I’ve only played it in versus mode, both competitively and cooperatively with my wife, in racing and both battle modes, and I can definitely say that this is the least pleased I’ve been with a Mario Kart title ever. I’ve actually thrown the Wiimote (luckily a mattress was in the way) :(

My major gripes? Well, let’s list:

• I’m actually not upset at the Wiimote-as-steering-wheel controls. They take getting used to and I don’t think they’re as precise as normal analog stick controls (I haven’t tried yet however) but as long as you recognize that about 350 degrees full left to full right is the complete range of motion you’ll adapt. Try to push more and you’ll simply confuse the game into steering the wrong way. This is something that could be improved by a stand or something that has a mechanical stop, at least you’d know when you hit the full range of motion. But again, you’ll at least get used to this.
• The first major concern for me (and this is huge) is that they seem to have drastically changed power sliding. In Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Double Dash when you power slide you can kind of adjust the direction you slide. They seem to have significantly reduced this in Mario Kart Wii. This significantly ramps up the difficulty. Turn too early and you are pretty much guaranteed to go over an edge or run into the wall. Turn too late and you are pretty much guaranteed to go over an edge or run into a wall. Even if you don’t spill out you’re likely not going to be pointed in the right direction once the turn is done. Probably the safest bet is to never power slide (or leave it in Auto) but then you will slow down a lot through every turn.
• Oh, and when you do run into a wall (and it will be frequent), you are practically guaranteed to lose 2-3 places each time. This would have been OK as a difficulty-enhancer had they not combined it with the penalty on power sliding.
• One thing that I hoped they would fix at some point is the rubber-band logic that allows the CPU to basically completely annihilate you just for doing well in a race. Do too well and all of a sudden you will have disasters rained down upon you as if from on high (and then you will no longer be in the first half of the leaderboard). In previous Mario Karts it would go from happening randomly to conveniently happening on the second or third lap. Now it just seems to happen all the time instead.
• Also cool is when you get hit by an item, and then get hit by a passing kart, and then get hit by another item (or two, you’re already hosed at this point). This happens in every Mario Kart game. But I think I’m already up to about half the number of times that it happened to me in Mario Kart 64 and Double Dash combined.

It’s not all bad news. I watched my wife play one-player and even though she made a lot of mistakes playing through her first time, she rather easily took first in all 4 races she played. Apparently my strategy will have to be trying to stay in 12th the whole time and hoping for good items. In addition the stages are inspired, both for racing and battle modes. I’m going to stay away from online play because that merely leads to me getting my face stepped on by someone I can’t so much as throw my soda at, but it’s nice that it has the option.

I’m going to go try playing it one-player and seeing if I can at least get some entertainment out of it in solo mode. It’s not like I can return it and get my money back. :-/

She took the car to the dealership. She actually had to make two trips; apparently there were two separate faults that would have caused the light to come in by this time. Nothing mechanical luckily, but apparently at some point while the dealership was troubleshooting the issue they had to unhook the battery. Doing this activated the anti-theft feature of my radio; it would not play music unless I typed in the anti-theft code. This code was included on a card which I was supposed to remove from the car and keep in a safe place. Needless to say, I had removed it from the car, and it is still in some safe place, nowhere to be found.

So my car radio has been silent for about a month and a half now. I finally got the time to really dig into this issue since the dealership apparently is completely unable to figure out what the unlock code should be. A little browsing on the Internet and apparently many people have had the same issue, and the unlock codes are few enough to list in one paragraph.

So I went and wrote them down and typed them in one by one. After about a dozen tries the radio started working again. Yay! I will record the code in my KWallet this time; it is the only thing which I reliably can count on being there. In case anyone else develops this issue with a Chevy Aveo, I found these posts helpful: automotive forums and Yahoo! Answers.

Anyways, one of the first things I did when I got back of course was to make sure it was fully updated. And wouldn’t you know it, they had just released Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), and would I like to upgrade it asked me. Well I’m a sucker for upgrades so I went ahead and clicked OK.

It actually went 99% smoothly. The 1% this time was that my sound no longer worked afterwards, which was unfortunate. Luckily a little searching around revealed a post on Ubuntu Forums from someone with a different laptop but an identical problem. It appears that the pre-loaded Dell driver for the modem replaces the audio driver so that when the kernel was upgraded but the driver wasn’t, sound broke. Uninstalling the Conexant HSF Modem driver (hsfmodem in Adept Package Manager) reinstalled the correct driver and things were fine. I didn’t even have to reboot.

If the Dell-added weirdness hadn’t been added this probably would have been a seamless upgrade. The differences appear strictly cosmetic at this point however. I know PulseAudio is now floating around in here somewhere but ALSA still works so that’s fine.

Tons more fun was had; I think I actually slept more and saw more movies when I was qualifying than I did this run. (You are supposed to neither watch movies nor be sleeping for no reason until you are qualified ;) Once, I actually got 12 consecutive hours of sleep… and promptly got the nickname “12 down” for the rest of the run. *sigh*

Either way though if you’ve sent me email or left me a comment and I haven’t replied back, well, that’s the reason. I’m living in a different house now so I’ll probably still be busy unpacking but feel free to drop me an email if you need something now that I’m back.

I have noticed much improvement to KDE 4, which is exciting to see. Unfortunately my sound still does not work, but I haven’t troubleshooted (troubleshot?) it at all yet. I’ve also applied the usual 15 or so security upgrades I seem to usually have waiting for me when I pull back in. Now it’s time to think about what computer upgrade I will treat myself to after this last patrol.

Also, two thumbs up to Super Smash Bros. Brawl. If I can figure out how to stop running into the walls I may eventually give two thumbs up to Mario Kart Wii. TODO: Make a TODO list for the new house and stick to it.

If I haven’t been very communicative recently I apologize, but I’ve been really busy. So stay safe and I’ll be back soon.

A couple of days after they tagged 4.0 I switched to using KDE 4 as my working desktop. (btw, isn’t it odd that the tag name is 4.0.0 if the release was called 4.0?)

It was remarkably more stable and usable than it had been just 4 or so weeks before when I had tried it last. I managed to fix a couple of JuK bugs (one very minor, another a crash) before 4.0.0 was tagged. Unfortunately I didn’t get time to do nearly enough testing so JuK as shipped with 4.0 has several bugs which are already fixed, including:

• Allow JuK to load the playlists and cache for KDE 3’s JuK (so you’ll need to wait for 4.0.1 to load your old collection. Sorry. :( )
• Correctly save the collection list after running JuK for the first time (so you’ll need to wait for 4.0.1 to save your new collection. Sorry. :( )
• JuK files in 4.0 will not be compatible with 4.0.1 due to the bug that prevented loading 3.5 data. But if JuK fails to load the files it will try again in a mode that should allow 4.0 files to load, so fret not.
• Some icons that used to show up had their names changed and I didn’t update JuK. Fixed in 4.0.1 and greater.
• I fixed a bug causing the Play Queue to show up twice on startup, and it was pretty random as to whether JuK would save whether you wanted the Play Queue shown or not on shutdown.
• The track announcement popup is pretty much completely hosed in JuK. I would disable it until 4.0.1, which has bugfixes for cover icon size, and track popup positioning.
• I fixed a bug where the list of playlist columns you wanted visible was not saved properly.

All of these issues are fixed in the 4.0 branch (what will be 4.0.1) and in trunk (4.1). There is still a bug where the History Playlist doesn’t have the extra “Time” column that it is supposed to have (and I’m not sure why it doesn’t). And of course JuK is still a little rough around the edges. But it is good enough for daily use I think even though the underlying code could probably still use some porting love on my part.

If you use kdesvn-build then it is possible to build the specific 4.0 release (using the tag 4.0.0 option pretty much everywhere) but I would recommend building the 4.0 branch instead if you’re going to be going to the trouble of using kdesvn-build. Especially since from what I under Gary L. Greene will be porting Konstruct to work with KDE 4 tarballs. Tarballs are mirrorable and put much much less load on our SVN servers. :)

Also I plan on pushing out the next kdesvn-build release at some point soon. kdesvn-build in /trunk supports downloading module updates while building which can be an impressive speedup. It introduces a few (minor) bugs which I may not have time to fix before I must release it or wait but I think the net benefits will be worth it.

Back to KDE 4 though, I wasn’t sure if I liked kickoff KRunner (the new Alt-F2 Run Dialog) but when I went to try and launch System Settings, as soon as I typed “system” it noticed what I was trying to type and brought up an entry to launch that program. Very helpful.

(Incidentally the reason I was doing that was to test switching cursor themes. I heard that in KDE 4.0 it worked without requiring a reboot of the X Server, and it worked for me so that’s pretty cool.)

So congrats to all the developers, testers, translators, artists, bug wranglers, marketers (I guess we have those now ;) and everyone else who worked so hard to pull of the next major release of KDE. I’ll try to keep doing my part (time permitting unfortunately).

Needless to say my first attempts to make it work in Wine didn’t go so well. I tried off and on over that month and eventually just gave up, playing it on the laptop when I had time. I basically never play it now, as moving over to the laptop is just too much of a hassle.

Last night I decided to try again. It took some 6 hours and probably the most debugging I’ve had to employ over this entire year on a problem, but Victory is Mine! :)

The first problem I had is that after patching the game to the latest version, 1.4x, it required activation (what Stardock uses for copy protection instead of CD copying controls) in order to start. This is normally pretty easy, and you can activate by email even if necessary. But the process always crashed. I first tried copying over the authentication certificate from the laptop but it’s tied to the machine you’re on.

So I then tried bringing down the network interface, running the activation again and trying to get the activation request so I could email it to Stardock. That didn’t work either, as it crashed just before I got to that part.

Getting fed up I decided to use one of the Wine debugging megaweapons, relay tracing. This option causes Wine to mark the entry and exit from practically every single procedure call in Wine, including function name, module, and parameters and return codes. You can filter this all down to just the module you need but I didn’t know where the problem was. 70 megabytes of a relay log later, I had something which I could look at.

It took a bit of deductiveness (i.e. searching for the last place where the serial number is used, which is probably close to the crash location) but it turned out the error was in advapi32, in the cryptographic code. Looking at the Wine source code, it looked like the code was trying and failing to read a required Registry key. But how did Wine install itself without setting up required Registry contents?

I tried running wineprefixcreate (which among other things, sets up default Registry contents) but that didn’t help. Eventually a bit of Google searching for the registry key name (Cryptography\Defaults or something like that) resulted in a hit on the rsaenh.dll in the Wine source, in the DllRegisterServer() function. That looked like it created the required keys. Hmm.

From my past life developing Win32 applications I knew that OLE registration for a DLL was typically handled by running rundll32 and passing the DLL name and entry point (DllRegisterServer in this case). wine has that tool as well so I tried running it and… success at last!

Now GalCiv2 wouldn’t run because it said I didn’t have DirectX 9.0c. I tried following some instructions I found to install DirectX 9.0c DLLs into Wine. It turned out I had to use the rundll32 program again on the wintrust DLL to get the installer to do anything. It would still error out though.

At this time I figured there were probably many DLLs that needed to be registered. So I took the rash action of going to my /usr/lib32/wine directory and registering every single DLL in there.

GalCiv2 still didn’t start up, but that’s because I forgot to undo some of the steps I took in the previously mentioned DirectX 9.0c install guide (namely, using native instead of builtin versions of some DLLs). Once I undid that GalCiv2 started up just fine. I haven’t actually played it yet. It was so late by that point that I immediately went to bed. Now I need to see if the game can actually be played in Wine.

I also wonder what part of Wine is supposed to register DLLs (i.e. installer, on first run, or what?) and figure out why it never happened here.

In my case due to circumstances I had a patrol pin with 2 gold stars (indicating 3 alert deterrent patrols) without dolphins. Normally this is the sign of a junior officer who does not have the trust of his captain as you typically get dolphins after your second patrol. In my case the pin and first star were for half patrols, but it’s nice going from dirtbag to experienced junior officer in 15 short minutes this afternoon.

While researching this entry I came across a letter from an SSBN commanding officer briefly describing what it’s like to serve on an SSBN, which I thought was pretty good. You can read it at http://www.news.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_5/confessions.html if you’re interested.

I have it splinted pretty heavily right now in order to be ready to go to Medical in the morning tomorrow. The sad thing about this is that this is the second time I have injured my hand catching a football (same hand even). When I was in high school I was playing catch and had the ball hit my left pinky instead of my hand and force the outer two finger bones over the innermost one, which I then had to pop out. That hurt a lot, and never fully healed.

I think I’m going to have to stop playing catch with real footballs from now on or something, this is crazy. I’m pretty sure I didn’t dislocate the finger this time, but judging from the continuous swelling I may have fractured the bone. We’ll see tomorrow I guess.

It’s a good thing I finished with Guitar Hero III on Medium yesterday because it’s going to be quite some time before I can play again I would imagine. :(

On an unrelated note, the Indianapolis Colts are beating up on the Ravens pretty bad at this point. Peyton Manning has already been pulled from the game, with 13 completions for 17 attempts, for 249 yards and 4 touchdowns. According to my QB rating calculator he only needed one more completion (even for no yardage!) to get a perfect QB rating of 158.3. His final rating was 157.5.

• Ported to KDE 4.
• The GENERATOR metainfo in the output has kio_perldoc now, so that proper blame may be placed.
• The S<> tag in Pod now produces HTML which isn’t super broken. (Look for Mac OS in perlport)
• Don’t try to load IMG tags. I wasn’t going to add this in except that it causes Konq 4 to crash for some reason.
• Fix formatting of bulleted lists. Patch graciously provided by Bruce Ravel.
• All C library functions are called like ::foo() now to avoid ambiguity. (e.g. with close())
• Corrected a call to execlp(). If you ran kdeinit in a terminal you could actually see the man page come up…
• Fix linkage for hyperlinks that refer to the same page.
• The HTML output looks more like www.kde.org now.

Still needs CMake, Perl 5.8, etc. The KDE 3 version is 0.8.1, and KDE 4 version is 0.9, but it’s the same feature set.