(played) title [rating]
d: developer
r: release
t: tags

• RPG: role play game
• H&S: hack and slap
• MMORPG: massive multi-player online role-play game
• DSA: DSA rule-set
• D&D: Dungeon & Dreagons rule-set

————————————–

(1993) Das Stundenglas [**---]
d: Software 2000
r: 1990
t: t-RPG (text input), DSA
c: This one was in English, while i hardly knew any. I played a bit of this game via dictionary, but as it was my first text(input) adventure i only manage to go into the first house and look around

(1996) DSA3 – Shadows over Riva [*****]
d: Attic Entertainment Software
r: 1996
t: RPG, DSA
c: Best role-play game EVER! I loved this one, i must say that i played in 1996 about 90% of the game, then i stuck* and i finished the game in 1999 ^^ (* For people who played that game, i stuck at the room where your group get mirrored)

(1997) Diablo 1 [****-]
d: Blizzard Entertainment
r: 1996
t: RPG, H&S
c: Great game, and the best (maybe first) example of hack&slay. Awesome ambient good balanced, interesting story and sub quests. I played this often with friends together someone was always the portion re-filler assistant

(1998) Baldurs Gate [*****]
d: Interplay Entertainment
r: 1998
t: RPG
c: Superb ambient, great story, astonishing graphics & effects (spells) this game was truly epic. But made me mad, after doing a perfect run (listen all dialogues, doing all sub-quests, uncover every tiny spot on the map, killing all mobs, i came across this evil belt, and i put it on without identifying it, it changed my gender and i could not take it off !! And last save point was ages ago !!

(2000) Diablo II [****-]
d: Blizzard Entertainment
r: 2000
t: RPG, H&S
c: Like the first part, very entertaining, longer better story, different regions easy multi player (the time before people start cheating) good fun.

(2000) Dark Age of Camelot [***--]
a: Mythic Entertainment
r: 2001
t: MMORPG
c: My first contact to MMORPG’s. I started in the beta, very interesting mmo experience, but lot of hours grinding It broke apart by to many changes and addons later on…

(2002) Neverwinter Nights [*****]
d: BioWare
r: 2002
t: RPG, H&S
c: Like Baldurs gate, and epic step in RPG history, great story, interesting graphics good balanced (D&D) if we ignore the endgame power boost of the magic chars.

(2003) The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind [*----]
d: Bethesda
r: 2002
t: rpl
c: Praised by the media for the graphics (i thought it was just OK) the skill and char build system was great, but the quests where thin over the world, the world felt dead. After the few awesome hours in the beginning on the game, it went so shallow, i stop playing it.

(2003) Gothic II [*****]
a: Piranha Bytes
r: 2003
t: RPG
c: After the cold empty world in Morrowind, the Gothic developers proven that handmade worlds cant be beaten in ambient and feel. until today i think the composition of the map is a unique piece or art! The only down was the short game play time and the horrible interface (port from a console)

(2004) Dungeon Siege [**---]
a: Mad Doc Software
r: 2002
t: RPG, H&S
c: Quite ok, a typical hack&slay, the story was well made, very lovely design map with different regions, levelling by experience

(2004) Sacred [*----]
a: Ascaron
r: 2004
t: H&S
c: Very interesting approach, but really unbalanced, endless mobs spawning getting really annoying. Was basically cheap copy of Diablo 2 plus some new features that where not though through

(2004) Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines [***--]
a: Activision
r: 2004
t: RPG
c: I did not expect a game to be so thrilling. The first game i played where the combination of projectile weapons fit into a RPG. But low rating, it had a bug at 60% of the game, i stuck and i could not finish it.

(2005) SpellForce: The Order of Dawn [-----]
a: JoWood Productions
r: 2003
t: RPG, strategy
c: Can’t remember clearly, but it sucked badly, RPG and strategy? com’on

(2007) Neverwinter Nights II [*****]
a:
r: 2006
t: RPG, D&D
c: Not much to say here, it exceeded my expectation i had to the second part, more quests, more side quests, more depth and nice graphics, LONG playtime … epic

(2006) The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion [****-]
a: Bethesda
r: 2006
t: RPG
c: After Morrowind, it was not difficult for Bethesda to create a better game. This one was still a generated world, but much more depth, more side quests, better ambient, exiting sequences (portals) and some quite intelligent NPC still not epic, but really good game.

(2006) Guild Wars [****-]
d: ArenaNet
r: 2005
t: MMORPG
c: After not to many MMORPG, i started with Guild Wars. The story is lovely, the storyline is well made for an MMO, the graphics where already ‘old’ when it came out, but the design of the maps is after Gothic one of the most beautiful ones of all times, i sometime login and just run around a bit, really nice composition of landscape element, very dense ambient.

(2007) Two Worlds [-----]
d: Southpeak
r: 2007…
t: RPG
c: Awesome game, beautiful made, but balancing sucked so so so badly, even after a try in 2009 and lots of patches the game was/is unplayable. The upgrade items idea is good, but the implementation is bad, by upgrade, sell, buy and upgrade i have a unbeatable equipment after 10% of the game, went to the end boss and onehitted him …..

(2010) Wurm Online [***--]
d: OneTooFree AB (independent)
r: 2011
t: MMORPG
c: low graphics, sandbox system, very entertaining, but messy on Linux (Java)

(2011) Drakensang [****-]
d: Radon Labs
r: 2011
t: RPG, DSA
c: Lots of detail work was done for this game, very well made dialogues, funny, entertaining story, good balanced (except the very end), great graphics, dense ambient, a REAL RPG

I choose  Gentoo for my secure box as i am anyways a gentoo user and the Gentoo Hardened team is developing quite steady. Afaik its also the only Linux distro that has a quite good documentation for NON-SELinux security features (coperate distros usually only support SELinux/AppArmor)

What is Gentoo Hardened?

It is a Gentoo profile that, if you choose it, it will add a few features to your compiler by default: CFLAGS=”-fPIE -fstack-protector-all” LDFLAGS=”-Wl,-z,now -Wl,-z,relro” you can add the useflags USE=”{$USE} hardened pic” to your /etc/make.conf as well, but that should be not necessary on a modern Gentoo system, but also will do no harm. As you can guess, this are only compiler flags, so we need to recompile the whole box, this will of course take ‘some’ time, here the way i did it:

I had already a system set up as non hardened, so i converted it by selecting the hardened profile and:

emerge --sync
emerge --oneshot binutils gcc virtual/libce
merge -e world # take 3 days holiday ^^
revdep-rebuild


Your system should be not only more secure now, but also more stable because the compiler flags catch a few bad programming habits, in my recompile i got only one smaller problem in a minor package that i posted to the Gentoo bug tracker.

Now the interesting part, lets add more features:

PaX
is the most important here, it is a way to protect the memory, it locks everything and then gives explicit access to the memory parts, it bring a tiny overhead but can protect the code from programming error and avoid most buffer overflow hacks.
After recompiling the system all your binary should be ‘PaX-ready’ (nice, need a sticker for my laptop ‘vista PaX-ready’). You now just need to add a few features in the kernel, this worked for me without any problems, its well documented here

GRsecurity
Manages gives you an improved chroot and it has also roles for all your services that are naked to the public and sets strict limits to them, has its own ACL that make SELinux pretty useless. The GRsecurity also starts with a few options to your kernel config, see here for more info. But as usually the trouble with rule based service profiles, you need the rules, this can be a quite time consuming work….

SELinux
Security-Enhanced Linux does not offer much more then GRsecurity (with its ACL) but if you run a cooperate environment that has to fulfill certain standards its can be useful because it apply the guidelines of the U.S. Department of Defense and under run a detailed check by the NSA, so not much more than fancy names here   … I did not used it, even though there are a lot of rules already …

RSBAC
This one is a kind of similar concept to SELinux with some more features, the main ‘features’ is that it is government independent and it sees itself more universal.

One more info about PaX, one feature i really like is: ASLR (Address space layout randomization): If a hacker wants to take over your box, he need to inject his code in order get access, so he need a security hole AND a place to put his injected code … ASLR can not help preventing the security hole, but it mixes up the memory randomly, so the hacker has a big problem to find the typical injection hooks like the address of the libc
Disadvantages: if you do some really dangrous dynamic memory juggeling in your code, it might run into some problems.

Links:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/hardenedfaq.xml

[EDIT]
Some update, if you proud owner of GCC 4.4.x powered by the new faster graphite subsystem, you might run into a few problems with Gentoo Hardened, better switch it off, and let GCC compile the loops in the old manner

normally i don’t care much if people use windows or Linux or mac, i just try to show people some new site when they never heard about Linux and help them with some install stuff if they want, so i am not a big fan of flame wars and fanboy-bashing.

But this morning i needed to work shortly on an windows machine, my windows optinion changed from “i don’t care” to “wtf” … The System was an WinXP on dual core with 4G ram, i was asked to help with some updates.

I started updating, everything went quite well, but then acrobat reader hit me straight in my Balls …

I never understood why document viewing application need a 70Mb download and about 150MB space to install, but this time i was really surprised, acrobat (only the reader) started downloading and unpacking and checking and installing, and checking again, and cleaning up and seriously ask me to reboot the windows system (that took 19min on a dual core system) … i was quite speechless already, but after the reboot he started again cleaning up registering components ands so on …

As he finished, i checked all the functions i could find in that app to figure out what that is all about, but it is basically the same simple PDF reader it was many years ago, i don’t get the point.

I checked out of curiosity some other components as well, i found a HP driver that uses 110MB of memory (some wired management stuff that can’t be separated from the driver). I thought gnome was already getting to heavy (using awesome now) but well, memory and new CPU’s are cheap these days ….

Cheers
xuedi

Cheers
xuedi

P.S.
Love this one: http://z0r.de/2029

The command line control is rhythmbox-client, unluckly its an GUI app that gets a bit confused if the right environment variables are not set, so that how i make it run easily for me.

First:

Make sure you can access the machine that runs rhythmbox easily, my laptop runs a SSH server, so first i created a certificate on my N900, this is not nessesary if you have there alreada a xxx.pub file:

cd /home/<yourUser>/.ssh
ssh-keygen -t rsa

Second:

You need to make your machine that runs the music play to know that this created certificate is accepted, therefor you need to register it, the first variable here is the key file its called something xxx.pub depending if you use rsa or another algorithm. You also need to copy that key over via SSH so you need to enter the name and ip or your machine that runs rhythbox:

ssh-copy-id -i /home/<yourUser>/ssh/id_rsa.pub <user>@<hostname_or_ip_address>

Third:

Make it more easy to access your remote music machine, if you use it only in a home wifi you can create a SSH config file and if you gave your machine that runs ryhthmbox a name lets say ‘myLaptop’ then this command will connect you via SSH: ‘ssh myLaptop’ but you can choose freely run ‘vim /home/<yourUser>/.ssh/config’ and enter this config option:

Host myLaptop
User yourUser       #or whatever you like
Port 22
Hostname <MusicPlayersIP>
IdentityFile /home/<yourUser>/.ssh/id_rsa
TCPKeepAlive yes
IdentitiesOnly yes

Forth:

The command to change your rythmbox need some variables set as well, that makes it quite long, so i suggest you create an alias for that, normally you do that in ~/.bashrc (for your user only) /etc/bash.bashec (for systemwide) but if your machine like mine N900 just using shell not bash you need to use ~/.profile . Add  now the alias command to our file of choice:

alias rc='ssh yourUser@myLaptop env DISPLAY=:0.0 rhythmbox-client --no-start'

Usage:

You can use that new command now for:

• rc –help                    # get all options
• rc –next                    # next song
• rc –previous            # next song
• rc –volume-up        # louder
• rc –volume-down  # more quite
• rc –pause                 # pause the music
• rc –play                    # start playing music

Some tip, the volume up and down command just change the internal rhythmbox level, so before you go with some beers, sandwiches, to bed an plan to stay there all sunday long, set the rhythmbox level to middle and ajust your system sound level to normal room sound, now you have room for more lous and more quite, and no reason to get up at all … well, get some empty plastic bottle and you even can save the way to your washroom

N900, N810, N800 Users

You can also create a desktop icon for ever singe command and create your own remote control looking desktop, but don’t be inpatient, command via SSH take a second to work, so don’t press 10 time more loud, that will be still executed just a second later and you neighbors might not like it…

Cheers
xuedi

I think this time i got for no vfat and sawp at all, just create a single ext3 over the 32G (minus the 256) and do the sawp as well as the vfat (needed for the camera) in the file system via loop device. So then i will be able to resize them dynamicly in care i need more space for photos or bigger swap if i like to run apache ^^

Filesystem: 32G ext3
- 1,5G /swap
- 1,5G /vfat

I am btw extremely surprised by the speed of the 900 compare to the 800 series, the only sad point is a little offset in the map software.

xuedi

[..] long chat [..]
he: You are the one who is confusing.
me: Really?
he: Yes, really.
me: Heng! Ni tau jian!!
he: Shen me ?

This bot really understand girlish Chinese slang!

Have fun chatting: http://international.jabberwacky.com/

Cheers
xuedi