Got this old but very popular game I wanted to play. It’s a Windows game, but not only that, the version I have is the simplified chinese version of it (I can read it, but not as good as traditional).

I was “lucky” and got someone else’s Windows XP box to try and see if it runs, and it doesn’t. It starts up and says it needs the version of the game only works on a simplified chinese version of Windows. Then I thought, I’ve seen similar problems with other programs. Let me try fiddling with those locale and default language and encoding settings in the control panel, not to mention that I need to reboot Windows almost after every change of the settings. However, none of the changes helped. The game still won’t run. And because you could ask, no, we don’t have a simplified version of Windows.

I know for the fact that the game actually runs under WINE pretty well (good thing being an old game I guess), so I gave it a go. Installation worked. Then when I run it, yup, got the same simplified chinese version error. But there’s something different. The texts of the error dialog box are all garbage. I imagine they’re simplified chinese, but somehow not using the right font or encoding. I decided to fix this problem first, which I knew it would be easy cos I have had same problems with other chinese games before. All you need is to set LANG, in this case, to zh_CN.

And guess what, that not only solves the chinese encoding issue, that also convinces the game to think I’m on simplified chinese version of Windows. The game worked beautifully. And need not to say, setting an environment variable doesn’t require rebooting… unlike some retarded operating system.

WINE wins!

Or otherwise known as her dad played too much Phoenix Wright…

Original photo at http://livia.pigeond.net/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=8556

Would be much better if I was wearing my Linux t-shirt… :)

So, I’m not the only one looking a solution for this problem.

Basically I want my RSS reader to fetch things (images for example) needed to display every entry during updates, so I can read them offline. Images in most feed entries are referenced remotely (http://), which are usually not downloaded until the entry is actually viewed. Some feeds use enclosures but that works more like an attachment rather than for content.

I’ve tried quite a few RSS readers and Straw seems to be the only one that does full automatic image fetch during updates. However Straw’s development has been stalling, and the latest version seems to be quite unstable.

Liferea has been my RSS reader for quite a while, and so I’ve decided to do it myself with (hopefully) the simplest way possible: a Liferea conversion filter which parses a feed and fetches things for offline reading.

At the moment it works by looking for <img> tags and fetches the image using wget, and then replaces the original image src to point to the local one.

It’s a pretty simple perl script. I have written it in a way so it can be extended it to parse and fetch other things in the future, maybe embedded videos for example. It currently downloads all images, one by one. It also checks if a file is already downloaded or not. You can change $SAVE_PATH in the script as needed.

You can git (yes, git) the script at git://pigeond.net/offline_filter.git. Or alternatively get the latest version here, or browse the repo at http://pigeond.net/git/?p=offline_filter.git.

To use it, set the script as the conversion filter for the feed you want to have things downloaded and it should just work.

Now I can read all the really important stuff on the train, like xkcd and failblog ;).

For those who need SCIM while running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit system outside chroot, there are two things (at least for me) needed.

Apart from the obvious that you need SCIM installed in the 32-bit chroot, you’ll need to set SCIM_MODULE_PATH to point to the 32-bit SCIM libdir. For instance, my iceweasel32 script looks like:

#!/bin/sh
export CHROOT=/chroot/testing.32

export GTK_PATH=${CHROOT}/usr/lib/gtk-2.0

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${CHROOT}/lib:${CHROOT}/usr/lib:/lib32:/usr/lib32

export SCIM_MODULE_PATH=${CHROOT}/usr/lib/scim-1.0

export MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=${CHROOT}/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

linux32 ${CHROOT}/usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox-bin "$@"

Secondly, you’ll need to add a symlink in /usr/lib32/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodules for the chroot’s /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodules/im-scim.so. Not the cleanest way I have to say, but it works.