Now that I’ve managed to get my copy of Neverwinter Nights to run in a VirtualBox VM (as detailed here), I wanted to make sure I got the most bang for my bucks, and played around a bit with a few tunables.

My VirtualBox settings depend a lot on my hardware, of course. In my case it’s a MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM. I initially started granting 2 GB to the VM and trying to measure how much is needed with vmstat while running the game. However, either there is a memory leak in nwmain or the way of measuring vmstat into a file leaks memory somehow (to HDD cache or some such). The measurement had only 400 MB of the 2 GB left after playing and quitting the game only freed up memory to a total of about 900 MB. However, setting the total available memory to 1 GB seems to work nicely. My settings are like these:

The first thing I do after starting the VM is turn off host integration for the mouse. While that generally works quite satisfactorily, with NWN, I can’t stand it. Because the SDL game tries to mess around with the mouse pointer at a lower level, moving the mouse out of the VM leaves the mouse pointer invisible. When you click on something rendered by the host (say an icon on the backdrop or a window), the mouse pointer becomes visible. If you, then, move back into the VM, you suddenly have two mouse pointers painted one over the other … rather distracting.

As far as settings in Neverwinter Nights itself are concerned, a resolution of 1400 x 1050 was what I was going for. One word of caution: “environment mapping on creatures” seriously messes up your display. I started with these settings:

Initial Video Options

Initial Advanced Video Options

Those settings worked well for a while. The only thing I noticed were some white polygons here and there, a couple of trees, some carpets, my Paladin mount, nothing terrible. But it turned out that I was quite lagged in situations where a large number of other characters were around. I was looking into my network connection, memory and storage load, but it, quite simply, turned out to be anti-aliasing. Turning that off removed any lag for me (that I couldn’t explain by a major download or some such.) It also doesn’t impact the look and feel so much IMHO. My current settings, thus, are:

Current Video Options

Current Advanced Video Options

I don’t use any of the SDL environment variables that I used to, anymore. The only thing that I changed in nwn is to remove the game provided SDL libraries from the library path to make it use the newer ones from jaunty. Not sure that makes much of a difference, though.

Anyway, I’m set. The game hasn’t crashed ever once in VirtualBox.

When an old friend of mine asked whether we wanted to try and play a bit of “Neverwinter Nights” again, I had accidentally just read that the game is available on Mac, too, and I embarked on an odyssey to get this to run.

Of course, I still had my whole old NWN Linux installation backed up. So I extracted that again. I imagined, I would just get the latest patch from Bioware, extract the Mac binaries, copy them over and be done with it. That, of course, would have been too easy. I did get the latest patch and extracted the Mac OSX apps. However, they wouldn’t run. Turned out, I needed some specific libraries from the MacSoft version of the game. The Mac game is no longer for sale, and quite contrary to prices for the PC versions, prices for used Mac versions are pretty high on ebay. So I found the old NWN Tech Demo on the Internet and copied the “Bink Carbon Library” to my NWN directory and the libraries in the miles/ directory to my miles/ directory. Lo and behold, the game would start, I was overjoyed … for a while.

A while later it turned out, the game did not run reliably. It took up the habit of crashing on me in the most inconvenient situations. I died a couple of times on both “Forgotten Realms Cormyr” and “World of Greyhawk” because the game crashed when I was almost done with some heavy fighting, myself almost spent, I then couldn’t get a connection again for an hour or more, and eventually got back right into the dungeon nearly dead with all the monsters respawned. No fun at all!

So before diving deeper into any action, I resolved to get a more stable gameplay experience. I tried researching the crash, but all the CrashReporter told me was that it was some sort of rosetta problem. I completely replaced rosetta with the original Leopard CD version. That, at first, seemed to help, but after a while I was getting the same crashes. Then I tried wine, with or without the NWN Wrapper off http://nwn.bioware.com . No luck there.

Finally, I thought, why not use VirtualBox? After all, VirtualBox does have OpenGL support. So, another attempt:

Install Linux on my recently updated VBox 3.0.8. I only had a gutsy CD ready, so I used that. Installation done, VirtualBox guest additions installed (with message about too old a kernel for DRI), glxgears showed smth., fire up nwn and … the complete VM crashed … wow!

So back we go to the VirtualBox documentation to find that OpenGL support requires kernel version 2.6.27. Gutsy’s way too old. I update to hardy, to intrepid, reinstall the guest additions and glxinfo shows OpenGL version 2. Try nwn again … the VM crashes again. That with the docs saying OpenGL has been tested on ubuntu 8.10 (though glxgears was a lot smoother, now.)

Before giving up completely, I upgraded to 9.04 without much hope. I reinstalled the guest additions again, for the sake of completeness fired up nwn, and … IT WORKS!!!

I’ll test this some more and come back with good settings.

So, since I do pursue the hobby of taking photos with even more energy than I used to, it’s inevitable that I have some more pictures to share. Here are a few samples from a quick photo session with a friend of mine on the southern side of the port of Offenbach.

It’s been a while since I announced (along the way) that I was going to get a DSLR camera in this post. Well, I have got it by now. It’s an Olympus E-520 I bought with the two kit lenses. With a few initial hurdles cleared, I’m quite happy with it. Obviously, as soon as you start to extend your own limits, you painfully recognize where the new ones are. So it is when after buying an entry class DSLR with a pair of pretty decent kit lenses you start to take different kinds of pictures and more consciously, you start to find yourself in situations where you don’t even press the release because without trying you know there’s no way your equipment is going to get the picture at the right exposure, sharp, with sufficient depth-of-field. As always, it is the last few percent of excellence that take the greatest energy to achieve. It is not just energy, though. There is a considerable amount of money involved in wanting this lens, that body, this tripod, or that flash.

Now, as a hobbyist, there are limits to the amount of money I’m willing to spend per year. But there are other ways of putting energy to a good use. One thing that has been nagging me, was that I had all those depth-of-field calculators online, but none which I could carry around. Yes, there are cardboard dials you can carry around, but that’s one more (rather frail) thing to carry around in the already limited space of my camera bag. Yes, there is depth-of-field calculator software for the iPhone and one for PalmOS, but I have no such device. I do, however, own a Java-enabled mobile phone which I carry around most of the time, anyway. And as a big fan of the “write-once-run-anywhere” idea, I was mildly annoyed that nobody had implemented such a piece of software in a cross-platform way. Then I did it, myself.

So, this then is dofCalc, the portable depth-of-field calculator that requires no more than a Java-enabled mobile device that supports MIDP 2 and CLDC 1.1. It not only allows you to calculate the depth-of-field from the other related values, but also to calculate any of the other parameters, like aperture from a desired depth-of-field, focal length, and subject distance. Along the way, it can calculate the hyperfocal distance and has a configurable circle of confusion to be usable with virtually any camera. If you think this could be useful, visit the sourceforge site and download it for free. I’ll be looking forward to your feedback.

Have been meaning to write this when I was struggling with it for the first time, but never got round to doing it. Now, I needed to do it again, and here’s my report.

If you own a Samsung ML-2010 (or 2010R) printer, you may or may not know that it requires very special printer drivers due to Samsung’s own printer language SPL. The eeepc by default only supports the printer by half. You may hook the printer up to your netbook and it will even recognize it and suggest the (normally) correct driver/PPD. However, if you go with those suggestions, you won’t be able to print, because the installed software lacks the translation engine for SPL. It could be included (as it is with most current Linux distributions). There is an open source implementation called splix that I have previously written about when I ported it to the D-Link DNS-323 NAS device. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a working binary package for the eeepc (and was too lazy to set up a build or cross-compile environment for it.) I found an easy alternative, though, that didn’t involve installing the huge and messy Samsung driver in its entirety. Here’s what I did:

1. download the Samsung unified driver and save it to /home/user
2. extract it (e. g. through the file manager and right-click on the archive). You should end up with a folder /home/user/cdroot.
3. open a terminal (press house-key and “T”)
4. cd /home/user/cdroot/Linux/i386/at_root/usr/lib/cups/
5. cp backend/mfp /usr/lib/cups/backend/
6. cp filter/rastertosamsungspl* /usr/lib/cups/filter/
7. /etc/init.d/cupsys restart

Before you delete the driver archive and the extracted cdroot directory, be sure to add your printer. When the “add printer” wizard suggests a driver, don’t accept the default, but select the ppd from file. You’ll find the ppd files covered by the unified driver under: cdroot/Linux/noarch/at_opt/share/ppd/ML-2010spl2.ppd

Note, that not all printers supported by the unified driver use SPL. So, the procedure above may not work for every one of those printers. If you pick a ppd file of a printer using a different printer language, you will get errors in the cups logs (/var/logs/cups/) about a missing filter. You may get away with copying the other filters, too (in step 6). However, those may depend on additional libraries (check with ldd), which also may need to be copied to appropriate places (like /usr/lib).

Last year, when my wife was somewhat annoyed with me tinkering around with our computer rendering her unable to access her email, she saw the ASUS eeepc during some TV coverage of cebit. She had to have it.

I decided, at the time, that if my wife wants to have a technical gadget, it was my duty to support that, esp. as it was a Linux box. Furthermore, her birthday in November would give the display time enough to grow a bit from the original, tiny one. So, I waited and eventually bought a 900A at a very good price some time in October last year.

I configured the beast and with the exception of my wife having to switch to thunderbird from evolution, she felt comfortable from day one. It even encouraged here to play around more and try things out, where previously she would have constantly been afraid to break something. The only minor issue was with the keyboard, where the space-key was not mounted evenly and was very hard to operate. This we didn’t regard as a big problem until two months ago, when we sent it to ASUS to have the issue fixed. The whole repair procedure was very convenient and professional. The only very minor thing was that when the online tracking tool said the machine was fixed, we got no further update as to whether it was shipped already, or when it would. So, for a few days, we were a bit lost. Overall, though, I’d give the service a big thumbs-up.

When the netbook returned, I noticed the disk had been reset and the software updated. I don’t know why replacing the keyboard requires deleting user data, but I had been warned and backed everything up. That was no big deal. What was a bit annoying was the fact that the touchpad behaved differently. On every other mouse movement you would accidentally e. g. activate a link on a web page, or activate an item in a sub-menu when actually you wanted to dismiss the menu. I twiddled around with the settings for a bit and managed to get it work in a way that at least did not render the touchpad completely useless, but it was still kinda annoying with unwanted clicks every now and then. Then the netbook stopped to join our home WLAN network. You would need to explicitly join on every reboot and then the notification area icon would not refresh the status (even if ifconfig would show the DHCP address). Finally, pressing the power button no longer brought up the shutdown/suspend dialog and when shutting down through the power icon in the notification area, the system would not power off completely. You would always have to wait for disk activity to stop and then have to press and hold the power button (prolly smth. around ACPI broken). Very, very odd … and very annoying.

So I started to review my options, was even looking at other distributions, esp. at ubuntu-based ones, where I was hoping a larger, technical community would help working out such issues better. Before going there, I wanted to see if a factory reset might be enough to get things back to normal. I backed up the whole user directory to my DNS323 NAS device. Then, just to play it safe, I followed the steps here to get a way to boot into single-user mode. Then I rebooted, entered the grub menu by holding F9 after powering on, and selected “Restore factory settings”. I followed the wizard, rebooted again, joined the WLAN network, rebooted once more … and everything was back to where we were when we initially got the box: WLAN joined automatically, shutdown dialog displayed on press of power button, touchpad working as before.

The conclusion then was that some updated messed up the system. Now, while I understand automatic updates for security fixes and new features, I hate it, when they break a running system. If that’s what I wanted, I’d never have switched from Windows to Linux. So, what I did was manually install just a few application updates that I though would not do any harm (firefox, acrobat reader, and such), then I disabled automatic updates.

Disable Automatic Updates

As my wife uses German localization, “Software-Verwaltung” would be “Software Management” on the preferences/settings tab, “Aktualisierungen” is “Updates” and the two checked boxes would be something along the lines of “Confirm installation of updates” and “Show Icon on demand”. Everything else is deselected.

Since the update service had already downloaded the list of available updates and I don’t have a way of saying “I don’t want this update, EVER”, on every reboot the notification area would alert me and ask me whether I want to install the available updates. I know my wife had basically installed every single update just to get rid of that pop-up. As I didn’t want that, again, I needed to turn that off, too. Here’s how I did it:
rm -rf /var/cache/UpdateService/
cp /opt/xandros/share/UpdateService/Updates.xml /opt/xandros/share/UpdateService/Updates.xml.orig


Then edit /opt/xandros/share/UpdateService/Updates.xml to look like this:
<data remote-timestamp="Fri, 22 May 2009 06:56:07 GMT" timestamp="2009-05-23 21:14:15 UTC" >
</data>

Now, everything’s back to normal, and my wife is a happy camper again. (And if she is, I am … or at least, if she isn’t, it’s hard for me to be )

After having just bashed one book, I need to do something for the Yin/Yang balance. So, here’s a book recommendation:

Book: Java Generics and Collections

While one may sometimes think that books on programming languages are obsolete with everything out there on the Internet, there are situations when after researching for hours, reading tutorials, blogs reiterating the tutorials, etc., you wish you just had somebody with some real in-depth knowledge to explain things to you. If the matter in question is generics in Java, I can absolutely recommend this book by Maurice Naftalin (funny last name, though) and Philip Wadler. It goes way beyond what the vast majority of tutorials explain. You might find everything in the Java Language Specification, but this book is certainly easier to consume.

It has solved these questions for me:

• Q: How do you subclass a class with fairly wide type bounds in such a way that you restrict the bounds but not just select a parent further down the chain? For example, you may want to allow just one specific type.
  A: You don’t put the type in the declaration of your child class, but in its extends/implements clause. So, you don’t do:
  
// THIS DOES NOT COMPILE
public MyMap<String, MyObject> extends AbstractMap {

  You could potentially do:
  
public MyMap<K extends String, V extends MyObject> extends AbstractMap {

  Since String is final, that may be OK, but are you safe on V? Maybe, maybe not.
  To pin this down, you could do:
  
public MyMap extends AbstractMap <String, MyObject> {
• Q: How do you use a generic method when the type cannot be inferred from the method parameter (e. g. because there is none)?
  A: Let’s say you have a method like this:
  
public class MyClass<T extends Blah> {
...
public List<T> getList()

  And then you want to call this from another generic class. The following may work but -Xlint:unchecked complains.
  
public class MyOtherClass<T extends Blah> {
MyClass<T> foo;
...
List<T> bar = foo.getList();

  The clean way to do it, is:
  
List<T> bar = foo.<T>getList();

If you’re interested, you’ll find the book with this information:

Title: Java Generics and Collections
Authors: Maurice Naftalin, Philip Wadler
Published: October 2006
Pages: 284
ISBN 10: 0-596-52775-6 | ISBN 13: 9780596527754

It’s been longer before I’m continuing this series than I originally expected. But now, I can’t stand this any longer. This time it’s Lawrence Norfolk’s novel “Lempriere’s Dictionary” that I’m all upset about. The book is Norfolk’s first novel, an attempt at something big, and has received some considerable applause. I fail to quite understand what for, though.

Lawrence Norfolk: Lempriere's Dictionary

Believe me, I am really trying to enjoy this book. Maybe I wouldn’t be as upset, if I didn’t. The book itself, I received as a gift from my wife. But now, I’ve been reading it for months and haven’t progressed any further than page 200 and something. Of course, you may say, the book just is no easy read. And I may not be up to the task. — Well, I have read a few difficult books during my studies of “English and American Literature” or “Medieval History”. I also thoroughly enjoy things like Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” (including every single, distracting footnote). This is very different, though.

It all starts with the inner monologue of the protagonist. For pages and pages he wallows in self-pity, almost unbearable. From there, I thought, it can only get better. And it did to some extent, but even later the characters remain hardly credible in their actions. Like when John Lempriere goes to meet with his counterpart in an old inherited contract only to be shown an absurd drinking game and then eventually take part in it rather than smacking Septimus who stole his money to place a bet. Even later, he decides to write a dictionary following the advice of an again completely absurd session with a psychiatrist Septimus organized … Huh? Why does Lempriere even still associate with Septimus? Why does he take the psychiatrist for serious, when he feels it’s a farce?

But what’s probably worse to me, personally, is that Norfolk is just no story-teller. He prefers to indulge in endless often completely unmotivated discourse (for example between Septimus and the landlord of a cafe on the comparative merits of coffee vs. tea) just to sound scholarly. This, I feel, is a lot more to the benefit of the author than the reader.

Anyway, the rest of my sentiments have already been voiced elsewhere. I’ll link to a few review that sum it up, nicely. Fairness, of course, demands to admit that there are favourable reviews, too.

A to Z! About 24 letters too long.

Lempriere’s Fictionary

Light industry masquerading as art

Overwritten pretentious drivel

I don’t often blog about work-related things considering this blog more my personal, private outlet. So, it’s almost like having followed a tradition to not have blogged about the recent change of my position. I won’t do it now, either — there is just too little to say, now, or too much. Suffice it to say, that I’m busy and excited, and that it’s the first time that developing open source software is a considerable part of what I do for my living.

Those who know me, will know that I was at a time involved in the IDM-CBE. Now, maybe history does move in circles after all, or spirals (and this time I’m inclined to say upwards.) Now, I’m working on the Identity Manager IDE here and there.

Recently upgraded my DNS-323 to firmware 1.6 because of one of my harddrives never going to sleep. And lo and behold! The firmware upgrade fixes the issue. So I’m one happy camper.

I did encounter two issues, though:

1. Prolly due to something I did wrong when playing around with the iTunes server a while ago, now the web mgmt. GUI would crash, whenever I clicked on the iTunes Server tab on the advanced configuration page. What solved the issue for me was to delete /mnt/HD_a4/.systemfile/.mt-daapd/.songs.gdb
2. The other thing was that my scan server setup no longer worked when turning on the scanner after booting the DNS-323. Detection of devices after bootup == hotplug, so that was easy: The hotplug agent had changed, and I needed to generate a new diff file to patch it at startup. The result then is as follows (the lines may run out of the page on the right, just copy/past to your local text editor):

--- /etc/hotplug/usb.agent.orig	2009-04-27 16:54:03.000000000 +0100
+++ /etc/hotplug/usb.agent	2009-04-27 16:54:58.000000000 +0100
@@ -1,6 +1,21 @@
 #!/bin/sh
 #echo "0=$0 1=$1 2=$2 `env`">>/tmp/debug_usbagent

+## echo "$ACTION - $PRODUCT - $INTERFACE - $TYPE" >>/opt/tmp/usb.hp.out
+## echo "arg1: $1" >>/opt/tmp/usb.hp.out
+if [ "$PRODUCT" = "4b8/10b/104" ]; then
+    if [ "$ACTION" = "add" ]; then
+##         echo "Detected Scanner, starting scanbuttond" >>/opt/tmp/usb.hp.out
+        PATH=/opt/bin:/opt/sbin:/mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/bin:/mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/sbin:"${PATH}" sh -x /mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/start/05xinetd.sh start ## >>/opt/tmp/usb.hp.out
+        PATH=/opt/bin:/opt/sbin:/mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/bin:/mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/sbin:"${PATH}" sh -x /mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/start/06scanbuttond.sh start ## >>/opt/tmp/usb.hp.out
+    elif [ "$ACTION" = "remove" ]; then
+##         echo "Detected Scanner removal, stopping scanbuttond" >>/opt/tmp/usb.hp.out
+        PATH=/opt/bin:/opt/sbin:/mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/bin:/mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/sbin:"${PATH}" sh -x /mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/start/06scanbuttond.sh stop ## >>/opt/tmp/usb.hp.out
+        PATH=/opt/bin:/opt/sbin:/mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/bin:/mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/sbin:"${PATH}" sh -x /mnt/HD_a2/fun_plug.d/start/05xinetd.sh stop ## >>/opt/tmp/usb.hp.out
+    fi
+fi
+
+
 echo "PRINTER" > /tmp/UpdateOLED_USB_dev
 if [ "$1" = "add" ]; then
   if [ "$ACTION" = "" ]; then