that the power doesn’t go out until it’s finished, as there is loud thunder outside and there are lots of flashes coming in the window. (And I’m posting this onto the same server that is upgrading now! Hopefully the MySQL database won’t be wiped.)
Update: Dist-upgrade went without a hitch.
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25 November 2005
I downloaded the demo of Quake 4 from iiNet‘s private 3DGamers mirror and it’s looking pretty good.
I’ve already finished the singleplayer campaign included in the demo which consists of three levels (maybe two or four – I could be mistaken as I didn’t really count). Since I’ve only got a GeForce 4 the framerate is quite low (in the 10-20 fps range) which is surprisingly better than Doom 3, which ran at a measly 1-15 fps.
I like the singleplayer mission a lot more than the one in Doom 3. Mainly because in Doom 3 all you’re doing is creeping around dark hallways with a torch where you know that a monster will predictably either A) burst through a wall, B) fall from the roof or C) be just around a corner. However in Quake 4 it seems more interesting as you interact and work with squads and fight in dark creepy corridors and a new addition of open outdoor spaces.
I could relate my first experience with multiplayer to the multiplayer in Unreal Tournament 2004. For some reason the walking motion and just the feel of it just felt like it was a mod for UT2004 or something. The multiplayer just doesn’t feel much like good old Quake 3: Arena.
The game seems pretty cool and I’d like to buy the game in a few years time if it becomes a “classic” title you can buy for 20 or 30 bucks but it’s not going to be worth it for me unless I get a better video card.
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24 November 2005
Oh man, why does configuring the server have to be so complicated?
OK, I’ve kind of got my permalinks working. Well, I’ve managed to drop the index.php out of the permalinks by installing mod_rewrite. And it’s taken me about six months to figure out how to do that, but all I had to do was add the line LoadModule rewrite_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_rewrite.so in my Apache config. (Duh!)
So now I can use my mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess files now.
And that’s my next problem. WordPress isn’t writing to my .htaccess file because it’s whining that it’s not writable, althought the permissions are set to rwxrwxrwx. And the web server refuses to read anything that’s not at least r-x by everyone.
Well, that’s a whole lot of things for me to sort out and hopefully I’ll fix it in the next few days. Or weeks.
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23 November 2005
I really don’t like MSN Spaces. In fact, I don’t like much that MSN offers at all.
Take Hotmail for instance. The interface has been clogged up with advertisements that don’t catch your eye anyway because there are so many of them. And it’s so slow. The underlying code hasn’t been updated since when I first signed up for Hotmail when I was about 10 years old (2000). Which is really bad when you compare it to Gmail. Gmail does have ads, but they’re the world-famous text-based ads that aren’t annoying at all. I don’t even notice them half the time, but I have clicked on text-based ads many times but I’ve never clicked on an ad in Hotmail.
Which brings me to MSN Spaces. (Well, not really, but I couldn’t think of any other way to start off the post.)
The interface is quite similar, but not quite as many ads; the only ones are at the top of the screen.
The theme of the space has rudimentary customisation ability, but you are restricted to themes that come with MSN Spaces. And “theme” is just that. Like a colour scheme, the themes only pattern the background and colour the text. That’s right, you can’t customise the HTML workings of your space or drastically change the appearance, unlike Blogger.com, which enables you to build your own theme from scratch, HTML and all. If you host your Blogger.com blog on Blog*Spot, then it adds a “blogger bar” to the top of your blog, but it doesn’t really intefere with the rest of your HTML and can be turned off if you publish your blog to an FTP site.
If you take a look at MSN sites (and even worse: nineMSN) such as Hotmail and Spaces you can easily see that they’ve been clogged up with ads and “new looks” which still aren’t standards compliant.
But I have new hopes for Windows Live. It’s a Microsoft project to try and bring back some of the web monopoly back to Microsoft after companies like Google have been stealing it with services such as Gmail.
Live.com features a new webmail (we have new hope for Hotmail users), search that sends queries through XMLHttpRequest, a new online virus checker and a whole lot of other stuff. The user interface is clean, and remotely standards compliant with deliberate Firefox support! They are also rebranding MSN Messenger as Windows Live Messenger (in beta status now). I managed to get my hands on a leaked beta download link and managed to get Live Messenger working through a “proxy” application to force Live Messenger to communicate through the old Messenger 7 protocol but I uninstalled Live Messenger a day later because I couldn’t stand running the proxy.
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