Author: Matthias

Europe’s most sexy vegetarian

is Belgian! Even West-Flemish, of course. 😉 An award presented by PETA.

Just a few days ago, I went to an info evening about the environmental impact of meat production (they showed the documentary “meat the truth”) and guess what, they invited Fiona Dewaele to give a short testimony of how she became a vegetarian. The final outcome of the contest wasn’t known yet, but I really granted her the victory as she seemed a nice girl. I guess it was a small effort for her to join the info evening since she still studies literature and philosophy here at the university.

Now afterwards, it’s funny to see all the “media/model” glamour pictures spread over the internet but still recognize the “real girl” behind the pictures. I could post one from the pictures from the event, but I’m not sure whether she’d like that. 🙂 (although she probably wouldn’t mind) Anyway, here are some “media pics” instead. 😉


Fiona Fiona Fiona

Congratulations, Fiona!

Van Dale dictionaries on linux

After several rant mails to the Vandale publishers house, I finally gave in/up. About a year ago, I complained that I couldn’t buy a linux version of my favorite Dutch dictionaries (not that there is a choice when it comes to digital Dutch dictionaries). Online dictionaries don’t cut it for me, I always need the words (or expressions) that free online ones don’t provide. 😉 The answer was that there does not exist a linux version. So I asked when the linux version would be released. The communication stalled but apparently it got escalated and I got an answer by another person telling me there was no linux version planned, however he was delighted to announce the availability of a Mac version within only 3 months!

You know this smiley banging its head against the wall? That’s me, banging my head… How can they be so stupid to port to another platform and not take cross-platform toolkits into account?? I couldn’t help myself, so I started to lecture “cross-platform 101”. 😉 I am not sure if I was able to get through to him, but I hope at least a few fragments stuck in his mind. 🙂

In the meantime, they do have a mac version. I never received a reply to my plea. So I decided to give it a try under wine. Surprise, surprise (not), it works! (using the win2k installer patch). Sometimes, wine can really be a godsend. For the occasion, I created a few desktop icons since the original ones suck badly.

I created them by drawing bezier curves with the original icon from the website in overlay. It actually sounds easier as it sounds. 🙂 I had to tweak my beziers quite a bit to have a somewhat appealing result. Since this will probably be the last time I will take a KDE3 screenshot (still on my suse 10.3), I decided to post a screenshot of the icons with my desktop in full glory 😉

Vandale icons

Also spot the home-made icon for Cave Story, but that’s merely a rip from the game resources 😉
Here are the icons in case you want them too:
vandale icon Englishvandale icon French

FTP: copying outside chroot jail

Your typical ftp setup will allow your users to only copy/modify stuff in their own home dir (=chroot jail). Which makes sense. However, from time to time, you’ll want to access directories outside your home dir and then the following workaround can come in handy. Concretely, I have a few hard disks in my box, so, from time to time, I want to write directly to another partition than my home partition because of space constraints.

Obviously, you can allow root to access ftp, but we’d like to avoid that if possible, right? Simply making a symbolic link in our home dir also doesn’t work because of the chroot jail.

What you can do however, is mount a directory in another place. Suppose I have a /dev/sdb1 which is mounted to /mnt/data. I want to have access to the download dir on that drive. Then I can do:

mount --bind /mnt/data/download /home/mattie/download

to access this from my home dir. you can use the -r option to make it read-only if you wish (though doesn’t make much sense in my scenario). I suppose it might also work using hard links but I didn’t try that as I didn’t need a permanent link. Using mount, the link simply disappears on the next reboot.

Controlling XMMS using a gamepad

On windows I used to control winamp using global shortcuts. Since I didn’t immediately find this plugin on linux (although google seems to suggest it exists), I tried the joystick control plugin. But I never used a joystick before on linux.. 🙂

I plugged in my Logitech Dual Action Gamepad and a cpu spike indicated something got detected. 😉 I didn’t have high hopes it would work in XMMS though, since that’s about as archaic as one can get with a gui app. 😉 I enabled the libjoy.so plugin and set the path right to /dev/input/js0 instead of the default /dev/js0. I tried some button and some joystick. It didn’t do anything.

Let’s have a look at Yast. Yes, it has a joystick module, but it didn’t seem to list my gamepad. But then I read in the side column that you don’t have to configure anything if you use an USB gamepad. So next thing was to try KDE’s control center which turns out to also have joystick module. Indeed, the gamepad with all its axes and buttons was properly detected! While I was there, I also did a calibration, mostly for fun, as it didn’t seem necessary. So why didn’t it work with XMMS, because it was just too old?

In a final attempt, I tried testing a “general analog joystick” in yast, which triggered a package install (don’t remember which one). I don’t know if it was the package that did the trick, but after that, it worked in XMMS! It was just a matter of finding out the right buttons by trial and error (the mapping didn’t correspond to KDE’s mapping).

Fine-tuning Urban Terror configuration on linux

This has actually been too long ago, but I’ll to reproduce accurately. 🙂

First of all, why would you need to configure your urban terror install on linux? Can’t you just extract & play like on windows? Yeah, you could. Except when:

  1. You’re using a recent libcurl (which is used for downloading new maps through HTTP).
  2. You’re using an azerty keyboard (or a keyboard map which contains keys that are unknown to ioq3).

Which is quite a lot of people, at least, in Europe. 😉
Continue reading Fine-tuning Urban Terror configuration on linux

Adobe doesn’t like Opera?

I was idly surfing the Adobe knowledge base (yeah, one of my secret hobbies is memorizing KB’s ;)), when I encountered to my surprise the following instructions for uninstalling Adobe Bridge:

Remove remaining folders and files for Adobe Bridge

Back up any personal files you want to save from the following directories, and then remove the listed folders and files:

All versions

Documents and Settings\ [User Name] \Application Data\Adobe\Bridge
Documents and Settings\ [User Name] \Application Data\Adobe\Updater\Data\bridge1.aum
Documents and Settings\ [User Name] \Application Data\Adobe\Updater\Data\bridge1_meta.txt
Documents and Settings\ [User Name] \Application Data\Opera
Documents and Settings\ [User Name] \My Documents\Updater\bridge1
Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Updater\Certs\bridge.cer
Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Adobe Bridge
Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Bridge
Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Launch\bridge\1.0
Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\StartupScripts\bridge.jsx
Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\StartupScripts\bridgecenter.jsx
Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\StartupScripts\ols.jsx

They cunningly snuck in an instruction to remove all Opera application data! Can you believe this? 🙂 how evil 😉

New record

In my studio I reached a new record for lowest temperature. I have a min-max thermometer, so it’s easy to know 🙂
Last night when I arrived, it was 6.5 °C. After 6 hours of electrical heating, it became 12 °C. yay. Today, I won’t reach it. I tried playing an FPS, but my aim is totally frozen. 🙂

My last record was about 9-10 years ago on my student room, where the wind was blowing over the floor due to bad insulation. I was in the highest room and since there always came air in the heating circuit (central heating) I was lucky to have water at all in my radiator. And in the event it reached my room, it had already cooled down since the heating pipes weren’t insulated. I somehow still managed to get 12 °C anyway although I think I added another electrical heating device to achieve a temperature this high 😉 I remember playing Half life with my gloves and hat on. Now I only need a hat, probably because there is no wind anymore.

The Crippled World of Modern Gaming

Citation on how the author experienced the end of Fallout 3:

The final quests consists of following a massive MechWarrior-esque robot who basically does all the killing and fighting for you. All you have to do is stay behind him and collect the loot of the dead Enclave soldiers – loot you’re not going to need anyway, but hey, in an RPG, grabbing loot is a reflex. You then shoot a few Enclave baddies in a building, flick a switch, and the game ends. It was so easy I kept on telling myself this was just an intro to a massive battle.

When I realised I had actually finished the game, I was all ready to grab some chips, and make me a nice pot of tea, but before I even got up off the couch, the ending sequence was already over. Five pictures slid by, with the voice over telling a three-sentence story, and that was it. The end. That’s your reward for 140 hours of gaming and 64 Euros. A sepia slideshow.

Usually, I’m not that much of a fan of Thom Holwerda’s somewhat provoking/sensational writing style, but this piece really is an entertaining read 🙂
Read the full story on OSNews