How The Game Is Played

Living with Linux, first week

Okay, so this week I started actually working with my new Linux systems to do real work. All in all, its been a pretty good experience.

I'm in heavy in documentation mode right now. OpenOffice2.0 beta is pretty nice, if you ignore the ocassional times it seems to lose track of my mouse. When that happens, I can generally fix it by hitting return. I don't know why, it just works.

This is the architecture document for the Sun Game Serve that I'm writing which means lots of diagrams. I'm actually quite happy with Dia, a freeware diagramming tool. It does everything I need and will export PNGs for my doc.

I installed Netbeans 4,0 with every intention of going away from my beloved JBuilder Studio 7. Then I went looking for a tool to replace TogetherJ and generate sequence diagrams for me for my document. The end result of two days of searching-- I installed the Linux install of JBuidler Studio 7. Sorry Netbeans, you just aren't ready for prime time in my world yet. The good news is that Java and Borland have made Studio 7 fully portable and it works just smashingly under Linux. I notice no difference from my previous WIndows experience. (This doesn't surprise me as I've actually done un-supported OSX installs of JBuilder Studio 7 and it worked fine there, too. Ya gotta love Java cross-compatability.)

I've been having some grief from subversion. For some reason when I added a directory at home to the docs repository, it wouldn't create it when I updated at work. Over-tired and fighting with it I managed to lose a days worth of work. I still haven't figured out whether this is subversion's fault, the gui tool I'm using to talk to subversion, or pilot error but I;'ll be more careful next time and figure it out. The one thing I AM really missing from Windows is TortiseSVN. I wish someone would do a Linux equivalent.

On the game front, I took a break tonight and played Matrix Online, or tried to. Stability continues to be a problem and major frustration wih this other-wise fascinating game. In particular Ive had a lot of trouble with it locking up on me when I go to the "marketplace" to put the loot I've grabbed up for sale.

I bug reported it and got a nice response back that it was a "known problem" and that they were "looking into it." That and other stability issues, such as a mission that dumped on me half way through, are severe annoyances. Really, this is one of those games that needed a lot longer beta period then it got.

Oh well, Im still enjoying it for the moment despite the frutrations. We'll see how long thats lasts,

Well thats the journal for this week. Time to go to bed, and then tomorrow, more document hell.

Posted at 03:52AM Apr 02, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[1]