Tuesday 29th January, 2008 @ 1:04 am
I still keep a Windows partition around, partly to see what the competition is up to and partly to play games. One of my pleasures recently has been playing Unreal Tournament 3. A Linux port is in progress but has yet to be delivered so I’m biding time with the Windows version.
Try as I might I couldn’t get the NAT traversal to work with the v1.1 patch. I read various blog posts informing me to use a STUN server but that seemed unnecessarily overkill.
I finally worked out the problem this evening! Epic added STUN support to v1.1 and added initialised the server variable in the configuration file to a dummy value which turns on the STUN NAT mode, breaking the existing NAT support.
To fix this change the:
“StunServerAddress=stunserver.org”
line in “My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Config” to:
“StunServerAddress=”
and it should all just work 
Posted in Computer Games
7 Comments »
Friday 18th January, 2008 @ 1:17 am
The title is from the “Live Organ Transplants” sketch on Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life“. I’ve seen this referenced a fair bit recently about the British Prime Minister’s plans to make organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in.
Some people seem to be in uproar about this but I can’t really understand why. At the moment many people die waiting for organ transplants. Many people die with perfectly good organs and no problem with organ donation but never got round to getting a card to signify their consent. This is, in my humble opinion, stupid and unjust.
Moving to an opt-out system would save many lives so if people have religious/moral/whatever reasons for not wanting their organs removed on death they can stop it happening. The proposed legislation also says that the family can object and stop the donation going through so I’m surprised by peoples’ opposition. Personally I’d like to be able to still have a donation card so my family can’t object as I don’t think it is their right to do so.
What do other people think? The state over-reaching again or doing something good? This seems to be working in Spain with organ donation up 250%. Does anyone know any more details of the situation there?
Posted in Politics
17 Comments »
Saturday 12th January, 2008 @ 2:51 am
Congratulations on everyones hard work in getting KDE 4.0 out! I’ve got it running as my full desktop on my laptop and as a secondary on my desktop. Hopefully the Gentoo packages will be released soon so I don’t need to use my hacked-together scripts and environment overrides to “properly” run KDE 4.0!
I feel proud but yet kinda guilty. Proud that some of my code is in (albeit only in kdepimlibs) but a bit sad that I didn’t spend more time helping with the release due to the business of the last few months. I think getting a KDE 4.0 desktop up and running will increase my motivation and the time I get to spend hacking on KDE.
To all the whingers: stop complaining, you were warned for a very long time that 4.0 wouldn’t have everything you wanted. 4.1 on the other hand will be the amazing epic you have been waiting for, just be patient! The developers are now especially glad that they have a nice, stable base to build KDE4 applications on.
Again, well done folks and thanks for all your hard work!
Posted in Software Development
No Comments »
Wednesday 9th January, 2008 @ 12:45 am
I’ve been playing a fair bit with Git the distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds. I’ve found it suits my needs pretty nicely as you can either use it in a distributed fashion or as a replacement to Subversion where you push to a central server.
It makes it really easy to share your trees with others and the concept of local vs remote branches is really useful for when your branches don’t make any sense to the users of your code. You can pull my repositories from here or see my commits on my GitWeb. Git nicely imported all my changes from my Subversion repositories that I was using previously for my version control. Not everything in there is in a totally usable form at the moment but Git makes it far easier for others to send me patches (if they feel the need).
I hear on the wind that KDE is considering moving to a distributed version control system eventually. Some of the subprojects such as Amarok have been using it partially for development and it seems to allow some interesting new approaches to development and reduces the barrier of entry as a lot more can be done without Subversion-write access as Git is more orientated to sending around individual patches than Subversion is.
If you are a software engineer give Git a play. It is fast, well documented (now) and takes some interesting approaches for problems rather than just settling on being CVS+n.
If you are a Git pro and notice anything I’ve said incorrectly or configured wrongly then please let me know!
Posted in Software Development
1 Comment
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