/dev/stu

Posted by stu at April 1st, 2008

The Wine project has been going since 1993, and has got to the point where a large percentage of windows programs run well in linux.

A perennial question is when 1.0 will be released, excitingly it looks like this will be sooner than we thought – as seen from their mailing list today:

Paul Vriens <paul.vriens.wine at ??????> writes:

> Just noticed that the dates attached to the versions on
> http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleasePlan are not correct.
>
> 0.9.58 came out on March 21st.
>
> Does this mean we still stick to May 9th or do we stick to 0.9.61 as being
> 1.0.0.rc1?

We should stick to May 9th, we'll just have to wait for this date to
coincide with a release. If my calculations are right this should be
release 0.9.218 on May 9th, 2014. Hopefully we can clear the 1.0 bug
list by then.

--
Alexandre Julliard

Posted by stu at February 20th, 2008

The good news is, my laptop can run the Blender game engine at a decent framerate.

The bad news is I found out that is the Vista taskbar that more than halves it.  I run without Aero, as Aero completely borks OpenGL (quite apart from the fact that Vista limits you to OpenGL 1.5).   It’s bothered me for a while that in Blender I could never get over about 30FPS – on the weekend I found out that I can have the window as large as I like and get much better framerates as long as the window doesn’t touch the taskbar.

This is the kind of thing I hope SP1 will fix, but I severely doubt it

Posted by stu at February 18th, 2008

My dad found this old advert for the Osbourne I… at only £1250 + Vat (and with a free 12 Inch amber for a limited time), this is The One To pickup… or not as they were never popular. Weighing in at “below 24lb” (10 Kilos!) this was a proper computer running CPM the anscestor from which DOS was cloned. It’s interesting as this was before the 8 bit wars had really kicked off in the U.K. with well known computers from Spectrum and Commodore, Amstrad and Acorn.

[EDIT - Add Flickr link]

Flickr

retrocomputing

Posted by stu at February 12th, 2008

As our washing machine broke, I was in the Laundrette where I saw this on the wall -

The writing on the bottom says

£1000 Reward!

Will be given to any person who can prove that this soap manufactured by Lever Bros.
Port Sunlight on Mersey
Contains any form of adulteration whatsoever or contains any injurious chemicale

In Victorian times adulteration of products was widespread and it’s interesting to think that some of the big brands we have today came out of this – Cadburys being the famous one, their unadulterated cocoa essence leading to the Adulteration of Foods Acts.

Posted by stu at February 9th, 2008

While trying to find some good freeware to use the flash on my phone as a torch, I stumbled across a couple of nice apps

Obex Commander for sending files to your phone over bluetooth.

YBrowser a Series 60 file manager (you can do useful things like send multiple files over bluetooth in one go)

So far haven’t found a decent torch app, though so will have to keep looking on that front.

Posted by stu at February 9th, 2008

This is very cool – lock and unlock your computer depending on your phone being in bluetooth range.

blueproximity.sourceforge.net

Next time I’m in linux I’ll definately have to play with it. Something I’ve been wanting to do is automatically rotate the songs on the memory card of the phone when in bluetooth range, so I’ll have to see if it’s possible to hook up the connection event to a script.

[edit] fixed link

Posted by stu at January 17th, 2008

While browsing on the train today, I hit my data limit of 2gb, so now I can’t check my email or browse until the 24th!

Maybe it’s time to check in the internet addiction for a couple of hours a day read some books?

Posted by admin at October 22nd, 2007

More MSys troubles, it turns out that sh.exe stackdumps were somehow caused by my Logitech Quickcam.

To stop the segfaults, just kill the lvprcsrv.exe process and things start working again.

Found here