My friend Tristan and I have been fans of Master of Orion 2 for well over a decade at this point. Personally, the game is within my top three all time favorite games (also including Crusaders of the Dark Savant and Close Combat 2).

Anyways, a long time ago, we discovered that network multiplayer of MOO2 was deeply slow and sucky (like impossible to play for a protracted period of time). The games we have played against one another have either been hotseat or deeply time consuming and resulting in no real conclusion.

Well, no more. I finally got off my butt in regards to this issue this week and managed to get MOO2 running quite nicely in Dosbox. This resulted in us spending about 19 hours over the course of the last weekend playing the game the way it was meant to be played (to the bitter end of course, and several times over to boot)!

Anywho, this worked so well, that I am currently writing an NSIS installer which will pull all the necessary components off of the install CD, as well as properly configure DOSBOX such that nobody else needs to go through the decade long pain in the ass that we went through ever again.

Basically, what I have so far asks for the path to the install CD, copies the DOS only files to the HD, patches the game and sets up a local copy of dosbox to run it.

Later I will write a launcher which will get the dosbox environment running in some sort of sanitized location and execute various cli switches to configure the gameplay itself.

Weee!

-Ted

So February is rapidly drawing to a close and I figure I should make a note on the status of the various projects that I am working on.

To start with, it is currently 3:30 AM and I am, for the fourth or fifth time this week trying to get firefox to install a file to an specific protected directory (system32 on windows XP and Vista). The problem is that firefox is specifically designed these days to block this kind of behavior (especially dealing with the whole UAC thing).

Anywho, I am also managing a VPS transition for a small manufacturer here in Calgary. Lastly, I have 3 small contracts for web sites with various companies here in town.

Not only that, but I am also working on my Landmark Introduction Leaders program, which takes it’s time.

So lots of stuff going on at once. Never mind working on httperf in the background too (only a couple dozen lines written since the beginning of the year).

I feel that I want some minions.

All in pursuit of having more freedom than I know what to do with. (Hence the bike tour this summer).

Later Alligator.

-Ted Bullock

As the title of the post indicates, I have been playing around with the gnome-do tool. And so far I really do like it.

For those people who aren’t familiar with the tool, it’s an application (written in mono I believe) with which translate fairly simple commands into a useful result.

For instance, when I summon the gnome-do program and type tristan, I can either choose to start a chat with him or send an email.

I especially like how I don’t particularly need to take my hands off the keyboard in order to do something on the graphical screen.

So I removed the gnome menu from my desktop and will give “do” a whirl for the next month or so.

-Ted

I was just reading “Last Chance to See” by Douglas Adams. Like most of his work, his writing once again proves to move almost orthogonally to the normal train of thought.

For instance,

Virtually everything we were told in Indonesia turned out not to be true, sometimes almost immediately. The only exception to this was when we were told that something would happen immediately, in which case it turned out not to be true over an extended period of time.

RIP Douglas, you’re still in my heart.

As many people who follow what I do in the world know, I am a former cross Canadian cyclist and manage my own personal website as well as a cool community project called Wheels in the Water. This summer I am planning my second tour of the country by bicycle.

I am leaving from Horse Shoe Bay in Vancouver on June 3, 2009 and will be arriving at Cape Spear at noon on September 9, 2009.

You will be able to follow along with everything between now and then via this blog, as well as my identi.ca feed.

-Ted