Linux

On your marks! Get set! Render!

I had the day off work today, so having nothing better to do, I decided to race raz0r (PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz, OS X 10.4.1) and media (Pentium III 933mhz, Ubuntu linux (Hoary)) in rendering with Blender.

raz0r, rendering frame #15 from Magnets: The Movie, required 313MB RAM, and took 2:30 mins to render the frame at 400×300.

media required 380MB RAM, and took 3:40 mins to render the same frame at the same size.

In the words of Stormy Waters, “Smoked that bitch!”. I was expecting the outcome to be along those lines, but I’m not sure why linux requires almost 70MB more RAM to render the same frame.

The output pictures from both were identical, obviously.

Updated!

  • Post category:Linux

I updated my stepmania box to include 2 missing DDR mixes: DDR Extreme (arcade) and DDR 4th Mix Plus. Also got some sweet new themes for it.

I’m also considering picking up another Ignition pad, so those of you that like DDR have no excuse for not playing anymore πŸ˜›

Daisy.. daisy…

  • Post category:Linux

root@sigbox:~# uptime
12:23:26 up 152 days, 20:45, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.04, 0.06

I have to shut sigbox down today for an upgrade πŸ™ 152 days, 20 hours, and 45 minutes without being powered down or restarted. But when it comes back up, it will be running a fresh install of Slackware Linux 10.0 and have a much larger storage capacity.

DCSquares News

I’ve spent the day adding a buddy list feature to the DCSquares site:

Now you can see how your friends are doing! Also, DCSquares 1.4 Beta is now available for the Mac. 1.4 final should be released in a week or so!

Untitled

  • Post category:Linux

Well, I’m finally almost happy with my desktop.

I curved the top corners of my menu panel, and added a 3 pixel drop shadow to the bottom to add more contrast between the wallpaper and the panel. Here’s a zoomed in version, for those of you without magnifying glasses:

I also made my own icon for the gnome-bluetooth bluetooth:// URI:

I’m still looking for something to replace the home icon, the one from the Snow-Apple icon theme looks kinda silly.

Finally, I got a nice blue GTK+ theme that isn’t so much of an aqua-clone that you wanna puke called Glossy P from art.gnome.org. Maybe I’ll make an orange version of it for Jay, but I kinda like the blue, so I’ll keep it for now. Lastly, my window border theme is a modified version of my most favorite theme ever: Crux. Someone finally updated it so it shows the application’s icon in the title bar instead of an empty box!

Here’s a screenshot of the whole thing together (click to enlarge):

Kinda like OSX, but without that stupid dock, and I get to keep the window list at the top, and a taskbar at the bottom πŸ™‚

Crop circles

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Well, SamTown suffered yet another UFO attack, and this time they left crop circles in my farm!

Isn’t that cute?

Welcome to SamTown, population YOU!

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Name: SamTown
Population: 456,305
Founded: 1900

I’ve been playing the (now defunct) Loki Games linux port of SimCity 3000 a lot recently, so I figured I’d show off my city a little.

Untitled

  • Post category:Linux

Ok, so GNOME comes with this kick-ass Unicode Character Map:

It shows what those crazy non-arabic symbols mean in the status bar. Anyway, here’s a funny conversation I had with James (you probably wont be able to see the japanese characters, but you wouldn’t understand them anyway):

(12:09:16) Sam Steele: δΈ‹δΈŒ
(12:09:23) Sam Steele: I made something that makes sense!
(12:09:23) Sam Steele: hehe
(12:09:37) James F: lol but its in katakana!
(12:09:46) Sam Steele: lol
(12:10:22) Sam Steele: 丈 = unit of length equal 3.3 meters; gentleman, man, husband

how are those even related? rofl
(12:10:37) James F: lol they aren’t but i can explain’
(12:11:03) ***Sam Steele waits for explanation
(12:11:28) James F: ok japanese isn’t just japanese
(12:11:42) James F: the kanji are all borrowed from chinese
(12:12:10) Sam Steele: ah, so one country’s unit of measure is another country’s husband.. I get it.
(12:12:18) James F: and sometimes when things change meanings from china, such as the origin kanji meaning of height
(12:12:52) James F: they are borrowed into the language… just like how a pound means like 5 different things in the us…
(12:12:57) James F: to hit
(12:12:59) James F: to weigh
(12:13:05) James F: to spend english money.
(12:13:07) James F: uhh…
(12:13:20) Sam Steele: that’s 3
(12:13:20) Sam Steele: lol
(12:13:20) James F: many other adopted slang references… …
(12:13:28) Sam Steele: … .. sure.
(12:13:29) Sam Steele: hehe
(12:13:35) James F: lol yeah.
(12:13:39) James F: totally unrelated.

Fsck you, theif!

As my way of saying fsck you to who ever has my laptop, I’ve revived the MS-DOS build of DreamZZT, and decided to pit it head-to-head (or xdosemu window to xdosemu window) with the original ZZT:

It still needs a bit more polishing before release, but it works well enough (even saving / restoring!), and I’m not gonna let the loss of my laptop stop me from coding. I’m hoping to do another release within a few days.

Go penguin, it’s your birthday

  • Post category:Linux

I finally got around to doing a Linux port of DreamZZT:

Because it’s built with libSDL, it should also build on Mac OSX, BSD, and other platforms supported by SDL that Jay doesn’t believe exist. I don’t have access to a Mac, so anyone out there with OSX and the compiler that would be willing to compile and test dreamzzt for me, please let me know.

-Sam