Entries by dakira

Patriotism is a bad thing because it always leads to people considering themselves superior to others. Local Patriotism is different, though. Support your local dealer. support your local beer brand, support your local whatever, support your local blogs. A friend of mine has a nice multilingual (German / English) blog with stuff from in and around Hamburg, St. Pauli.

So this is my way of support[ing] your local blogs. If you live in or just like St. Pauli go and check out bluebubble.org for nice, charming, and funny stories.

Cheers
Matthias

postscript: the blog is updated more regularly than mine ;-)

Currently, the only feature packed Bittorrent client available in Linux is Azureus. Azureus is great but it has a huge downside. Their developers apparently don't know how to make use of Java's and SWT's speed and there are huge memory leaks. On slow systems this makes using Azureus a pain in the a**.

Windows users have their great µTorrent. Micro-sized and (almost) as feature-rich as Azureus. The bad news is - there is no Linux version, yet. ludde, µTorrent's Swedish developer promised there will be one. I trust he can do it since he already showed his cross-platform dev-skills with his other well-known project ScummVM (which he doesn't maintain anymore). Well, right now we still have to live without a Linux version of µTorrent but the good news is: You can easily run the Windows version using wine. This is what I'm going to explain now. I will show it for Ubuntu but it works simularly for any other distri.

I just saw a gameplay demo of Spore, the next big hit being produced by Maxis and published by EA. I haven't been a big gamer for years but this looks really promising. Basically they wrap up all game concepts you ever heard of in one huge game (except maybe car racing and kung fu). The video is a cut-out of a presentation held at the Game Developers Conference 2006. See the links below for a link the the whole presentation and a nice flash presentation of Spore.

Will Wright on Spore at GDC 2006
Spore Homepage

As there are no descent Podcasts in Germany, yet, a friend of mine and I are currently working on one. It is German only, though. Which is of course the point of this Podcast. We call it Z! Zeitgeist, Entwicklung, Technik which roughly translates to Zeigeist, Developments, Technology.

If you understand some German be sure to give it a try! The podcast is still under heavy development and the website doesn't even have an own design, yet. But we're already broadcasting it on a regular weekly basis and we are hoping for a big acceptance.

Z! Zeitgeist Entwicklung Technik

Everyone has been talking about Ubuntu for the past year. I have been using it exclusively for a little more than half a year now and recently switched over to the new version. So I thought it's just about time to tell you what I think about Ubuntu. This is not going to be a complete review but a subjective opinion with screenshots.