Software

As more games become available for Linux on Steam, I've been adding to my collection. Although I don't get much time to play, I like to support bringing titles to the platform with my dollars. Of the ones I have tried, the Wargame series by Eugen Systems has been a standout.

Purchasing the trilogy during a sale, I started with Wargame: AirLand Battle due to it having a tutorial as a starting point. Going into this game thinking it was a more typical RTS, I quickly found out just tossing your units at the enemy results in a quick loss. The game has a dizzying array of units modeled on real world counterparts, and requires knowledge of how to use reconnaissance and correct unit selection and tactics. Unlike other games where one can just crank out more units if a strategy doesn't work, this game has 'decks' of available units. Just like in a real battle resources for each action are limited, and there's no time spent building bases and collecting resources.

In one of the tutorial missions I went in not realizing how the game works, and began to use the usual RTS tactic of building tanks then working my way up the map to clear each area in turn. By the time I got to the top, I had plenty of 'resources' (action points in this game), but was confused; why couldn't I build more tanks? By this time the AI was tearing my tanks to pieces with their air force and I was getting quickly overrun by their tanks. Reading more about why I lost and how the game actually works online, I tried another strategy next time; instead of wasting resources fighting battles that didn't matter, I flanked the enemy and cut off their air corridor. This time, with logical tactics, I won easily. I've been hooked ever since.

With Desura and Steam bringing an influx of commercial games to Linux, I've been trying some of these out. My favorite so far has been FTL: Faster than Light; ironically a game available for Linux without either of these distribution platforms.

Who hasn't dreamed of commanding a starship, navigating space, fleeing a mighty armada of enemies? Check out the video on the right by Nerd³.

For a few weeks now Google Maps has a bug where 22/322 at Clark's Ferry is impassible via through route directions. This is not the first time I have found bugs in Google Maps, but it is the first one I have seen involving a major highway.

Debian 6 Squeeze release is imminent. This will be the first release where I'm the maintainer for a Debian package.

When using the run trains feature of xtrkcad, the tutorial is misleading where it directs dragging the engine and cars to the track. Instead, these items are placed just like track elements; click on the item to place in the toolbar, then click within the drawing area and drag the item where you want it.

First select the engine to place in the toolbar (shown selected here in blue and black):



Then move your cursor down into the drawing area, click and hold, dragging the engine into place on the track (shown here in orange just below the brown wall):

Apple lingered about 6 hours today before posting its special event online, and now their servers are so saturated downloads are proceeding at under 10KB/s. It took what may be the foremost media technology company in the world 6 hours to post an event, a company that produces software designed to allow extremely fast editing and production of video.

Even with all the technology available to them their servers cannot handle the demand to get the event to my Apple TV in a timely manner. This is the clearest obstacle to the Apple TV replacing other media, the network it connects to simply isn't ready yet.

Having just returned from the Central PA Open Source Conference, I found it to be a very informative and useful conference. A wide array of interesting topics in different fields were covered, and there were many items I can apply over the next few months to my own projects.

My favorite session was Hardware and Honeybees, in large part because it showed interesting uses for technology and hardware hacking, something as a software-oriented person I do not see much of. Using cell phone text messages to control electric fences, web cameras to monitor hive status, and inexpensive temperature monitors to find problems were all topics in this interesting talk.

The latest pre-release version of Firefox 3 is available. As a main focus of this release, performance and memory usage are improved. In particular Zimbra, the most heavyweight web application I use, has much better performance when used with this version. A more native look and feel on OS X and Growl notification support are nice features too. It is enough of an improvement that I do not intend to go back to version 2 after experiencing this pre-release.

I have been an advocate of RSS ever since I discovered it. RSS allows me to keep up with the news on many topics while losing as little productive time as possible browsing many websites.

Having used many RSS feed readers, I have been consistently disappointed by the lack of synchronization support for read articles and tagged items across computers, as I use many different systems throughout the day. Google Reader has this feature by its nature of being a web application, but oddly for a company specializing in search, it didn't have feed searching, a feature I use constantly. I have switched between RSSOwl and Newsfire, liking the rich client features, continuing to be annoyed by the lack of multi-system sync, but not annoyed enough to write an RSSOwl plug in to do it for me (one of those things I would enjoy doing if I get some free time).

Yesterday Google Reader added feed searching along with other useful improvements and refinements.

MacHeist is at it again, with a whole new set of shareware applications being sold as a bundle. Although there does not appear to be a charity benefit this time, there are many more applications in the bundle. All applications have been unlocked at this point, so you are assured everything in the bundle. The offer expires midnight EDT on Thursday, July 19.

In homage to the movie WarGames, DEFCON encourages the player to replay cold war doomsday scenarios, sitting in a bunker commanding forces to destroy the enemy using silo, submarine, and bomber based nuclear weapons. Unlike other games which force the player to wage war on the developer's platform of choice, this game lets you destroy the world on Linux and Mac OS X as well as Windows.

To add some strategy instead of simple destruction, viable defenses are available if used correctly. One example are the silos which fire interceptor missiles, but only when not firing nuclear missiles themselves, preventing poorly planned attacks from hitting their targets. This creates interesting strategies and bluffs to be used against other human players.

Shall we play a game?

In the process of migrating from a Sharp Zaurus 5500 to a Nokia N800, I needed to convert my extensive ZSafe password list to Password Safe format so it works with pwsafe for maemo. In case it might be useful to someone else, the conversion script is available. Note that it requires pwsafe for Linux (I installed the pwsafe Debian package before building this script).

There is a wonderful application for OS X called Disco. It makes burning much simpler than the built-in Finder options, with the added touch of a smoking CD burning window which makes burning fun. I have found one problem with it though, the Spandex system doesn't always correctly span your files across multiple discs.

MacHeist, a group that has puzzles they call Heists periodically for members to solve and get rewards for completion, has a special bundle on their site for $49 until December 18. This bundle currently includes 9 applications, and will include 10 if they reach $100,000 raised for charity (25% of the bundle purchase price goes to charity). A large savings over buying the applications separately, with a charitable contribution to boot, I recommend anyone who runs OS X check out this offer.

The CSS Cheat Sheet dashboard widget is a useful quick reference when working with CSS. It includes commonly used information on selectors, the box model, units, and inheritance. It is especially useful in conjunction with an editor supporting CSS code completion.