Author: pilif

ScummVM 0.3

ScummVM 0.3.0b has been released a couple of days ago even without the agreement between the project group and LucasArts. ScummVM is a free (as in speech) engine capable of running most of the old Lucas Arts Adventures everyone likes so much.

Why is this important? All the older games (read: all the good ones) came out when computers where powered by DOS (mostly MS-DOS) and had an original Soundbalster ISA Card (or something compatible to it). Even with tricks it’s impossible to get those old games to run with sound on most of the modern systems.

And this is where ScummVM kicks in: The program runs on many modern OSes and understands the format the old games where written in (the actual executable was also just an interpreter back then) and thus allows to play the original games in the new environement. Of course you still need the original game, but who doesn’t?

The sad thing: LucasArts did not seem to understand what the project is acutally doing and tried to shut it down using the dammed DMCA. Forunately the voices of many fans stopped LucasArts from proceeding and they began negotiating an agreement with the ScummVM Group. But just read here (last paragraph of the announcement).

Anyway: I did not have the time to test the new version, but the Release Notes look promising.

Another day full of “fun” with hard- and software

I was very happy this morning when I’ve seen that my Bluetooth-USB-Adaptor (link points to a german page, but I could not find the product on the english pages) finally arrived. It took me about 3 months to actually get one.

I ordered the part to backup and synchronize my Nokia 7650 with my Desktop PC as I’ve not seen a way to get the data from my Notebook (where I can use Infrared for synchronmisation) to my Desktop in a simple, automated way, not involving writing a program for myself. And the additional benefit was that BT is a lot faster than the old IR-Connection.

I began installing the adaptor at the same time as Richard did. The difference: He had an Ericsson T68i and – that’s my point – a PowerMac with OS 10.2.

The sad stroy: Getting the Nokia PC Suite to work involved hacking the 3Com driver to get it to install with my Acer BT-Card, rebooting about 500 times. And – after many hours of trail and error – the results were not satisfying at all: I can synchronize with my Outlook (the good thing), but I cannot do anyting else, Richard can with his mac (where the installation took about 2 minutes): Sending and receiving SMS, making calls, receiving calls,…

I really am thinking about byuing myself a Mac…

Syncing, Syncing and Syncing….

OK…. the odyssey goes on: When I posted the last entry here, I just had synced my Nokia 7650 (links in previous entry) over bluetooth with my outlook and besides my dissappointment about not being able to send SMS to richard and call him from within Outlook (what is perfectly possible from Mac’s Addressbook-Application) I was happy to finally have Bluetooth working with my cellphone.

Then some time later when Richard left the office, I deceided to try out my phone with his Mac (I have my own account there). First thing I noted: BT-Pairings are per computer and not per user on the Macs which is not really what I would have exspected as it can lead to problems.

Anyway: I was quite pleased to see that Ricahrd’s Mac does not recognize my Nokia Phone and thus does not offer any of those cool options, making my Windows-BT-Configuration actually superior to the one that is possible with the Mac. At least with my phone :-) [not that I’m really happy about this – it’s just better than before, but not good at all. As a PDA, the 7650 rocks. As a phone too. But not as a companion for other devices. And the PC-Suite provided with the phone is quite crappy too, besides its capability to sync with outlook]

I don’t really use outlook for anything but as a common denominator between all my PIM-devices and applications as every one of them can synchronize with outlook: My Zaurus, my IPAQ which the company provided me to write applications for it and finally, Mozilla for sending Email.

Anyway: After the sychronisation of Outlook with the Nokia, the outlook-addressbook was cluttered with two empty contacts and many of the imported ones had fields just containing a single space. You can call me a perfectionist, but I did not want them in my other devices/applications. So I’ve removed them.

Then I synced again. Effect: Contacts where doubled on my cellphone and in outlook. The corrupt ones where back.

I removed all the contacts from the Nokia adressbook (over the Phone itself. The PC-Suite does not provide a GUI to access the contacts directly. It was a lengthy procedure) and I synced again with the effect, that the contact database of Outlook was now complete empty. I’ve had somewhat forseen this and thus made a backup before the synchronisation which I reimported into Outlook.

Again: Synchronisation.

This time it seemd to work. But my own contact entry was again doubled. Once the correct entry and once with spaces in the secondary email-adress.

I removed the wrong entry and synced again. -> Yippie! It worked.

Then I made the next mistake.

I syncronized the IPAQ (which does not work over bluetooth regardles of the software telling me the opposite).

Effect: double contacts in Outlook again. I’ve no idea why because all the entries on the IPAQ had a much older modification date.

Again: Removed the old contacts and synchronized again. IPAQ and Outlook were in sync.

Then: Sync with the Nokia.

Double contacts again….

I hope, you are getting the point. It’s strictly impossible for me to have a single working contact-database on all the devices. I don’t know where the error slips into (but I tend to blame Nokia for it) and I certainly don’t know how to fix it. It’s just terribly annoying. And as the Nokia way of synchronizing is completly proprietary, there is no way to replace the faulty part.

I’m just beginning to regret having bought the Nokia 7650 and given my old T68i to my girlfriend. But then again: I really like the user interface, the speed, the stability [I’m trying not to remeber the having-to-reflash-the-software-incident last week] and the featureset of the 7650. After all, I must conclude that the perfect solution for a techie like me does not exist yet. Hopefully it will sometime.

Underground History

There are not many things I like more than the athmosphere of a dark, dusty place some meters underground. When I was a child, we used to play in a small cavern below the house where my paretns had their flat (the whole story ended with us nearly being arrested by the criminal police of Zollikon which suspeced us to be trespassing drug-addicts – but this is another story which I will tell you perhaps another time).

Anyway: On Slashdot, I just saw an article about abandoned subway stations in London and I had to visit the site to learn everything of another place with this great athmosphere. To be honest: Just while writing this, I deceided that I will have to go to those subway stations sometime to make my own photographs – to breathe the dusty air for myself and to tell you, fellow reader, about it.

Until then: Have fun with Underground History

pots.ch

I must confess: I’ve slept not nearly enough last night. And today I was ICQ-ing a bit with Jonas and we finally came to the point when we found that POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service – the official technical name for the standard analog telephone technology) is quite a nice name.

Following the tradition of buying domain names for internet access technologies (adsl.ch), I went and reserved pots.ch for me.

The domain is active and after about 2 o clock CET, you will be able to reach me at ph@pots.ch.

I really like this domain. It comes just after gnegg.ch in the list of strange domain-names I own :-)

MLDonkey

Possibly, you have heard of the eDonkey filesharing program. Since long, there exists a compatible OpenSource-Program called MLDonkey. MLDonkey needs a Unix based system to run (although I think, i’ve heard of a cygwin port). MLDonkey has a nice GUI and generally seems to work better than the original Linux-Client – even more in combination with the Windows-Remote-Control-GUI MLDonkey Watch.

The developer of MLDonkey seems to not longer have time to continue the development, which is a shame as there are still some small problems with the client – some of them making problems on the eDonkey-Servers out there.

Pierre Etchemaite now provides some patches under http://concept.free.free.fr/mldonkey which fix a lot of the problems currently still in the client. If you want to use MLDonkey, you should really apply them.

On the Mailinglist (subscription via the Savannah-Page linked above) the patches and their results are discussed.

Don’t hesitate and give MLDonkey and the Pango-Patches a try!

Fixed Searchengine

I’ve just realized that the searchengine-setup for Movabletype in a mod_perl environment has not been documented and I thus never added the needed directives to the apache configuration leading the search-engine on this site not to work.

This is fixed now.

For those wondering what to add to the apache-configuration to enable the searchengine with mod_perl, please use the following code snippet to enlighten you:

PerlModule MT::App::Search
<Location /mt/search>
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler MT::App::Search
PerlSetVar MTConfig /path/to/your/mt.cfg
</Location>

JclDebug

If you are a Delphi Programmer like me, you surely know the problem with users reporting an exception here and there but you cannot reproduce it at your place. This can get even more dramatical if such exceptions are thrown within threads as this will lead to an immediate bluescreen in Windows 9x/ME and to a “visit” by Dr. Watson in the NT-based versions of windows.

Imagine you could get a detailed error-report containing a full callstack of where the error occured combined with information about file and line-number. This report could be generated directly on the users computer and be sent to you via email or directly via the internet, using a custom procedure – even directly creating entries in the bugtracking-tool you are using.

This and more is made possible by the Project JEDI – more accuratly, the JCL-Subproject with its JclDebug-Framework. When you have completed the installation of the package, a new Menu Option called “Inser JCL Debug Data” will be added to the Project-Menu of your Delphi-IDE.

Now you add an Exception-Dialog to the Application using “File, New, Other…” followed by “Dialog, Exception Dialog”.

The newly added Form can easily be customized to your likings.

Now make a complete build. The IDE-Plugins will create a MAP-File, compress it and add it to the .EXE-File of your Project. When an Exception is thrown, the new error-dialog will be used, displaying a complete callstack with filenames and linenumbers.

I’ve created a small CGI-Script for receiving such reports and automatically filing it into my phpBugTracker (a very nice “Bugzilla-Light” written in PHP). This has already helped me to track two stupid bugs down which I was never able to reproduce on my development system.

Oh and before I forget: The whole thing can be downloaded on it’s Webpage at Sourceforge.

PostgreSQL 7.3 – it works

I’ve installed the new release of my favourite database, PostgreSQL today and I can happily announce that the upgrade from 7.2.3 went without any problems (a strange thing to announce when having my luk with software in mind ;-).

I’ve not yet had the time to check out all the wonderful new features (Schemas, Domains, a very extended ALTER TABLE and much more), but I will try it somewhere this week.

What I’ve noticed during the update: The current Webmin-Module (1.030) for administering Postgres’ users does not work with the current format of pg_hba.conf but editing the file by hand is quite straightforward – more so because of the very extensive comments in the file.