Month: April 2008

Linkage Se7en

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

Would you like a fresh Wallpaper for your desktop that isn’t a naked babe or some shallow TV star? Pixelgirl has supplied me with cute desktops for years, and I’m currently looking at a leaf everytime I log on. Some guy wrote Super Mario in Javascript, and in only 16K. That is made of awesome. In Germany, having the wrong skin color can get you kicked out of your apartment. That is maybe not entirely surprising, but the complete lack of subtlety about it is. I just tried finding a new place to live in a country where I am a foreigner, and I can somewhat relate. And finally, the new Ubuntu is coming out tomorrow. You should give it a shot, it won’t bite.

Eclipse + CDT + MinGW + XP x64

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

I’ve previously complained about the lack of decent free IDEs for developing C++, and since it’s been a while, I gave Eclipse another shot. The good news: CDT 4 no longer crashes every 5 minutes, it has much better project structure, and I think I can work with this. The bad news: It took ages to get everything up and running with MinGW.

The following is an attempt to remember what the problems were.
Continue reading →

Music Quiz

~ Enno ~ 3 Comments

The following is one of my favorite pieces of music. Not because of it’s musical merits, but because it immediately conjures up the time around the Anarchy Online Launch, when we were working hard to Finish The Game. Somebody shared this around the office, and while I’m not sure about its origin, rumor has it that it was made by one of the guys in the audio department.

And now for to the quiz part of this post: Where are all those sound bites from? Having grown up with a lot of dubbing before I first heard this track, I had a vague idea about a few, and since then, new bits have been popping up every now and then when I was watching TV or movies. This is part of what makes this fun to me: I knew the sound bites first, and I’m finding the references later.

So far, I can tell:

  • Shall we play a game? is from War Games, of course.
  • We need more monkeys! … We’re formulating a new plan! – from Toy Story, the scene where they try to use they Barrel of Monkeys to save Buzz.
  • You said bullshit and experience is all it takes, right? – Google says this is from 48 Hrs, which I never saw.
  • Beavis and Butthead are in there, probably a clip from the “Vistual Stupidity” computer game.
  • Unorganized Grabasstic Pieces of Amphibian Shit is from Full Metal Jacket
  • Not enough time is from Heat.

But there’s a lot of them I have no clue about. Got any ideas?

Shakespeare’s Pulp Fiction

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter a carriage, with JULES and VINCENT, murderers.

J: And know’st thou what the French name cottage pie?
V: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
J: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
V: What say they then, pray?
J: Hachis Parmentier.
V: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
J: Cream is but cream, only they say le crème.
V: What do they name black pudding?
J: I know not;
I visited no inn it could be bought.

More here.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

~ Enno ~ 2 Comments

That was the solution I was offered by customer support regarding my DSL problems. And you know what? I actually hadn’t. So I felt like a real git when it turned out that power cycling actually fixed it.

Reboot Me!

At this point, let me say something positive about Alice DSL customer service. They get a lot of bashing, but in my only encounter with them, they’ve been nothing but polite and professional. I got past the first level guy really fast, to a technician who obviously had a script that catered to a lot of configations: “What version of Windows do you have?” “Do you see more than 10 icons in the control panel?”, etc. are very good questions.

You get an extra brownie point for recognizing the quote.

Eclipse RCP Patch 1 for 3.3.1 (3.3.1.v20071002_331) requires feature “org.eclipse.rcp”

~ Enno ~ 3 Comments

I recently spent half a day trying to fix this Eclipse error message, which prevented me from updating/installing anything at all. So in case I ever trip over it again, here’s the solution:

  1. Help -> Software Updates -> Manage configurations -> Eclipse RCP Patch 1 -> disable
  2. restart
  3. Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install -> Scan for updates of the currently installed features
  4. restart

Al Gore has a new slideshow

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

This one still needs some polish, but after hearing his old one so many times now, it’s refreshing to see that he is still fighting the good fight and continues working on the problem.

Interesting question at the end regarding his feelings about the democratic candidates’ stand on the issue. Originally found it here.