I’ve just created a couple twitter accounts for myself!

philhassey is going to be my dev twitter account, where I might be posting real-time stuff about game-dev, python, and whatever else comes up.  Should be interesting if I get into it 🙂

galcon is my twitter account for news about Galcon, galcon.com, new games, etc.

P.S. Galcon for the iphone is an IGF Mobile finalist!  Check it out!

Here’s my “tip of the day” for running OpenGL Apps on a Linux / Ubuntu guest in VMWare Fusion.  The problem is that while running VMWare Fusion on OSX, your guest Ubuntu system doesn’t have 3D acceleration.  Bummer!  I really like doing my game-dev under linux .. so after a bit of searching I found this neat trick:

1. Open a Terminal in OSX (host OS)

2. ssh -Y ip.address.of.guest.OS
(You can find out the IP address of your guest OS via ifconfig.)

3. run the game you are working on 

4. OSX pops up a window with your game running at full speed!

Via that SSH session I can run my games under linux, but the OpenGL stuff is forwarded to my OSX host, which renders it at full speed.  This is called X11 forwarding, which I had heard of before, but I didn’t know it included OpenGL 🙂

I’d love it if Fusion included 3D acceleration of linux-based Guest OSs, but in the meantime, this will get me by.  One thing to note, this isn’t perfect.  I tried running tux racer, and although it seemed to run at full speed, the view wasn’t centered and so I only saw the top left 25% of the game.

-Phil

While I’m complaining .. the other big one I have is synchronizing our iPhoto and iTunes collections between two computers.

I want to be able to say “I want these two computers to keep each other’s iPhoto and iTunes libraries in sync.” And have it do so.

What I don’t want:

• Use a shared disk.  This is pointless because these two machines may not be connected to the network, so they need to have local copies of stuff.
• Use rsync.  This is what I’m doing, but again, this is not how things should be.  This is 2009, things should be easier than breaking out cron and command line utilities to get things done.  Not only that, it only HALF solves the problem, since now we have to decide that one of the laptops is “the master” and the other only receives updates.  Lousy solution, but it’s the best I’ve got so far.
• Use some 3rd party utility.  This should be built in.  (From what I found, there were no real solutions out there anyways.  Just variations on the rsync theme.  So I figured I might as well use what I’m used to.)
• Excuses about how syncing is complicated.  Yeah, I know.  That’s why I want YOU to fix it, not me.  Really.

Well, I’m still quite enjoying my Macbook.  The biggest complaint I’ve got so far is the inconsistency of the file pickers.  These are things where my wife has said, “This isn’t working, look.”  And low-and-behold, due to some coder out there being too smart for their own good, have broken the file picker in various unusual ways.

• When uploading a file to a website, the file picker that pops up does not let you navigate into your iPhoto Library.  The only way to get a picture out of it appears to be to open up iPhoto and drag a picture from iPhoto onto the Browse button on the website.
• When changing your desktop background, accessing your iPhoto Library requires clicking on the little arrow to the left of the words “iPhoto Library” .. The whole word should be clickable.
• My wife was confused by this and didn’t click the arrow and gave up.  Instead she tried last night’s work-a-round and loaded up iPhoto and tried dragging pictures from iPhoto into the “Pictures Folder” area.  This didn’t work.
• Since we have 10,000 some odd pictures, the mini iPhoto Library browser that appears when you click the arrow is pretty much useless.  Especially how it removes the year from the listing.  So the only reasonable way we could figure to get a background picture chosen was to open the Finder and attempt to drag pictures from iPhoto onto the Pictures folder.  Talk about taking the long way.
• When selecting a photo in the Finder and then pressing Delete, it doesn’t do anything.