Mattiesworld

I know the headline is a bit cheesy, but it seems Google is really on to something with their Google Waves. Check it out:

Did I mention it will be open source?

Everyone knows, first thing you have to do after installing mysql, is setting its root password. I used to do this using the mysqladmin tool like this:

/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'

For starters, you should not forget to do the same command for your other host names (-h option), but also there are still some other tasks like disabling anonymous access and removing the test databases. Today, having another mysql install, I noticed that the install script mentions this neat tool packaged with mysql to do just all that.

Just run /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation and you’re done!

If you own a dual action gamepad, i.e. one with 2 sticks, Gunroar is a game you MUST try out. If you don’t own that, you might wanna try it out anyway as there are also game modes that are well playable without a gamepad.

To me, Gunroar is a typical old-skool action “shooter” game implemented using modern techniques (others may also want to call it a geometry wars clone). In other words: success. The wireframe and polygon style rendering is refreshing, the action is fast, the music and sound effects perfectly fit the bill, did I mention fast action? It really blows your senses.

What really puts this game apart, is it superb dual action gameplay. The game sports several game modes:

• Normal mode: one stick to navigate. If you start to shoot, the navigation stick becomes a strafing stick. Also “torpedos” available.
• Twin stick mode: real dual action Use one stick to navigate, the other to aim/shoot.
• Double play: if you thought twin stick was the fastest action your brain can process, try double play. You have to control two gunboats simultaneously! The combined position of the 2 gunboats determines the shooting direction. Your brain might protest in the beginning, but try it and you will enjoy.
• mouse mode: use arrows for navigation and pointer to aim and fire. Don’t think this mode would be inferior because of the focus on gamepads in the other modes!

But the best part is: all this action seems so hyperkinetic and stressing, but once you get the hold of it, it all feels quite natural and works even relaxing Also, each game mode has its own distinct gameplay. It’s amazing what you can do with so little.

A few factoids to close. Gunboat is:

• written by some Japanese guy Kenta Cho.
• written in D
• uses SDL
• uses the ant build system
• is not open source :/

This week I noticed a strange problem with my irc client.
First day (Tuesday), it would fail to connect. Since my login to the campus network expired, I had to relogon, so I thought the problem was simply related to that and that the irc client wouldn’t recover until an application restart.
Second day, it still didn’t connect, which I thought was strange, but I didn’t have time to chat anyway, so I neglected.
Today, I frowned and decided to take a look

First of all, I noticed it wasn’t really a connect problem, it couldn’t even resolve the hostname. Heh? When I ran “nslookup irc.freenode.org” it spit out:

;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode.
;; Connection to 192.168.2.1#53(192.168.2.1) for irc.freenode.org failed: connection refused.

mmm..
I went to the freenode site, to see if there were any news items reporting problems or outage. There didn’t seem to be a news section. So I assumed: no news == good news.

Then, I noticed the actual hostname for irc is really chat.freenode.net instead of irc.freenode.org. “chat” or “irc” in front works both. Indeed, that did work. So why did irc.freenode.org suddenly stop working? Was it because of a recent patch (although I couldn’t remember applying any in the last week)? Was it because of my firewall? Both answers are negative.

The friendly chaps at #freenode kindly tipped me off that the dns record had probably become too large to be transmitted through UDP and that TCP dns requests seemed blocked. Servers get added to the network on a regular basis, so that would explain why it suddenly stopped working. It became obvious that my dusty old router would be the culprit (quick tip: never blame your linux kernel first ). After all, according to contemporary standards, one could declare mine “ancient”.

Quite recently I already encountered some problems with it. After an upgrade of the campus network, I kept having strange packet loss when playing multiplayer games for more than 2 minutes. I had never updated my firmware, so I thought I might try that. Although the latest firmware release dated back to 2004, it did help! mattie=1, router=0.

After I pulled the router out of the chain, the dns problem was solved indeed! Unfortunately, updating firmware is no longer an option, so I guess the router and I are even now.

On #freenode, I was told I wasn’t the first one to report this problem, so I guess a lot of people will need to update their firmwares, buy new routers, or simply use a more local dns name.

is Belgian! Even West-Flemish, of course. An award presented by PETA.

Just a few days ago, I went to an info evening about the environmental impact of meat production (they showed the documentary “meat the truth”) and guess what, they invited Fiona Dewaele to give a short testimony of how she became a vegetarian. The final outcome of the contest wasn’t known yet, but I really granted her the victory as she seemed a nice girl. I guess it was a small effort for her to join the info evening since she still studies literature and philosophy here at the university.

Now afterwards, it’s funny to see all the “media/model” glamour pictures spread over the internet but still recognize the “real girl” behind the pictures. I could post one from the pictures from the event, but I’m not sure whether she’d like that. (although she probably wouldn’t mind) Anyway, here are some “media pics” instead.