Kinect the Dots.

Anyway, was just thinking about some possible things. I definitely did not want to add “studios” to it, and I’d rather not explain why for that one. I thought maybe “games” would be something to add, but it just didn’t seem to fit right. But then, it hit me. Just one little change would make all the difference.

Shadow Falco.

Whether I’ll stick with it or go back and forth between the original, I have no idea. But for now, I own it.

Meanwhile, I’ve starting working through the book XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example to get me into a position of being able to build my own side-scroller for my game programming class. Judging from what I’ve seen of the class book (Learn XNA 4.0), we won’t be getting near side-scrolling in the course, and if I’m mistaken, it’d probably be at too late of a time for me to get my project up to snuff. I figure the sooner I get to it, the better.

I’ll talk more about the book later, but the overall thought of this post is: I want to start my own company. Start with indie games and move up. But, I need to decide what to do.

My classes this semester are: an astronomy lecture and lab, a web programming class, and a game programming class. I hope to somehow use these to better my site. Maybe even end up making this all rather portfolio-y. Who knows.

In the web programming class, we make use of the Apache Tomcat server, which is pretty nifty. We also began using Cloudscape for databases.

The game programming class has us using Visual Basic C# in conjunction with XNA Gaming Studio.

I will go into more detail on things in future posts. At least that’ll give me something to write about.

I ended up finding the solutions here. It said it’s something Macs tag on files that haven’t been run yet to prevent them from doing anything until they have been approved. A very good feature, but it made the situation a bit annoying. What I did was deleted the plugin and downloaded again through Ubuntu. Problem solved.

But then, the permalinks weren’t working. =/ After some searching, I found the answer here.

To enable the mod_rewrite module at apache, I just simply do this 3 step:

First, add the rewrite.load to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/

Second, edit the apache configuration for my virtualhosting. For example, in my computer I only have one virtual hosting (/var/www) that is default from installation, so I make some adjustment for that (In my case I have to edit this file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default)
sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
Change the Allowoverride value to all for the document root directory
For example, I made change to this part of the configuration:

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride all
Order allow,deny
allow from all
# This directive allows us to have apache2′s default start page
# in /apache2-default/, but still have / go to the right place
# Commented out for Ubuntu
#RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/

Finnaly, just restart the apache
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

My suggestion though would be, for the second step, to do
sudo pico /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
instead. Much easier, in my opinion.

Then, I found that I needed to put this into the terminal:
chown -R www-data /var/www/wordpress

That was it. Did that, and it worked! Crazy, huh?

If you haven’t fully activated Akismet but have it turned on, disable it. It seems that little bugger is causing the issue. Otherwise, finish activating it and get it up to date. See if that works.

I had to help someone fix this issue and couldn’t find the solution on the internet. So I post this here for someone else. I did the same for the last couple posts. Maybe I’ll do this more often.

First was that it could not write to writeminidump.exe. To solve that, we went into the Steam install folder and deleted ClientRegistry.blob.

Then steamTMP.exe was unable to open for writing. That was killed off in the TaskManager, and then Steam was restarted. This led to the issue next being for steamNew.exe. The Steam site actually had a solution for that. Apparently, there might be some security issues.

We tried turning off the firewall and running to see if that did anything. Also while running the file as administrator. All that made was:

Error: delete of Steam.exe failed, Win32 Error 5 “Access is denied.”

When the firewall was turned back on, it turns out it was putting steam.exe and steamtmp.exe in its sandbox. After taking them out, we tried again for the update.

AND IT WORKED! Kudos to Kuro for his level of computer literacy and helping to solve the problem all by himself.

What makes their OS different? It’s just a browser. Yup, just a browser.

Picture this. You turn on your computer. After you log in, you’re automatically in IE, Safari, FireFox, etc., whatever your browser is. And you can use nothing else.

They do have a good idea on how to keep everything working. For instance, Google Docs works just like Microsoft Word online. If you want to write something, it gets saved there. But that’s the thing, everything is online. You write a paper, it’s online. Now, some may see this as cool, since you can access your stuff from anywhere.

But if you ask me, it’s only asking for trouble. That’s just waiting for a hacker.

Not to mention, that if you have no access to the internet, you’re out of luck. This thing can’t run without the internet.

For those who seriously only ever use the internet, this is good for you. But for the rest of us, who use programs and don’t want our stuff stolen, we’re good. We’re good.

Luckily, Chrome OS is being crafted for netbooks, where something like this could actually work.

Here’s some links you can check out for more:

• What is Google Chrome OS?

• Google Chrome OS UI Concept Video

Linux.

Right now, I’m typing on a Linux OS. Ubuntu to be exact. There are many different brands, or “distros” as they are called. Although there are a couple paid ones, a majority of them are free. Yes, free. Download, install, and you’re good. And everything there is to install on Linux, be it a media player or video editor, they’re all for free.

However, Linux is in the same boat as Mac with software compatibility. Everything is being made for Windows, so it’s lucky to have a Linux version. Extremely lucky. However, there are ways to run Windows programs. There’s the free emulator, wine. And then there’s running a virtual machine through VMware, but this means that you need a copy of Windows, which blows the freeness out.

Currently, I’m running Ubuntu on VMware Fusion for Mac. Compared to my installation of Windows 7, it runs much more smoothly, even when limited to only 512 MB of my RAM. There is no lag whatsoever. Now, I’ve upped it to 1 GB (1,024 MB), but it still is so much better than that Windows VM of mine at 2,500 MB, which is a shame with Windows getting most of the big programs and games. But it’s a great display of how little is needed to run Linux. Back in high school, I had a programming teacher who enlightened us on the fact that Linux can run on PCs that Windows crawls on. This is proof to that.

At this moment, I’ve switched to Unity, which is a feature on VMware Fusion that makes the desktop of the OS you’re running within it to disappear. The programs and windows run right on to of the Mac desktop, running in unity with the original OS. So, you can see where the name comes from.

It does seem a bit buggy still, with it unable to get one of Ubuntu’s windows to go full screen. There’s also some lag with dragging the windows around, with some frozen imprints of a previous window sometimes being frozen overtop of the next one you bring up or when you switch tabs. However, the fact that the windows sit on the dock just as they would if they were original Mac programs is just plain awesome.

Unable to run Linux to it’s full extent with the limits of running a virtual machine of it, I can’t play with the cool cubed-desktop-switch thing that really sets Linux apart from other OSs. But even in this limited state, there is a second desktop I can switch to. It’s not so 3D cool, but the ability to have multiple desktops to switch to (maybe so you can have one cluttered with icons and the other nice and clean) is awesome.

Leaving Unity and back to Ubuntu itself, at full screen, it appears to be the actual OS I’m running, with no signs of Mac at all on the screen. It feels nice. I can gladly say if I couldn’t get another Mac, or if I went for a netbook (which Apple doesn’t make), I’d certainly opt for having Linux on it.

As I play around and experiment with this OS, I’ll make some updates here on it in the future.