May 31, 2012

Vacation: Lisbon

Been on vacation for about a week in Lisbon. Beautiful city, nice people, loved it. Free-Walking-Tours are great. Hostels are nice and clean. I stayed in the My Lisbon Home Hostel. Lisbon offers a lot of beautiful places around the city. We did take hundreds of pictures all over the place. Meet a few lovely people over there and had lots of fun. Visiting all the nice places did make the vacation a bit exhausting. But was still totally worth it.

Next vacation gonna be nice and relaxing with the sea and a sandy beach to lie around all day long. Maybe Greece? Or Italy? We'll see ...

EPIC: The Humble Indie Bundle V



The Humble Indie Bundle V (pay what you want and help charity)

crazily good games :) ...

Game Over for Moonlight

Moonlight sent into twilight - Update - The H Open Source: News and Features

sad, sad thing. But expected ...

Two Guys SpaceVenture



Two Guys SpaceVenture - by the creators of Space Quest by Two Guys From Andromeda — Kickstarter

cool project, would love to see that happen.

May 20, 2012

MOAI: Multi-Platform Development

As Tim Schafer postet a movie about how they are going to use MOAI in their latest game. So I had to have a closer look at it. A few months back I already once noticed MOAI but I didn't care much about it. Nor did I have a closer look at it. Now that this changed here are my first thoughts on it.

MOAI is primarly intended for 2D mobile game development. But it's also possible to develop and distribute Windows and Mac games with a Linux port soon to follow. At least that's what their Website tells us. Mostly as a user of MOAI you code using LUA which is a pretty neat programming language. Overall it looks like a fast multi-platform 2D game development environment.

Zipline Games is the company behind MOAI. They make money from selling Games and Cloud Services (which MOAI fully integrates with). I especially like the Cloud stuff as that's definitely something I would want to use in my games.

My biggest problem with MOAI is the currently missing Linux support. As I develop my private projects solely on Linux (Ubuntu) I can't do much right now. The only possibility is to build the Linux part yourself from the Linux branch. But last time I checked they said it will be integrated soon. So I'm waiting for that.

Right now I mostly use libGDX which offers similar things except for iOS support (which they work on) and Cloud integration. Otherwise they seem very similar. But cloud for me would be a big plus and I would move my development efforts to MOAI with proper Linux support.  I hope that's gonna be released soon.

Logitech Linux support

Performance Mouse MX (and others) Linux support - Logitech Forums

I recently purchased a new Logitech Performance Mouse MX. Basic mouse functionality does work fine under Ubuntu. But special hardware things like changing the DPI doesn't work under Linux. Otherwise, I love my new mouse. The hardware is great, and Packaging is awesome.

So if you happen to use Linux and have Logitech Hardware leave a note so Logitech does know that users are out there.

May 4, 2012

BBC News: Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth

BBC News - Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth on shaking up system software

Neat to see how more and more big sites report on Ubuntu. This didn't happen a few years ago. More and more start to notice Ubuntu, great trend ..

Ubuntu 12.04 - dislikes

As usual, after the official release of the Precise Pangolin and my first impressions, my dislikes on this nice and polished Ubuntu 12.04 release.
  • They removed my favorite Launcher Feature. As I wrote before, I really loved the Launcher window dodge feature. It was great to work with and with the new edge resistance it would have been so much better to use. Really a shame they did that. Autohide feels like such a big step back from such an intelligent feature. (It's possible to get this feature back.)
  • They changed how Meta+1/2/3/.. behaves. It now only raises the last focused window from these. Before it did raise all windows which I found much better. I used this a lot so now it's a bit more cumbersome.
  • Skype still doesn't work properly. Distorted audio is the norm for every notification. Basically this makes me hate Skype. Didn't try to call anyone so far, so don't know how the audio is there. I think I need to apply my old Skype audio hack to fix this, again.
  • Just like last time I still need to manually edit the Pulseaudio config file and set "enable-lfe-remixing = yes" for my subwoofer to work with normal stereo sound (like music playback). This is annoying and one of the only things I need to edit a config file for (which I still hate to do).
  • I start to hate it more and more when applications create directories in my home folder. And I'm not even talking about hidden directories here (which is bad as well, a .ssh, .config and .local should be all there is). The default Backup application creates a deja-dup/[computername] directory for Ubuntu One syncing. Why not use something like Ubuntu One/Backups/deja-dup/[computername]? If I use Ubuntu One that directory will be there anyways.
  • Compiz Scale window switching seems to have problems sometimes. It happens that some windows end up on the wrong Workspace after switching. Not really sure how to reproduce it, just happens sometimes.
  • When the computer is Idle and the display deactivates it starts to do something. The fans start to spin faster (and with that also louder). As soon as I do something to reactivate the screen it stops. Annoying as usually you can barely hear the fans even while doing normal activities like browsing the web. Like this I can't leave the computer on while doing something else.
  • Focus stealing got a lot better. It only happens very rarely anymore (like while running Synaptic). Still annoying, but mostly gone now.
Thank good that most of my old dislikes from Ubuntu 11.10 are fixed now. Especially the Unity related ones. Unity is pretty great to use now. Generally, my dislikes seem to move more to niche areas. This is a very good thing.

May 1, 2012

Android Ported to C#

Android Ported to C# – Xamarin

pretty crazy stuff. Sounds awesome. Maybe I've to try that Java-To-C# translator on some of my Java projects. Just to see how well it works.