Tips and Tricks About Computers, Web Development, Linux, the Internet and the Like
Freeware
Non-free Art In Open-source (FOSS) Video Games
Jan 14th
Introduction
I’ve been interested in art since I can remember, the marriage of computers and art has always fascinated me. I would spend math classes (sorry Mr. D) fiddling around with my calculator, drawing pixel art and saving them in the storage on my calculator. I would hack up BASIC programs or marvel at ASM based games and sub-shells. Later these activities moved over to computers, websites, software, the internet and open-source video games, such as Nexuiz or Xonotic. My brain has always enjoyed trying to pull the worlds of art and science together but it wasn’t always viewing the two alike.
Originally my feelings about art were 2 dimensional, as I’d expect many to view it. It’s easy for art to be a fleeting glimpse. You see the final product, the lines of the creation process are blurred, the definitions of “source” gets lost.
When I first started contributing 2d art to Nexuiz, I was submitting PSD files. I didn’t realize at the time but I was deterring other artists who were without Photoshop the ability to properly edit the file because of some advanced settings in the file that could not be read by open-source software. This hindered others who were trying to expand on my work or create derivative works.
Now that isn’t a completely fair comparison because source is still being provided, only limited to a number of people. However, the reason I bring it up is because it was the beginning of a turning point for me. As I delved more into Linux and the world of Free Open-Source Software (FOSS), I was realizing how important source is to a community. How source code teaches, how knowledge of techniques are passed on. My involvement with Nexuiz and other (at the time) open-source projects, are what kept this message strong in the back of my head.
On Art in Video Games
Source of some art is almost impossible. A hand draw sketch for example, in the digital world however, things are different and art source becomes a very powerful teaching tool. Often, for the creation of maps for these games is not the most straight forward process. The mapping software and map entities require some critical thinking. The most common way to learn to add a feature to your map if you don’t know how, is to identify a map with the feature you’d like to implement, open its .map source file and study how it was done.
The reason this all came up for me today was because of a popular open-source ioquake-based game called Warsow. The code is licensed under GPL and the art has a proprietary, closed-source license. As a core member of the Xonotic team, we faced the decision of how to license Xonotic when we forked from Nexuiz. This decision was not as easy as you’d think because of ‘techniical’ license issues. The code must be GPL because of its lineage, GPL is not so keen on art. Creative Commons is an art license, not so keen on code. They seem like they’d be a good merger but from what I understood they could cause issues for distribution. We’d have to distribute the code and art as separate packages. In the end we licensed everything under GPL to make things easier for ourselves.
I thought Warsow was facing the same problem and today they had a developer Q & A, I decided to ask about this, pardon my bias phrasing.
[-z-] asked: do you think distributing warsow as one package is legal under the licensing terms?
crizis answers: Yes, it is. Even Richard Stallman himself blessed way of having open engine and restricted artwork. All code in Warsow is open source, artwork is not.
I found this interesting and with some conversation with with fellow Xonoticans, I came to learn how Richard Stallman, the founder of free software, feels about art in FOSS and I couldn’t disagree more. How is requiring the source for compiled programs any different than requiring the source for art?
Expanding On My Feelings
In my opinion, non-free art in free software is not in good spirit, it does not help others learn and it can hurt the growth of the game. The distinction between art and code gets further blurred when you see how interactive the artwork is.
I can argue that maps are code. They are a meta file, you can open them up in your text editor and edit them, they are filled with coordinates of brushes and entities, that hold keys with settings for the objects references to textures and can even contain some mild programming. Shader files are used to enhance textures and brushes. It’s not conventional programming, it’s closer to “virtual circuitry” as MrBougo called it.
This information is lost if source is not provided. Mappers have two choices on how to de-construct such features. Reverse engineer or decompile the map. The former likely being a waste of someone’s time and the later being an example of two wrongs not making it right.
I do not mean this as an attack on Warsow, it was only what re-lit my interest in the topic and the views I found by RMS were shocking. I think this should be a topic for discussion because in my eyes, art should fall under a similar license as code in FOSS, especially in software such as a video game where media is more advanced and interactive.
If nvidia-settings cannot save to xorg.conf, do this
Feb 11th
If you’re using ubuntu and having trouble with nvidia-settings saving to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, you may find the following tip helpful in relieving that annoyance.
Looking for something interesting when I login to one of my servers, I decided to whip up the following script I appended to my ~/.bashrc file.
close nvidia-settings
in terminal:
sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
paste the following:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
EndSection
save and close.
back to terminal:
sudo nvidia-settings
and save the file.
The "easy" way to listen to internet radio in Ubuntu
Jul 15th
I started with rhythmbox like most new Ubuntu users. It seemed nice enough but not in the area I was concerned with, internet radio. I tried out many players but was disappointed with different areas of different players. From Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 I was using the “good” Amarok (for KDE 3.5). Disappointed by the exclusion of that version in Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 and unimpressed with workarounds like the PPA’s, I decided to play the field. I came across Exaile, which I’ve blogged about in the past. It’s a good enough player… most of the time. It crashed too often for my likings and I’m getting sick of pkilling it.
It struck me today that I needed a simplier more streamlined solution for my simple needs. I needed a console application. Through a little research, I found moc, which happens to play shoutcast streams as I’ve become accustom to.
I then proceeded to set myself the following way:
sudo apt-get install moc mkdir -p ~/Music/internet_radio && cd ~/Music/internet_radio wget -r -l2 -nd -Nc -A.pls http://www.di.fm/index.php for file in *.pls; do mocp -a $file; done mocp
1) Installed moc
2) created a directory to download all the playlists from di.fm (since this is the station I listen to most often)
3) wget all the playlists
4) add them all to moc
5) start moc and [tab] to the play list side, enter to play
enter -- starts playing
s -- stops playing
n -- plays next item from the playlist
b -- plays previous item from the playlist
space -- pause
p -- pause
S -- plays at random
R -- repeats the same song in a loop,
Next (X button below) must be OFF
X -- switches to play sequentially
o -- plays a file from the Internet
u -- moves playlist item up
j -- moves playlist item down
Ctrl+u -- adds the URL to the playlist
g -- searches marked string in file names
/ -- searches marked string in file names
r -- rereads the directory
T -- switches to the theme selection menu
f -- toggles display mode of song titles
TAB -- switches marker bar between the playlist
and the file manager panels
l -- switches between displaying the playlist
or the file manager panel
P -- switches full path in the playlist
H -- toggles hidden files view
Ctrl-t -- toggles song duration time
Ctrl-f -- toggles format file view
m -- moves to directory entered in config file
G -- moves to directory with currently played file
i -- moves to marked directory
U -- moves to upper directory
a -- adds a file to the playlist
A -- adds a directory recursively to the playlist
C -- clears the playlist
V -- saves the playlist
d -- removes marked item from the playlist
Y -- removes all empty items from the playlist
< -- decreases volume by 1%
, -- decreases volume by 5%
> -- increases volume by 1%
. -- increases volume by 5%
x -- toggles the mixer channel
? -- shows help
! -- goes to a fast dir 1 (set in config file)
@ -- goes to a fast dir 2
# -- goes to a fast dir 3
$ -- goes to a fast dir 4
% -- goes to a fast dir 5
^ -- goes to a fast dir 6
& -- goes to a fast dir 7
* -- goes to a fast dir 8
( -- goes to a fast dir 9
) -- goes to a fast dir 10
F1 -- executes ExecCommand1 (set in config file)
F2 -- executes ExecCommand2
F3 -- executes ExecCommand3
F4 -- executes ExecCommand4
F5 -- executes ExecCommand5
F6 -- executes ExecCommand6
F7 -- executes ExecCommand7
F8 -- executes ExecCommand8
F9 -- executes ExecCommand9
F10 -- executes ExecCommand10Above commands from polish linux’s article on moc audo player, great resource.
deluge torrent – sort of like uTorrent for Linux
May 12th
When I first switched to Linux, I was running a lot of things in WINE because I was having trouble finding good linux alternatives for a few programs I use every day. Many programs weren’t a problem because they were designed (or redesigned) to be open-source and cross-platform. Those of you who have been following along have seen me recommend some applications as I made the switch but for the record, here’s a quick breakdown.
Cross platform applications that didn’t effect my switch to linux:
Web browsing: Firefox
Email: Thunderbird
(S)FTP: Filezilla
Web browsing: Opera (used for testing)
Applications I used on Windows and their alternatives I’ve found for Linux:
Text Editing: – Notepad++ | Geany
IRC: mIRC | Konversation (tried kvirc for a while but it’s too buggy)
Music: MusikCube | Amarok 1.4 / Exaile
The other programs I use are either minuscule or obvious (e.g. AIM to pidgin).
Today I’d like to share with you another great application that has replaced uTorrent (which I ran in WINE for a while and disliked), Deluge. What I love about deluge is that it is a native application with an interface that looks and behaves much like uTorrent does. Right click open folder in uTorrent in WINE is very face palm because it would try to open it in the stripped down windows explorer type thing :shudder:.
Anyway… I started using deluge at version 0.5 or so and since then it’s had a major code rewrite and feels more solid and (appears it) is now more extendible. Below is a screenshot of how nice it looks.
It even has a web-ui (if you install the package). You need to run this manually with the following command:
deluge -u web
The only thing it’s missing (that it had in earlier versions) is a good RSS plugin. There are some “solutions” like the FlexRSS plugin or Feeder (web ui only; good luck, have fun with installing that) but they are inferior to uTorrent. However, that is not enough to send me away and I highly recommend this as a Linux torrent client.
To install the latest version in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, I added the following PPA to my software sources >> https://launchpad.net/~deluge-team/+archive/ppa
Free Resume Templates – Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Dec 24th
With more and more people using the Internet as a way to market themselves or find employees, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes the norm. As an employee, I find it an easy way to convey information about myself to employers. As an employer, it gives me an idea of a person’s professionalism and understanding of the age that I can easily reference or ask a friend for an opinion on.
I present to you my first two pieces of work released under the creative commons, 100% XHTML/CSS valid resume templates.
Resume Template – Modern v1 by Tyler Mulligan
Released under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License you may freely use and modify this resume template as long as you leave in the credit to me in footer, don’t sell it and release it under the same or similar license (see the link for details).
To use it Download the zip from the Resume link in the footer, extract the files, edit them for your liking and information, upload them to your server and then upload the zip so others may easily download the template from your footer.
Resume Template – Neo v1 by Tyler Mulligan
Released under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License you may freely use and modify this resume template as long as you leave in the credit to me in footer, don’t sell it and release it under the same or similar license (see the link for details).
To use it Download the zip from the Resume link in the footer, extract the files, edit them for your liking and information, upload them to your server and then upload the zip so others may easily download the template from your footer.
If you make any changes to these, I’d be glad if you told me. The XHTML is pretty solid but I was pretty conservative when it came to the CSS to keep the classic look and feel of a document.
Bash script to convert pngs to jpgs, thumbnail them and generate forum code
Aug 11th
I’ve been working on a tutorial for Nexuiz Ninjaz that requires a lot of screen shots. I’ve been utilizing the command line tool scrot to take screenshots on specific windows. These images however, are large pngs because the scrot date pattern wasn’t working properly when I tried to generate jpgs while repeating the same command. I went forward knowing I could find a way to batch compress these pngs later. Figuring I might as well “add a turbo while I’m under the hood”, I opted to both thumbnail the images (duh) and generate the forum thumbnail code (VROOOM).
So, to convert pngs to jpgs, I created a bash script which uses mogrify to convert, compress and thumbnail them and sed to assist in generating the forum code.
#!/bin/bash
#
# Convert pngs to jpgs, thumbnail them and generate forum code
# Created by Tyler Mulligan - www.doknowevil.net
condir=converted
if [ ! -d $condir ];then mkdir -p $condir;fi
pagename="http://www.nexuizninjaz.com/pics/howtos/map_link_a_ninja/"
# Convert to jpg and create thumbnails
echo -e "backing up originals...\n"
cp *.png originals
echo -e "converting to jpg...\n"
mogrify -format jpg *.png
echo -e "copying to converted directory...\n"
cp *.jpg $condir
echo -e "creating thumbnails...\n"
mogrify -resize 50% *.jpg
for file in *.jpg ; do mv $file `echo $file | sed 's/\(.*\.\)jpg/thumb_\1jpg/'` ; done
mv *.jpg $condir
echo -e "cleaning up\n"
rm *.png
# Generate forum code
for file in $condir/thumb_*.jpg ; do
tempname=`echo $file | sed 's/thumb_\(.*\)/\1/'`;
echo "[url=${pagename}${tempname}][img]thumb_${tempname}[/img][/url]"
done
Future plans call for adding flags to support different image types, and including the ability to take screen shots and generate the forum code on a per screen shot basis.
Sorta Off Topic: I’ve taken a swing at frameworks be developing a new layer of organization on top of cfg files in nexuiz. I’ve thoroughly documented this scalable, fully customizable package I’ve dubbed the Ninja Pack for Nexuiz
Geany, the Almost Notepad++, Improved gedit with a Few Extras That Make You Smile
Jul 21st
I was browsing around linuxappfinder.com today and came across Geany, which I’ve already gotten quite comfortable with.
Some features I found that make it similar to notepad++
- The hotkeys are very similar if not identical to notepad++ (gedit has different ones)
- It supports regex find/replace
- It supports ‘find in files’ – by using grep
- It’s a lightweight and efficient IDE
Some features Geany has that notepad++ doesn’t
- Status window with a history
- Scribble pad
- Built in terminal
- Color picker
- Support for projects
- Tight integration with my window manager
- The functions menu is expanded to contain all sorts of clever information that I can fold in a non buggy tree
Some features notepad++ has that geany doesn’t
- TextFX (neat macros that help you with string related pattern updates)
- GUI for changing theme colors
- Tabbed find/replace and find in all (nit pick)
Why I’m quickly choosing Geany over Notepad++
With tight integration with gnome (as opposed to notepad++ which I have to run through wine) and a package of dark themes which I was able to find quickly through the Geany’s FAQ.
I haven’t tried it on Windows yet but I’d imagine it’d run pretty well.. though you are missing out on a lot of things you can take advantage of in linux. If you’re a windows user and would like to give it a whirl, this will help you.
Nexuiz 2.4 has been released!
Mar 1st
Yesterday the much anticipated 2.4 release of Nexuiz was had. This is a great milestone for the team as it includes many new features such as better graphics, smoother game play, newer and updated maps, better weapon balancing and new game types. The game now boasts over 10 game types both official and unofficial as one of the diggers describes, Nexuiz is like “Quake 3 on crack”.
Give it a whirl, it’s free!
And if you like the game, please Digg it!
Firefox 3 Beta 3… Pretty Sweet
Feb 14th
Firefox 3 Beta 3 is looking pretty nice, I decided to give it a test run because Portable Apps released it yesterday.
The UI was a little strange to me a first but it started to make more and more sense. Here’s an opening shot for first impressions.
The navigation buttons have been streamlined a bit, putting more emphasize on the back button, combining the history into one drop down and moving the Home button to the bookmarks toolbar.
One of the first things I noticed (and love) is the google suggest style address bar that queries your history based off titles and URLs.
They’ve also added a star that signifies whether you have bookmarked the page or not and it allows for a quick uninvasive way to edit your bookmark for the page.
While I find this a nice feature, I don’t believe it solves the problem of organizing your bookmarks… but rather encourages sloppiness by requiring a second click to pick a folder. I’m not sure how this will fair on the ‘mom test’.
Something I ~love~ though, is the ability to search addons without going to the mozilla site.
In conclusion, FF3 is a vast improvement that certainly increasing my web browsing efficiency. Great work guys, I look forward to the final release.
