Neverwinter Nights on Ubuntu 12.04 64bit with Nvidia

My NWN install doesn’t see as much action as it used to, but I’m still happy I can run it on my somewhat new install of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64bit.

• I solved the too-much-black issue by “export MESA_EXTENSION_OVERRIDE=-GL_NV_vertex_program”
• Solved the too-much-white issue by using the 310 experimental driver for my NVIDIA Quadro 2000M from the ubuntu-x-swat ppa
• Solved the non-starting client by removing the package libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0

Given that, my nwn script looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

# This script runs Neverwinter Nights from the current directory

export SDL_MOUSE_RELATIVE=0
export SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0

# If you do not wish to use the SDL library included in the package, remove
# ./lib from LD_LIBRARY_PATH
#export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./lib:./miles:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
#export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./miles:/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./miles:/usr/lib32/nvidia-experimental-310
export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pulse
export MESA_EXTENSION_OVERRIDE=-GL_NV_vertex_program

./nwmain $@

IDM-IDE ported to NB 7.2.1

A friend and former colleague asked me whether I could help porting identitymanageride to a recent version of Netbeans, after he had been told that there would be no more investment in that tool from Oracle. Thought I would not get to it after just having picked up a new job and landing right in the middle of an ambitious customer project.

Turned out, it was not as much effort as I had anticipated from the long time the code had been unattended. And so, there it is: Your IDM-IDE plugin for Netbeans 7.2.1, essentially just a port plus two minor bug-fixes (one to avoid an AIOOB exception when trying to save a project as an internal repository project without server configured in Netbeans and one to address issues with XPRESS breakpoints and the UI XPRESS editor by removing the breakpoints if the UI editor changes the XML.) Enjoy!

You don’t need a case for your iPhone … or maybe you do

Got a new job. Back on the road and guess what, I got a new company phone: My first iPhone.
I have been using a Mac for a while and was aware of Apple always knowing exactly what the user wants, better than he himself at times, and of Apple always doing things in the most naturally intuitive ways, to anybody but IT professionals, maybe. So I was not very surprised, when the printed documentation coming with this iPhone 5 did not much go beyond tuning the device on.
Well, there’s always Google, of course, and I did a lot of reading whenever I felt surprised over being unable to do this or that. So I came across this great plea about how you don’t need a case for your iPhone. I totally share the overall sentiment and was laughing my pants off. I have never owned a case for any phone I have had and have never understood why people e. g. put protective covers over their car seats and drive around with ugly seats for years only to make them look good when they sell the car. I mean, it is all good to be mindful about posterity, but you can overdo it. Unfortunately, no matter how much I enjoy being right and cool, in the case of the case, I have found I do need one to protect about four by four mm of all the iPhone, and that is the glass covering the camera’s lens. After using my HTC for two years and never minding a single scratch on its back from being put down on desks and stuff, I started to wonder why the pictures I was taking now and then were so very crappy. Let’s suffice it to say that when I looked at the lens and imagined having similar scratches on my Zuiko 12-60mm that made the hair on my neck stand up. I regard it as a design flaw to have the lens and back of the phone as one even surface and am a bit disillusioned to see the iPhone be in the same situation, but luckily there are a gazillion of cases for sale.