The little Inn by the wayside

Railwaymodeler · Post by **Railwaymodeler** » Sat May 31, 2008 0:55

Hi, all! Welcome back, Pater! Would you join me for a Friday drink?

Well, my landlord gave me till next Wednesday to have my business completely out of my apartment, and to that end, I'm on target timewise. So after then, I'll have evenings free. Yah!

Anyway, how is everyone today? Yesterday, UPS delivered my birthday present from my dad, which took longer than expected to get here, a 40 pound box of antique trains. Will spend a part of the weekend restoring them. Got three of the 50 cars mechanically good again, but they could use paint touchups still.

SGSW · Post by **SGSW** » Sat May 31, 2008 4:07

As the HOTU admin once said ... so much for my regular update.

@Chroelle - Actually I used the new link, ran in to Maz on the MSN, glad to hear that your wife is doing fine. And about Xbox60 piracy. Is dead easy, the 1st thing you must do is install Linux on it. Just google it.

@Railo - Nice to see that your doing fine. Good luck with business.

@Everyone - I hope you've been havng a good tme, going to egypt and so on.

I'll try to post more frequently now that I finished KOTOR.

eMTe · Post by **eMTe** » Sat May 31, 2008 14:19

Now this is a pleasant surprise to see you here.

Whatve you been up to?

Post by **Chroelle** » Sat May 31, 2008 15:17

I have been knee-deep in getting Anna introduced to her new kindergarten, and when she comes home she is so fussy you wont believe it. She has simply had her share of experiences for the day, and that really eats at ones nerves, so when she finally goes to sleep I can start my day with chores and emails, leaving next to no time to do any gameplaying...

Tanja and I are going away to stay the night at a hotel, and watch an outdoors performance of a mix of classical music (Vivaldi) and Beatles with a picnicbasket at our disposal. I really look forward to it. Anna is getting looked after by her godmother to be. She is finally getting baptised two weeks from now. You might remember we cancelled the last one because Tanjas was in the hospital.
So the rest of my free time goes to planning that event.

Househunting has been stalled while we go over these things, so at least that is a relief. Though I do look forward to having time to dive back into that.

I hope to be able to play a couple of games next week, so maybe then I will have the time to even add one or two... I gotta stop saying that.

Have fun with Conan Scythe, but dont forget us.

What is everyone else up to at the moment? I know Maz is deeply buried in icehockeysticks and protectiongear....

Railwaymodeler · Post by **Railwaymodeler** » Sun Jun 01, 2008 2:05

I am working on models this weekend. My railway is a bit derelict looking as I haven't had the time for it that I would like to, so this weekend I promised myself I would change that and have been repairing track (Most of it was fine though) and working on scenery (Which was a bigger mess). Wiring was the biggest mess, and I'm working to streamline it, somewhat.

Anyway, I also got two laptops to repair by tomorrow, they just need XP reloaded, so they aren't anything to worry about. Nice fast AMDs. One's already almost done.

Tank · Post by **Tank** » Sun Jun 01, 2008 2:34

Welcome back Pater! Glad to hear you enjoyed your trip. To be honest, I'm not very active these days on the forums. Neither here or at OGC because I'm busier enjoying the nice weather here.

Good news: The second-biggest local footballteam moved up to the 2nd league (2. Bundesliga). So, I'm quite happy with that one.

Bad news: My pc (not the one I'm currently writing this post with) got infected. Second time in 1 month. Got infected with Virtumonde, which is very annoying to remove.

eMTe · Post by **eMTe** » Sun Jun 01, 2008 11:39

Tried ComboFix?

Maz · Post by **Maz** » Sun Jun 01, 2008 12:02

Tried Linux?

Well, my plans suddenly changed. I decided to change my salary payer. I switched from elektrobit to espotel, but managed to keep my current workplace at NSN

Isn't it funny to work in IT field

Result is that I am having my summer vacations now. All happened quite suddenly, so work schedules were messed a bit... I am somewhat terrified when I think what a mess I have in front of me when I return to my work...

Another decision which was made is that I will get married at autumn... So my holiday will probably not be such a peasefull after all. However I am cautiously hopefull I'll have some time to spend on here too

Tank · Post by **Tank** » Sun Jun 01, 2008 12:30

eMTe wrote:Tried ComboFix?

Yes. I used ComboFix the first time, but it couldn't remove some files. This time I used SpySweeper. Worked fine.

Maz wrote:Tried Linux?

That's why I got the problem in the first place. Downloaded a partition program (wanted to try something different than the Windows tool), but this had a little "extra".
I tried Ubuntu as a live-cd and I'm to install it soon (1st installation didn't work - bootloader could not be written). Perhaps today.

Maz · Post by **Maz** » Sun Jun 01, 2008 17:38

Yeah, dualboot can be a pain... Especially since windows tends to owerwrite the boot records if they're changed. I have seen many working dualboot setups, but never really managed to create one. I gave it up after it did not work at first few attempts... The way I did it, and way I recommend is to have 2 physical drives, one for linux and the other for windows. You can then unplug the other drive when you install linux. Then at startup you can simply select from bios from which drive to boot. (Just make sure you set linux as default

)

Post by **Chroelle** » Sun Jun 01, 2008 19:47

Maz wrote: Another decision which was made is that I will get married at autumn... So my holiday will probably not be such a peasefull after all. However I am cautiously hopefull I'll have some time to spend on here too

When did you pop the question mate? And congratulations on that. I might be going down on one knee one of these days soon too, but I dont think we are talking autumn wedding...

How long have you guys been together now?

Oh and by the way...my former post was a copy of my post in Age of Conan thread, because my keyboard set out so I could only copy and paste text, but I wanted to let you know I was away yesterday and some of today. We had a blast watching outdoors ballet and the hotel was great with lots of things to offer. It really makes a difference when you get kids that you somethimes take a step back and remember that you are girlfriend-boyfriend as well as parents.

Post by **Zyx** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 22:02

Maz wrote:Yeah, dualboot can be a pain...

Yeah, I like my current setup so much better...

VMs for teh win.

I have seen many working dualboot setups, but never really managed to create one.

I've never had problems, as long as you install Windows first. The other way around you need a way to get back to your Linux some other way (boot disk/cd, bootloader program in Windows...)

And you don't (usually) need to unplug drives if you have multiple HDDs, you can just use your BIOS's boot alternatives and choose which HDDs to boot from...

Pater Alf · Post by **Pater Alf** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 19:00

Time to celebrate again! I added "The Winter Solstice" to our database and if I counted right we now have 200 different games on CWF!!!

Hooray!!!

Post by **Chroelle** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 21:01

Cool!!!

You rock PA!

Champagne on me...and being imaginary as it is... it might as well be Dom Perignon!

Railwaymodeler · Post by **Railwaymodeler** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 23:44

Wow! I feel like CWF is really going someplace. This is great! 200 games!

Champaign? Nah better pass for now. Got a networking job to do a little later...

Post by **Chroelle** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 19:03

Well I havent been in here since Fridaty because we were engulfed in preparing for and actually celebrating Annas christening/baptism.
Everything went as planned and we had a really great party with lots of people there.
And oh yeah...I proposed to Tanja and she said yes.

Pater Alf · Post by **Pater Alf** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 21:26

Congratulations mate!!!

Tank · Post by **Tank** » Tue Jun 10, 2008 0:05

Congrats Chroelle!

Post by **Chroelle** » Tue Jun 10, 2008 11:59

Thanks! We are actually talking about getting married this September. But lets see if we can actually do that...

Maz · Post by **Maz** » Tue Jun 10, 2008 14:27

Congraz C!

I on the other hand have not been online at all lately. I've been planning the weddings, playing with kiddos, and yesterday was spent on zoo. Besides I dug up the good old pong project. I pretty much re-planned it, and if I ever have the time to finish the first version, I'll try to extend it a bit... I have some plans

And if someone with basic C skills want's to participate, it is now possible, because I decided to write it both linux and windows compatible. Currently there's easy optin for windows users to st up the environment... Anyone up to taking a challenge?

Currently I have following rough plan:

1. Program will be divided into 2 executables, server and client.
- Client(s) will query ball and paddle positions from server, which will calculate the positions. This will be done via socket interface.
- Clients will do the drawing of game.
- Clents will send keypresses to server, which will update paddle speed accordingly.
2. Server will be simple threaded application.
- It will have timing thread, which calculates positions, and updates this information in data storage.
- It will also have a thread listening network sockets (1/client), and sending data to sockets when needed.
- And one thread for listening new socket connections.
3. Exact structure for client is not at all done.
4. Graphics will be overly simplified, because I am no artist.
5. Starting and ending the game are not thought at all, because it requires coding decent GUI, and I am no GUI writer. ATM it is just intended to make the game running, although if this is ever finished, then it really requires a game starting screen with all standard options.

ATM I am (slowly, perhaps 2 or 3 hours / week) writing the following parts:

1. Server statrtup scenario.
2. Network IF on server side.
3. Data storage and timing. (which is probs the hardest part on server side).

I have tested p_threads API on windows with DEV C++, and noted it works. And I believe I'll get POSIX sockets working too. So there should not be that big problems on server side if I just can figure out how to do the timing

mmm... Seems like I got a bit carried away once again

Sorry peeps