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Month: July 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2010

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I just built myself a new Windows VM. After I spent the next ~six hours patching and rebooting several thousand times I went to install Microsoft Visual C++ Express. I had not yet had a chance to play with it before today but 2010 has been released into the wild. So I download it and start the installer. To my absolute surprise the bare-bones install is 2.4GBs. Two, point, four gigabytes. Two, point, four gigabytes. I was floored.

I have not been quiet about my great exodus not so much towards Linux but away from Windows. I used to get phone calls every week from family and friends about how their computers were slow, something stopped working out of the blue, or whatever. I have since moved most of them to 100% free software built by the community and have never hear of any problems since. As a matter of fact my father (who requires Windows-based software for work that mandated he stay with Windows) uses my mother’s Ubuntu-based laptop whenever possible because he is absolutely sick of the headaches. This is a man who does not know a mouse from a trackball and given his inexperience even he is sick of the God-damned horror show that is Microsoft Windows.

Any way, back to the point before I wrap up my short rant. I will now move all of my software development over to another operating systems and cross-compile from now on.

Hey, Microsoft. I am disgusted by you. I have a choice and I no longer choose you.

Automatic Games

Automatic Games

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I have always loved games that masterba… er, play themselves out. In such games the player sets the initial conditions– perhaps even writes a little code or designs something– and then lets it all hit the fan.

As of late I have been staring at Gratuitous Space Battles. In this one you design a small fleet of space ships, complete with hulls, engines, weapons, shields, and the like, and then set them against waves of enemies. The beauty of the game is no setup will work equally well against every enemy (at least once you are past the first few levels, that is).

This has re-sparked interest in my idea for something I am currently calling Evolution Battle (yes, yes, it is a dumb name). I envision it as SimLife mixed with something similar to Gratuitous Space Battles. Players would create the “life” with its basic attributes and then stick them in the world with other “life” to compete for resources. I think it would be a great project for me since it would involve a few technical challenges I am not sure I have encountered before.

Just an honorable mention for a few of my other favorites: Crazy Machines (a near-clone of The Incredible Machine), the classic Conway’s Game of Life, Robocode, Bloons Tower Defense 3, and Lemmings (sort of).

Force an fsck Check

Force an fsck Check

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In order to force an fsck check on reboot simply stick a file in the root of the filesystem you wish checked named forcefsck and reboot. You can use the line touch /forcefsck to create it. If you have the filesystem mounted under another path edit the line accordingly. fsck will automatically remove this file when it is done with it.

If you wish to check a filesystem you can not mount for whatever reason boot into a live-CD (such as Ubuntu) and run fsck /dev/sdXY where X and Y are your device and partition. Assuming the issue is not with your partition table you can use fdisk -l /dev/sdX to help figure out which partition is which.

These commands may require root privileges depending on your distribution.