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2007

  • in movies
  • 1 min read

Blade Runner

I’ve previously mentioned my enthusiasm for Blade Runner (interesting, but horrible, flash website), and was happy to see (via the Digital Bits) today that the Final Cut will be opening in Minneapolis on Nov. 30th at the Uptown Theater. I originally saw Blade Runner when the Director’s Cut was screened in 1992 in Milwaukee, and you can count on me being at the Uptown to see this final version.

The Final Cut’s December release has me seriously considering getting a Blu-Ray player, the first film to do so.

Experimental Support for Compiz-Fusion

It’s hard to tell from the following screenshot (unless you click through to the 1920×1200 version on Flickr), but yes, that’s experimental (note the key word, experimental) support for Compiz-Fusion on Foresight Linux 1.4.1. This includes a majority of the plugins, the Compiz-Fusion icon on the panel, and the Emerald theme manager among other things.

It seems flawless on my Nvidia card running the propietary drivers so far. ATI users using the Radeon driver have had a couple issues.

It’s been fun playing with it, I forgot how much stuff Beryl (and now Compiz-Fusion) has over just the vanilla Compiz.

A huge shout out to pscott for packaging this.

It’s not recommended for normal users (yet).

foresight-compiz

  • in Linux
  • 1 min read

Seagate FreeAgent

On the way home tonight, I stopped off at Best Buy and picked up the Seagate FreeAgent 250GB external hard drive that’s on sale this week. Now that I have an office, I wanted to take my music with me to work so I could listen during the day. (Yay for having an office!)

It comes formatted as NTFS, which annoys me to no end. It lists on the box it’s NTFS, and works with XP / Vista, and MacOS, both PowerPC and Intel. At least I knew what I was buying.

But NTFS is notoriously difficult to work with on Linux, though the NTFS 3G driver has made a lot of progress. And of course my system doesn’t have the NTFS 3G driver installed.

Whatever happened to good old FAT32?

How annoying. Luckily, I have a Mac Mini and one Windows box left. I was feeling lazy.

Quake Wars on Foresight Linux

The Enemy Territory:Quake Wars Linux client was released Friday by id. The 17mb client and installer is using Icculus‘ Mojo Setup for installation. This is a welcome change from the Doom3 and Quake IV installers which required you to manually copy the .pak files from the CD or DVDs over to your hard drive. With Mojo Setup, you just run the executable file you download from id, pop the DVD in and it installs the client, Punkbuster and copies the necessary files over from the DVD.

With both the demo and the client, I was running in to keyboard lockups when playing. It didn’t matter if I was playing in full screen or windowed, the game would continue, but my keyboard was totally non-responsive. I tested Compiz enabled and disabled, windowed and non-windowed, and dual monitor and single monitor. It turns out that Pidgin, X-Chat and Mugshot would cause it to lock up. Basically, if anything appeared in the notification section Quake Wars would free the keyboard. Alt-tabbing to different applications and coming back to Quake Wars didn’t help. Disabling those applications before running Quake Wars has stopped the keyboard lockups.

Playing in full screen mode is definitely more immersive, and Quake Wars supports a native 1920×1200 resolution. Playing windowed in dual monitors I was playing in 1680×1250. It’s a pain though to switch xorg.conf and restart GNOME just to play a game, so I haven’t made up my mind.

The Quake Wars FAQ recommends a low latency kernel configured with CONFIG_HZ_1000=y. Foresight’s kernel does not include that setting, and using the Nvidia drivers currently in the repo, 100.14.03, performance has been smooth as silk. I’m running a Core 2 Duo E6300, 2 gigs of RAM and a Nvidia (BFG) 7950GT.

I’m enjoying the full game much more than the early beta client I played in Windows. While the game is definitely faster than Battelfield 2, it’s not as fast as I first thought. I still have a ton to learn (like joining a squad or learning to fly the air vehicles), but it’s fun. 2 out of 3 maps played this afternoon, and I was top Soldier, top kills, and close in top EXP. The promotions and unlocks by campaign is better than I expected, as I wasn’t sure how tempoary unlocks would be, but they work well. I thought I had played on a ranked server today, but searching for my stats, I can’t find them. Guess I need to play some more!

Kudos again to id for releasing a Linux client. It’s nice to have a state of the art game to play on Linux. The next month or two should be great for the state of gaming on Linux, with the rumored Gears of War release, and the definite release of Unreal Tournament 3.

Bad Comcast, Bad

It’s been rumored for a while that Comcast was filtering traffic on it’s network, specifically Bittorrent, and now the AP after significant testing, according to this story on MSNBC.com.

I’m extremely disappointed to have this confirmed. After Time Warner and Comcast swapped markets a year ago, I’m now a Comcast subscriber. Time Warner and it’s Roadrunner service was an excellent internet provider – a number of years ago when I was running a home server, I received an email from Time Warner. It informed me they noticed I was running a mail server, which was against it’s TOS, but they probed and it wasn’t compromised, and they let it be.

Comcast, on the other hand, within 3 months of taking over service, jacked up my rates by 30% (from $45 / month to $60 / month), on the premise I only had their broadband service, and not their TV or phone service, but would leave my rates at $45 if I signed up for one of those. (I still don’t understand how this isn’t illegal tying… I really wish I had gone to law school.)

As a Linux developer, Bittorrent is a legitimate file sharing service. I can share ISOs of the software I contribute to. Bittorrent is not just a copyright infringing service.

Comcast needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

Support net neutrality, and learn more. Call your Senators and Congressional representatives, and don’t let big business ruin the internet.

Foresight 1.4 / GNOME 2.20.1 Appearance Issues

If you did a recent updateall in Foresight in the last day or two, there was a bug in libgnome that has been fixed.

On some default installations or a conary updateall, users would not see icons in the GNOME menu, no desktop background, and when you tried to change your theme (System -> Preferences -> Appearance) it would crash. It looks like it was a Gconf setting error upstream in GNOME. It would have looked something like this:

firstboot

It was set as /etc/gconf/schemas/desktop_gnome_interface.schemas.in and should have been /etc/gconf/schemas/desktop_gnome_interface.schemas

A big shout out to Ken VanDine who tracked this down and fixed it, and is filing the bug and patch upstream as well.

The groups will be updated in Foresight tonight, but until then, do a sudo conary update libgnome and it should be fixed. For some odd reason restarting X didn’t fix it, but it was fixed on reboot.

This means 1.4.1 with PackageKit will be released in the next day or two.