With the purchase of a new Canon Digital Rebel XSi comes the almost obligatory new flickr account. I have been resisting but with all this fun equipment I might as well share some of the photos. Hopefully I will be good at updating it regularly.
I recently switched from Ubuntu to Fedora 11 after getting fed up with some of Ubuntu’s annoyances. I have been disappointed with the direction that Ubuntu seems to be heading. They seen to be trying harder to copy Microsoft. One of those annoyances are that Jaunty automatically opens the update manager every morning. Yes I like to keep it up to date, but its my decision when to update. At least they don’t reboot automatically like Vista.
So on to Fedora. Fedora 11 is more up to date which is pretty cool. Having the latest version (Firefox 3.5), dosbox and other packages is impressive. But being up to date had its disadvantages. Such as The ATI proprietary driver for Linux does not work on the later versions of the kernel, so their is no 3D acceleration supported at all. Which made me miss compiz a lot. Its just frustrating to have an expensive card that doesnt work at all. Which makes me think that I will probably go with Nvidia next time, they seem to have better support for most programs as well as drivers. And Fedora conveniently doesnt have a failsafe mode which made reverting back to the old driver entertaining. And the sound seems to pop and click sometimes, which I find extremely irritating. But Fedora’s not all bad for sure. The color scheme is better. Down with brown! I also like that it comes with a good handful of desktop wallpapers. A little thing but I think it makes it feel more customizable. The package manager is kind of interesting. The search and layout in my opinion is quite bad. Its kind of hard to find the packages that you want. But the fact that they seem to spread out programs into more packages if necessary is more ideal then the Debian setup. Like the fact that on Debian you can not remove cheese or evolution because their tied to gnome desktop is a horrible idea. Albeit its gnome’s idea not Debian. But still in Fedora it is not a problem. There is just a package that has the nautilus plugin for evolution which is safe to remove. And presto you can remove Evolution. But once again there are some issues. It would take a lot more work then Ubuntu or Debian to get all my programing utilities and libraries set up. For instance ruby shoes doesnt seem to work on Fedora 11. Which is a big problem for me because I’m doing some development with it. There’s probably a way to fix it, I just didnt want to mess with the symbolic link problems.
So I returned to Ubuntu and… sometimes it seems to be running slow, maybe that was because I was transferring 30 gigabytes between hd partitions but still with my computer I treat slowness, and unresponsiveness as a bug. And it still has that full screen compiz lag bug. Darn Ati. But there will be a new release soon. So hopefully it will be better.
So all in all I’m a little disappointed at the state of Linux on the desktop. It seems worse then it was 6 months ago. The reliance on Mono, etc…
I did some summer cleaning on the website today. I decided to try a new color scheme for a change. I have been unable to find any other good free wordpress themes that fit Virtual Kingdoms, so this is how it will stay(for a while at least). There was also some pruning done on old outdated parts of the website. The About page has been updated to tell a little of VK’s history. And I removed the adsense block, if you really miss it, I might put it back. 
Send a note if you encounter any problems or dead links.
I recently learned about a new free/open source action/arcade game. Its called Leges Motus. It was a class project at Brown University, which after the semester was then liberated. Their site has a good one sentence description: “Leges Motus, the open-source 2D team-based tactical shooter set in zero-gravity.” Gameplay is very reminiscent of a certain game played in a well known science fiction novel. The only problem is that there is no AI. So being a team based game with no one else to play with on the servers has a distinct disadvantage. But this is a great warm up game that you could play at LAN parties. It’s quite entertaining to learn how to navigate your character in zero g, trying to get to the enemy’s gate. I would suggest rounding up a few friends and trying it out. I enjoyed the map “big” which is a huge empty room where one can practice flying using the recoil of your blaster(a little like the American Astronaut Edward White with the zip gun).
Ever since returning from the Yellowstone trip I have been considering getting more into photography. To be specific, I have been looking into investing in a digital SLR camera. I have a Canon Powershot A530 and have been really impressed with its quality. This particular camera (while on, with lens extended) had a high speed encounter with a stationary object. The lens barrel got pushed off the track and looked quite unusable. But with some considerable force the lens barrel was pulled out to its proper position. And I haven’t had a problem with it since other then sometimes the protective lens shutters do not not open all the way. But that’s a lot better than I thought it was going to be. Or the guy at the camera store who told me it was quite broken and would cost less too buy a new one then to fix it.
I have also been very impressed with Canon’s menu interface. The majority of the Yellowstone photos were taken with a Fujifilm Finepix s5700, which takes some pretty good pictures. But the menus are quite a mess. If you want to change a setting you have to go long lists of options. Apparently organizing options in categories didn’t come to their minds.
So With my experience I decided to stick with Canon. I headed off to Cnet and Canon’s official website to see what’s currently being offered. I looked at the various models, checking reviews and prices on Amazon. I have pretty much narrowed down my search to the Canon Digital Rebel XSi 12.2 MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Lens.
So after finding a SLR camera you need to find what lenses you want. About the only thing I knew about lenses was that I wanted to get a telephoto so I could take some bird and wildlife photos. A very helpful site has been Photo Notes’ Beginners FAQ Before reading that guide I only thought about zoom as the almost useless 4x, 10x numbers that point and shoot commercials talk about. Apparently what’s important is the focal length.
So after learning more about the type of lens I want, the searching began. The two best review sites that I found are The Digital Picture and Photozone’s Lens Reviews. I also searched through a myriad of different photography forums deliberating over which telephoto to get. I have been amazed to see how current the information is. It seems most google links to forums seem to be old forgotten topics. But most that I looked at were written in either April, May or June. This largely has to do with the fact that one of the lens I was looking at is a brand new lens, but I still find it interesting. So the two telephoto lenses that I have been looking at are the Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS Lens
So that leaves me on the last step: Trying to rationalize spending that much money. Unless someone wants to give me a free $2000 Amazon gift certificate. Too bad photography is so expensive. But it has been fascinating to learn about it anyway. For instance bokeh is the artful blurring of the background in a shot. Which expensive lens are good at. And I had a good laugh looking at insanely expensive lenses like the EF 1200mm f/5.6 L USM which weighs 36 pounds and goes for $120,000 used.
Lately I have been taking a break from learning ruby and working on my game. I beat the campaigns for Warcraft 3 Frozen throne and Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. Though I cheated on the last Warcraft scenario. The population limit really gets to me. They wanted to focus on squad battles, but the battles are often so chaotic you sometimes have no idea whats happening anyway. In the last level you can only have a population of 100 and they have 2 – 3 sides with a 100 each. With stronger units then I can build. Perfect recipe for a fun level. It just got a little irritating by the end with both story lines being predictable and redundant. Warcraft’s was slighter better though. I mean in Supcom the Aeon princess sacrifices herself at the end of the original campaign and at the end of the expansion. I am very glad to hear Square Enix is working with Gas Powered Games on Supreme Commander 2. It sounds like the story should be vastly improved. Apparently a lot of work has been done on optimization as well, so it will hopefully actually work on regular systems. Personally I think it should be considered a bug when it runs really slow on a Core 2 Quad 2.4 ghz machine with 6 gigs of RAM.
Last Weekend I went to Yellowstone with the Family. I uploaded some of the pictures to my Picasa albums.
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| June 2009 Yellowstone |
Recently I played around with different Virtualization programs mainly Virtualbox, Virtualpc, Vmware and Dosbox
My goal is to get old 16 bit programs such as Kings Quest 7 and SimCopter to work on 64 bit operating systems. XP-64 and Vista dont support 16 bit programs. I was able to install Windows 3.1 on dosbox using this guide on Vogons I was even able to get a decent 1600 resolution with the s3 driver. I was able to get some of the old Win3.1 games to work like Amazon Trail but I have been unable to get King’s Quest 7 to run.
So I moved onto Virtual Machines trying to get Windows 95 or Windows 98 to install. Which opened up another can of worms. Win 95 and 98 were not bootable cds so you have to have dos first. I wasnt able to find a full dos install disk. And the dos boot disks I had access too didnt come with a cd driver. So I installed FreeDos in Virtualbox, You have to run setup /is /nm to prevent it from using scandisk and finding out that its missing files. Half the time the setup for both of them would crash. Finally I was able to get Windows 95 and 98 to run. But they dont support the Virtualbox graphics driver. Which leaves you at 640×480 with 16 bit colors. That I consider to be unusable on 1920×1200 resolution. If Virtualbox scaled resolution to fit the fullscreen it might work. So I tried to install Windows 95 and 98 on VirtualPC. Its made by Microsoft right? so it should work right. Well wrong I never really got either to install at all. There has to be a way, I just havent found it yet. And got plenty sick of trying.
So on to Vmware. I only have access to Vmware player which is really lame compared to Vmware server or even Virtualbox. I’m runing a Debian 5 image from Visoracle in Vmware. It might be fixed in a newer version, but I cant stand how the player is always loosing focus. If your cursor gets to close to the sides or the top in fullscreen mode, the focus automatically returns to the host OS. Nice feature right… except every time in order to regain focus in the Guest you have to click around five times inside the window. And it loses focus a lot. And everytime you start it up it displays that stupid note press ctrl alt to return to the host OS. That would be nice if that was the only way to remove the focus like in virtualbox fullscreen mode. And the Unity function is a joke at least in Debian. You press the unity button and it picked the applications menu. All open existing applications were ignored. New applications could not be moved and the cursor would not appear in them. You could type stuff but that’s all. I’m sure it probably works with some guests. Virtualbox seamless mode works really nice comparatively, and its free. I think vmware probably is faster but its hard to tell for certain without benchmarks. Its also nice that sharing the clipboard between guest and host worked out of the box in vmware.
Rest assured progress is continuing on KQ the Betrayer. I encountered a problem with running kq with liblua5.1-0-dev installed on Jaunty Jackalope. It would crash on startup with the error “could not parse ./scripts/global.lob” Switching to the liblua50-dev package and completely removing the 5.1-0-dev package and then recompiling fixed the problem. I’m pretty sure it used to work on Intrepid, but I could be mistaken. In other news we added a couple of new tiles this week.
After I updated Supreme Commander to the latest patch I could no longer play the original game. It turns out I had to remove game.prefs from application data and then it worked fine. (The old save files were incompatible but it wasn’t a big deal for me). I really enjoyed going through the campaigns when I found the side I liked best and went with it. I played through the Aeon campaign. It didnt have as many levels as I expected,but each level takes a long time. Throughout the level it slowly expands your area of operations until you have access to the entire map. The best thing about the campaigns is that on many levels you get to start with prebuilt tech 3 bases. Which means you get to jump into the best part of the game, the tech 3 and experimental units. Epic battles oh yeah, with some of the best graphics I’ve seen. Thanks to an ATI Radeon 4870, and Intel E8500 Dual 3.16 ghz with 8gb of RAM. Surprisingly I still get a little lag when playing huge skirmish maps with the larger unit limits. They were right this game requires a monster of a computer. But it does look awesome.
