Somehow this blog becomes a picture gallery…

We’ve captured the hornet!

I’m currently sitting here having my breakfast (breakfast, but not too fast, as I occasionally comment on it), after I spent the majority of the last night programming. For me, there are two types of spending a night programming. First, when you keep working on your code, but it will not suddenly happen that everything fits together and you fall off your chair and sleep on the floor dreaming bad dreams. Second, when you keep working on your code and it will suddenly happen that everything fits together and your problem is solved. Sometimes, I like going for the second one. That’s also what I went for last night.

So now I’m here, feeling a little puzzled as every morning, doing some crosswords and trying a sugar-free coffee for the first time. I’ve always used the excuse that I need sugar for my brain, so I can’t drink sugar-free coffee. But let’s see, if this blog gets even weirder as it already is, it may be a result of lack of sugar.

A few days ago…

…I was looking outside the office window, hoping for sunshine…

In my spare time, I've been playing around with MythTV, a PVR project based on Linux. A very nice feature is the use of program guides which enables the user to record programs easily. Basically, there are two ways to feed MythTV with program data. First, the use of XMLTV grabbers which download data from certain websites. Second, it is possible to get program information directly via EPG from the broadcast signal.

Unfortunately, the first alternative didn't work out very well because of some grabber errors due to changes on certain websites... so I went for the second alternative.

Using version 0.19, EPG didn't work out of the box when using Astra satellites. After searching the web for a solution, I've found this here useful (in siparser.cpp):

I've removed these lines and voilà, works like a charm ;)

MythTV also features a bunch of plugins - my favorite one is MythWeb, which allows to control MythTV via a website. Here is a screenshot of it:

Recording TV programs is now officially considered as addictive.

The only problem I got with pizzas is that they do not respawn.

I missed it. This is my first blue screen in Windows XP :-)

But I have two screens so I had double of the fun.

About 4 weeks ago I bought an new (used) car. After 6.500 km (or 92.500 km operational performance) the engine gave up. I won't bore you to death with the technical details but to say the least a part broke and destroyed the cylinder. The following images should illustrate this.

First, the dismantled old engine:

The dam(n)aged cylinder and cylinder head.

Last but not least the new engine.

So I'll get a new engine for my car for free, due to warranty :-) Feel free to ask for high resolution pictures.

I was pretty shocked this morning after reading Niko's blog and then Jurie's blog that Take-Two has closed the Rockstar Vienna offices. There is still no official press release by Take-Two, but the website of Rockstar Vienna seems to be unavailable and there is already a news entry on Gamasutra.

So it seems that Austria has lost its biggest game development company which was employing more than 100 game developers. I'm kinda curious about the impact of this on the Austrian game development scene.

As I am not able to attend the E3, I'm always interested in watching video footages of game presentations held at the show. Recently, I discovered that there is a video download client at E3Insider.com which provides videos at a decent quality. Unfortunately, there is no Linux client and the one for Windows doesn't work with Wine or other emulation kits...

This error message beats everything:

I'm wondering if there is another message if that error message also fails..

it sucks when it dies with an OutOfMemory exception and leaves your .metadata folder crumbled