----------------------------- Tue 24 Aug 2010 21:02:55 CEST ----------------------------- Tinderbox Today I installed everything needed to run a Tinderbox, i.e. PosgreSQL 8.4, Apache 2.2 and Tinderbox. The day after tomorrow I'll configure the thing (no time on Wednesday) and hopefully run the first tests. If everything goes smooth I'll set it to work next week and start concentrating on pkg_upgrade again. The thing needs to be working in the middle of September if I want to do decent testing before the release. ----------------------------- Wed 18 Aug 2010 20:21:36 CEST ----------------------------- EuroBSDCon 2010 Speakers The list of EuroBSDCon 2010 talks is out: http://2010.eurobsdcon.org/presentations-schedule/ It's pretty impressive, I'm starting to feel nervous about speaking there. ----------------------------- Wed 11 Aug 2010 01:25:36 CEST ----------------------------- Dreamfall - The Longest Journey This night I finished Dreamfall, the successor of The Longest Journey. So here are my impressions. The Longest Journey was a far better game than Dreamfall. In fact I'd go so far to say that Dreamfall is not a game at all. It's an interactive narrative. The game starts with very simple riddles and the difficulty only increases slowly until around the first third of the game, when I finally used pen and paper to track some symbols. Afterwards Dreamfall drops all pretense at being an adventure. It's always clear what you have to do, without much thought and you just go through the motions. Unlike The Longest Journey, which was a traditional adventure with pre-rendered locations, Dreamfall is played from a shoulder perspective. The controls need some time to get used to (and switching of the horizontal axis in my opinion, which can actually be done), but are quite efficient, once the keyboard controls have been learned. Dreamfall also has a fighting element, which is very awkward to control, this was "balanced" by the developers by making fights ridiculously easy, which somewhat damages the otherwise very convincing worlds. Some fights are simply not meant to be won, which has the same effect. Zoe, the main character, actually beats up a professional criminal and later cannot succeed against much less threatening looking enemies. Having established that the gaming elements of Dreamfall are near worthless and that it's really just an interactive narrative it is time to point out, that it is an amazingly beautiful one. The story and characters are twisted and gripping. All the locations amaze with their sheer beauty. So between the cutscenes that drive the story, one gets to explore several locations such as Mercuria and Venice, known from the TLJ, as well as amazing new places. Despite being pretty limited, they all feel very large, which is a great combination, because you don't get tired of walking around and there is a lot to see. I will not spoil the ending, but I can tell you that the story is not yet completed and that you will be surprised and upset about it. Also, really wait till the end of the credits. Should you decide to play Dreamfall, something that I really recommend, be warned that you will see how the beloved characters from The Longest Journey have suffered and lost their hopes and dreams. I really hope for a third game (there was some episode style stuff announced, I despise the idea, but I suppose I can wait for the release of all episodes and buy a bundle). Such a game would hopefully heal some of the wounds or at least grant some of the characters the relief and dignity of a meaningful death. Also, it should not be untold that April and Zoe both are terrible heart breakers in my opinion. All the men in the story bear it well, but they cannot conceal their pain entirely - just like in real life. ----------------------------- Tue 3 Aug 2010 19:17:16 CEST ----------------------------- Talk: EuroBSDCon 2010 I just got this e-mail: Dear Dominic Fandrey, I am happy to tell you, that your Talk: Binary Package Management and Object Oriented Shell Scripting under FreeBSD Dominic Fandrey was accepted. Less than 9 hours to departure for Wacken 2010. Oh, happy day! :D ----------------------------- Wed 14 Jul 2010 19:01:13 CEST ----------------------------- TFT Monitor I was thinking about getting a 22" TFT monitor. I was hoping to get something with 120 DPI or more, which would mean 2240x1400 for a 16:10 screen. But the best you can hope for are 1920x1200, which are just 103 DPI. And prices for these resolutions still start around EUR 450. Of course you can go for 1680x1050, with prices below EUR 200, but those are just 90 DPI. Which I don't think is acceptable. I'll stick with my CRT for now, which I'm using with 1600x1200, ~100 DPI. ----------------------------- Sun 11 Jul 2010 16:07:59 CEST ----------------------------- XMMS2 Why is it that all XMMS2 clients suck so much? I've been using mpd/Sonata and consider Sonata a pretty minimalistic client. But none of the XMMS2 clients I have so far encountered work nearly as well. Why do I want to drop using mpd? Because it hangs when the HD is under high load. And by hang I don't mean there are gaps, instead it halts playback altogether. ----------------------------- Fri 9 Jul 2010 22:25:53 CEST ----------------------------- Recovering I've been sick the last couple of days. I don't know what kind of sick, I just felt very week. And whenever I tried to concentrate on something, my body simply shut me down. I should have written an exam on Wednesday, which I didn't attend. 30 seconds of reading and I found myself with my head on the desk. I also ate only one small meal each day, the last couple of days. This lasted until this afternoon, now my appetite is back and my drive for physical excertion has just reawakened. I feel like I've just been reborn. Too bad there's an exam on Monday, thus I have to suppress that drive. I wonder where that drive comes from - I'm not a very athletic person. ----------------------------- Thu 8 Jul 2010 22:45:07 CEST ----------------------------- The Iron Giant I've just been watching The Iron Giant for the second time. It's a WB film released 2000 AD and I can only recommend it. It doesn't have the impact of Ink or Love Exposure, but it's a simple yet decent story. It's a cartoon, the art style obviously anime inspired, though there's a typically American feeling to it. Which actually suits the movie quite well, because it manages to avoid the typical cheesiness inherent to all the Disney toons. I wonder where the distinction is. Anime has a clear feeling to it, a certain aesthetical aspect that clearly says it's Japanese, which "The Western Culture" has never succeeded in immitating. Is there an English equivalent to the German word "Spielfilm"? It literally translates into "acted film". I'll use the term "regular film", for now. So, even in "regular films" you can always tell it's Japanese. The same works for Chinese films, which have entirely different aesthetics. Thinking about it, French film also has a very distinct aesthetic. I always feel there's a gap to our neighbours (I'm German, for those who don't know) that seems very difficult to bridge. Despite our entwined history the way they think appears alien to me. However they know how to do things with style. Though we Germans occasionally manage to produce something with style, it seems to me that we are brutish amateurs in this regard, if you compare us to the French. The only exception are automobiles, they have a knack for producing really ugly cars. Enough of my wandering thoughts for today. ----------------------------- Sun 4 Jul 2010 16:40:32 CEST ----------------------------- Birthday, White My 28th birthday is approaching, I do not remember when I last celebrated by birthday. 2006 would be possible, but I do not remember such. Today I found my first truly white hair. Normally it's just a broken hair. which lost its colour below the damage, but I traced this one from my hip up to the skin on my head and it's all white. And another white one is growing right next to it. Strange that such a thing should happen. I do not feel the like my youth is passing. ----------------------------- Tue 15 Jun 2010 22:08:45 CEST ----------------------------- Keeping Track, Urban Terror Today my boss sent me an article about how people track stuff about themselves: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all This article is actually written to discourage breaking people down into chunks of data, but I find it inspiring. Maybe I'll start to immitate some of that stuff. A database of ideas sounds cool. I wonder what kind of format should be used for this. Considering that it should still work in 20 years (as in the example), it should be fairly simple, but it should also be efficient to navigate. It'd be nice to have a mobile device, that I can type on quickly and on which I could record stuff and merge with existing data. My audio-player comes to mind, but the notepad saves stuff in a strange binary format. Entirely unrelated I went to look for Urban Terror source downloads and found that everything dates back to 2007. http://www.urbanterrror.info I wonder, what have they been doing in the meantime. The project appears to be pretty active. What happened to all the bug fixes and improvements in the ioquake3 engine they use? ----------------------------- Sat 12 Jun 2010 12:34:59 CEST ----------------------------- GPN10, OpenArena, UrbanTerror At the moment I'm at the GPN10: http://entropia.de/wiki/GPN10 The same location as last year, which ensures a really cool atmosphere. In other news - my OpenArena port has still not been committed. This honestly really, really sucks. In better news, Alejandro Pulver will pass the iourbanterror torch to me. I already got the ioquake3 port from him, back when I ported ioq3-1.36. By the way, there's a poll about your preferred OA gaming platform, go vote BSD, even GNU Hurd is in front of us at the moment! http://openarena.ws ----------------------------- Sun 23 May 2010 15:05:25 CEST ----------------------------- OpenArena on FreeBSD Because I feel very stressed I needed to feel successful again. So I ported OpenArena 0.8.5 to FreeBSD. The submission is waiting for maintainer approval, I doubt this will happen (the maintainer is inactive since 2007). So it'll be delayed until a maintainer timeout occurs. For those who don't want to wait that long: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=146818 ----------------------------- Fri 21 May 2010 00:27:08 CEST ----------------------------- Dio I'm nigh shocked that of the ~300 people I watch on DeviantART nobody mentioned it. Last Sunday Ronnie James Dio died of cancer. Ride The Tiger one more time and mourn the loss to Rock and Metal for the world. Raise your voices to the words of Jack Black and Kyle Gass again and sing once more, Dio Can You Hear Me? I am lost and so alone I ask you for your guidance won't you come down from your throne It was 2009 when I last saw him rocking the stage with Heaven And Hell in Wacken. All I saw was a deity of Rock'n'Roll, no sign of sickness. Now I count myself lucky to know, that he rocked to the end. ----------------------------- Sun 16 May 2010 20:32:31 CEST ----------------------------- Iron Sky - Teaser 2 A new Iron Sky teaser has been out for some days. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeAfoiN5SDw To cite myself (http://lon-kamikaze.deviantart.com/journal/32194523/): I just watched the new Iron Sky teaser four times in a row. The successor of Star Wreck will redefine the Satiric Space Opera genre, watch it, obey! Wesforce (or Wanderlust, as she calls herself, now) informed me that the music is Laibach's B Mashina. ----------------------------- Sun 16 May 2010 17:46:42 CEST ----------------------------- Everythings Amazing & Nobodys Happy We're living in an amazing, amazing world and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots. Fefe linked this super amazing video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk#t=1m25s The aspect ration is wrong, mplayer users can work around with -aspect 16:9. ;) ----------------------------- Sun 2 May 2010 17:33:14 CEST ----------------------------- Heart Stopping Beauty Last night I watched the Winians' Ink. A film so beautiful that tears came to my eyes when it ended. Never before have I seen such a thing. It has been compared to films ranging from Donnie Darko to The Matrix. And one sees similarities to both and many of the other films it was compared to, but still saying it is like one of them would do it injustice. There is one thing you can compare, though. And that's the way a film makes you feel. And Donnie Darko really is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think this question. Ink is a dark and beautiful fairy tale and nothing I can write would do it justice. So last night I went to sleep, with beauty in my heart such as I had not felt for many years. Unsuspecting that this very day I would see something vastly different and just as beautiful. Sion Sono's Love Exposure. Another film I had yearned to watch for a long time and recently imported from the UK alongside Ink. This film has nothing in common with Ink, apart from being, like all stories worth telling, about love. A film with as many faces as love itself, violence, perversion, beauty, deception, prowess ... A story such as could never emerge from a European culture. Yet European influences are plainly visible, but have so tightly been assimilated by the Japanese that the way they manifest often makes them appear nigh alien. This film delivered everything I expected, never in the way I expected it. There is but one explanation for the way I feel now. I'm in shock. Tomorrow Heavy Metal will again fill my mind and I will again moon my nights away over my inability to seize what my heart desires. But today I am ablaze with beauty and for as long as the memory stays with me, this moment cannot be undone. ----------------------------- Sat 10 Apr 2010 15:31:41 CEST ----------------------------- Polish Government Wiped Out In Plane Crash I just read that a lot of Polish government officials, including president Kaczynski, died in a plane crash this morning. Apparently the pilot tried to land the machine despite very strong fog: http://www.heise.de/tp/blogs/8/147408 Kaczynski always striked me as the nasty fanatic Christian kind, I certainly never sympathized with his political agenda. Still this is kinda shocking. Things like this make me wish I was still on speaking terms with my ex-girlfriend, who is Polish. I'd like to know first hand what is going on there, now. ----------------------------- Fri 9 Apr 2010 08:06:41 CEST ----------------------------- automounter/GEOM Last night I wanted to start working on GEOM and felt uncomfortable that I'd have to touch all geom_label label providing code (i.e. the code for each file system type). After reading src/sys/geom/notes and some manual pages I stumbled over gstat, which produces statistics for all geom providers. I have no use for statistics, but a list of geom providers, which equals a list of all devices that might hold a file system, is quite useful. I cleaned up some code in automounter and added probing for all unlabeled devices in the provider list, so automounter can finally deal with media that is not labeled. ----------------------------- Thu 8 Apr 2010 11:59:27 CEST ----------------------------- GEOM labels Over the easter weekend I added support for empty labels to automounter. the geom_label class normally does not accept empty labels, but there is a number of fat file systems with control characters as a label around. These will be accepted, but displayed with an empty label. Automounter 1.3.6 replaces empty labels with the original device node name when creating the /media//