Recently I have bought Silent Hunter 4, a submarine simulator for Windows XP. It is the 4th version of an old sequel (when I was a kid I used to play Silent hunter 1).
Graphics are pretty detailed, the game is nice to play. Unfortunately the game has no real game lobby (no chat and many players complain that they cannot host games).
Here some screenshots:
Web developers are struggling every day to make that website or user interface compatible with as many browsers as possible.
There are standards (I hear you say). Yes, there are! W3C is a consortium which defines recommendations. However, these recommendations are sometimes vague and most often do not cover innovative/new ideas (standards are often defined after a new technology is already in use). Therefore, browser's rendering engine's output will vary and must be tested by developers.
On windows, it is not possible to install more than one Internet Explorer version, because newer versions tend to replace older versions (IIRC it was possible to install IE4 and IE5 on the same box). This is a problem for web developers (designers and programmers) because there is often a need to support more than one version (making sure the current project works in the most used environment as well as in future/older browsers).
Linux, wine and ies4linux come in handy in this situation. combined with Xvfb and some standard *nix tools (like ImageMagick and WindowMaker) make it possible to create a web service for capturing screenshots of sites in IE 5, 5.5, 6 and 7.
Currently I am working on a appliance (VMWare image) as well as a howto on how to do this.
I have finally decided to upgrade my Desktop from Edgy to Feisty. Because this is my everyday work environment I usually do not like to upgrade.
The computer
This computer used to run Dapper and was upgraded to Edgy. I have done quiet some customization (gnome and system services) and feared that the upgrade will break some packages. However, after the last, painless upgrade I decided to try another upgrade instead of a fresh installation.
Upgrading
During the upgrade there was 1 serious issue: the mysql 5 package demanded a hard coded uid (102 IIRC) which is used by another daemon already. This lead me to completely remove mysql 5 for now (fortunately, this was no productive mysql server, I have another one running on a stable debian). Then I was prompted to review diff of a couple of config files I have changed manually (namely ntp.conf, a firefox config file and cupsd.conf). Done! With all packages Installed on this PC it had to download roughly 1 GB of packages, the whole upgrade (downloading and installing) was done in one and a half hour.
The big moment - Reboot
During the upgrade i was happily chatting with friends on IRC as occasionally browsing (I was advised to not do so, however). So, the great moment came and I rebooted (already expecting loads of errors spitted into my face). And ... WOW ... no problems during the Boot process as it seemed.
The first WTF
Because I have recently switched from 100mbit to a gigabit Ethernet, my computer has 2 NICs installed, although the 100Mbit NIC is not used any more. Edgy has configure my eth1 (the gigabit interface) as eth0 and the old eth0 as eth2 (100Mbit). During boot, Feisty tried to connect trough eth2 which was not connected to the LAN and therefore my NFS home shares couldn't be mounted.
sudo ifdown eth2; sudo ifup eth0; sudo mount /homefixed this and I could log in again.
apt-cache search -n vmwaresaid, feisty ships now with vmware server, YAY! This means, whenever a new kernel is distributed, I do not need to updated the vmware modules myself, for this reason ubuntu ships a separate package with the pre compiled kernel modules for the selected kernel. sweet!
