Ubuntu 12.04 Upgrade Failure

May 1, 2012 , , , Comment

Always have at least 2GB overhead when upgrading your Linux distribution! If you don’t you’ll regret it!

I attempted to upgrade my primary desktop from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 for Long-term Support last night and managed to lock up three of my four CPU cores with kernel processes when I ran out of space on the root partition.

Unfortunately, the only way I know to remove the locks is to reboot, but I’m pretty sure the reboot will fail because half the new packages still haven’t been configured, including the all the ones related to the kernel (hal, acpi, etc). Thankfully, I keep good backups so I’ll just do a clean install of the system and restore my configurations from /etc. My desktop has always been my techie playground so the Ubuntu install I broke is a pretty big mess after years of tweaking system configurations.

I could use a Live CD and chroot into the system to complete the upgrade, but now that I’ve really messed up the system, I’d like to get a clean start. This time, however, I’ll be sure to allocate more space to the root partition. I’m looking forward hopefully to many years of service on a stable LTS release.

Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Impressions

April 30, 2012 , , Comment

The first Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event was so much fun, much more than I dared imagine. I’m now even more excited than ever about this game coming out (I didn’t think that was even possible). After playing in this first of many beta events, I know the folks at ArenaNet will make sure they get it right! I got to play through most of the human campaign as a Guardian and delved into some PVP action as well. There are still many improvements that could be made, so I’m sort of glad that ANet hasn’t announced a release date for the game yet:

  • Many world events in the human starting areas don’t have very long chains of events. As a result, the chain of events would repeat more than once as I was exploring an area for completion.
  • The interface still needs refinement including a stack button to easily combine stacks to save space in your bank and inventory. I also noticed that the interface fonts didn’t look very good when you set the interface size to small.
  • The PVP arena was pretty fun, but needs plenty of rebalancing. The current matching algorithms still need to be refined and it was pretty annoying to be forced to change to the opposing team from your friends by the match rebalancing.

Those were the biggest nitpicky issues I’d like to see fixed in the upcoming betas. I filed plenty of bug reports with typos in addition to these issues, and I’m sure the team is working their butts off for all of us.

Thank you ArenaNet for letting us all get a glimpse of your game! You have a winner here and I can’t wait for the next beta weekend! Here are my screenshots from the beta. The landscape and character designs are absolutely stunning. Enjoy the high resolution screenshots. I hope you guys like them enough to post them on Pinterest!

Site Redesign 2012

April 23, 2012 , , , 3 Comments

I’ve wanted to redo the look of my website for about a year now and have finally finished a new look that I’m reasonably happy with. With this redesign, I had a few goals in mind.

Goals of the Redesign

Create a responsive design

By leveraging the power of media queries, the browser is able to adjust the layout and typography, based on the width of the browser viewport.

Use a grid system to set the type

Typesetting was based on a 13px vertical grid to maintain the flow of the text throughout an article. All elements, including headlines and lists, take up a multiple of 13 in vertical space.

Use Typekit for custom fonts

Web fonts are finally a viable method of changing your site’s fonts without the hassles and downsides of previous methods: sIFR, Javascript replacement a la Cufon, and others. I wanted to experiment with Typekit to see what kind of impact using a different font has on a site. A very significant one!

Things I Learned

Love the single-column layout

My initial design had two columns, which created a lot of useless empty space on the right-side where the sidebar was located. However, the content of my site doesn’t really need the second column, so I removed the additional column. As a result, the layout pulled together nicely, become simpler and more elegant. Single-column layouts might be a luxury only smaller sites can use, but they really allow the focus to center purely on the content at hand, rather than distracting the reader with various other articles.

Grids as a guideline

Grids are a great starting point for layouts because they let you quickly prototype the frequently used elements of a site: the logo, navigation bar, content section, sidebar, and footer. However, sticking too strictly to the grid starts to make a design feel too rigid. In future iterations of the design, I’d like to style some elements that break out of that rigidity without breaking the flow of the content.

Experiment with web fonts

We’ve finally reached a new era where the majority of our web audience is using modern browsers with decent standards support, allowing us to use increasingly more technologies that blur the lines between print and screen typography and layout. This is extremely exciting because it enables us developers and designers to present our messaging and content more effectively and creatively than ever possible.

Conclusion

This is a very exciting time for web development, with lots of really great technologies coming out that open up new avenues for both designers and developers. Also, the openness of the web development community is amazing. There are many fantastic resources out there that greatly ease the development and design processes, giving us more time to spend on creating a unique experience for the most important people – our visitors.

Resources:

ZURB Foundation: Rapid prototyping and building framework
Typekit: Web fonts provider

CyberSpeed Unleashed Review

May 28, 2011 , , , Comment

CyberSpeed Unleashed Cover ArtSixteen years later from the original game, Mark ‘TDK’ Knight has released CyberSpeed Unleashed, a remix album of the music from the 1995 game CyberSpeed. And boy does it get your adrenaline pumping and make you want to race again, preferably in a more modern racing game. CyberSpeed’s gameplay was… hectic, to put it nicely, but it was Mark’s music that really made the game stand out. The original game disc could be loaded into your CD player to play the soundtrack which was awesome. I fondly remember overloading a couple sets of crappy speakers listening to the CyberSpeed soundtrack at max volume when I was a kid.

The new CyberSpeed Unleashed remixes add heart-pumping bass, upgraded instruments, and some very welcome complexity to the originals, making each track a lot more interesting, while keeping the original riffs I love. The new instruments sound great, especially the butt-kicking bass instruments. Both Cluffy Flouds remixes also have all the ambiance I loved from the original tracks. The new Cluffy Flouds 2 remix is definitely one of my favorite tracks. The Boggit Protein Accelerator is another great track and is delightful light-hearted. The original game included silly future-age commercials that would air between races and this was one of the background tracks.

Some things I didn’t really like about the new remixes were some instrument choices. The low-quality violin instrument in CyberSpeed Race 5 detracted from the environmental ambiance of the track. The notes played by the violin instrument also weren’t held long enough which hurt the flow of the music. The low-high “boing” instrument in the background of CyberSpeed Race 6 was also really distracting and was just enough to prevent it from being one of my favorite tracks. I also wish Mark had incorporated more of the piano riff from the original CyberSpeed Track 5 into one of the remixes. The entire second half of Track 5 was great and was one of my favorite original tracks.

All-in-all, if you’ve played CyberSpeed before, you owe it to yourself to give this album a listen. It has all the extra excitement you wished the original tracks had and more. If you haven’t played the game before, DON’T! Just kidding! CyberSpeed has one of the best racing game soundtracks out there and should definitely be in your game music collection. CyberSpeed Unleashed is a great complement to the original soundtrack. The original has a lot more atmospheric ambiance which I enjoyed, but the new album gives you a lot more bass and is so much fun to listen to.

Favorite tracks:
Cyberspeed Track 4
Cyberspeed Track 7
Cluffy Flouds 2
Boggit Protein Accelerator

CyberSpeed Unleashed is available for download at CD Baby and iTunes

Convert Video for Flash Streaming

August 1, 2010 , , Comment

This is a simple script I’m using to convert the videos I take on my Canon S90 for posting online using a flash player.

#!/bin/bash
# Convert videos from Canon S90 to flash-playable streaming format
for file in "$@"
do      
        filename=$(basename $file)
        filename=${filename%.*}
        # Convert the audio stream to AAC
        ffmpeg -i $file -vcodec copy -acodec libfaac temp_vid.mp4
        # Move the H.264 MOOV atom to the beginning of the file for progressive streaming
        qt-faststart temp_vid.mp4 $filename.mp4
        rm temp_vid.mp4
        # Create a screenshot
        ffmpeg -i $filename.mp4 -f image2 -vframes 1 $filename.jpg
done