Cedega: Where Democracy Doesn't Work

Posted by Trejkaz Thu, 20 Oct 2005 01:15:00 GMT

An article on Slashdot today talks about a new software shader engine made by Transgaming, which will certainly become part of Cedega.

I used to be a Cedega subscriber. I was creating my own builds from CVS for a while using a poached Gentoo ebuild, and eventually subscribed. I subscribed not only because TransGaming “asked” Gentoo to remove the ebuild, but also because I thought that I could vote to try and swing things away from that “must port Counter-Strike and EverQuest and nothing else” mindset that the entire Cedega community seems to have.

Graphically, the thing is great. Games like Diablo 2 ran remarkably smoothly in most cases. But the game Oni, for instance, one of the more simple games that you would expect to work perfectly, won’t run under Cedega with sound turned on, thanks to Cedega’s shit support for DirectSound3D.

However, the way it works in the Cedega community, is that votes go on the games, not on the bugs. Never mind how many other games are affected by this one bug, if they’re all separate games, each of which a few people like, the votes get spread out and games like EverQuest get all the attention. Hell, I saw them putting attention on Doom 3, when there was a week (A WEEK!) left until the native Linux release.

Reasons like this were what made me stop paying for the subscription… I’m sure they’ll figure out the Right Way of handling voting at some point in the future (please, take some cues from Bugzilla and basically any other open source bug tracking, okay?) but until then, I’ll be content with dual booting to play my Windows games even though it means turning off my torrents..

Anyway, it’s comforting to see that they’re still focusing entirely on the graphics end, while the sound subsystem silently rots away.

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Jabber: The File System

Posted by Trejkaz Fri, 16 Sep 2005 04:00:00 GMT

This just in, development of a Jabber File System for Linux, sitting on top of FUSE, which may soon be merged into the mainline Linux kernel (FUSE may soon be integrated, that is, not the Jabber filesystem.)

It seems to have been developed reasonably hastily and thus is probably still a bit rough around the edges, but already you can do things like this:

ls /mnt/jabberfs
echo 'Hi, how are you?' > /mnt/jabberfs/bob.example.com/messages

There are a few instantly recognisable issues, but they’ll probably be resolved soon enough:

  • “messages” is just a file which contains all messages, instead of a directory where multiple messages sit like in Maildir;
  • replacing the “@” with a “.”, which is going to cause name clashes here and there (bob.smith@example.com vs. bob@smith.example.com);
  • no multiple-resource support yet.

But already, I can somewhat see the appeal of this. I’ve been wanting to integrate Jabber support into Rails lately, and to do that, I would normally need to make some kind of ActionMailer lookalike, where I run a script that connects to Jabber and spins around, creating objects in the database where appropriate.

This sort of trick would let me do that without really needing to run a daemon… well, I suppose the daemon would be providing the filesystem.

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Just Shoehorn It

Posted by Trejkaz Mon, 24 Jan 2005 01:42:00 GMT

In today’s news, a certain Windows user/developer hacks copy-on-select into a certain IM client (names withheld to protect the innocent/guilty.)

I found a better solution to this problem years ago I call it “using Linux.”

This solution is “better,” because in Linux, you get it in every application as if for free.

But while we’re on the topic, there are a great deal of UI deficiencies in Windows which need to be tackled at the OS level.

  • Lack of copy-on-select, as just mentioned;
  • Needing to aim for a thin titlebar, thus violating Fitts’ Law in the most horrible way (a large number of X window managers allow you to hold Alt and click anywhere in the window, which is much more comfortable);
  • Needing to click on a window in order to use the scrollwheel to scroll it. If I wanted to click on the window and scroll the window, I would have clicked on the scrollbar.

Those three are the ones that bite my butt on a regular basis around once every 10-15 minutes while at work on a Windows machine. I think if they fixed these few issues, the entire OS might just become pleasant enough to use as a real desktop OS (crashes and hardware issues notwithstanding.)

So I dunno. Is shoehorning Windows into Linux on an application-by-application basis really getting anywhere? Instead of adding copy-on-select to Psi, Firefox, mIRC, PuTTY, and the other dozens of applications, people could have spent time adding it to the OS itself, or even just spent the time installing another OS. It doesn’t take that long. :-/

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