My first working weekend

It was time.... after working for nearly four years now I had my first weekend that I needed to work.
The first 48 hours I had a total of 7.5 hours of sleep
And now its sunday, i'm done and am now waiting in a cafe to go back home. but i have some more hours until my taxi goes to the airport.

man i'm tired. plus the benefit was biased: it was not really the most successful weekend.

it was cool that i got some experience out in the field, but this working hours... no thats nothing for me.


btw i am currently playing around with mono quite a bit.
plus i am playing around with SDL.NET, which i think is a quite cool and simple framework.
though nothing compared with microsofts framework you have real cross plat´form compatibility.

when working with it i found also a nice-nice c# and sdl.net game that you should try out:
dyson

go check it out. it also should work under linux thru mono, but when i tried it it crashed.
well, i sent the developers a crashreport and a coredump.
they didnt send a reply though.

dyson is a RTS game. can somebody explain to me why there are no reasonably high-level written
open-source RTS games out there??? the only one matching that criteria out there being either developed in c++ or C# out there is Glest. which i dislike....
i'd kill for getting my hands on some c# RTS sourcecode to play round with. if anybody knows one, please tell me.

though i dont think anybody will read this specific post


best bytes

dual screen solution on ubuntu 9.04 jaunty with nvidia

after updating to the new version of jaunty of course the dual screen stuff did not work anymore. the xorg.conf couldnt be read anymore, and even couldnt be backed up....

anyways, after update was complete i needed to play around a bit.

to get dual screens in jaunty running again with synergy i then found the folowing solution:

i started System>Administration>"Hardware Drivers", activated the revommended NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 180), rebootet and then started nvidia-xconfig.
now i started System>Administration>Nvidia XServer Settings, enabled under "X Server Display configuration" the second screen again, changed the configuration to "TwinView" and everything was fine.
Seems ATM i am not using Xitami extensions anymore.

now only thing that needs to be done after update is is... i need to get my broken gcc running again....

after my update from hardy to jaunty (with middle-step updating to interprid) i was surprised to find that the build-essential package wasnt installed any more. after reinstalling... i still cannot compile, but i will will have a look now

best bytes

Getting Synergy (Windows Server) to work with a dual screen Ubuntu Synergy Client

Today I had a hard time after I tried to change my synergy solution.
Before I had a WindowsXP-Ubuntu solution where 2 monitors where on the XP machine that acted as the synergy server and one monitor on the ubuntu machine. I now decided to move one of the monitors to ubuntu (for display-quality reasons).

At first i had a hard time getting my Ubuntu Hardy Heron to work with 2 screens and I took some wrong turns but I finally found my solution:
There are already many tutorials on the net, and luckily my Ubuntu machine has an nvidia card inside which made things easier:
Here is what worked for me:
I installed nvidia-settings application via classic
sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings

and then ran it with sudo. Here I activated my second screen which is running now.

Hooray dual-screen usage! But unfortunately Synergy did not work properly anymore.
Synergy switches screens between my first ubuntu screen and my XP screen, but it cant reach the SECOND ubuntu screen.

when using the "--display" option with synergyc program, I could convince synergy to use the second ubuntu screen, but then the first ubuntu screen would not be reachable....

I then tried to use the (optional) Xinerama support in the nvidia X-Server Settings, but when doing this synergy skipped half of my first ubuntu screen and immediately stepped to the second ubuntu screen.

I took a deeper look into the synergy documentation and finally found my solution:
using the (optional) Xinerama support in nvidia with an exotic synergy option!

at first, I checked the "enable xinerama" checkbox in the nvidia-settings program. Then I manually changed the config file of my windows synergy server. You can find that config file by pressing the "Info" button in the Synergy Server application.
In that file I added the option
xtestIsXineramaUnaware = false
in the "Screen" section under the name of my ubuntu machine.

Finally all screens work!

I am pretty sure this description can help some guys to get their system running. Good luck for you :)

SocketCC and Monodevelop

I had another request for the socketcc port recently. It is interesting how many people are interested in it. But definetely not surprising! :) I was quite right with my suspicion that there is a big need for having such a library.
But this time is a bit special because the guy who requested it is looking for re-implementing the ipV6 functionality.
One can find his post in one of the blog entries about socketcc.
He seemed to be quite enthusiastic to work on this as soon as he has time. I already sent him the sources, now I am curious what will come out of this. I was surprised when i just found out what additional features we have already put inside socketcc that were not inside the original library. I even now found some forgotten code where I played with some "Ping" class which i wanted to add to the library. its even working in some way, but i stopped development when i didnt need the functionality anymore.

I would very much like to see the library all (and the effort we put in this) to be strong with (nearly?) all the initial features in it again to be available to the public.

A OO cross-platform approach to sockets for C++! If this gets sturdy, this will be powerful indeed....

Today I discovered that there is an unstable debian package for monodevelop 2.0 Beta 1 linked from the monodevelop site. was it my whining at the foodformonkeys.blogspot.com site where i released my frustration about no-debian-package being present? i will never know :) but i am certainly very happy we now have a .deb package! I immediatly tried to install it.
Unfortunately my system at work does not fullfill all the required needs, and because this is my development pc I will not install a unstable libc library just for testing out monodevelop.

so i will need to test it at home on the weekend. hopefully i find time for it....

thassit for now folks,

happy coding!

Color Haze in concert

On the 14th Color Haze played in the arena. They were supported by the band rotor.
I was very much looking forward to this concert. I got tickets around christmas and counted the days till the 14th with anticipation.... I may have to add that I regard Color Haze as one of the 3 best active Stoner Rock groups.... if not the best. And they are a great live band! So my expectations were high.





It was one of the best concerts I've been to for a long time. The new album of Color Haze shows that the band definetely progresses their music! One of their songs on their new album "All" has support by a hammond organy. It reminds me of some santana tracks that I know.
All the songs on the album are good. But the ones they played live were even better there. Longer versions with such an energy.... just great.

Rotor was the band playing before Color Haze. I heard some songs of them already of their ablums, but they kicked ass live. They have no crowd-participation, but they make a hell of a sound! I talked with some guys afterwards who liked the performance of Rotor better than the one of Color Haze who followed... Rotor are also very good from a technical point of view!

I was very pleased when I found out that the concert was sold out. This is definetely a good sign for Color Haze(/Rotor). After the concert I talked with the band leader, who is also the owner of the Elektrohasch label on which the band is distributing their CDs. On the 13th they were playing in Linz in front of 500 people. The concert was sold out to. my hopes are with them that they are on their way to bigger success. This would not only be good for them but also good for Stoner Rock!

Rock up!

Monodevelop Beta 1 is out

Yes, finally it is there. If you read roadmap I think this month the final version was planned.... but I am happy that we at least have the Beta! Still I very much would like to test it out. Unfortunately there still aren't any .deb packages that I could get a grip on!

This is something I dont understand: if I have a beta of a software, I would like many many many people to test it so I will get may bugreports so I can then bugfix more efficiently. For this they should provide debian packages and packages for red hat based systems!

Ok, I do not know the internal structure of the monodevelop development team, maybe they just don't have those ressources to get this done.

Well, I will patiently wait and search the net until some .deb files get available! I cannot wait to finally be able to write me some of the tools I so desperately want for linux!

Monodevelop 2.0 Alpha 1 is out!

first versions of the new monodevelop are out. boy oh boy i cant wait....

on the official site you now also will find some installers. Unfortunately only for SUSE and stuff, no package for debian.

But do not despair dear debian-comrades! You can find debian packages at
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=980739
It has some drawbacks though: i didnt find a package for the debugger add-on yet, so if you depend on deb packages because you can't or don't want to build yourself (like me), so i still need to wait.