Broken Sword III

I really don’t like sequels. Really.

But then again: Broken Sword III has been released these days (it was called “Baphomeths Fluch” here in the german-speaking part of the world). BS was one of the greatest classical adventure games I’ve ever played.

It’s not only about the great story, it’s about the tings I learned (quite a lot about the order of the templars) and the great sequences I came acrosse here and then (the scene with this boy, the kebab-guy and the toilet-brush in Syria comes to mind).

It was really great and I think, I played through it at least five times (with enough time between each session to forget how to solve this scene in Paris with the painter, the watchman and this old toilet – how I liked that puzzle!!!)

The second part was good too, but not that good. What I really found a shame is that they have not provieded such a nice booklet as they provided with the first part, where quite a thick booklet was in the package, explaining the rise and fall of the templars. And then was that not-so-great story, the not-so-great humor and so on. All in all a great adventure, but nothing compared to the first part (just like Monkey 3 compared to Monkey 2 or even 1 [part 4 was better again])

And now the third incarnation of “Broken Sword” is out.

I can’t wait to get it (if it’s as good as “The longest journey” has been, I will do the same as back then and buy multiple copies. That’s the only thing that keeps my favourite genre alive. Adventures where the reason for me getting a computer and thus opening the path in my live I am currently walking on) and I really hope that I can get my hands on an english version (that’s quite difficult here in switzerland).

If not, I will buy the german version, but I will use “different channels” to get to the english version anyway.

Can’t wait. Must have!

Review follows ;-)

Fun with SPAM

Sometimes, some SPAM slips through my SpamAssasin filter and is delivered to my mailbox. A real pearl of quality-spam was delivered today. It contained the following paragraph:

Note that this is not one of the emails that some corrupt Africans do distribute to other countries of the world. You are the only person I am contacting for this transaction and can only contact another person if I found out that you are not ready to be of help. This requires a private arrangement.

yeah, right!

KDE 3.2 Beta 1

I finally found some time to compile the current Beta Version of the upcoming KDE-Release.

Although it needs quite some more time to start, the overall speed-impression seems much faster.

The user expirience can be explained by one word: slick (very slick, actually).

What a nice work!

I’ll definitely post something more as soon as I finished reviewing it

Many thanks to the KDE-Team for this great release – actually the first one where I not only like the functionality, but also the look of it. Very nice indeed.

Each problem has a solution…

… it’s just a question whether you like it or not.

But then again: Does idealism justify using the wrong tool for a particular problem just because the right tool does not seem ideologically right?

We’ve installed an evaluation version of Microsoft Exchange and despite some problems at first, it’s working very well and is the best groupware-solution we have tried so far.

Needless to say that there are many proxies and relays between the net and the actual box. That much I don’t want to trust it ;-)

pptp + linux = much fun.

Actually it’s not that bad. Its just another of those things-that-work-stop-working-and-it-takes-ages-to-find-out-why-things.

For about four weeks I had a problem that LAN-Connections did not work after resuming from hibernation and I was unable to access my pptp-server in the office from home. On the linux side a got a timeout while waiting for LCP-Resonse (or something like that) and on the windows-side, the whole process stopped while validating my (long and thus quite secure despite the flaws in the pptp-protocol) password.

Who would have thought that those problems share one thing: The common cause ;-)

For accessing another server of a client behind a cisco-router, they provided me with the “CISCO VPN Dialer” which, when connected provides an option called “Stateful firewall (Always On)”. I confess. The “always on” suggest that this not-so-well working firewall (have I said that I hate desktop-firewalls, especially those by ZoneLabs which this VPN Dialer obviously uses) also is running when the applicatoin is not, but then again: Who could think, that something stays running even though there is not GUI indication (and no way to turn it off, besides re-dialing) whatsoever?

I found this out when I tried to ping my workstation form a Linux-Server within our network, which I tried after seeing that VMWare stopped working too (incredibly useful for making screenshots of strange OSes).

So my expirience with this cool CISCO VPN-Dialer is as follows:

  • Breaks well-working applications (VMWare)
  • Makes me unable to use my own network while connected (despite the checkbox telling me otherwise)
  • Breaks PPTP (and I already suspected Linux)
  • Is incompatible with the Hibernation Mode that comes with Win 2000 and later
  • Is an usability nightmare as it does not provide any visual feedback of being running despite the fact that an always running firewall and a VPN-Dialer do have nearly nothing in common.
  • Is an even worse usability nightmare as there is no way to turn that firewally thing off besides building up the VPN-Connection which has even less to do with a firewall than the tool alone.
  • Is insecure: Everyting besides the PPTP-Connection was well working when using WLAN to connect to the network – even the ping from the server to my machine.

    Great product indeed.

Gentoo on a xSeries 235 Server

Yesterday, one of the harddisks (or was it the SCSI-Controller – it does not matter…) of our very old, self-assembled developement/fileserver went down. As we had backupped the important data and I had a spare PC running Linux (the multimedia machine I wrote about here), getting a working environement was a matter of about two hours (one I used up trying to get the old server to boot again).

Anyway: We deceided that it was time to move away from self-assembled machines to something more professional (and hopefully more reliable), so we ordered a IBM (we really like those machines – great support, long warranty and rock-solid) xSeries 235 machine which arrived today.

I deceided to install Gentoo Linux on the machine as it will mostly be used as my developement server (and as a windows-fileserver for our data), so eventual downtimes do not really matter (but latest versions of the installed software are important) – a nice testbed for this distribution until I roll out production machines running Gentoo.

Besides the hardware-RAID5 the new server had built in, we plugged an old 120GB IDE drive to be used as storage area for not-so-important files (read: music, temporary files,…) – additionally it contained all the current developement work, so I had to copy it’s contents down to the new virtual RAID5 drive.

Installing was quite easy, but unfortunatly, the current gentoo-sources kernel (2.4.20 – heavily patched) does not support the DMA-Mode for IDE-Devices on the onboard chipset (ServerWorks something), so copying about 30 GB of data from the IDE drive to the RAID was not funny and neither was doing anything on the server when transfers to the IDE drive where running. It was slooow!

Installing a current 2.4.22 vanilla-sources kernel solved the DMA-Problem but raised another: The xSeries 235 uses a Broadcom bcm5700 Gigabit Ethernet chipset which is not supported under a vanilla kernel. Of course, I forgot to patch the driver in before I rebooted the newly created kernel which forced me to go down to the basement, compile the driver and go up here again to write this text.

Anyway: The server is now working like a charm. I really look forward to really use it and to take advantage of the greatly increased speed (PII 500 Mhz -> Xenon 2.6 Ghz and more than twice as much RAM than before)

Another Mail client

It’s just not over yet. As a fellow reader of my blog, you may have notticed that I am looking for the best email client (read there for my requirements). Becky! which I reviewed back in march really is great, but the threading function does not work very well and neither does GPG or PGP which I made a requirement in our company.

Since very long, I know of the program The Bat! which was no alternative so far, as it fulfilled all my requirements but being IMAP compliant (apart from that, it’s a really great program)…

Now they released a beta version of The Bat 2.0 which has full IMAP-Support. I am currently looking into that and I’m going to post a full review soon.

What I dislike about Java

I really tried to get into programming something in Java. Alone the psossibilities with JSP/Servelets seem very interesting compared to what you get when using PHP. Another thing would be the many excellent IDE’s (even free ones like Eclipse) out there that only support java (I know that PHP-Plugins for Eclipse exist, but they are not really usable – a thing I’ll write about in the future).

But I never really took off and until today I never really could describe what is holding me back.

Today I found this article which explains it by using examples to compare python to java. Although it’s about python (a language I don’t really like), most of the point in there apply to other scripting languages (PHP, Perl, Ruby,…) too.

Really good read and finally the explanation I was looking for.