Wolfenstein 3D is 20 years old. To celebrate it’s been re-released as a browser game.

And as Crikey notes, a 1992 Sydney Morning Herald reviewer was “flabbergasted” with the game: The game, we are warned, is rated PC-13 – Profound Carnage. Good advice. There’s plenty of blood and guts, and the sound effects are blood-curdling, so my sub-13-year-olds won’t be playing.

I remember playing it at my mate Brian’s place back when it was first released — the ancient computer I had at home couldn’t cope with it.

I had a go of it again last night. Sure enough, it worked well in the web browser. After about half-an-hour of shooting Nazis (and Nazi dogs) I felt a bit queasy. I think it was due to focussing on the low-res 3D, rather than the blood and guts.

(Hey, has anybody done a Downfall parody tie-in?)

It used to be I could view Chinese characters in Notepad, Notepad++, Wordpad, that kind of thing. It stopped working at some stage: all I got was little squares. Wierdness.

No amount of fiddling with encoding settings (particularly in Notepad++, which is replete with them) seemed to fix it.

Looking around the Control Panel’s language settings didn’t help either. You can install extra Language Packs, but the Chinese one is for Windows Enterprise and Ultimate only. I knew this couldn’t be the answer because previously it had been working, but I was only on Windows Professional.

Following a tipoff I found via Google, from someone having similar problems, I tried this: create a new local logon; log on as it; log off again; go and try again.

Sure enough, that worked. Why? Well that’s anybody’s guess.

This is pretty cool: the 6502 source code to the original Apple II version of Prince Of Persia has been released.

The article also includes the story of how it was lost, found and recovered.

RIP Jack Tramiel, 1928-2012.

One of the developers at work had used the Visual Studio web authentication tool thingy, which created an SQL Server Express database which was configured in his web.config to attach the file for use.

When migrating this to a server that has SQL Server (not SQL Server Express) this obviously doesn’t work; you get connection errors.

As this useful post says:

AttachDBFilename is unique to SQL Express, it spins up a user instance of SQL Express attached to a specific DB Filename for single user mode. Database is simply the name of the database to use, it has no additional connotation. For any production server, you would most likely not be using AttachDBFilename. It is strictly useful for development and experimentation in single-user mode.

The answer is to attach the MDF (database file) to SQL Server. You may want to change the database name; it seems to just plonk in the original filename (with path) there, which is pretty unwieldly.

Create an SQL Server login, and a database user (linked to the login) for it (I gave it the dbowner role, though it’s probably possible to restrict it a bit more), and then change the web.config:

• “data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;” becomes “Server=(local);”
• “AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|\aspnetdb.mdf” becomes “Database=[databasename]; User=[username]; Password=[password]“
• “User Instance=true” needs to be removed

Cross your fingers and hopefully that’ll work.

Why did nobody tell me this before? On a HTC Desire S (and apparently at least some other HTC models) you can grab a screen shot by holding down Power and pressing Home.

Not sure it’s this easy on other Android devices, alas.

Blogger has split itself into separate country domains, such as blogspot.com for US, blogspot.co.uk for UK, blogspot.com.au for AU.

But what’s really puzzling is that these apply to the user, not the blog. The blog may be visible on a multitude of different blogspot country domains, dependent on where the user is located.

This has broken a number of addon tools, such as commenting and social networking.

More details at Girl Does Geek

Google’s information on this

How to override it (though it only lists a few of the country domains; you’d need to find as many as possible to add in to make it work for everybody)

– It rather appears that Google/Blogger didn’t think too carefully about this.

I rise to speak on the Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Amendment (R 18+ Computer Games) Bill 2012. I am sorry that I cannot join in the debate about slide rules and slates, but, like the member for Solomon, I do remember having the Commodore 64. I do remember that, to play a computer game, you had to sit and wait for a tape player to load a game for about half an hour, and hope that it did not get caught some way through it, so that you could play a game of Aztec Challenge or Soccer. The most violent it got then was that a gorilla might throw a barrel at your head while your character was playing, but that was about it. But things have moved on enormously since then. There have been advancements in technology, advancements in innovation and advancements in people’s creativity, and that is a good thing. It is extraordinarily to be welcomed. But it is time for the law to catch up.

– Greens MP Adam Bandt in Parliament, 15/3/2012

Still maintaining ancient VB6 code, and wishing the mouse scroll wheel would work in the IDE? Microsoft has the solution, via a VB add-in. Q837910: Mouse wheel events do not work in the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE.

(Or for some reason if you reject the add-in, you can downgrade back to Intellipoint 4.12… doesn’t sound like a terrific idea to me.)

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is now available for free download.

ZD Net has an article describing how to set it up in Virtual Box, and how much power your box needs to run it properly. Good way to try it out, I reckon.

Might have a play on the weekend.

I recently had reason to restart an old virtual machine on VirtualBox running on my Ubuntu machine, and was presented with the error:

Failed to start the virtual machine XP Install 2.

Medium ‘/home/net2/.VirtualBox/Machines/XP Install 2/Snapshots/{70eab271-a63d-4bff-aa7b-8ac8b713e3b6}.vdi’ is not accessible. Could not open the medium ‘/home/net2/.VirtualBox/Machines/XP Install 2/Snapshots/{70eab271-a63d-4bff-aa7b-8ac8b713e3b6}.vdi’.
VD: error VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND opening image file ‘/home/net2/.VirtualBox/Machines/XP Install 2/Snapshots/{70eab271-a63d-4bff-aa7b-8ac8b713e3b6}.vdi’ (VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND).

I figured that somehow the backup had been hosed, as it had been through a couple of restores and system migrations. A ls of the above failed with

ls: cannot access /home/net2/.VirtualBox/Machines/XP: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access Install: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access 2/Snapshots/{70eab271-a63d-4bff-aa7b-8ac8b713e3b6}.vdi: No such file or directory

And then it occured to me that I was running under a different username now. As such:

cd /home
sudo ln -s josh net2

solved the problem with the computer is completely fooled into believing that net2 is still a user on this machine. Well, for the purposes of VirtualBox anyway.

Computerworld has a list (that they are continuing to update) of which devices are getting Google Android 4 (Ice cream sandwich).

Alas, there’s no news of some phones, including my HTC Desire S. (The Desire non-S is looking very iffy, apparently.) There is a hacky way of getting it onto a Desire S… if you’re willing to forego being able to use the camera. No thanks. No doubt some other devices have this option available too, for the hardcore.

The bigger picture on this is that with a myriad of phone manufacturers, Android updates are a lot more hit and miss than Apple’s, where Apple’s absolute control clearly benefits customers by making operating system updates available quickly on all recent models of phone.