xsamplex

On the personal side: This month the weather has been really wet and mild. The weather has been hovering around the -5 to +7 degrees. I recall we only had 2 or 3 days really cold weather (-19s). Additionally, we had a couple of snow days, but since the temperature still goes up during the day, most of the snow has melted and/or changed into ice. It definitely doesn’t make for good photo opportunities.

Continuing on that post I made earlier this month on Elite and X3 (here): I decided to get Evochron Mercenary. From the initial screens,the impression I got is that this game strongly resembles Elite. It looks like fun (you know, that is if you like these free-form games) but you can’t compare it to the X3 series. Evochron seems to focus on the Newtonian flight model: to be honest, the flight model is not all too different from X3. When I find time (time is precious), I’ll take a closer look at EM. Get it or not? Well: it’s not badly priced. If you’re into games with a steep learning curve, you should check it out.

Having spent almost 100 hours on X3:Albion Prelude, I find the game itself sort of boring: this is mostly because there are no real missions in this extension pack. Sadly, X3:AP does not include the X3:TC missions and as far as I can tell only contains one true mission. Egosoft promised to reintroduce the PHQ (Player Headquarters) in a V2 of X3:Albion Prelude, but the emptiness has quite some people upset. Lets hope I can run X Rebirth on my laptop.

So, the last couple of weeks, I’ve finally decided to push for a 1.0 release of Convendro (Google Code downloads, Github code): the reason being that I thought it was getting obnoxious that it was still in ‘beta-ish’ mode. After what, 2 years? Come on, pal.

That being said: I’ve mainly focused on clean-up and creating two separate installers for 32 and 64-bits architectures.The irony is that twhe development tool chain literally forced me to deliver two separate installers: First, VS (and the Express edition) has a funny bug (right-oh-here) that kicks in when ever you want to target a full project to 32-bits. My alternative choice, SharpDevelop, does not like targeting 64-bit as ‘there is no x64 debugger yet’. Tough luck and tough shit as a famous rapper once proclaimed: we just change the build to fit the 64-bit dlls and create new installers. Whatever.

So 1.0 out and what’s next? I have no idea, yet. I wrote Convendro because I got tired of WinFF and some other unspecified ‘ad-supported’ conversion tool. I’d love to be able to support more recent versions of ffmpeg. Clever-er parsing of output. Support for other encoders/decoders. How or what, I just don’t know yet.

It probably doesn’t surprise anybody that I’ve added “X3: Albion Prelude” (Egosoft) to my collection of playable games. This is supposed to be an expansion to “X3:Terran Conflict” (earlier on xsamplex), but to be honest, it doesn’t feel like that: from what I can tell is that some of the X3:TC features aren’t there. It feels more like a stand-alone game than an expansion, which makes the $9.99 price it sold at initially a very reasonable price. Alright: this is not supposed to be a review of sorts, so,

The reason I bring up X3 is that the joy playing this game stems from the initial skirmishes I had in the MSX version of Elite, like, way back in the late 80s (earlier). At one time I showed someone some X3 gameplay, and I was asked what ‘the point is of travelling for hours without doing anything at all’. Which is true: the game doesn’t have real goals (besides the missions). The only goal in the game is whatever the player wants to make out of it. On your own pace.

This is also what set Elite apart, 25 or so years ago, and it was indeed one of the most successful games ever made. I wish X3 would get the same attention as I believe Egosoft is doing something remarkable here.

The main event that marked 2011 was most likely the Japanese tsunami back in March, which triggered that nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant. I mentioned the disasters in a posting on March 20th (here), where I mainly focused on how the media presented the disaster to the public and how “hot” news events like that, slightly fall below the news radar because reporting the death of thousands of people sells.

On the Canadian side: the most important events circled around the Canadian general elections (May 2nd), where the CP managed to get the majority of seats in the House. Surprisingly, the NDP decimated the Liberals and ended up becoming the Official Opposition party. Not long after, the NDP’s leader Jack Layton retired from politics and died of cancer back in August. Layton’s funeral was most likely the number one story in Canada. I’ve not mentioned this year (I think) but I was eligible to vote. This was not as much as an emotional event as when I accepted the citizenship back in 2010. However, it was definitely a memorable ‘first’.

As usual, for a more detailed Canadian outlook of 2011, the CBC has put together a list of the most visited stories on their site, ordered by month.

Update: I’m totally aware of the Arab Spring, the death of Khadafi and even, the death of Kim Jong-il: too be honest, while interesting I have my doubts that things will be changing for the better any time soon in the affected countries. If so, I’ll surely bring it up.

I‘ve been mostly reading books these days: The Iconia I bought for my birthday (review) is the ideal reading device. Well, mind the glare then: I’m sure that future devices will have touchscreens sans gloss. What’s the point of having a tablet if you can’t use it outside?

Anyway: reading books. I was finally able to finish off a bunch of book series: I finished all of the Hunger Games books. I also finished off the ‘Sword of Truth’ set: while I liked it, I thought the writing quality had its ups and downs. I thought the Harry Potter books were pleasant: as with the movies, they did go from ‘light-hearted’ to mostly ‘dark’. Well, with the traditional happy end, because these are kids books, mostly. I have this feeling that JK Rowling will not produce anything of substance after finishing off HP.

I’ve kept track of most books on Twitter: sadly, Twitter is not the best media to store ‘historical’ data. Since I’m mostly using the Amazon Kindle reader, I was surprised to see that Amazon doesn’t really track which books I read. With envy I look at the Kobo reader, which has an excellent ‘social’ media ‘tie-in’ and ‘achievements’. I do find electronic books rather expensive. Oh well, back to reading my book

Now that I’m a full-blooded Canadian (previously),there are a couple of distinctive things that make the difference between the continents I’ve lived on, North America and Europe. The five things that truly surprised me:

• Snow. During my very first snowstorm, I thought snow was sort of fun. When this snow kept on going for you know, a couple of more months, that ‘fun’ part quickly faded away. It’s not really the snow amount that bothers me tho: it’s the fact that the snow keeps hanging around for a while because of the subzero temperatures.
• Seasonal awareness. You can literally feel and smell the seasonal changes: I’ve never really paid attention to this when I lived in Europe.
• The dramatic difference in fauna and wildlife. Seeing deer walk around surprised me. But raccouns, skunks, groundhogs, coyotes? Not to mention, the difference in birds: hummingbirds, cardinals and robins (“giant robins”) absolutely make up for the little birds I’ve seen and gotten used to in Europe.

I remember the very first day I saw a Bluejay fly about and I was too stunned to figure out what I just had seen as I couldn’t properly name the bird. I wonder if that’s the same feeling the very first North American explorers had when they set foot on this continent.

Earlier this week, Friday to be exact, Kerebos Productions released their much anticipated sequel to “Sword of the Stars”, “Sword of the Stars II”. The game was originally distributed on Steam: however, this ended up being a (so it was claimed) a ‘beta version’ which indeed did not work. Later that night, Kerebos uploaded the ‘real version’, which ended up being a version that a) did not work as promised and b) did not appear to be feature complete for the price of a 40,- a pop. Fans on Steam raged over this as: witness the threads (“Serious problems at Kerberos”, “A new letter from Kerberos”, “5 hours??” and “Patch incoming shortly”).

In summary: it appears that Kerberos could not meet the expectations of releasing a full product. I can’t get over it how the product was hyped and (at the end) a not-working game was released at the full price. Shoddy and genuinely unprofessional. I don’t know what really happened at that company (exodus of developers perhaps?) but releasing beta software and then playing the victim card doesn’t make me want to play their video games.

Earlier I bought FIFA 2012 (no, really) after pondering if I could live with EA’s new Digital content delivery mechanism called ‘Origins’. Origins is still beta, I believe and at the moment, I wouldn’t even dare to compare it with Steam. However, competition is good: Steam has now been at it for what… 8 or so years and hopefully this will keep the Valve team on their toes. What about FIFA 2012? It is fun to play and I don’t really have trouble running it on my 3 year old Duo Core 2 laptop. I do find it annoying that in this age, software companies have decided that their software should only run when there’s an online connection. Shame.

To my surprise, I saw that Ubuntu’s “Oneiric Ocelot” was released, which I decided to let go through via Ubuntu’s Update manager. I ended up double surprised when I found out that, from version 11.10 and on, only the Unity shell will be part of Ubuntu. I despise Unity (earlier). Despise is a hard word: lets say I can’t get used to that fixed launcher. I found it also very disk-intensive, sort of defeating the purpose of making a light shell. Going way back to Gnome was easy, though:

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

Wherein I ran into the third surprise of the week: Gnome 3 is now part of 11.10. Gnome 3: it reminds of Unity, that is: without the bloat. Everything now centers around the “Activities” panel, which is sort of an overview of what is active and what is currently running. There are a bunch of nice tricks you can do but it leaves me still mixed: Since there is no real task bar, it’s really hard/impossible to find particular process messages (like the file copy windows). Gnome 3 seems also geared towards hot-keys and short-cuts: you’ll find Gnome’s Cheatsheet handy (location). There are definitely improvements: Screencasting is now built-in using the hotkey CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+R (output in WebM format!), effects are used sparingly and geared towards a uniform experience. Do I like Gnome 3? So-so. But, it just has a slightly better feel than Unity.

10/22/2011: I ended up installing the Gnome Shell extensions + an external Dock program (“Dockie”) to take care of the missing features I was looking for.

One of my biggest pet peeves is ‘AutoComplete’: the functionality of a text box to suggest (and complete) previously entered data. I’ve seen many bad implementations and the one fresh out of memory I can remember is Opera’s URL box, which I’ve mentioned a many times.

For RoundAbout, I implemented the AutoComplete in the ‘MailProperties’ box (see image above and video right here): The code can be found around this url, look for the method Memo3KeyUp). If I look at the code now (and to be honest, I’m hardly a Delphi programmer these days), I have no idea what I was doing: I recall that in some conditions the Autocomplete should stop doing its thing most notably when the user uses the navigational keys. Additionally, the partial matching was troublesome at one time also. What surprised me most was that everything could be implemented in one event (The KeyUP event of that particular memo box). Messy.

Eventually, I grew up and when there was a request to make an autocompleting editable combobox, I was smart enough to clean up the code and section it off in several methods (KeyUp/KeyDown and OnChange). This code end up living in its own component (PMComboBox): the code is so clean that I’m certain you should be able to take this code and rewrite it in other Windows-based programming languages.

Eearlier this month, REM announced that they were breaking up. That is: after being over 30 years in the music industry, the three band members decided that:

“Working through our music and memories from over three decades was a hell of a journey. We realized that these songs seemed to draw a natural line under the last 31 years of our working together”

Today’s ‘Past The Bridge’ entry, (musically) encompasses the band’s earlier years perfectly: So. Central Rain (35+ seconds). I refrained from using their more popular works as I believe that everything went downhill after their ‘Out of Time’ LP/CD. Sure, ‘Everybody hurts’ sounds pretty and ‘consumable’ but it’s over-engineered and over-done. Compare that to their earlier works, were Stipe’s lyrics, superimposed on the band’s simple chord structure, created songs people still don’t understand today. That is the brilliance and timelessness of ‘So Central Rain’ and for that matter, all songs on their album “Reckoning”.

I ran into REM during Stipe’s infamous contribution to KRS-One’s HEAL project (earlier) and KRS-One’s contribution to REM’s “Radio Song” (YouTube, another brilliant song). This was in a time where the band slowly started to become the focus of attention, which skyrocketed after their ‘Automatic’ CD. The rest is fairly history: I lost interest and found other music I cared for. In my opinion, REM never recovered their artistic skills after ‘Automatic’. Maybe that’s the curse of commercialization. Maybe not. Who cares.

A glorious moment: Today I’m finally retiring my 2004/2005 Centrino laptop: it was initially my work laptop in a previous work life and was eventually passed on to me with the permission of management of said employer. It has served as my main Ubuntu laptop since 2008: as I didn’t have the official permission to carry the laptop’s OS, it made only sense to install Ubuntu on it. I recall, that at that time I had to do some manual stuff to get, for example, the wireless working.

Laptop 2 is another pass-me-down, but obviously a lot more powerful than the Centrino/512MB laptop I’m retiring. I expect this to last me for at least a couple of years, with the traditional host of Ubuntu upgrades. Once again, I refuse to run Unity on this thing: however, I might consider running Gnome 3 on this as I believe the Nvidia 8400 should be able to handle this.

For now.

Exactly a week ago, it was the 10th anniversary of 9-11: it looks like the (re)construction at the former Ground Zero has made substantial progress. To be honest, I’ve never followed the progress on the 9/11 memorial (official site) but personally, I like the idea of the water falls. The last week, we had our share of remembrances and that: I wasn’t planning to elaborate on my personal thoughts. Here, have a link to the Archive’s excellent TV News archive (link).

We had our first frost warnings of the years, which means that most likely Fall will be short. One of our maple trees got really hit during the last storm (Irene). Strange enough: I believe we went thru the worst part of hurricane season. That is, the last hurricane I’ve heard of was Maria (CBC news) which only hit Newfoundland earlier this week.

And last but not least, a pet peeve. Now that I’m using a tablet (Android based) I noticed that a lot of companies have mobile variants of their websites: By default it’s these mobile variants that are shown. I find this irritating, particularly knowing that most of the mobile browsers have no problems showing a full website.

By now you have read about hurricane Irene: For a change it made landfall in the US and it’s expected to hit mainland Canada (via Quebec) later this night. Canada’s Weatheroffice has it’s expected path plotted on this page, where you can also see that they’ve started tracking hurricane Jose. Obviously, it’s tracking a more eastern path.

Irene is full-up mentioned in the news, particularly by US outlets, where the lower parts of several states are under flooding watch: the main gist is that it could have been worse: the current death count stands at 19. The expectation is that the situation here in Canada will be less severe: In NB, NB Power currently reports at or around 10,000.

Around here I’ve only noticed the casual strong/torrential rains. Additionally, the humidity has gone up, which is generally another sign of a tropical storm passing by. I don’t expect the power to go off, but hey, hurricanes are unpredictable: stay inside and most important of all, have a good sleep.