All posts by kobaan

Archive, Games

Own X3 Map released

I know there are already some good
sectormaps available, even for the latest Release X2 of the
X-universe saga.

There’re also quite a few lists with some more information
available, so I decided to include as much information as possible
into my very own map.
If you’re interested you can download it here:
http://home.mnet-online.de/tuxine/x3kobaanmap.jpg (gif and png
version also available)

Features:

Showing all sectors for X3 by their names
Graphical Sectorsize
Mark Solar Power Plants
Mark Shipyards
Mark Docks
Mark Pirate Bases
List Superfreighter I/II availability
Relative Spacegate Positions
Mark profitable asteroids for each sector by ore, silicon,
nividium
List sector protection M1,M2,M6 and TL availability
Energie Support/Shortage mapping through the whole map
Prepared non-functional space-gates
Marketprice comparison
Rocket Damage/Speed/Range data

Changes:
V0.5
Included marketprice comparison list
Included rocket-data list
Included Race color-coding

V0.4
High resolution clean-ups
set non-functional gates visibility

V0.3
Energy-Support and shoratge highlighted through the map (blueish
background)
Legend scaled to a more readable size
Scaled some known wide sectors in width t.b.c.

V0.2
Translated Sectorname Avarice to german Habgier
Include information on highest asteroid value: ore, silicon,
nividium
Added pinpoints (yet invisible) for non-functional spacegates
List Superfreighter I/II availability

V0.1
Include information on shipyards, docks, pirate bases, solar power
plants
Include information on spacegate positions
List sector protection M1,M2,M6 and TL availability

V0.0
Scaled sectors by their size (middle spacegate distance)
Initial version based on old maps, with additional sectors

I didn’t translate the map to english yet, this may follow someday
later.

Archive, Music

Last minute XMAS gifts

To all of you seeking for last minute
xmas-presents, I can suggest this great audio CD of the korean band
Bulldog Mansion which has a wide variety of different music styles
as they play some funk, bigband, ballad, ska and rock.
In my eyes a perfect xmas gift for all people who want to escape
the last frustating 5 years of english and/or german top100
music.
theresheis
I just loved the songs of Bulldog Mansion when I did find a nice
flash cartoon on the net: there she is (goto->amalloc) another
part of this cartoon series will be published soon.
http://www.sambakza.net
http://www.bulldogmansion.com

Archive, Games

X3 Reunion – First Impressions

Time to spend some time on blogging
about my X3 Reunion progress
.
Whenever you want to enjoy space / flight sims having a joystick is
a must, even better when you got force-feedback Winking So if you bump,
it will bump back to you, physically.
x3screen00008
Reunion, is the 3rd part of Egosoft’s space trading and combat
series, above we can see Nikonofune which is the ship of
Saya.
x3screen00001.0
This is mine, at the very beginning, you’ll already get a M4 Argon
Buster and a Mercury TS,
but earning money is still hard to achive at the beginning.
x3screen00002
This shows the landing lights of a solar power plant.
x3screen00005
Space stations are huge, and there are only a few docking bays now,
most of the time they’ll be in the middle.
x3screen00015
Nebula rendering, atmosphere and lighting textures are incredibly
improved.
x3screen00012
As well as station design. Most of them don’t differ anymore
between races, but their designs textures, bumpmapping and light
effects are really eye-candy.
x3screen00009
Dockingclamps. Although it’s a space game there’s good sound
effects too, even in space, well it’s a game so that goes ok.
x3screen00014
And there is a great variety of BGM for all the space-sectors, some
frightning, depressing or relaxing… as in Kingdoms End.
x3screen00011
Are you still reading this text ? Enjoy the pictures.
x3screen00032
This one is a bit obscure, this is the station in Grand Exchange,
which obviously was sprayed by some teenagers ? Winking))
x3screen00030
Inside of the station it seems someone painted some japanese kanjis
on the walls…. strange.
x3screen00028
Where am I ?
x3screen00019
One of my f****ing expensive superfreighters.
x3screen00023
Being attacked by the side…. shame on them. My turret is in the
rear.
x3screen00034
Someone’s in a hurry…. profitsssss….
x3screen00033
A nice shot from the side, lighting is really great here. Each edge
will reflect sunlight when moving… wow.
x3screen00037
Asteroid fields are beatiful, as long as you see them early enough
when flying through thick sight-killing shield-eating nebulas. (X2
had acid nebulas damaging your hull, I guess it’s still the same, I
don’t wanna try this. But in X2 the shielding was weakened by
lightning charges inside nebulas, which I haven’t experienced yet
in X3.
x3screen00036
The weather is cloudy, beautiful storms cycling in the planets
atmosphere.
x3screen00035
A huge carrier ship of the Teladi. Slow but deadly. But who wants
to be on war with that trading geniuses.

Expect more, when I find some time and mysterious places…

Andy.

Archive, Games

Preparing for X3 Reunion – Part I

Finally I bought all the components
for my new X3 – Reunion Game-PC. So I started assembling all the
parts together.
(I know the images aren’t in the right order, but after converting
this blogentry for the second time, I have no more energy to drag
and drop that image positions over and over again…)

Although I will still miss the great Thermaltake Armor Chassis,
which I cannot afford, the Aerocool Engine II on the picture to the
right, is really a good alternative for 1/3 price.

The main focus was a combined front and rear fan working inside the
PC case.

I also downgraded the CPU from a dual 4600 to a simple but fast
enough for X3 Athlon 64 4000+ San Diego.

Those two steps were enough money-saving.

To further push performance to its peek I decided to invest in a
high class graphics chipset at a low cost. The PowerColor X850XT
PCIe ATI Radeon R480 Card with 256MB.

Compared to all the other X850XT its price is lowest, but
outperfoms an Geforce 6800ultra quite nice Winking.

Since I did not yet buy my windows OS I just did a quickrun in
Gentoo Linux, which was installed in a second(hour), and measured
about 9700 fps with glxgears.

But not enough. Regarding to the latest discussion on egosoft
forums
a lot of people suffer from AC97 sound issues, whilst people using
a seperate sound card report to get a 10% performance
increase.

Now I had two choices, buying a seperate soundcard for more money,
or buying a mainboard with high quality onboard sound.

When I saw the specs on the MSI K8N Diamond compared to the Asus
A8N SLI Premium or the DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D, the thing was
crystalclear.

MSI offers 6x SATA 3GB’s with excellent equipment, and an onboard
Soundblaster Live 24bit on a lower price than the Asus…..

yummie…..

Bought …

Because of the 6 SATA’s and the possibility to upgrade the CPU to
dualcore in the distant future,

I was looking for a power supply with all those connectors for the
future and a low-noise 12cm fan.

And I remembered the tests on tomshardware that showed only a few
surviving candidates in a power supply stress test.

And the winner is: a 500 watts Seasonic S12 power supply with 4
SATA and Dual-CPU(not core) connectors ready for every usage.

Further it has an active power factor correction which saves energy
when the system doesn’t need the full power.

Let me excuse for the color of the dvd-rom drive. It’s a samsung
whatever I have no idea what version code or features it has. I
just read it has 130ms access time for dvd, which is bad. I know
that.

But it was cheap and my favourit Plextor 713 in black was sold out
that day.

And…. so to say, I just bought it to get Gentoo Linux installed
that day. LaughDD

Since I didn’t want to have all technology and more important no
cables filling the view into a windowed PC case, I installed a
Samsung 200GB SATA2 8MB harddisk with native command
queueing.

I didn’t read much about harddisk speed yet but cache transfers
show up with 1799.89 MB/sec in Linux and buffered reads with 55.26
MB/sec. That’s worlds better than my old PATA.

Although I’m not convinced by SATA data and poer connectors yet, I
can see them breaking apart someday.

Yep, and the memory… 2×512 CL2,5 Kingston DDR400, since I’m not
the overclocking guy, everything here standard, and MSI’s
intelligent overclocking is also disabled. (maybe it’s worth
putting mem, cpu and gpu on fire when X4 is being released, we’ll
see)

so far….

Archive, Music, TV

The Mediacenter Ecstasy – Part IV

Success ! I got DRM/DRI compiled
cleanly and have an totally
accellerated X-Display. XVideo Motion Compensation is also
working
as I found a precompiled Xorg version with all the stuff
needed.The funny thing is, that my MythTV database is now broken,
had
no time yet to investigate that further, to much to do at
work.

Meanwhile there’s also a patch available for IR-Support on my
DVB-T Terratec 1400 card. But I think I’ll skip this one and
use my good old X10 radio remote, which is already supported
in
the kernel.

Let’s see when everything is done, I’m also planning to strip
down the whole system to a working Image for you EPIA-folks
out there.

Good night…

Archive, Operating System

The Mediacenter Odyssee – PartIII

Finally I decided to delete all the
Fedora trash from my epia.Since I found some good howto’s for debian I gave Debian
Sarge
a chance which installed fairly easy, and most important,
rather
minimalistic. But again it lacks the newest kernel features
that will support my newer DVB-T card Terratec Cinergy 1400,
as well as framebuffer-support for the Epia M10000.

Fortunately, after some frickling, I managed to backport the
DVB
stuff into the older “newest” debian development kernel,
and also the via-frambuffer driver.

A bigger problem was the DRM/DRI drivers which refused to
compile
for my debian kernel, with some strange missing symbol
errors…
Anyway Mythtv is now up and running, although without
hardware
mpeg accelleration.
Menuloading is a real pain in the ass, and also channel
switching,
but timeshifting and the EPG works great anyway…

On the internet I found an article on “KnoppMyth” which
promised
to work “out of the box(from CD)” on a Epia system…
waahhh….

After a short try, I realized that it works also without
accelleration
and further needs a huge desktop installation….
Not to mention the missing support for my DVB card, but OK.

I really wonder that after those many years of DVB
introduction
it’s still impossible to buy a settopbox which has all
features
built in.

For example Pinnacle’s Showcenter (a streaming-client) can be
combined
with a streaming server PC which has a PCTV card (analogue or
DVB)
so it is possible to programm it like a VCR. But the only way to
see
Live-TV is to programm a channel via Showcenter, wait for the
recording
to start and then pickup the file inside the videolist and play
it.

That’s simply bullshit….

Archive

The Ultimate Mediacenter – Part II

Meanwhile I gave Fedora a chance to
proof that it’s worth to build a mediacenter in less time than on
gentoo.
After hours of downloading and burning the installation dvd (what
happened to the good old network-install)
I managed to setup a minimal Fedora Core 3 system (minimal means
700MB on Fedora, ughh, Gentoo does the same in 40MB).Due to the high demand of diskspace for a core installation I
needed to assign a unused logical volume of my gentoo
base system and relocate /usr to it. But anyway everything works
out of the box. Well done.

The Via Epia M10000 C3 Ezra mini-itx system needs special packages
for hardware-acceleration (direct rendering, mpeg2-decoding, motion
compensation).
Those are available for FC3 on:
http://washington.kelkoo.net/epia/FC3
Simply installing xorg-x11 will select the epia-specific packages,
as long as the epia repository is set up correctly.

Currently there’s only a binary rpm for via-drm on the C3
nehemia(i686) version of the Epia M10000 board available.
So I had to rebuild a native C3 ezra-t(i586) version of the
package:

rpmbuild –rebuild –target i586
kernel-module-via-drm-2.6.12-1.1376_FC3-2.6.7-1.ucr.src.rpm

For the Terratec Cinergy 1400 DVB-T card and a few others there,
just right in time, an backpatch-update for the cx88-driver on FC3
became available on
http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/3/en/i386/RPMS.at-stable
cx88-kmdl-2.6.12-1.1376_FC3-0.0.4_20050708_202133-58.rhfc3.at.i586.rpm

So far done for the base.

I intendently left out more detailed setup of configfiles,
startup-entries and so on, which can be found everywhere on
google.
(xorg.conf for epia, minimal fc3 init.d, modules.conf, rc.local,
.xinitrc)

For a mediabox which should boot really fast, a big window desktop
is just overhead, so I’ll use the minimalistic twm as my
windowmanager, although there’re people who prefer a minimalistic
windowmaker instead. We’ll see later if that’s worth a
change.
After installing TWM, I do “switchdesktop twm”, for activation (twm
should be default anyway).

Now for the mediacenter software…

I decided to use mythtv, as it is best supported and has wide
plugin support for almost every feature someone could want.
Not sure yet if streaming internet tv will be supported through a
playlist-wrapper for mplayer. We’ll see later.

The Mythtv-suite as well as mplayer and friends are all available
here:
http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/3/en/i386/RPMS.at-stable

Fedora will not be my favourite system, but at least it’s fast on
Epia and package support is ok for common use. Except for the
compile time gentoo’s package-management is lightyears faster than
on fedora.

Let’s see how this stuff works tomorrow.
Good night.

Archive, Music, TV

The Ultimate Mediacenter – Part I

I’m already looking a long time for
the ultimate media and entertainment center out of the box, but yet
nothin’ serious came up my horizon so far.

Since living in a flat, I’m not allowed to use a satellite-dish
which terminates my dream of the wonderufl DVB-S. We got cable with
almost 40 channels, most of them home-shopping-crap… but at least
Munich is DVB-T broadcasting about 24 channels since May this year.
DVB-C brings only 8 free digital channels on cable, all the other
stuff is commercial and really expensive.

So the obvious way to go was, using DVB-T together with analogue
channels from the cable and mix all that well with the usual
mediacenter stuff (movie player,photos,music,dvd,text).

I studied all of the latest set-top boxes, and commercial
media-centers, but all of them lack one or more big features:
Internet-TV-channels and custom onscreen infos/ticker
Finally you would end up with more single media boxes than a
home-cinema-rack has AV-connectors.

Building my own PC media center seems the only way to achieve my
“everybody’s?” ultimate mediacenter goal.

The big problem now is, that it’s almost impossible to find a
software which can handle DVB-T and analogue channels within one
channellist. That means you always have to change the device/tuner
and then select the channel, instead of simply channeljump through
analogue and digital broadcasts. Further to pass analogue channels
the same way as a DVB receiver does to a mpeg2 decoder, analogue
channels will need to be encoded to mpeg2 first to feed a unique
output-decoder… grrrrrrrrr.
I think most people will not understand the above as long as they
haven’t tried by themselves.

OK, I skipped the analogue part for the moment, and start using
DVB-T.

Yesterday I bought the Terratec Cinergy 1400 DVB-T Card, which is
now officially supported in Kernel 2.6.13. (There’re also
mixed-mode cards available, but without mpeg2 encoder, which means
it’s just two cards in one, nothing more.)

Already a long time ago, I bought myself a Mini-ITX PC, to have a
compact, powersaving and silent computer for the living room.
Since I’m a gentoo linux enthusiast, I compiled everything from
scratch on that slow=powersaving machine.

Compiling the new kernel for an Epia M10000 Ezra board, was quite a
challenge, although I had absolutely no problems in the past, but I
found out “vesafb-tng” doesn’t work anymore in 2.6.13, “vesafb-old”
does only work if it’s not compiled as a module. And compiling
takes quite a time on this 900MHz hardware. For a first try I
skipped patching the sources with older 2.6.7 epia patches, which
I’ll need later to get hardware-mpeg-acceleration CLE266,
framebuffer and XVideo motion compensation XvMC running.

After compiling 2.6.13 for the third time, this time successful, I
gave up and did go to sleep.
Not sure if I’ll pick up there tomorrow, or simple use my already
prepared debian-dvd’s.

It’s hard to reduce power consumption, if you have to let the
computer running the whole night to get some stuff compiled.
Where’s the powersaving here ? A fast machine can at least save
power when it’s unused.

…to be continued…

Archive, Diary

Diary Import October 1999

26th october 1999

(The day is long Aya)

25th october 1999

Improved my SQL firewall pages.

Compiling 2.2.13 for zuse and maybe for stun.de too.

24th october 1999

Big cleaning up day again.

Some new cooking experiments. Happy) hmm.. delicious…

23rd october 1999

Big cleaning up day,
And another shelf free for Aya.

Aya’s leaving today, and going to Malaysia for shopping and
a last relaxing before language school. Enjoy !!!! Winking Kiss.

22nd october 1999

Did Sunscan 2.3B on all of my sparcy-firewalls. Passed !
Happy

Wrote an interface to search inside of the firewall logfiles
of course using PHP3 and all the logs written to the MySQL
database.
Just half an hour work…. Happy))) Cool.

21st october 1999

My parents left this morning for holiday in egypt.

Managing service contracts with SUN.

Finally I’m allowed to use PHP3 and MySQL at work…. Sad((((
GRRRRRRRRRRRR………. now !!!!! that I’m almost finished
with
all that script using flat files !!!!!!!!! Jesus !!!!!!!!!

20th october 1999

Wrote documentation for all my firewall-scripts.

Linux 2.2.13 is out…. hmmm… a little bit late to install on
stun.de.
What do you think Reyk and Gerd ?

Gone to dinner with my parents because they go on holiday
tomorrow,
I wonder which they forget something or not. As usual Happy

19th october 1999

A little (big) outage in one of our partners site Happy))
Hey Mr. Firewall… there’s something wrong no more packets
here….
And in fact… it wasn’t the firewal, it wasn’t the communication
line,
it wasn’t an power failure… just another cisco byte the dust
Happy))

Bought something nice for Aya. Happy For XMAS of course.

18th october 1999

Big Y2K Novell meeting at work…. this red-package stuff is
chasing me… Happy))

Wrote a script to analase the firewall rule usage to see or
manage performance optimization.

17th october 1999

Installed a new mixing tap in the bathroom and also a new
shower.
Wow 9 different ways of having a shower Happy a lot of massage functions
really interesting this shower-developement Happy

Replaced a few parts of my room-seperators, now it’s much more
smooth
to slide and installed distance plates for the two iron
ropes.

Watched so many japanese movies and documentations on
television…
…oh this will take a long time to fully understand the
japanese.

16th october 1999

Our family visit left this morning, and COLT Telecom is burrying
new fiber
cables in front of my house. Happy)) If they’ll tell me which one of these
thousands
of fibers is my gigabit internet connection Happy)))))))))))

15th october 1999

Set up the Cannaserver on Linux. Now my japanese dictionaries are
working,
german, english and japanese, with Kana and Kanji input Happy)))) Yippie !!!

14th october 1999

Installed 4.7 again, now with a little bit more priviledges.
Happy LC25

More updates for www.stun.de and some last configuration steps
before the
installation in Frankfurt.

13th october 1999

Installed netscape 4.7 at work, without being administrator…. big
mistake
now my NT is a little bit confused. Time to hack a little
bit.

Two new developement kernels released… we’re now up on
2.3.22.

Oh my head…. too much party yesterday.

12th october 1999

My trukish coworker gave a party because of quitting his old
company,
and after that it’s my moms 50th birthday. Big family
party…..

What a day.

11th october 1999

Solved the ssh problem on www.stun.de. Connections are no longer
refused, when we’re using
dynamic IP ranges. Net-fu is broken… hmmm… don’t know
why.

Kernel 2.4 will be already released in november 1999, hmmm… nice,
so I can introduce
Aya into newest technology from beginning.

10th october 1999

Today our scientific institutes are opened for the masses.
So I’ll go and see what our nuclear-fission reactor is doing.
(I just hope that they can finish in my lifetime….)

Discussed some of my visions of nuclear fusion, and again I feel
like they don’t
want to hear new theories. Maybe they’re all to horny doing
practical experiments,
than thinking about easier, not yet realizable theories.

2.3.20 released yesterday…. boys… you make me trouble…
doing Stun.de updates for the kernelgrapher.

9th october 1999

Bought a new pillow for Aya… sorry I couldn’t find a plastic one
as in Japan,
do you agree on feathers ?

Reyk called me on the phone and agreed to install the www.stun.de
server in
Frankfurt on 28th.

Gerd agreed to be available on 28th for testing with the server
from Munich.

Had big fun together with Gerd and Eva at Shananigans Irish
Pub,
where Mane Maniac played live guitar and harmonica blues.
And bought two CD’s Happy

8th october 1999

FTP-Problem solved, now it’s officially a software bug on the
clients FTP.
And thanks to standards, we’re not allowed to use a different
software,
because of some software contracts…. Happy))) Another point for commercial….
(negative, of course)

Tonight there’s an ANIME special on TV, most thing in original
japanese audio
with german subtitles. Cool for learning languages I think,
especially for
learning slang.

Managed my holiday so that I can pickup Aya in Frankfurt on
29th.

7th october 1999

Our big ftp transfer problem is escalating today, and we finally
found out why
it doesn’t work. It’s clear now that netmanage’s chameleon ftp
can’t handle
passive ftp transfer correctly. When we installed WS_FTP the
problem was gone.
Bullshit ! I can’t understand why all these people just want to use
commercial
products, because of support they all say…. yeah… fuck… Not
one word about
bugs, only fixes and new features published. Every single shareware
or freeware
is better documented and support than that fucking commercial
stuff.
And then the customers make me responsible if something doens’t
work….
Fuck ! I can’t do anything when those assheads don’t know how to
write correct code !
And you customers…. you wanted that shit from MS !
So don’t blame me !

6th october 1999

Forgot to mention that 2.3.19 is out, and on cutting edge you can
read the fascinating
release date(time) 4-Oct-99 24:44 Happy))))))) yeah 24:44
Oh my god…. others are figthing with Y2K problems and we didn’t
recognize that we
already have to work 25 per day now ! Happy)))))

At work there’s more and more shit stacking….
Anyway, I feel very good at the moment, I need this
stress…..

5th october 1999

Had an almost perfect day, I feel so much energy…
everything went fine. Solved a severe firewall problem with active
FTP connections
to well known services. Went to the companies doctor and he said
that I’m in good
condition and the sight of my eyes is almost as sharp as the sight
of an eagle.

Compiled Nedit for AIX today, and rm vi Laugh Not really….

More radioactive shit happened, this time in south korea.
And in London a train crash occured…

4th october 1999

What a week, so many ANIME in original japanese language on TV, I
have to record
all of them, for Aya and me. (Nice to learn languages by reading
subtitles in german)

Discovered a collection of precompiled CPAN modules, wow that fixes
my union semun
problems…. Happy Tricky !

There’s another date of www.stun.de installation in
Frankfurt.
If everything goes ok, I’ll install the server together with Reyk
on 27th october
this time, I’ll drive by myself and the day after in the very early
morning
I can pick up my lovely girl from airport. Kiss 😡 !!!!!!

Greenpeace says still four times higher radioacivity in Tokaimura
but all people
are already back in their usual life, becuase the government said
it’s already over.

3rd october 1999

Still birthdayparty-damaged…

Have to go to Oktoberfest today, with my coworkers…. oh how I
hate Oktoberfest,
and next year I have to show Aya. I wish I could get just one year
off.

Aya wrote me strange mails, I don’t know what she means, and I
don’t feel
good by reading them….
I guess my answer are not much better in meaning….
maybe it’s all because of culture difference.

Hey you people out there, how do you manage culture problems inside
your
relationship ? I can’t stand that japanese “saying nothing, block
everything”
behaviour any longer. Am I the only one, or is it my fault ?

2nd october 1999

Big birthday-party of one of my coworkers, I hope it’s not getting
too late
tonight. Everyone of us has prepared a little poem, song or
present.
Will be nice I guess.

Ohhhh… my head…. someone switch off that light, and kill that
noise in my head.

1st october 1999

Discovered lots of dictionaries on the net, but everything
precompiled,
but I need unencrypted versions for my CGI-Server.

Played around with XJdic.