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Linux: Ubuntu - wtf with the compiler?! (Or, apt-get install build-essential doesn't work)
Fri, 27 Jun 2008

Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) are very popular Linux distributions, regarded as being both flexible and easy to use for newbies, and still usable by those of us old in the tooth with Unix-and-friends systems.

But get this -- the current Kubuntu distribution DVD includes the gcc compiler (good!), but does not include the required files to actually make use of it (for C coders, things like stdio.h are missing.) I mean, the inclusion of the C compiler is questionable .. either include it and dependancies, or none of them and require a developer package to be installed. But actually including the compiler in a broken state? _Wow_.

Anyway, being someone who has been through this with older Ubuntu's, and Debian and others, I just figured I'd do the old "apt-get install build-essential" and be done with it. Again I was shocked to see "build-essential not found".. Wait, what? Seriously?

Turns out the installer sets up the apt-get repository list to a dozen sundry places, none of which are carrying the developer stuff? Or perhaps I just needed to run an 'apt-get update' first.. only now just occurred to me (but if so.. why wouldn't the distribution have included it, if its including things in the repository list?)

Fine, whatever says I, but then wondered.. why wasn't it pulling it from the DVD image? Oh, the installer by default doesn't mount the DVD image which I suppose makes sense, given people might well have yanked it out. After poking around, it would seem the suggested incantation is..

Pull from the DVD image

sudo apt-cdrom add
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential

Seriously, before you can build Hello World, on a Unix-like machine, you have to jump through a few hoops. That first apt-get should just work. And don't include gcc-broken to begin with. It just seems so odd to have such obvious and trivially repairable things screwed up in a major Linux distribution in this day and age. Wow.

[ Category: / technology / linux / ubuntu ] [link] [Comments]

Gaming: Age of Conan MMORPG
Fri, 27 Jun 2008

Updated end of month; see below

(Aside, I'm working on a new, extra crappy simple blogging system. Fun stuff for a couple hours.)

World of Warcraft pretty much took over the "MMORPG" (multiplayer life-destroying role playing games) market, with millions of players (literally.) Thankfully other companies have attempted to get into the market as well, with most being destroyed in the process.. but competition is good. Funcom's Age of Conan is the new darling on the block, the one that will possibly dent WoW a trifle (not likely can anything dethrone WoW besides apathy which will come in time, but if any game is to get on the radar it will be AoC, or perhaps the upcoming Warhammer Online.)

AoC does a number of things right, and a whole lot of things wrong.. but in this particular market that is more the norm; the UI needs work, there are lots of bugs, etc and so on but it will evolve over time, if the players give it that much rope.. and with the voume of units sold (already a million IIRC) then it should have the momentum to carry on for awhile. Good.. competition is good, and they at least are innovating in a few ways (not many, but a few.. enough to keep things fun. Good job Funcom!)

See more ...

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / pc / mmorpg ] [link] [Comments]

Parenting: Rules to parent by
Tue, 17 Jun 2008

A friend of mine pointed me to this instructional article for new fathers; read with the utmost of concentration!

Hit up Skepchick

[ Category: / living / parenting ] [link] [Comments]

Day by Day: Seriously, wtf squiddy
Fri, 13 Jun 2008

Swiped from here

[ Category: / day_by_day / anxieties ] [link] [Comments]

FamilyTech: Review: Wee Ride bicycle seat for kids
Thu, 12 Jun 2008

(Aside; I just described something to someone and liked the analogy, so thought I would repeat it here. Maybe its wanking but here goes -- I was describing one of the reasons I like to code so much, and so many free games and tools and so on; I compared myself to a 'chef' - as someone who likes to code "for other people", as a chef likes to cook for other people. There is a pleasure in the act itself, to seeing life come from nothing, to achieving the desired goal and all that.. but there is a joy also in making something from nothing and giving it to other people to also enjoy. So there you have it, at heart I'm an entertainer of the geek sort. A techsihibitionist?)

I'd like write up a full and lengthy review of the Wee Ride bicycle seat but let me be a little brief; essentially though it is a 'front mount' seat, which is to say it sits in your lap as you bicycle, so that a small child (40 pounds and less it suggests) can go biking with you, relatively safely. For this sort of device there are a few main options -- the common rear mount seat, the bicycle trailer/chariot, and the front mount seat.

At first I wanted to narrow down and the front mount appeals to me much more than the others -- the rear seat is traditional around North America but means the poor child is stuck looking at your back or side to side the whole trip (which seems dangerous to me with the child wanting to tip themselves over to see!), and of course you cannot much see the child should they cry out. (They are on the other hand protected from anything you might bike into such as tree branches or bugs in the air and so on.); the trailer can be cute (certainly everyone loves to wave at them as you go by right?) but shares similar issues as the rear mount seat.. it worries me that you cannot directly see the child, that something might run into the trailer behind you, or that you drag it into something :) Still, those are low chances, so trailers are a good option I believe.. and further, the better ones can double as pushcarts with an extendible handle at the back. Still, for my goal of just hopping on the bike and getting around, heading to the park or even to do small chores, the front mount seems ideal.

As to which brand, there seem to be a half dozen various seats that can be found; in my immediate area there are only a couple available, mostly at expensive bike shops. So while I did various reviews online and decided I liked the Wee Ride, it turned out to be readily available at Toys-R-Us and Canadian Tire, so that made the brand decision easier.

The price on Wee Ride is very good, certainly a very good value IMHO -- for a little plastic seat and mounting bar they're making some $$$ -- but for all the enjoyment we get out of it, $69.95 CDN seems a very good price. (Factor in you must buy a toddler friendly helment for about $25 CDN.. a helmet that is slightly different than a small child helmet.) (The seat was $69.95 at TrUs while being $89.95 at CanTire, fwiw.)

Installation really was quite simple -- theres a bar that you bolt on under your handle bars on the post, and onto your seat post. The bar extends as needed to fit various bike sizes (male or female styled), and bolts on using O-clamps so should fit on pretty much any bike; the construction of the bar is very good. The seat itself just has a single thumbscrew to attach it to the bar, which seems a little weaksauce to me .. but the advantage is the seat can be removed in one minute, should you wish to bike without the child carrier in place, which seems a good feature.

My only real complaint then is the buckles on the seat .. I need to adjust them tighter perhaps, but while looking around or fidgeting my 15 month old daughter can wriggle out of half the harness, though the waste belt stays good and tight on her. Furthermore, while in motion the drivers arms are cuddling around the seat, so theres minimal chance she could possible slip out.

As to seat positioning -- you might worry having an extra 25 pound child monted on the bar would raise the center of gravity and unbalance the cycle, but it seems not a problem; they suggest carrying a bag of flour around for a minute to get used to the weight, but in pratice it took me all of 5 seconds to be peddling around, no problem, turning and braking on hills and such. No problem whatsoever with balance (and I've not biked in years!) Furthermore the seat is not uncomfortable -- your arms go arond the sides to the handle bars no problem (though it might be weird on a 'road bike' with curled horn handlebars, but on my T-bar mountain bike, no problem. You do peddle a little wide, so your knees aren't near the seat.. so you lose a little power. Better exercise, and practice for when you want to waddle..... All told, fine!

Summary - the Wee Ride might not be absolutely perfect, but it is a Very Good value for the money, and is extremely fun to have. Did 10km or more last night to the park and back, and tootled around the area to explore. With my daughter. How awesome is that? And everyone you pass waves and giggles since it is so adorable.

[ Category: / living / family-tech ] [link] [Comments]

VM: using VMWare's vmware-player for free virtual machines, installing from Live CDs or isntall CDs, and so on. And Parallels, too. Kubuntu.
Thu, 05 Jun 2008

This short posting might be way over the top for some people; thats okay.. if you don't want to know about virtual machines, you're probably better off :) I just wanted to be able to run Kubuntu (a Linux distribution) under Windows.

A virtual machine is a software application that within itself pretends to be a machine of some sort; an arcade game emulator is an application you run that within itself looks like an arcade machine so those games can run within it. VMWare is a company who writes a virtual machine engine that allows you to run a Windows or Linux or whatever 'real computer' within itself.. on your computer. While at first you might just think this an asinine experiment, to us IT nerds it can be quite beneficial.. instead of having 5 actual PCs on your desk, you can use one good one running a half dozen virtual machines within itself.. handy for software testing during development, or for running many servers within one (and when one virtual server dies, you can just restart the virtual machine application for it.. much easier than rebuilding a new physical machine.)

Anyway, in the past I was a big fan of VMWare -- rock solid. Of late a competitor has come out - Parallels - originally for Mac and now also for the PC. (There are others, and various open source options as well. But for my purposes I'm talking about the big boys here.) I tried Parallels on my Mac a couple years ago and it seemed okay, but I never much got into it as I was trying to operate it via a remote desktop connection, and Parallels could never get the mouse to work right. (They claim its due to acceleration on the machine at my fingertips, factored against the mouse acceleration on the machine I was logged into, against the mouse acceleration of the machine being emulated. I think they're jut lazy.)

Parallels is very inexpensive (say $60CDN?), so when I had need of something recently I thought to jump on their Windows build. Tried to install a Kubuntu 8 into it, and failed. Tried Kubuntu and Ubuntu 7.. failed. Saw a pile of posts online about CD emulation problems and fiddled with many options but in the end.. many hours spent, and no results. Sucks. So probably a good tool when it works, but if it cannot handle installing one of the most popular Linux distributions... it has issues still. Fine.

So what to do, after having already popped a few dollars for Parallels? VMWare Workstation is more expensive ($180 give or take CDN), and I was already in for Parallels. Now, don't get me wrong.. I really like VMWare, so I am seriously considering popping for VMWare Workstation. Again (I've bought it 10 years ago, too.) But we just moved, and I'm very much broke right now.. but fortunately, VMWare has a free offering -- the VMWare Player.

VMWare Player lets you run a virtual machine that someone else has created. I started to get myself confused though -- what is the difference between created or not, for installation of an OS on a blank machine? Are they really just talking about paying $180 for the version which knows how to create the virtual machine description/configuration? If you're bandying about a full install, then it makes sense.. given the disk image, just run it in VMWare Player. But for installing a fresh OS ... what is 'created' versus not 'created'? A fully created blank machine cannot be much work, right? (One can aqssume Workstation also includes administration tools and so on and so forth.)

Turns out I am right.. I cast my eyes around for details on what makes up a VMWare descriptor, to see if I could just create one by hand (that is null and empty), and see what VMWare Player does with it. Empty disk image files can be found in various places online or created using freeware tools. You can specify a Ubuntu (say) Live CD as the virtual CDROM. All you need now is the virtual machine description file .. it would seem the commercial VMWare product really just creates this file, and the empty disk images (and administratoin and so forth).

In a few web forums I found references to this snippet.. create 'foo.vmx' and paste in the following. I've noted some customizatoins you might wish to make. 

config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "3"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.filename = "Ubuntu.vmdk"		# name of disk image to use
memsize = "256"				# pretty small, maybe need to increase it
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"

#ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"	# use this pair of lines for actual CD drive
#ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

ide1:0.fileName = "ubuntu-5.10-install-i386.iso" # use this (fixing filename) for an ISO
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"
floppy0.present = "FALSE"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
usb.present = "TRUE"
sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
displayName = "Ubuntu"
guestOS = "Ubuntu"
nvram = "Ubuntu.nvram"
MemTrimRate = "-1"

ide0:0.redo = ""
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
uuid.location = "56 4d 5c cc 3d 4a 43 29-55 89 5c 28 1e 7e 06 58"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 5c cc 3d 4a 43 29-55 89 5c 28 1e 7e 06 58"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:7e:06:58"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"

tools.syncTime = "TRUE"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"

uuid.action = "create"

checkpoint.vmState = ""

Simple store that file alongside the disk image, and point to the right .iso .. and boom, your free VMWare player can now create a VM for Ubuntu or whatever you should like to install there. Kudos to John Bokma, the apparent head vampire for this VM description file.

Armed with this setup, I installed Kubuntu 8 into the VM; VMWare Player is clever enough so that networking works from the virtual network card, so running web browsers and so on within the VM works fine.

UPDATE: Rickard informs me of a website that builds vmx files for you -- how interesting is that? Check the site out here: http://www.easyvmx.com/

[ Category: / technology / virtual-machines ] [link] [Comments]