World of Goo

world_of_goo1

I caught sight of World of Goo while browsing slashdot of all places. It turns out that a Linux version of it was recently made available, so I had to give it a shot.

The style reminds me a lot of Tim Burton’s movies.  The gameplay is similar to fantastic contraption mixed in with lemmings.  I’ve only played for a few minutes to get a feel for it, I suspect it gets a lot more challenging as you go on.  The little bit I did play, impressed me enough to want to tell others about it.

There are versions for Linux, Mac and Windows – as well as Wii.  If you’ve got any interest in puzzle games, give this one a spin.  Kudos to 2D Boy for  making a cool cross platform game – nice to see that a small team with a vision can still make a go of it.

K3B – Burn Baby Burn

At work, I primarily use a Windows based environment, but my home desktop is Ubuntu.  I did tinker for a while using Linux on my work laptop but found that the power management was temperamental and for my usage pattern the laptop has to sleep (and wake) predictably or its not useful.

Of course, my Ubuntu desktop isn’t the only machine at home.  Jenn’s got a Mac, and there are various Linux boxes and a host of other devices (squeezebox, etc) all on the network.  Really the network is much more important than the actual desktop you are using since mostly we’re talking about web and email access.  The network centric approach falls down when you want to do something like burn a DVD, then the machine matters.

Ubuntu comes with a nice set of built in tools  – but I wasn’t satisfied with the standard ones.  It didn’t take me long to come across K3B and I haven’t looked back since.  The user interface is intuitive, and I haven’t managed to make a coaster yet.

Just today I found myself needing to burn a Mac OSX .dmg file.  Now K3B doesn’t handle .dmg natively.  So the first thing we need to do is convert the .dmg file into an .iso ‘like’ file.  There was a handy thread that discussed exactly this problem and pointed at dmg2iso.pl.  The perl version works fine from my testing, but will fail with large .dmg files.  The solution is DMGExtractor, a java implementation that does the same conversion work.

Once you have converted the file – you might simply want to take a look at it without burning a CD or DVD.  This is easy under Linux.

sudo mount -t hfsplus -o loop test.iso /mnt

The same trick can be used with normal iso9660 format files by using -t iso9660 as the type.

Now its time to burn a DVD with our converted .iso like file.  K3B will dutifully check the format of this .iso file and report that it is not actually an iso9660 format file, but we know from mounting it that it is a valid filesystem in the hfsplus format.  K3B will let you still burn the DVD using this non-iso9660 file with a well worded warning that it can’t promise this will work but that there are valid formats that K3B doesn’t know about.

The resulting DVD works fine on the Mac – K3B hasn’t let me down yet.

When DNS Fails

Tonight I needed to do a bit of work as we’re coming up to a deadline and as usual things are running a bit behind. Normally I just VPN into work and use remote desktop to drive my desktop. Unfortunately when I went to do this tonight I wasn’t able to connect to my workstation via remote desktop.

A quick NSLookup query turned up the problem – it seems the DNS server at work had been reset and the DHCP lease for my workstation had not expired yet.  This means that the DNS server had no idea what IP my machine is using, but my workstation is under the assumption it has the rights to that IP address still.

Jim happened to be one of the few online, so I chatted with him a bit to see if he had any ideas how to resolve the problem.  He mentioned that this had happened to him a couple of times and his solution ended up being to drive back into work, I figured that would be my backup plan.

Jim then suggested using arp on a machine I had recently ssh‘d into from my workstation.  While I hadn’t actually used ssh to connect to any of our lab machines, it  got me thinking about our CVS server – as I was running Eclipse on my workstation and did have in theory an active connection.  From my laptop I was able to ssh into the CVS server, then using netstat I got a full list of the active connections.  Looking through the list turned up a few which were numeric (clearly where DNS had failed to provide a reverse name mapping).  From there it was a simple matter to remote desktop to the “right” numeric address to reach my workstation – I got lucky on my 1st try.