This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

I’ve been a Linux geek for almost a decade, first started heavily using Linux in 2001 as part of my youthful play (Mandrake 6, kernel 2.2 FTW! :-D ) and become a full blown Linux user in 2002 with RedHat 8.

These days, I run Fedora on my workstations and CentOS or RHEL on my servers – I love the Red Hat approach towards structuring the OS and the very rigid release policies, but there’s a number of reasons for my Fedora choice:

• Developed by a strong community focused and driven on the goal of being a true free as in freedom operating system backed up by an ethical company (RedHat).
• Fast-paced release cycle, every 6 months a new release with brand new features.
• Binary-based distribution, something like Gentoo would be faster paced but then I’d have to spend a lot more time compiling and tweaking.
• I’m familiar with the OS environment and packaging for it, infact I run my own repositories for both RHEL/CentOS & Fedora which are publicly available.

My use of RHEL (or CentOS if it’s a non-work system) for servers is mostly for the same reasons, as well as the fact that there’s a huge support life (about 7 years) for RHEL which far surpasses the hardware itself.

Of course, I haven’t always been a Fedora user, I have a rather colourful operating system background, which is why I do feel at least a slight right to be able to comment on OS debates:

• First computers I had were i386s with Win 3.1 and MSDOS. Used to hack around with BASIC/QBASIC coding on them, tweaking games and just generally prodding everything to see what would happen.
• First real computer came with Win 98, I spent a couple years learning HTML, hacking more BASIC and getting into C/C++ coding with 2D directx games.
• Experimented with Mandrake 6 for a while, Linux was this amazingly awesome yet completely unfamiluar environment – very different these days, in a way it’s sad the the mystery has gone.
• Eventually moved to Redhat 8/9 as my primary box along with a Windows XP laptop.
• When the original Fedora Core came out, I was pretty unhappy with it – whilst I see the business focus of RedHat made RHEL more sense, I’m still sad that they killed their free as in beer release and still think it did some harm to their brand awareness – think about the fact that there would be no CentOS if RedHat still had a free release.
• Disillusioned with Fedora Core, I stumbled through the interwebs until I found the beauty that is Linux From Scratch.
• Linux From Scratch (and Beyond Linux From Scratch) involves compiling *everything* from the kernel up to the desktop environment and applications, all manually from the tarballs and patches – no package management tools or dependency solving. Doing it on my 433mhz Celeron with 192MB RAM would take about a week…. Those were the days. :’)
• LFS was awesome, but difficult to maintain, so I ended up moving to my own distribution for a while (Jedo Linux) originally based off RPM before shifting to source-based portage distribution with entirely custom ebuilds.
• Ran Ubuntu 6.06 for a couple years when I started my first job as I needed something with easier package management for work purposes.
• Work ended up buying me a shiny Macbook, used MacOS Tiger/Leopard for two years, whilst running Ubuntu at home.
• Moved away from Ubuntu after seeing how much Fedora had improved, started with Fedora 9 and have been using it ever since.

Aside from my personal use, I’ve supported a number of different OSes for commercial purposes: WinXP, *shudder* Vista, Win7, Windows Server, Debian (which for some reason I’ve never been a big fan of) and Solaris.

So I’m a bit of an OS slut, but these days I’d say I’m firmly a Red Hat fan and will continue to be so for the forseeable future until I decide that Linux is too mainstream now and move to something like BSD or Minix. ;-)

This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

PHP > SEX

As much as this will make some of you gag and want to cause me physical pain (or more so than normal anyway) I have to admit to being a complete and utter PHP fanboy. :-O

Yes, PHP is quirky at times, but it’s fast, lightweight, easy to develop simple or complex systems with and has a huge number of useful functions and extensions.

I love it’s multi-dimensional hashes/associate arrays, it’s syntax style and the way it feels to write and engage with, it suits me just right. :-)

The other fantastic reason why I love PHP is the vast amount of resource information available online via php.net – being able to lookup any function and see not only the official documentation, but also hundreds of user submitted comments and examples is fantastic.

I’ve developed many major web application projects in PHP (these days mostly in object orientated MVC-style structures) including:

• Amberdms Billing System
• LDAPAuthManager
• Amberphplib (my custombuilt framework for web apps)

PHP has a bad rep for being “insecure” which is more a problem with stupid configurations (eg register_globals) or the fact that a lot of new programmers start with PHP and don’t always understand the security implications of developing for the web.

Aside from PHP, I’m pretty fluent with Perl (although I kind of hate it) and know bits of C/C++ although not enough to code anything that exciting, my C knowledge is mostly enough to fix a bug in some existing code or hack in a new feature in a simple application.

I want to expand my C++ knowledge and I’m considering looking at Java (for writing apps for Android) as well as possibly experimenting with Python, Ruby or one of these other new  cool languages that people are using. :-)

As some of you *might* have realised, is that I’m actually slightly addicted to twitter.  However I’ve been having a few frustrating problems recently:

1. Twitter is taking up far too much time, a lot of it due to the very intrusive way that one has to check twitter, thanks to it having it’s own interface.
2. New twitter isn’t particularly good, it even manages to bog down the performance of my older mac mini that I use as a TV computer with sluggish javascript.
3. I’m not that happy using a proprietary network and want to move to StatusNet in future, however I need a cross-network client that can do both twitter and StatusNet, ideally one that is open source.
4. Twitter search and logging sucks – a decent client with built in logging would be very useful.

I use Pidgin for all my other instant messaging needs – I have yahoo, MSN to facilitate communication with people stuck on those networks, as well as XMPP and IRC all via one application with a unified user experience.

I did consider using an open source microblogging focused application, such as Gwibber, however all the ones I’ve found don’t work well for huge volumes of tweets or getting back to historical messages (from a usability point-of-view).

I had a look around at twitter plugins for pidgin/libpurple, and came across two particular ones that looked good:

1. microblog-purple
2. prpltwtr

Both these clients support Twitter as well as StatusNet for future proofing – here’s my thoughts on both:

microblog-purple

Microblog-purple appears to be an older and well polished project. I also found that it was included in the Fedora 13 repositories which made installing and testing very easy.

Where it fell down for me, is that it lacked avatars and would raise notification of new messages for all tweets received, not just @replies. For me, this is a considerable annoyance and I couldn’t figure out a way to fix it.

On the plus side, it did have a very handle command interface, such as \refresh to get new messages ASAP or \replies to get a list of recent replies received.

Whilst this plugin didn’t meet my needs, I can certainly see it being useful or a good option for others, so don’t discount it purely on the fact that it didn’t do exactly what I wanted.

prpltwtr

Prpltwtr looks like the younger project, however has done a nice job of making twitter more XMPP like and has the nice ability to display the user avatars in the chat window.

There were several really nice features:

• Avatars so I can see my great looking picture everytime I post (I’m not a narcissist, honest!)
• All the searches I have setup appear in Pidgin as chat rooms, so you can load them and just follow along with the conversations – eg at a conference.
• When a new @reply or DM comes in, Pidgin opens it as a separate conversation tab, just like if someone had started a new IM conversation with me. This might get annoying, but I think it’s quite effective and I think it can be turned off.
• The home timeline acts as chat room, so your normal notification rules will apply – in my case, it only alerts me to messages if someone does an @reply.
• There is an option to have all your twitter friends appear in pidgin as contacts. I have this disabled due to the fact I follow 300+ people and it would be a bit much.

It’s not all perfect, there’s a couple limitations/bugs that I might take a look at given time:

• The home timeline refreshes faster than the @replies – so sometimes I see a reply in the home timeline to me, but the new window doesn’t appear for another window or so – it should really be smart enough to recognise the reply and load the window at the first opportunity.
• The UI for doing replies is a little clunky – I think microblog-purple does it a lot better with the reply done by clicking the twitter handle.
• A reply-to-all feature would be nice – this seems to be lacking in so many clients, even official twitter for android still doesn’t have this :-(

Here’s a screenshot showing off the behaviour on my Fedora 13 machine:

Note in particular:

• Saved searches appearing in side bar – you can add or look for a specific one by joining a chat using the hash tag as the room name.
• The home timeline acts as a chat room – the people you are currently engaging with appear as being in the room on the right.
• @replies or DMs are opening new tabs – eg you can see @nzJayZee’s @reply in the home timeline, but it’s also opened into a new conversation tab.

Overall it seems very nice though, maybe slightly immature, but I’m going to give it a run for a week and see if it meets my needs or if I can hack in the features that I need. :-)

Get prpltwtr!

Sadly it wasn’t packaged in the Fedora 13 repositories, so I’ve gone and compiled some RPM packages for it – these can be downloaded from the Amberdms open source Fedora 13 OS repositories. (repo page or direct link)

Unsure about other distrutions, however compiling it is just a case of making sure that pidgin & libpurple development packages are installed and downloading the source tarball from the home page.

There is also a version available for Windows users and in theory it should compile for MacOS…. post a comment if you do get it to work on other platforms please. :-)

Configuration

Once installed, it’s just a case of enabling the plugin and then going and adding the account type. Make sure you check to use OAuth authentication, since traditional/basic authentication is no longer accepted by Twitter.

By default the home timeline will update on a 1 minute basis – right click and edit settings on the contacts entry to change.

The @replies and direct messages are 30mins by default, I changed mine to 5 mins to be more useful to an addict like myself.

This question was clearly devised by someone who failed to realise that there is any music player *other* than the ipod.

For the record, I have never owned a portable Apple device (ipod/iphone/ipad, etc) nor do I intend to – supporting Apple means supporting a company that believes in locking down your freedom in proprietary systems.

I listen to all my music directly off my laptop – either with my Sennheiser HD212pro headphones or via a NAD3021i amp with some JPW speakers.

I set my entire music collection on shuffle, here’s what I got:

1. Muse – Hysteria
2. DragonForce – Ultra Beatdown
3. Disturbed – Pain Redefined
4. Rush – 2112
5. Marillion – Bitter Suite
6. Iron Madien – Run to the hills
7. Nightwish – Ocean Soul
8. Genesis – Jesus He Knows Me (live version)
9. Hawkwind – Do That
10. Kraftwerk – The Model

As you can see, I have a range of tastes. :-)

To start of the 30 days of me blogging challenge here is the day 01 post containing 15 (hopefully) interesting facts about me as well as a recent picture (or three since I’m bit of a camwhore).

1. I’m somewhat of a workaholic. Actually, that would be an understatement, I’m regularly doing 60 to 80 hour weeks and spending far too much time on a computer.

2. My family unit consists of myself, mum, dad and a younger brother. Dad is from the UK, don’t have much to do with that side of the family, and mum is from NZ. Tend to see mum’s parents semi-frequently, but outside of that I don’t associate with my extended family.

Like my dad always says, “Family stops at front door”. ;-) I just tend not to see a need to associate with them when I share no interests, just because they’re family.

3. I run a Wellington-based IT startup company called Amberdms, focusing on open source software and solutions. This means I get no sleep, work insane hours and am constantly hurrying around doing ten things at once.

4. I’m single. I’ve dated a bit and had a few flings, but never really formed a proper relationship with anyone. I recently started dating again to (somewhat) disastrous and/or amusing results depending on your point of view ;-)

5. According to my twitter followers, I’m known to be obsessed with cougars. In reality, I tend to subconsciously fancy older women, simply on the basis that we tend to interact and relate better.

My dating age range tends to be 18-30, lately I’ve been exploring the upper levels of that range and met some awesome ladies, although I think the age gap is a problem for some – I fear I may be cursed to be single until I’m in my 30s :-/

6. I’m younger than I look or behave – many people believe that I am around 25 but that’s a little off…

7. There are frequent debates about my sanity. In my defence, I’ve never been *proven* to be insane. I’d also like to point out that genius often borders on madness ;-) I might also mention I have a slight ego here…

8. I got into computers properly around intermediate school and was hooked on Linux within my first year of college (high-school for you American/international readers), starting off with Mandrake 6 and later moving to Red Hat 8 and onwards.

For a couple years I had my own Linux distribution (Jedo Linux) as a fun side project, which also taught me far too much about packaging, compiling and how a Linux operating system fits together.

9. I’m a born and bred Wellingtonian, although have been to a number of places in NZ and AU, mostly for business or conferences. Don’t have any particular plans to travel in the near future, I like it here and business somewhat ties me to Wellington.

10.  I’m a bitter, godless, atheist, I have very little time for religion – which will get me in trouble sometimes since I tend to open my mouth too much.

I think part of the problem is I can’t see any way someone could believe in religion and it really surprises me when I discover that someone I know has beliefs.

Having said that, I don’t really mind people who are religious for the right reasons (eg: caring about others, being good to people and having their own beliefs) rather than some religious believers who use it to try and silence or suppress things they dislike or try enforcing their beliefs via legislation or constant campaigning.

I’ve met some pretty amazing and caring people and cute couples who find that religion helps them, but I’m not sure it’s something I can ever understand.

11. Of course being a bitter godless atheist doesn’t mean I don’t have morals/ethics/beliefs – I’ve been lacto-octo vegetarian since 2008 and slowly moving towards veganism. This was slowly brought on by considering the fact that I’d never hurt a pet, yet was eating animals of equilivent intelligence, so I made the jump in 2008 and haven’t looked back.

I’m a pretty lazy cook, so I’m not exactly the most healthy vegetarian as you’ll quickly realise reading some of my posts/tweets. ;-)

I try to avoid being the whole “fanatical vegetarian” but I do have some pretty strong opinions about it and sometimes get into “vigorous debates” over the issue.

12. I flat with my friend Tom. Being a meat eater and opinionated, we tend to have interesting debates and philosophical discussions about just about everything anywhere.

13. I’m a strong believer in open source, my laptop runs Fedora Linux and running an almost entirely open source stack (there are a couple proprietary applications for work). Linux and open source has been a huge part of my life, both in getting me a job, but also as a way of making heaps of smart, fantastic friends and developing strong morals/beliefs about freedom, information, government and more. It’s probably one of the largest influences in my life.

14. At times I suffer from being somewhat egotistical and overly demanding with requests – something I’m trying to avoid.

15. I’m an infoholic – addicted to email, twitter and RSS feeds. I read almost every single message I ever get, which can take a bit too much time sometimes.

Normally I’m quite a calm relaxed user, able to handle even the toughest problems dished out by computer software without losing my cool… Unfortunately this weekend has driven me to a new level of annoyance thanks to the joys of a WW2 strategy game called “Company of Heroes” developed by Relic Entertainment and published by THQ.

This game is a particularly fun multiplayer RTS which ensures many hours of amusement when played at a LAN party and overall is one of the best strategy games I’ve played in some time.

When I originally purchased the game, it’s DRM simply consisted of a product key and requiring the disk to play – whilst annoying and pointless, this was something I could put up with.

However, in their infinite wisdom, the developers decided that it would be a good idea to lock this product down even further to inflict as much pain as possible upon their paying customers in the name of anti-piracy.

Over time they have pushed out updates making their product more and more unusable by the legitimate customer and driving me crazy.

And so, I give you the tale of woe that is the Company of Heroes customer experience.

USING THE GAME
In order to play online, or to EVEN START THE GAME you must have the game updated to the latest release at all time.

If you just want to start the game and have a LAN or single player game, it will force you to download the latest patches before you can play – regardless whether or not the patch is 100MB or 1.8GB (yes, 1.8GB patches do exist).

I can understand the need to patch in order to be able to play online – there is the security reasons as well as simply needing to have the same API version as the other players. However, forcing the user to update in order to be able to play locally is totally ridiculous and causes a lot of messing around simply to handle developer stupidity.

It is possible to trick this to allow you to play without updating by pulling your network connection or writing some firewall rules to block the connection back to the game servers, which will then cause the game to prompt for the install DVD, but it’s all hassle that shouldn’t be required.

Of course, that is assuming that the disk verification actually works! I had to reinstall CoH, and now whenever I start the game, it claims that it “could not verify media”.

Oh, did I happen to mention that this error happens regardless whether I even have the disk in the drive or not? It appears to me that it doesn’t even bother to check the media and just fails.

I suspect that if I was to connect online and authenticate with the relic servers it will work, but what happens when my internet is down again?

Currently my DSL is screwed (* long story about another equally inept company) with the only fix being my new cable internet connection going live on the 18th. How am I supposed to use this product meanwhile? What about users with only occasional internet access – overseas troops, travellers, or the poor people who still have to use dialup?

PATCHING
I understand the need for patching, I’m even pleased that Relic have decided to support the product and regularly fix issues, tweak features and maintain the product.

However, I’m not please that I have to deal with shit such as:

1. Huge patches of 1.8GB due to new expansion content being deployed via patch.

This happens so that non-expansion players can play with other expansion players and – in theory – players can upgrade to a purchased expansion by entering a product key from the newer release.

However, they managed to fuck this up, so that after I installed the original CoH, applied *all* patches and then entered my product key for the Opposing Fronts expansion, it unlocked only part of the content.

In particular, I found that there were no voice files or campaigns installed from the expansion making the game rather limited.

So I actually need to install from the expansion disk instead of the original disk – but when I do this, I can only play the original content when I have a working internet connection, when offline the original content is hidden as the product key is only associated with my online login.

This was the reason I originally tried to reinstall, in order to try and make both the original and expansion content work whilst offline. I guess I’m asking for too much…

2. Incredibly slow patching when applying.

Seriously, how does it take 15mins to install 100MB of patch?? The main game installer is slow enough that I can go take a shower & sort out the laundry to find it still running when I return and the patches just seem to continue this slowness trend.

3. MISSING PATCHES!!

This point is very, very, frustrating. I have a local copy, of EVERY. SINGLE. PATCH. released by Relic on my file server. They total close to 3.8GB

However, I do not seem to have one mysterious patch which is required after I reinstall the game using the Opposing Fronts expansion disk.

Once this mysterious 114MB patch has been installed, it will then allow me to install the rest of the patches that I have locally. However, this patch does not exist on their website at cohpatch.relic.com, meaning I can’t stick it on my file server for future use.

The only way I’m going to be able to install this patch is to use the in-game downloader and then packet sniff the traffic with tcpdump or wireshark and see what URL the patch is being downloaded from and save a local copy.

I can solve this, but it’s just a PITA and could really be avoided if they didn’t force patches onto users so much since I don’t often use the online play features.

4. Product version lies

And to make product patching even more fun, the version number lies. Under the control panel, I can check the version of the game that is installed.

According to the support information, I have version 2.0.0.0 installed when I’ve done a clean install from the original company of heroes disk.

But hang on, this is the same version that I have installed when I install from the CoH Opposing Fronts expansion disk instead – they can’t both be the same version!

If I then try to patch the install using the orginal disk, I can patch with EN_2101_2201_Patch.exe. However, this patch won’t work if I attempt to patch the install from the opposing fronts disk.

So what is the *real* version of the application? They can’t both be version 2.0.0.0, since they exhibit different behaviours. And how come patch 2101 to 2201 works with version 2.0.0.0??

FUCK RELIC ENTERTAINMENT/THQ
I’m a legitimate owner of both the original game and the expansion, however there is no way I am ever going to buy another Relic/THQ game ever again after all this crap.

I suspect if I just pirated the game, I would not have had any of these stupid problems and would be happily playing it right now.

So I’ve wasted several hours trying to make this product work and I’ve ended up at a stage where the game flat out refused to start with an error about being unable to verify the media, even after a clean reinstall and reboot.

I love the game, but it’s horrific DRM and update “features” have certainly given me a sour taste – I can recommend to anyone considering playing it to skip the retail version and go straight to a pirate download site. After all, Relic must be keen supporters of piracy, as I can think of no other reason for their product to be so terrible towards paying customers.