Baby 2.0, Warcraft III & other adventures

So I haven’t been as active as I’ve historically been. My Ubuntu systems have been running flawlessly, and Baby 2.0 has arrived, albeit with a rocky start.

As I’ve been in a new job, I didn’t plan on taking much time off for the baby, just the day itself followed by the weekend, actually. However, she arrived with lung problems that required an extended stay in the NICU, including a transfer to another hospital for advanced care.

Without going to further detail, after a week, Baby 2.0 arrived home safe, sound and fully healthy. All is well, so what follows is the official record:

After 39 weeks of compiling, Baby 2.0 was RTMed. However, there was an egregious read error while untarring the archive. After forcible extraction, a cycle of dependency hell ensued, with core components of the binaries refusing to unzip due to unmet depencies, ehich could not be met without the aforementioned components unzipping. Argh.

Eventually, new apt updates resolved the dependency issues, and all processes resumed normal functions. However, this scenario was the source of much woe and gnashing of teeth. Hope I never see these errors again.

Once this was resolved, I set out to try Warcraft III, including the Frozen Throne expansion, running under Wine, including the single-player campaign movies. After a bit of research I found the solution, and the games appears to run very well under wine. Next, I’m going to try to replicate it on th Mini 9.

Firewalls & Proxies

I started a new job a month ago, doing security operations on firewalls for a Fortune 100 company. It’s appears to be a good place to work, and as I start getting the hang of things I think I’ll enjoy it. The new responsibilities have slowed my free time quite a bit as I ramp up, so my online presence has tapered off a bit the last few weeks or so.

The nice part is I get to spend part of my day SSH’ed into Unix systems, forcing my command-fu to improve, which I’ve always wanted to sharpen.  Firewalls: another great addition to my repertoire!

the adventures of cptnapalm and tankgirl

This was just posted on Slashdot, and I love it. Exactly how I feel about linux, and great narative.
Reposted with cptnapalm’s permission.

In the 1997th year, much Quaking was being done by myself, a young 2ltnapalm. I fragged and it was good. Yet not all was well in the land of the rocket launcher. There was this fell beast, Windows 95, which ever was watchful for any joy in the world, existing only to bring the blue hell to the screens of the earth.

“Surely, there cannot be this misery alone for the computers of the earth. For in the earlier days of home computing I cast off Windows 3.0, who was then but a pretender operating system, for DOS 5. But Windows has grown more ambitious if not more useful and its infection spreads wide and no retreat to DOS does it permit. Tell me, Quakers, are their no alternatives to this dreck? And speak not of MacOS, for it is a joke.”

Out of the depths of IRC, from the servers of EFNet, the oracles of #quake did speak.

“Linux. For it is stable and the Carmack has decreed that Quake shall run upon it with joy in its heart.”

“Carmack the Wise is a powerful programmer and much does he understand. Hark, I shall give this Linux thing a shot.”

To the merchant Computer City, I did go and they had a boxed copy of Red Hat 4.2 (if my memory does not betray me) which I did buy. Upon returning to my abode, I did begin preparations for the installation upon my whitebox. Partitioning was simple enough. The choices which one needed to make were not difficult, but to one who was but yet a pup it, it was so foreign. Eventually, perseverance and much RTMFing did triumph. Linux was installed. But one other thing must be done. X.

Many were the incantations invoked and the curses hurled due to X. Long days were spent editing text and typing that accursed startx only to find my work in vain. And yet did I endure for I knew that Windows 95 was cackling in the darkness of Redmond, awaiting my defeat to consume my soul should I fail and never again would I be able to hold my head high amongst the geeks of the realm.

Always teetering on the edge of disaster, but never managing to destroy my machine (which the pages of man ensured me was possible), I one day found something new. Something unexpected. For after messing with mode lines and color depths and other things arcane, startx worked. A graphical user interface was mine!

“My heart doth rejoice in this success! I shall install Window Maker and Enlightenment and many others besides so that I may never be bored with the look and feel of this machine, for that is the crowning glory of this victory: I can have any UI I desire.”

Feeling very pleased with myself, I looked over all I surveyed with great confidence, yet the victory was not mine alone. For this unnamed box had endured much in the trials of installation. Yes. “Endured much beyond the reckoning of the typical home computer,” said I, “and not just endured, but thrived and in the coming days shall have many challenges to overcome, so henceforth let this machine be known as tankgirl!”

Many were the adventures of tankgirl and, now, ltnapalm. Running a website over a cable modem, a MySQL database server, and numerous other tasks that tankgirl did perform, singing all the while with her K6 233 and 128 megabytes of RAM. In time, helper machines were obtained so that less interesting tasks tankgirl would not have to do herself, for her processing time was valuable and wasted on other tasks. A 486 there was, scorned by many as out of date and useless, now raised from its nadir to its apex with Linux installed and became a mighty wall of fire, shielding the local area network from the depredations of script kiddies and other wearers of the black hat of crackerdom.

Many were the nooks and crannies that cptnapalm and tankgirl delved into together, from dabbling in C programming and shell scripting to kernel compilation and switching to Debian. Together we witnessed the horrors of sendmail.cf and learned the mysteries of bind. And Quake there was, of course, too.

After long years, time did takes its toll and its toll was death. Impoverishment prevented upgrades and our nomad existence did batter her shell. But she soldiered on and on, where the endurance of lesser computers would have failed. Brave and bold until the end, peaceful was her departure, for one morn she would not be roused with a power on nor ever again for she had departed her silicon, travelling into the ethernet, never to return.

Mourning I did, yet not forgetting gratitude to have been the user of such a fine machine for so long and the operating system, Linux, which did allow her to shine so brightly.

Though her fans are now silent and her processor processes no more, she is remembered. Let the webcrawlers of Google and Yahoo and all others there may be find her tale here and echo it for all so that the songs of her adventures are sung forevermore.

Garmin Nuvi 205

I received a GPS for Christmas, and finally got some time to play with it a bit.

The Nuvi 205 is pretty slick. I mounted it to the windshield & plugged it in. No reading of the manuals needed here kids.

After agreeing OK to not play with it while driving, I found it very easy to cnfigure and get me where I want to go. As soon as I got home from my 1st trip, I plugged it into my  PC to see about getting it updated.

The good  news ius that Ubuntu recognizes thdevice as a storage drive, so I can add extra voices, cars, etc by simply unzipping them into the appropriate folders.

Wine even allows the installation of the Garmin software updater.

The bad news is that the Garmin software updater does not recognize the device when plugged into Linux, even under Wine 1.1.14

So, I had to plug it into a WIndows box to update the OS and install the 2009 map update, which I got free in my 60 days of free updates.
The map update was 1.2gigs. Sheesh.

Aside from that snafu, I’m now cruising down the road being tracked by “Judy,” the British voice guiding my onscreen Black Pearl.

NXE: Encouraging used games?

OK, I’ve installed the  NXE for my Xbox 360 Elite. While the new navigation system and Marketplace layout is nice, and the Avatars are , well, Mii-like, my favorite new feature by far is the ability to install games to the hard drive. Some of the benefits include:
improved load times (in most cases)
less heat generated (arguably)
much quieter operation without the DVD drive spinning.

I’ve installed several games to my 120gig drive, making me really appreciate my choosing the Elite when I bought it last year. Recently I had been wondering if dropping the extra cash was worth it, since I don’t plan on buying stuff from the Marketplace (too much DRM, thanks), making the extra $100 or so essentially cosmetic for the black case.

So, when the new hard drive installation became an option, I was overjoyed. I have a softmodded Xbox with a 120gig drive that I load all of my (legally purchased) games on, in addition to streaming all of my movies that I rip from the DVD to xvid from my linux server to XBMC. So suffice it to say I’m not fond of digging my discs out to use the content, but I digress…

The new feature works great. Insert disc, select it from the Dashboard and select Install to Hard drive. This essentially rips an ISO of th game disc to the hard drive to be read during play. After this, you select the game, and it prompts you to insert the original disc for authentication. You didn’t think MS would allow disc-free play, did you?
In any event, I find this acceptable as the disc drive screeches for about 1 second, then goes absolutely silent, and the game loads.
And loads well. In fact, I never hear the fans kick in at all during gameplay, so the system obviously does stay cooler to some extent.

Now, to the point of this post.
While shopping for gifts this past week, I saw a few games I would like to have myself, but not enough to pay full retail price. Now when I see these games, I would normally just think, “I’ll wait a few months and pick them up new after the price drop”. I don’t normally participate in th used games market, as it’s essentially a ripoff:
Gamestop is selling Force Unleashed used for $55 in my neck of the woods. That’s a whole $5 less than retail. For a used disc. For a used disc that who knows whats been done to it, and what condition it’s in, specifically. Not to mention the developer sees none of that money, but thats another post I’m not going to get into now. ( Yes, 1st right of sale, I agree that’s a good right, etc)

However, I saw another game thats maybe a year old, still selling for $40 retail that I saw in the bin for $15 used. Now that’s a bargain. And I thought, “hmm, used. It only needs 1 really good rip to the hard drive, and then a validation check at load time.”

I don’t know if I’m the only weirdo that thinks this way, but in a strange way it seems to me that loading to drive and the less intensive verification check would be an encouragement to buy used, as it takes some of the fear out of getting an abused game disc.
I’m personally going to continue to buy new when possible, but I think it will be interesting to see what kinds of changes to the used game market will be seen now that the consoles allow hard drive-based play.

Blog of Helios

There’s been a ruckus this week about a teacher confiscating a  student’s linux CDs. While I feel there was confusion on both sides, I think everyone should read Part II (assuming this interchange is legitimate):
http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/

UPDATE:

A week later I’m not to sure this is even legitmate, however. There has been zero confirmation or proof that this event even occurred. I’m ashamed that I jumped to the assumption that this is fact, regardless of which side of the fence I’m sitting on, on this one.

Angry & Distracted: Politics Suck

Ok, I’m posting this from my Windows mobile phone, so pardon the formatting. How I wish firefox was available mobile. I need that Mini 9 I guess.

I’ve been pretty bent lately about the politics this year, which came as quite a shock to myself. Guess I’m getting cranky in my old age.
Just thought I’d throw that out there. I’ll resume posting about Linux & gaming soon. In the meantime, read the angry african blog. He’s got a good one today…

DVD Ripping, Linux-Style

Yeah, I’m a slacker. been 2 weeks since last post. That’s a problem with Linux: Things don’t often break when you get it up  running

OK, today I’m going to give a rundown on how to rip & encode your precious DVD movie collection from the original disc to xvid format (.avi) which is playable and convenient to stream across your LAN to your display of choice, therefore removing the need to keep using (and potentially scratching) your discs.. In my case, that’s a TV with an XBMC-enabled xbox.

1. Ripping from the original media
Most DVDs are encrypted with some scheme to prevent your backing up of your own purchased media. Now, truth be told, the decrypting tools native to Linux are not on par with those available to Windows. Sony’s ARccOS protection is pretty crafty, and frankly does a rough job to the dvd standard spec. Luckily, there are relatively few discs with this garbage on them.

In many cases, the now-defunct DVDShrink works great to rip the vast majority of titles, and works perfectly under wine. Just install it, and set the Windows version to XP. I have mfc420.dll, quartz.dll & riched20.dll set to native/builtin. Yes, K9Copy in Linux does this, but I’m a fan of DVDShrink, and I know it has great quality. Your choice.

However, for more stubborn titles, DVDFAB HD Decrypter works great under wine as well, and is even ilsted as supported under Linux via wine by it’s developers. I run it under wine as Windows 2000 with mfc42.dll in the library as native.built-in

Use one of these 2 apps to rip the main movie only, including the single language track of your choice (English 5.1 personally) to your hard drive. DVDFAB does this with no compression, and you need to manually override it in Shrink, unless you’re looking to put it back on a single layer dvd. But that’s another post

2.Encoding
After you have the decrypted files on your harddrive, (they are in a VIDEO_TS directory, comprised of several .VOBs, .BUPs, and IFOs), you’ll want to re-encode them into a cohesive single high quality file for playback. My preference is XVID, because its open source, and high great quality. For encoding, enter Acidrip. It’s in the Ubuntu repositories, and is simply a sudo apt-get install acidrip away.

Launch Acidrip, go to the Video tab, and configure it as follows:
Codec: lavc
Passes: 2
Options: vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:v4mv:vqmin=2

Now, the tricky part. Well, not really. You want the bits/Px to sit at .200, which the hint on this window tells you is a great ratio and the picture will be good. Not too high (wasteful) and not too low (blocky/pixelated). So, go to the Path window and point it at your source directory (where your .vob files are) and hit Load.
Change the bitrate until the bits/px reach .200, and it should change to a grey color. You may need to enable the Lock box to change the bits. On most movies, this ends up with a bitrate of 2067, or somewhere abouts. You can now save your settings, although I prefer to save it without the final destination listed in the Load field, as it changes depending on the film title.

Oh, enable Crop, and hit Detect. This will detect th formatting and avoid processing the blank black bard on a widescreen movie. Saves on quality, and video size. Why waste time & size on blank space?

OK, with all that set, flip over to the General tab, name the movie, and input the destination in th File name field. I prefer this:
/home/username/movies/%T. This puts them in my movies folder, with a filename the same as the Track Title. Handy, huh?

In Audio, I prefer the following:
Codec: mp3lame
Options: abr:br=128
Leave Gain a 0
I don’t include extra subtitle racks, so the rest is empty.

Whern you’re ready, click Start, and away it goes. On my Athlon 3200+ 2gigs ram, the average 2 hour movie takes a couple hours. YMMV. I suggest not doing anything else remotely intensive with the CPU in the meantime.

When it completes (remember, 2 Passes. It improves the quality), be sure to delete the original DVD files to save space, unless you want them for something else, or to burn a backup. I’ve discovered that most movies processed this way have a great picture (on a 31″ standard TV, as well as a monitor) and good sound (through a 100watt receiver) with a file size between 1.2 – 2 gig each.

When I’m done, I store them on a share on my server, and stream them to my XBMC systems connected to each TV in my house (living room and bedroom) It works awesome, and I never have to see the annoying spam & adverts on a movie, or search for my discs stored away in a box or a shelf somewhere.

Enjoy

Kubuntu Hardy Final Thoughts = Linux Done Right

Alright folks,

After some tweaking, I must say I think I’ve gotten Hardy to be pretty rock solid for my needs.
Restricted Drivers, check
XMMS/streamtuner, check
Liquidweather++, check
Moto4lin, check
Creative Zen V Plus, check (yes, I had a bit of trouble, but I didn’t see much use in posting the fix. Maybe another day)

Most of my daily uses are working great now, either after minimal fuss, or straight out of the box. Since I’m running Kubuntu, it didn’t come with Firefox 3 (or any other flavor), so I use 2.0.0.14, as I know all of my extensions work correctly, and I’m not real impressed by some of the GUI changes in Beta 3 yet.

Now with the summer approaching, I’m considering getting a new laptop for myself (go one for Her for Christmas, running Gutsy). I’ve been pretty impressed by the Inspiron 1420 she’s running, so I’ll likely get one for myself as well.

Mother’s Day

I realize this it’s off topic, but I thought I’d throw this out:

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!!

If anybody in western Washington needs an old-school barbershop haircut, go to her place at Double D Barber Shop in downtown Shelton.

Look Mom, your famous now! Keep me in the will