ShrimpWorks

Well I’m back from JHB :P.

I just spent my entire weekend playing EVE Online - a MMORPG type affair based in space - if you’ve played Microsoft’s Freelancer, you’ll have an idea of what this game’s about. Only difference is that EVE is a million times bigger, has thousands of players online at any given point (all in a single, living universe), is nowhere near as linear or dull, and the graphics will blow you away.

The best way I can think of for describing this game would be “OMG”. It is absolutely massive. Over the entire weekend I trek’ed around maybe 10-15 solar systems at the most, yet there are hundreds available. Every time I arrive to dock at a station, or pass by a stargate (transport between systems) there are ships I have never seen before. There are NPC-based missions galore, there are hundreds of player-run corporations, doing mining, production, peace-keeping, bounty hunting, and who knows what else.

This is absolutely THE most open-ended game I’ve ever laid eyes on… You can do absolutely anything. For example, you could set yourself up with offices and a production facility in a station, then go out and mine for ore and stuff, bring that back, refine it, buy some blueprints for a ship, build the ship with the refined ore, and sell the ships to other players. You could even buy ore from other players who do the mining for you, or buy new blueprints from traders bringing them from systems 20 jumps away.

It’s quite amazing… Get someone with a full subscription to give you a 14-day trial, download the client for free, and give it a bash :).

http://www.eve-online.com/

*sigh*

Seems I’ve been called off to head office again at literally a day’s notice. I was heading up next weekend though for a LAN with the Avatars (the UT clan I’m in), so I guess it isn’t all bad. Only problem now is carting around my PC, a new LCD monitor which I’ll pick up while I’m there, 2 weeks worth of clothing, and my laptop. Going to have to courier the PC up and have someone courier it and the monitor back after the LAN :(.

Internet is also blocked during office hours in head office, so I’m basically stuffed as I can’t exactly go home and see to things in the evenings. Where I’m responsible for a bunch of projects, websites, etc online, this isn’t exactly helpful at all. Hopefully I can still SSH home every now and then… Can’t even use VNC since my PC’s going to be all over the country.

Should be back by Monday the 28th… They don’t even know where I’m going to be staying while I’m up there.

*sigh* I hate this :(.

*sigh* Look at me starting a million projects and never finishing any of them :P.

Well this one, I fully intend finishing at least. It’s a wxPython GUI front-end for Dosage (http://slipgate.za.net/dosage/) which basically has the sole goal of making managing your comics easier for the mouse potatoes out there (and makes Dosage more accessible to the average Joe user who doesn’t want to mess around with command lines and stuff).

At present, it doesn’t do much, it simply builds a nice tree of comic modules (virtual modules are displayed as branches) and allows you to add those to a list (which basically makes up your ‘subscriptions’), and lets you select one or more of those and have Dosage download the latest strip for them.

OK so not much is going on… Thought I might as well pass along some general knowledge.

Changing the resolution of a Linux console is a fairly simple task (and requires a reboot) and is generally a nice thing to do if you intend using the console a lot.

Start off by logging in as root, and open your Grub menu file (mine is in /boot/grub/menu.lst). Next, find the option that would normally boot your Linux system (probably looks something like the following):

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.8-1-386 root=/dev/hda3 ro

Now, simply append to the end “vga=788”, so it ends up looking something like this:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.8-1-386 root=/dev/hda3 ro vga=788

The “788” is a code which tells the console to be 800x600 with a 16bit colour depth. Check out a table ot codes for all resolutions and colour depths by clicking the “read more” link below this post.

Save the file, reboot, and enjoy :-).

For reference, here are some VGA codes:

   Colors ( depth) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
   ---------------+-------+-------+--------+---------+---------
   256    ( 8 bit)| 769    771     773      775       796
   32,768 (15 bit)| 784    787     790      793       797
   65,536 (16 bit)| 785    788     791      794       798
   16.8M  (24 bit)| 786    789     792      795       799

I thought that it’s about time I messed around with proxies, so yeasterday I set up Squid on my server, xan.

The configuration looked like a bit of a mission for a first-timer such as myself :P, so I whipped out Webmin and slapped on the Squid module. I’ll take a look at the config options it generated some other time and do it by hand in future.

I must say the variety of options available is quite impressive. The access control lists are particularly exciting too, there’s a helluva lot that can be done with this stuff.

It’s only being used for HTTP at the moment, and is doing an excellent job. I’ve managed to get AWStats to do some basic reporting for it, so I can see who’s using how much bandwidth, viewing how many pages, what file types are being accessed, etc. I’m a bit of a stats junkie :P.

Overall I’m pretty impressed…

Seems I’ve spent most of today writing Dosage (http://slipgate.za.net/dosage/) modules - managed to find a whole load of comics, and ended up making 10 new modules.

It’s surprising how many comics have their main images sliced in half somewhere midway through the image (so it ends up being 2 images which Dosage obviously won’t handle), I found some that even have each panel in a separate HTML table cell :-/.

Not sure if it’s bad web design or whatever, but it’s a pity since they’ll never make their way into Dosage…

I’ve put my Python POP3 MailBox class up, it may be of some use to someone… Read the comments and stuff within the script for full details.

Download: http://shrimpworks.za.net/filemgmt/singlefile.php?lid=3

Well as expected, my little wxPython dict client is finished.

I decided to install the File Management plugin to let me put this stuff on here somehow… So check out pyDict in the “Files” link on the top-right of the site.

Or simply go here: http://shrimpworks.za.net/filemgmt/index.php

The ReadMe explains the basics of how it works and stuff…

Well I installed dictd on xan (this server) yesterday, and it seems to be working great for Nooblet (my IRC bot, powered by Supybot - http://sypybot.com/) since my ADSL is capped. Accessing it over the LAN and internet works great as well, though I have been hunting for a decent Windows dict client - they don’t seem to exist.

Anyway, so I’m creating a quick little client in Python/wxPython with the dictclient module (http://erwin.complete.org/devel) . Not intended to be a great big feature packed client, it just needs tolook up words after all :D

Should be done in a few hours…

So I thought I’d try out the highly praised Ubuntu Linux. I thought to myself, what better way to try than with their LiveCD - no need to mess up any existing setups.

Anyway so I downloaded the ISO, and after burning the CD, noticed it had a Windows auto-run feature. So I ran it, and was presented with a nice little window asking if I’d like to install Windows versions of OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, Audacity, Gimp, PDFCreator, Thunderbird or Firefox. That struck me as rather odd for a CD that’s supposed to be convincing you Linux is better (“Hey! No need to convert to Linux, just check out all this cool Windows software!”).

So I’m thinking oooookay, so I decide to try out the Linux bit of the disc. Everything boots up nicely, nice little GUI boot loader with a couple of options presented in easy-to-use menus, nice splash image hiding all the auto-detection of hardware and genreral stuff that goes on at boot time (pressing Esc kills the splash image so you can check that everything’s okay in the background). Once it booted up into Gnome, everything looked cool. Nice default desktop setup, theme, etc. I realised at this point that my router had DHCP disabled, so Ubunto had me offline. There’s a ‘Network Setup’ option in the “Actions” menu, which presented me with a nice little wizard for IP, DNS, gateway, etc options. Upon completeing this wizard and closing the application however, nothing would work at all. Icons on the panel did not launch applications, and neither did anything in the application menu. I’d have restarted X, but with LiveCDs, they seem to terminate and reboot as soon as X shuts down.

So anyway, I restarted the whole thing, but with the router’s DHCP enabled. Everything worked cool, the applications on the CD all worked as expected. At some point I entered the Network Setup again and needed another reboot though. Seems as soon as that is run it kills the setup…

It’s a very minimal system though, nothing really useful on it beyond OpenOffice.org - and who uses a LiveCD to do their general word processing. It even had Synaptic - but it prevents you from installing software or even updating the packages list.

I also tried Gnoppix, which is based off the Ubuntu LiveCD, but it suffered the same network configuration application problem, as well as lacking any interesting software. It also included all the Windows software Ubuntu had. In fact the only real difference I saw between Gnoppix and Ubuntu was the boot up splash image. Most of Gnoppix is still ‘branded’ as Ubuntu.

I think if they dumped the Windows software from these CDs, they’d be able to load on a LOT of extra Linux software to impress potential users more, as well as making it more useful as a general-use LiveCD.

The only thing that would make me want to install a proper Ubuntu system at some later date at the moment would be the fact that it’s a full desktop installation out-the-box, with the ability to install anything else on demand thanks to its Debian base.

For the moment I’ll be sticking to Knoppix when I need Linux-on-the-go, which it loaded with tons of useful and fun stuff (pity about KDE, though).