derek:b3studios

Ok so, anyone that reads this blog, should know by now how infrequently I update this. Well that will change. From my understanding everyone whose blog I read never blogs! I’m thinking about starting the infrequent bloggers club. We would inevitably meet infrequently.

But while I’m hear, let me tell you what Harper Reed did. Harper recreated one of the best twitter bots ever. It connects twitter to jabber (google talk). Why does this rock? Its as easy as sending an IM to excla.im, and bam Twitter status updated.

This rocks, because no more multiple apps across multiple platforms to make twittering easy. Try it out.

Only one question remains, Wordpress support harper? I would love this. If I could send a message from Jabber to my Wordpress blog and have it published. Perhaps I need to investigate XMPP more. Or just wish that someone else does it for me. Go internets!

It has been a long time, but I am back, and with force my friends! I’m applying at a new firm, hopefully they will like my resume. I do not currently fit the job descriptions they have, but I believe I can be a new, and great addition to the team, and I am very interested in the type of work they do.

Anyway, that was a quick update, I have much time on my hands tonight as the baby has gone to sleep. Perhaps I will slip onto irc, and check with everyone. Oh and do I have some goodies in store, later.

update: the max number of days that can be gotten is 7676 days.

This is a call out to Codeweavers. Mainly Jeremy White. I hope you read my blog I read yours! I love Codeweavers. They have for the FIRST time in a long time, enticed me to move away from Open-Source strict software, and pay for a product. Its that good. They save me time in management. I don’t HAVE a lot of time. I don’t want to mess with winecfg, I don’t wanna dink with X11. Well thats the thing, I can’t dink with X11 anyway, because hey OSX 10.5 ;-/ kinda screwed the pooch on that one.

Apple X11 + Wine = No OpenGL support. Codeweavers, wove an amazing web. Crossover, and CrossOver Games 7.0, is awesome. Finally GUILDWARS, on my Mac. Here is the problem. I didn’t try CrossOver, until I got a Mac, Wine + X11 fairly stable in Linux, and actually I didn’t have a Linux gaming machine, I’ve been all ATI, and well we know how their track record is but that is another post!

So here I am on a Mac that can game, stuck Dual booting. CrossOver gives me the ability to STOP booting Windows. YAY my Mac is happy! Because VMware takes care of the need for my day job. Sweet. I download CrossOver 6.2, which is ok so so. Its a little behind, but I take the 30 day free offer, and play loads of games. Honestly it wasn’t that great, but it worked. And I heard CrossOver Games was coming out. WELL, I downloaded the demo. And boy was I sad. I have so many MORE games I want to try with CrossOver 7.0, due to the upgraded wine. You know what, they gave me a week. OH SHIT?! I thought Jeremy White had 2 kids?! And a wife!? And articles mentioned he didn’t have a lot of time!? Jeremy, WTF? 1 week to try out 7.0!?

So here it is, proof of concept, because I don’t think its fair to post, and most of the geeks will figure it out. Extend your CrossOver Games trial, past 7 days. Note: This is illegal, I am still in my 7 day trial period, as of writing this. I do plan to purchase the software as it is great, and CodeWeavers is still the bomb. But I think they were unfair this time around.

Also Jeremy, if you do stumble across this, consider helping the Mac community out with Leopard. I know you are a big fan of giving back to the community. And the one thing that some other tinkerers and hackers would like, is to have working X11, and OpenGL with wine.

So today, I ran into great news, back in september someone released a patch for the Intel-HDA sound card, for Alsa 1.0.15!!!! What this means to you, if of course you have an Intel-HDA, is that your headphone port will not auto switch off the speakers, and it doesn’t just decrease the preamp, it works like it did on Windows!

Ok so how can you do this? Well these instructions should pretty much work on any Debian based system for sure. Since I use Dreamlinux, I’ll be talking about that distro, and Debian Stable in general.
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I’ve begun to grow more fond of Dreamlinux 2.2 after finding out whats making it tick a little more. I appreciate the fact that its built pretty much right on Debian Stable (Etch). While the packages are out of date compared to Ubuntu, its making for a very usable and speedy/fast system, with little to no bugs found in say Gutsy Gibbon. Gusty Gibbon is bloated, hardly runs well on my laptop, and suffers some setback. This happens every other release of Ubuntu to me, by the time the next release of Ubuntu is coming out, the current 6 month cycle is just finishing up on being stable. And I’m really not too fond of sticking with a LTS from Ubuntu. They just havn’t proved them selves to be LTS people yet. Debian on the other hand, has roots that go way back.

For now, I’ll stick with a slightly out of date system, loving the Debian Stable branch.

I’m been really getting into Dreamlinux, it appears to be a distro with pretty much everything I need. Like I said in my previous post, the only downside is that the system isn’t always up to date as well as it should be. With that said, Dreamlinux doesn’t come preinstalled with an easy network manager. Nore has the Dreamlinux team made the current network manager much easier to use. The problem is most related to laptop users. Laptop users, need an easy way to scan wireless networks, and pick an available one. I wrote a quick mini tutorial at the Dreamlinux Wiki about it.

But now, I have a new gripe. Engage Panel dumps the sys tray when it recycles, I hate this, because guess what, network-manager-gnome doesn’t automatically recycle it nm-applet! In other words, edit the Engage Dock using Engage Admin, and lose system tray icons, and need to restart the applet.

I found a quick way around that, and am providing my modified Engage Admin code. Basically how this works, is you replace the current Engage Admin with my modified one (or you can install them side by side, there are only 2 line additions), install a sh script to your home directory, enter the commands to run after recycle in the sh script. And now, when you recycle the Engage Dock, it will also run the commands in the sh file, easy - no more manually reloading nm-applet! Of course you can follow the small guide here, but I’ll also be adding it to the Dreamlinux Wiki .

Just follow these codes in your terminal window:


cd /usr/local/bin
sudo mv engage_admin.rb engage_admin.rb.bak