It’s quite early, but I find motivation in sharing my progress. The goal? A retro-style space war inspired by Blendo Games’ Flotilla.

Ingredients

1 package of ground beef
6 chipotle (or other spicy) sausage
1 bulb of garlic
1 medium sized white onion
2 tablespoons (at least) of chili powder for a mild sensation
1 can of red kidney beans
2 cans of beans in molasses
2 680mL cans of tomato sauce
4 heaping tablespoons of brown sugar (optional)

Instructions

1. Eat some breakfast or lunch. Whichever is closer.
2. Heat pot to medium heat. Cook a package of ground beef. I used extra lean.
3. Cut up 6 spicy sausages. Add when beef is cooked.
4. From one bulb of garlic, remove skins of all cloves. Leave whole. Add when all inedible bits are removed.
5. Peel and slice one medium sized white onion. Add to the pot. And stir while you’ve been adding stuff.
6. Add 2 tablespoons (the big one) of hot chili powder.
7. Cover and reduce the heat to low (2 on a scale of 10). Let sit a few minutes.
8. While the pot is sitting, strain and rinse 1 can of red kidney beans. Add.
9. Add 2 cans of beans with molasses.
10. Add 2 cans of tomato sauce.
11. Let sit a few minutes and then taste it. Add more chili powder as required.
12. If it fits, you can add more of your favorite ingredient now.
13. Optional: Add 4 heaping tablespoons of brown sugar.
14. Let it cook at low heat until you’re hungry again.

I’m hungry again writing down these instructions.

If you’re like me, you followed the setup procedures provided by Google. And then you eagerly created a new project and tried to start the “Blocks Editor”, as per the next set of instructions provided by Google. And then things broke.

The Blocks Editor requires super user permissions to run, otherwise the web start crashes. Here’s how to easily launch the Blocks Editor.

From the command line, create a file

touch javaWebStart.sh

and make it executable

chmod +x javaWebStart.sh

and open it in your favorite editor.

Paste the following into the file

#!/bin/sh
gksudo /usr/bin/javaws $1

and save it!

Now when you click “Open the Blocks Editor” and it asks you what program you want to open it with, point it to that script. It will ask for your root password (the gksudo part does that) and Blocks Editor has everything it needs to set itself up. No more crash!

sh uplink-complete-1.54DOWNLOAD.sh

complains

Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Uplink complete 1.54DOWNLOAD............................................................................................
.setup9739: error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-1.2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I found the solution at the Introversion forums, written by forum member pl3w5y.

Download the following deb files. I prefer to use the command line.

wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gtk+1.2/libgtk1.2_1.2.10-18.1build2_i386.deb
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/glib1.2/libglib1.2ldbl_1.2.10-19build1_i386.deb
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gtk+1.2/libgtk1.2-common_1.2.10-18.1build2_all.deb

You can swap out the ‘ca’ part of the url with ‘us’ or whatever your Ubuntu repository country code might be.

Now, inside the directory you downloaded them to, run

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

And that’s it. Now re-run the Uplink installer and the game should install fine.

First, I’ll assume you’ve already got access to the Steam-installed version of the game (either through Steam running in Wine or Steam on a Windows partition). I copied the XCOM game directory to a convenient location. You can find the XCOM directory at wherever your Steam install is…

Steam/steamapps/common/xcom ufo defense/XCOM

and I copied that to

/home/myaccount/Games/dos/c/XCOM

You can do the same from the command line, assuming you have a Wine-installed version of Steam, by copying the entire block below and pasting it into a console. Don’t mind if the text runs further than this window allows. The entire command should copy when selected.

cp -r \
/home/myaccount/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/steamapps/common/xcom\ ufo\ defense/XCOM/ \
/home/myaccount/Games/dos/c/

Now install DOSBox. From the command line,

sudo aptitude install dosbox

When that’s done, run dosbox from the command line.

dosbox

Or from the Applications bar.

Applications > Games > DOSBox Emulator

This will open the DOSBox window. You’ll notice it mounts the ‘z’ drive by default. We want to mount the ‘c’ drive, which as you’ll recall we created in /home/myaccount/Games/dos/c/

In DOSBox type

mount c /home/myaccount/Games/dos/c/

And change the focus to the c drive by typing

c:

Now we just navigate to the XCOM directory.

cd XCOM

and run the game

XCOM.BAT

And that’s it! Just don’t ask me how to play the game because I’ve got no idea. (It drops you onto the globe and doesn’t give you any hint what you’re supposed to do next).

In a similar case, you could use the same method to run the original DOOM when purchased in Steam, or even Commander Keen.

We're never doing Linux because that's dumb.
I don't care what anybody says, nobody plays
games on Linux.

But I do! We exist. Linux gamers exist!

This caused me to think about the state of games on Linux. I’m talking about real commercial support for games on Linux. It’s a catch-22. Simply put, I believe people don’t use Linux as their every-day desktop because there are not enough commercial games for it. Why isn’t there a large library of commercial games available for Linux? And I’m talking about games that are recently released with the intent of being available for Linux on or soon after launch, not games that have been out for a year and someone decided to port it over to Linux.

Anyway, back to the question of why isn’t there a large library of commercial games available for Linux? It’s because developers feel that there aren’t enough Linux gamers.

Linux gamers say: Make games for Linux, more people will use Linux.

Developers say: I’m not going to make games for Linux because no one plays games on Linux.

Hopefully a Linux-native client of Steam can fix this. Hopefully by the end of August, 2010.

This last weekend I finally got around to adding parallax in the vertical axis. It’s something that I’d just never gotten around to doing, and all that was needed was an additional 4 or 6 lines of code.

I’d played Osmos at PAX 2009 and was hooked. Of course I purchased it on Steam, but who wants to swap partitions just to play games? Native Linux is where it’s at.

I’m so happy to see more and more commercial releases of games for Linux. There is a market. Developers, hear our call!

Thank you, Hemisphere Games, for being an addition to the studios who recognise this growing market.

Other notable Linux-friendly developers

• id software (Doom3, Quake, etc)
• Icculus (Prey)
• Frictional Software (Penumbra, Amnesia)
• 2D Boy (World of Goo)
• Wolfire (Lugaru, Overgrowth)
• S2 Games (Heroes of Newerth)

And the list goes on. Introversion, Amanita, etc.

Grab the Linux build of Osmos now!

The rules: Print out all values between 1 and 100. When a number is divisible by 3 print “FIZZ” and when divisible by 5 print “BUZZ”. When the number is divisible by both, print “FIZZ BUZZ”.

My simple solution to it (a Perl script) is as follows:

for ($i = 1; $i <= 100; $i++) {
 print "$i:\t";
 if ($i%3==0) { print "FIZZ "; }
 if ($i%5==0) { print "BUZZ "; }
 print "\n";
}

This meets the criteria, though I don’t check if a number is specifically divisible by both within a condition.

This brought back a memory of an “Algorithm Analysis” exam from University. I call it “The False Coin” problem, though it probably has many names.

You have a pile of coins. All of the coins are equal, except one, which is lighter than the other coins. This is the false coin. You also have a scale which allows you to compare two weights against each other. Using the scale, what is the most efficient way to find the false coin?

The other students insisted you split the pile of coins into two equal piles, weigh the two against each other and find the lighter pile, then split the lighter pile into two piles, and so on.

Close. But wrong. There is a better way and it involves splitting the first pile into three equal piles. Compare two piles, identify which of the three is the lightest pile and split that into three more equal piles, and so on. With every weighing you get rid of 66% of the remaining coins, compared to only 50% when splitting the piles by half.

So keep that in mind before your next programming interview.