Along with the public beta of Wuala there’s also a new website.
Aside from the plethora of new information, a feature to install/launch Wuala straight from the browser and mucho polished bling, Caleido offers a few badges to advertise Wuala and link to your own shared files (very welcome indeed!)
Unfortunately all of those badges are… big. Many people (including myself) use the common 80×15 badges with the common layout icon on the left, text on the right.
That’s why I quickly threw together two small badges in the standard form-factor. Use them as you like 
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Without any doubt twhirl is the greatest twitter client available. It’s an Air-based application – meaning you can even use it on Linux.
Now, as you may know KDE 4.1 comes with a handy little twitter client plasmoid itself but the functionality is really limited, the plasmoid is a little buggy and overall can’t compete with twhirl. So, let’s install twhirl then, eh?
First thing you have to do is installing the Adobe Air for Linux alpha. Since the installation is pretty straightforward and the package is an RPM I’ll skip the details.
After installing Air just navigate to the twirl website, look for the “manual installation” paragraph on the right handside and click “Download and install the latest twhirl release”. The installation will start and you’ll be able to start the application afterwards by executing (if you installed it to /opt) /opt/twhirl/twhirl.
You probably want to get rid of the pesky taskbar entry now: With KWin all you’ve to do is press ALT+F3, select Configure Window Behaviour and choose “Window Specific” in the dialog. Create a new rule by clicking New, click “Detect Window Properties” and select the twirl window. Just accept the settings in the upcoming dialog, and close it. Time to edit the rules a bit: Double click the new rule in the list, go to the Preferences tab and select “Keep below”, “Skip taskbar”, select “Force” for each item and don’t forget to enable the checkbox at the end. Apply the settings and voila – a nice, widget-like twirl on your Linux desktop.
The nice thing about twhirl is that it comes with different color schemes and the “Black Magic” colorset matches the dark Oxygen plasma theme almost perfectly.
Yeah, this post is pretty sketchy, I wish I could upload media to illustrate it – but that functionality is still broken.
Update 08-28-2008: This post has moved to it’s own subpage. There you’ll find an updated version that should fix the wake issue.
Woot woot. Good things do happen 
Now it’s time to do some regression tests. Without implying bad things here, but people should be very strict with applications before giving out platinum status.
Things like “does work perfectly fine as long as you don’t click button X” or “works perfectly fine but has some visual glitches” usually mean the application does not work perfectly fine and therefore doesn’t really deserve platinum status. Feels a bit like cheating on yourself if you give out platinum too easily. Just my two cents, though.
A test version of Adobe’s Air for Linux is available for public consumption now. Tweet-r as well as the Pownce client work fine, there are some visual problems with alpha channels, though.
It is great to see that Adobe does release a Linux version, this should help adoption of this technology a bit. Even better, of course, would be a simultanous release on all platforms.
Composing music can be a very fruitless and hard thing to do.
Especially so when all your music talent lies in being able to play the pianica a bit, but that’s about it then. Thankfully there are several programs out there that will cheerfully make up for one’s own misses and provide easy and intuitive tools.
In the past I’ve been using Myriad’s Melody Assistant. It’s a very capable program for writing and rendering music. You can import Midis, change their notation, the instruments and render your stuff out to an MP3 if you want to.
Recently I started tinkering with music creation again after a long recess, I’ve been using FLStudio and it’s absolutely great. It has all the features of Melody Assistant plus a some real stuff for quickly producing and editing songs. There’s a waveform editor that allows you to do slicing, looping and sampling from within the program, a bunch of drumkits, VSTi support and support for soundfonts. It’s a real treat to be able to do work so swiftly, especially when you’ve got a basic knowledge only. There are several versions of the program out there starting from about 50$ up to 300$. Still, that’s pretty cheap if you consider the costs of applications like Reason.
And things get better from here on: FLStudio works fine with Wine on Unix. It does have the expected amount of visual glitches and minimizing is a no-no but apart from that the application works flawlessly. That’s not only cool for FLStudio and Wine but also for Linux .
There are quite a number of things that were stripped from Microsoft’s proud Visual Studio Express series. One of them being the resource editor in C++, another one being a buttload of templates for your project type. Like… let’s say… Windows service.
Now, while I dug myself through the documentation on how to write a service the more obvious and easier solution was ignored: Use SharpDevelop. It comes with a lot of handy templates… like Windows service. It can do a lot more though; the new beta version features support for XAML, respectively WPF, which is quite a nice addition.
So, best thing to do (if you don’t want to skim out the money for the full version of Visual Studio) is to use both IDEs side by side.
Now that is news, my fellow subjects!
Wine, the not-so-much-an-emulator program that bridges the gap between Linux and Windows, is about to hit One-point-O in a not so distant future. It took 15 years to get to this point and Wine is an absolutely remarkable piece of software. There are some interesting ideas floating out there as well, so I’m absolutely never going to get tired of watching it evolve.
Anyway, Wine 1.0… what can I say? I’d love Wine to be less Johnny-on-the-spot and a little bit more reliable sometimes. But then again, I’m primarily using it to run games like Team Fortress 2, so I’m in no position to complain about freezes. Wine works for just about everything by now and I’m eagerly looking forward to your 1.0 tarball .
Normalerweise führt der Einsatz eines Joypads bei GTA: San Andreas unter Wine dazu, dass CJ unentwegt vorwärts läuft. Das ist recht nervig und ein Fehler, der auch in anderen Spielen auftritt.
Im Bugtracker steht jetzt die Lösung: Einfach per chmod Lesezugriff auf /dev/input/event* geben. Funktioniert hervorragend .
Ebenfalls im Bugtracker findet man Hinweise darauf, dass an einer etwas besseren Kompatibilität zu nProtect gearbeitet wird. Hervorragende Neuigkeiten für jeden Onlinespieler .
One of the more unique search terms hitting this blog is "Puyo Puyo Fever! on Linux". Now to make this clear:
PPF! doesn't work on Linux as of yet. With a no-cd crack the game starts up but fails to initialize some filters/codecs and simply stays in the dark (requiring a wineserver -k).
Of course it is in my interest to get this awesome game up and running in Linux aswell, so I'll be glad to post follow-ups to this as soon as I get it working or find helpful hints.
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