Posts Tagged ‘fail’

PC Gaming – end of an era

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

I must admit, I don’t really buy software, because I find it terribly overpriced here, in Eastern Europe – but if I can afford it (probably through discount sales in major supermarkets) and do find it an invaluable one, I am willing to pay. If it is a game and it does entertain me (which is terribly hard) then it’s fine - I only ask for two things. Try to keep the software bug free (and at least try not to annoy me with patches and automated downloaders) and don’t install crap (spyware or other assorted “security” software “protection”) on my machine, because if you do so, I might as well used cracked executables (risk of getting malware, risk of having unwanted bugs etc).

Also note that having a broken Internet connection around here is not so uncommon; last time I felt a bit bored because of this I wanted to play Half Life 2 single player: Steam laughed in my face.

Now, on with the rant: I liked Neverwinter Nights a lot, but that’s a bit dated, so I’m willing to pay for the somewhat better (still butt ugly) graphics NWN2 would offer and I may consider buying Kotor2, though I’m not a big fan of the Star Wars universe. Also lately I tried out Mass Effect which really really could entertain me: I love the storyline, the carefully written dialogs, the graphics, the gameplay – and since it’s not an FPS, I still can play a couple of hours without having a migraine (free look camera controls even with vsync can give me quite a headache).

So this means we got a buyer, am I right? Hell no. All three software has showstopper bugs (NWN2 for example is well known for its’ lockups and freezes – more than 20 major patches/updates has been released since initial launch) and both NWN and ME has Securom protection, which is very very close to spyware. If I let the softwae phone home all the time and install a low level rootkit (buying it in a shop) I may play; if I choose to pirate the game, I commit a crime, loose risking data and probably will loose updates (a small hope for bugfixes).

So is this a justification for pirating games? Will I use pirated copies instead of legit ones? The answer is no: I will not use either one, this is not a justification, this is not an excuse; I just ditch gaming – the glory days are over for good, thank you EA, BioWare, Valve and rest of you.

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Linux display drivers – we’re not yet there, but getting closer

Friday, February 27th, 2009

I had an Nvidia card all the time but lately (couple of years) I have found it pretty annoying with Linux: switching desktops became slow, widget redraw was sometimes visible, compiz backpuffering left some garbage on the screen, but the worst thing was that I had many segfaults with Amd64, some of which I really did trace back to the Nvidia binary blob.

Now I bought an ATI card and I experience some issues on Windows (most with the stupid Catalyst control center, which is just as annoying as the Nvidia counterpart and some more serious ones with monitor standby/suspend) so I thought I’ll give it a try with Linux (using the firegl binary driver). Is this any better than Nvidia? To my greatest dismay, it is not.

The speed is very good, opengl performance is great segfaults are gone; compositing is still not the best (but I guess this may not be a driver issue), xset dpms force standby works absolutely well, BUT using an opengl app on the desktop (Blender, anyone?) totally freaks out the desktop (does not depend on the window manager, broke apart Xfce, Gnome and Fluxbox), both with or without compiz. Finally using the dual head mode the font rendering gets messed up (fonts are extremely small), which seems to be a resolution/dpi problem, but I’m too lazy to look into it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux Catalyst Control Center is the ugliest app I have ever seen (okay, probably a motif application, blast from the past:)).

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Patent trolls in the IT world

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

Beranger is ranting about patent trolls again (this time Kaspersky Labs) – so, while I find this whole patent trolling utterly stupid, I just gotta realize, I pretty much don’t care about it anymore. Linux is “mostly” protected as long as it is not mainstream and for the rest: give me a break, They won’t patent protect the freaking wheel (besides we’re talking about IT, bunch of ones and zeroes, it’s not human lives)! I’m not in the innovating business and if all hell breaks loose, like I don’t know, we end up having one OS only, well, it would suck. But that’s all. Many things suck yet we manage somehow, usually without fixing it, mostly because we’re just too tied up in our small crap powerstruggles from everyday life to corporation business.

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Ubuntu X86_64 stability revisited (from time to time)

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Ubuntu x86_64 is indeed unbearably unstable (still, now Intrepid Ibex is the chosen one). It’s not that I give a damn, but it’s a tiny little bit annoying, how the 64 bit version on MY machine, for ME happens to end up having segfaults all the time. From firefox to gnome-settings-daemon, from opera to audacious, stuff I use – and it only goes away on a reboot. To make things clear: Arch 64 works, Debian 64 works, Windows-7 64 works (though not much fun), Windows 32 bit works. I know, I know, it works for everyone else, so shut up please.

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CdCat: a catalogizer with a really broken data format

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

I’m using an opensource catalogizer to keep track of my CD and DVD collection (in fact I have been using Hyper’s CdCat for years); actually it’s pretty unstable, it seems to be unmaintained and some essential features are missing (read: it’s opensource), but since I don’t know a thing about Qt and I really am not interested, I thought about at least moving my main catalog xml into a db (sqlite for now) to do some testing on processing speed. Apart from finding this task utterly boring and unchallanging, I also have found a tiny little problem: the file sizes are stored in pretty print format! Not bytes, but kb, mb or gb!

So, some math: 1.72kb = 1.72 * 1024 = 1761.8 != 1760

I know that we say XML is human readable, but this is stupid; if one uses XML for massive amounts of data (my main, yet somewhat cleaned catalog file is well over 10mb) then please, please do optimize it for speed! Now we have some junk whitespaces, non-short tags everywhere, lossy file size data (1760 != 1761 – and that was just for kilo, not mega or giga), some really stupid naming conventions, full human readable time instead of a Unix timestamp.

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