BenV's notes

I can’t for the life of me begin to imagine why anyone would use cmake as an autoconf alternative. (continue reading…)

This game has been released a couple of days ago, and if you’re a fan of Baldur’s Gate and such games (like Neverwinter Nights) I’m sure you’ll like this game. So when we heard it was released we immediately moved our computers together so we could play a game just like how we spent countless hours playing Baldur’s Gate. (continue reading…)

Yesterday evening I was curiously looking at some tcpdump traffic that went through our dom0 of Xenbro. There seemed to be a ton of weird DNS requests. And with weird I mean spamlike domains, like familiesfirstmedical.com. After wondering for a bit I realized they were coming from our service domU that runs mail for the junerules.com domain. (continue reading…)

Version 2.8.5 is here! Some important security hardening going on, fixing a trackback DoS attack (or so they claim). Some more details over here. As usualy the automatic update failed for me, so once again the fix for this error:

Either patch it manually:

• Edit wp-admin/includes/file.php and change line 448 to a more reasonable default.
• The line sould become something like: $response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 600));

Or use this patch:

Wordpress auto updater timeout patch - Version - SHA: 9e89757f4b2e5536dbd9fe85a3befd00ab1c4a51

When I tried adding the above patch as a download (using the download monitor plugin) I got this failure:

What the fuck guys, this is a TEXT file. Grepping through the sources I find the wp-admin/includes/file.php file to be the nazi. Apparently I’m not allowed (as site admin) to pass this current_user_can( 'unfiltered_upload' ). Security hardening, yeah… against idiots perhaps.
I’m expecting an update of either wordpress or the download monitor plugin soon.
Meanwhile I simply uploaded the file manually and added an existing download. Pfffrt, the hassle.

Today the project to try out is Widelands, apparently a Settlers clone.
Since I loved the Settlers (the first one was the best) when the graphics were still acceptable, it is interesting enough to try it out. What I loved about the Settlers was the whole simulation concept. The construction of buildings, the little lemmings that moved the goods around, chopped down trees, fished, etc. The entire war aspect of the game was terrible (what do you mean my maximum level guy just got p0wnz3d by their new lowlevel rookie?!) . Therefore I liked the games that followed less and less. Settlers 2 was acceptable, a welcome upgrade in graphics and interface and stuff like that, but the war aspect… blegh. Then at 3 I had enough of the series. Why can’t it be a simulation where tribes co-exist in peace? I see how that might not attract many gamers, but how about an option huh? Another thing that was great about the Settlers 1 was the multiplayer multi-mouse splitscreen mode, where both players had a mouse on 1 PC and could control a single empire together. With SVGA mode it was great (continue reading…)

Yesterday evening after getting tired of playing the Aion open beta (it was the last night of the open beta, so we felt like at least reaching level 10, which we did… and then we could ~FLYYYY) we decided to go downstairs to watch some series on our beamer. So we fire up the machine connected to it, which runs everything from NFS. It didn’t take long for the boot screen to come up and after the default selection was made for us it ran through the boot process spewing out the usual kernel messages….. (continue reading…)

Lately I’ve heard some rumors about this new mmorhghhghg coming up called “Aion“.
Fileplanet (you know, the cancer popup site you sometimes get when you need to download a game patch and then need to click through 23894723897 registration things etc… which is barred from bugmenot…. *sigh*) handed out open beta keys. So I got one. And so did lotjuh.

Did I mention my machine doesn’t have windows? Makes it… interesting.
First we obviously tried wine. Well, it installs without much hassle, which is a good thing.
However, it doesn’t launch. Some piece of garbage called GameGuard doesn’t work on wine. And because it doesn’t, neither does Aion.
Great going Aion guys! Needless to say they couldn’t be arsed to write a linux binary for it, so they SUCK per default! They couldn’t even be arsed to write a Mac binary for it. Pffrt.

However, to make an interesting attempt to test out Virtualbox’s 3d acceleration support, I decided to install Aion in a virtualboxed windows xp that I “borrowed” from lotjuh.
Virtualbox is at version 3.0.6 these days, so first I installed the latest version.
The installation went fine:

Not only the installation, but also the updater ran fine:

Then the gameguard part came, it looked promising:

However, to all good things must come an end. So it dies because of hardware acceleration issues. No real surprise, but too bad for Virtualbox. Not there yet.

Maybe it’ll work one day when Virtualbox gets their direct3d working as well as wine has it working.

Anyway, from what I’ve seen of the game (it runs ‘fine’ on lotjuh’s PC with her “Seven” failure install), it’s a World of Warcraft wannabe.
Graphics are a lot better, they put in some cute stuff like when it rains and the character idles it’ll put a leave over their head. The movies are cute, the quests sometimes even show you stuff (like a little ingame movie of the target area) to go along with the text. But all in all it doesn’t look like a wow killer. No linux support (not even with wine), no mac support, and so far I haven’t seen a major reason for people to switch from wow to this game, except for the graphics. Then again, I’ve only looked at it for a short amount of time, maybe it’ll get better
I’m sure they’ll get a decent amount of players though, it’s a good wow clone.
Story wise the game is fail, I could sum it up with “There were gods, and a planet, and now the planet is split in 2 half planets and the ‘people’ on those halves fight eachother”.

It asks for a stellar converter if you ask me. (master of orion 2 reference, can’t find a good image/video on google)

After toying around a bit on the news sites I decided it would be interesting to see if qBitTorrent would run on slackware 64.
So we go to the download site, copy the url, and see if Slackbuild likes it. Slackbuild leeches, untars, gives the configure options (which are a bit buggy, I know, will be fixed next release), runs configure. Configure crashes out with “blabla boost blabla”. (continue reading…)

So I’m working on a little info script (check out Infoscreen) so I can have a nice overview
of my server when I look at console number one without having to log in etc.

Simple question:
“Where in /proc can I find a list of IP addresses with corresponding interfaces?”

Simple answer:
Try /proc/net/if_inet6!

… that’s great…. but I really wanted the IPv4 addresses as well.
“/proc/net/if_inet4″ or “/proc/net/if_inet”? Noooooo….

Conclusion: KANKER LINUX!

Obviously I can get the address by calling ‘ip addr show‘, ‘ifconfig‘ or a heap of other solution involving calling ioctl on sockets or using the netlink interface… but seriously, blegh.

The most retarded thing is that pretty much every other statistic about my network devices is there… including active connections and whatnot, but ipv4 addresses? Nooooo….. *RAAH*

Another annoying thing: morons that save their files with dos line endings.
Also known as “I’ve got motherfucking ^M in my file, AAAIIEEEEYGGrrgrll“.
I usually find out about this when bash complains about stuff like this:

(HAAAAAT!!!)

Solution:

(Don’t confuse fileformat with filetype, one is used for encoding, the other for things as syntax highlighting)

Solution 2:

I never use this since I never have that piece of cancer called dos2unix, but some distros do.

Solution 3:

That should fix it. On to the “let’s trash my home directory with my fancy new perl script that I just converted”