Civilization -- Freeciv as Browser Game (canvas / SVG)

Yay the joy, I have just discovered that Freeciv is now available as SVG / canvas game.

A browser game with reasonable performance (when using a modern browser) and this game is using open web standards.

From some tests ... FF 3.x on a fast computer is pretty laggy, but FF 3.5+ is very responsive. it feels like an X11 app over a not so fast connection. I am sure this will improve once the javascript implementations gain more performance and the canvas tag matures. After some webgames, this technology seems to be much more capable for games than html, css and javascript alone. Maybe a mix of canvas and html could bring some performance boost.

Freeciv.net seems to perform well on safari, chrome (et all), opera and firefox (< 3.5 recommended) but does not work well on IE8 (unusable, older IE versions are worse).

NOTE:
Chrome and Chromium users can use the --kiosk switch to start the browser in fullscreen mode (not well documented), example:
$ chromium --kiosk http://freeciv.net

Unfortunately on my gnome installation I cannot switch to other windows while chromium is running in fullscreen mode :-/

WTF, why can't I unmount a volume?

Sometimes some file locks are preventing unmounting a block devices (especially annoying on removable devices).

Some nice utilities are fuser (list processes using files, sockes or fs) and lsof (list open files).

This combined with kill gets those external block devices quickly unmounted when needed

packing several unix files into one executable shell script (simple installer)

These 2 scripts are able to pack a directory into a shell script. The shell script can then be executed on another system and will extract the packed files into a target directory, unix permissions will be preserved (tar is used).

What you need:
- sh
- readlink
- dirname
- basename
- tar
- gzip
- uuencode
- uudecode
- cat
- chmod

pack.sh

#!/bin/sh

# $1 is source directory or file
if [ -z "$1" -o ! -e "$1" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 <target-directory-or-file> <destination-file>"
exit 1
fi

# $2 is dst file
if [ -z "$2" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 <target-directory-or-file>  <destination-file>"
exit 1
fi

# Absolute path to this script. /home/user/bin/foo.sh
SCRIPT=$(readlink -f $0)
# Absolute path this script is in. /home/user/bin
SCRIPTPATH=`dirname $SCRIPT`

WORKINGDIR="$1"
TARGET="."
if [ -f "$WORKINGDIR" ]; then
WORKINGDIR=`dirname $WORKINGDIR`
TARGET=`basename $1`
fi

# pack directory or files into a uuencoded tar.gz archive
cat "$SCRIPTPATH/execute.sh" > "$2"
echo "w $WORKINGDIR $TARGET"
tar -c -C "$WORKINGDIR" -zf - "$TARGET" | \
uuencode "embedded-files.tar.gz" >> "$2"

chmod u+x,g+x "$2"

execute.sh

#!/bin/sh

# $1 is target directory
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 <target-directory>"
exit 1
fi

# create target directory (if not exists) or exit if we fail
mkdir -p "$1"
if [ $? != 0 ]; then
echo "Failed to create target directory"
exit 3
fi

# Absolute path to this script. /home/user/bin/foo.sh
SCRIPT=$(readlink -f $0)
# Absolute path this script is in. /home/user/bin
SCRIPTPATH=`dirname $SCRIPT`

cd $1;
uudecode "$SCRIPTPATH/$(basename $0)"
tar -xzf "embedded-files.tar.gz"
rm "embedded-files.tar.gz"

exit 0;