Open Source Windows and Linux Games

Have you ever felt the urge to kill off your time while you are working? A sense to release your tension from boring repetitive work at the office (or at home)?

Of all those burden and urge, you might have downloaded games from the internet and scored a few good round out of it, only to find out finally that you cant write your name on the high score list because you need to register first.

How many times you came across games you downloaded from the internet which impose delayed “unregistered” splash screen, denied you from high score list or even stopped working after a few days of installing?

The game locked you out from your own windows system, and some even installs malicious adware or malware that contaminate your windows!

Well not anymore if you choose the way of the Free (as in freedom and beer) path.

New Breed Software Inc.
Enter New Breed Software, a software company that embrace Free and Open Source ideology. The company was established in 1993, and it have been releasing numerous number of open source desktop games for various operating system including Windows, Linux and Atari.

Circus Linux

Their selection of games is quite good and moreover is Free! The games are not only nice and small, but they also come with complete source code and covered under the GNU General Public License.

Mad Bomber, New Breed Software

Another place to seek FOSS games is at the LGames project hosted at Sourceforge.net. Most of the game listed here are rather clone of popular arcade games, excepts they comes with source codes and installer.

lbreakout2

LTris

The website also features few javascripts and online games such as OCC, LBill, LCarrot, LMemory, etc for those who rather want to play the games online.

Most of the games featured on the website mentioned here are created by the portable libSDL (Simple Direct Media Library) which ease of the process of developing the games across numerous platform. The library are licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License and you can download the libSDL from it’s project website.
SDL Simple Direct Media

The libSDL website feature a directory which list games and applications developed using libSDL. You can find other games for your favorite operating system (but not neccessarily FOSS) in it’s Games Directory page.

Most of this games listed here works in Microsoft Windows environment and under GNU/Linux operating systems.

Finally, just remember although the games mentioned here does not require any payments or registration but the developers of the games mentioned here still spend a lot of efforts and time to perfect them.

Please show your appreciation when you can and donate a few bucks to them. I’m sure they will return your gesture :)

Mozilla Firefox 1.0.5 Released

Well, at last Mozilla Foundation released their Mozilla Firefox 1.0.5 browser. This minor release mostly focus in security fixes in javascript and plug a few memory leaks.

Download it at Mozilla.org

Watch out for Mozilla Firefox 1.1 (Deer Park) soon. It will feature the cache back button as recomended by W3C Foundation!

I’m waiting for Mozilla to provide their users with incremental Firefox update as they promised… (I only upgrade Mozilla Firefox after 2-3 minor releases)

WTF is ROTFL?

WTF is ROTFL?

Ever wonder what those geeky acronym means? What about RTFM, SNAFU, IMHO and OTOH? Those acronym are popular on the geek world and for some people who are newbie, they are hard to decrypt.

Certainly there are places where you can refer those acronym, but generic English dictionary isn’t one of it.

Enter wtf, a geek acronym definition finder. You can download it from http://www.mu.org/~mux/wtf/. It can be handy to use if you came across those rather cryptic acronym while reading the newsgroup or while on IRC.

The wtf is made of bourne shell script and should be portable on platform that use it’s variant (bash, ksh, zsh, ash, etc). Installation is simple, just :

$ tar -zxvf wtf-20050505.tar.gz
$ cd wtf-20050505
$ chmod 555 wtf
$ su
password: <you entered your r00t password>
# install wtf /usr/bin
# install acronym /usr/share/misc/acronym
# exit

Hey, that’s unix! I want to run it on my own M$ Windows XP 32 b33t! I grow up with M$ products!

oops, maybe I forgot to mention that you could run it in any environment that offers bourne compatible shell. I suggest you install MinGW or CygWin on your Windows pc and proceed with the above installation step.

Here’s the screenshot of my Windows Desktop running wtf inside CygWin.

Wtf Screenshot on mypapit desktop

Fancy huh? Guess you dont have to STFW to find cryptic acronym anymore….

p/s: Greetz to El-Lotso for pointing out wtf to me

Create your own favicon.ico online!

Ever wonder what’s favicon.ico is? favicon.ico is a small icon which appears on the left side of your browser address bar when you surf certain web page like this :

Before   After

I found an interesting webpage which allow you to create favicon.ico online and put it in your webpage.

The website interface is easy to use. You just have to select which picture you would like to create the icon for and click “Generate favicon.ico”.


favicon tutorial

After that, you may want to download the generated favicon.ico, and upload it to your website. Then, to display the icon next to your webpage name, you need to include this line in between your <head> </head> tags :

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" >

Alternatively if you like, you could (offline) produce favicon.ico file from png files, provided that the png files dimension are multiples of 8.

First download this program png2ico. Then, you can create a png file (or use readily available gnome png icon hehe). Finally, you can run the png2ico program on the png files by typing :

png2ico favicon.ico tux.png

After that, you will find yourself having a Microsoft compatible icon file. Generated from PNG!

What? you don’t know what is PNG? It’s an image format similiar to GIF files. Well, you can always look here Portable Network Graphic.

For other instructions generating favicon.ico, please refer to : DumbWebProgrammer

Wow! New Look, Same Content

Today, I finally got the time and guts to completely redesigned my blog using css. Well the result of the work is satisfactory for me, considering it’s the first time I use css completely to redesign a website.

I have reorganize my fellow bloggers’ links into alphabetical order. Manage to fix the “CSS Tooltips” bug, now it works in Internet Exploer! I reduce the extensive decorative graphics and slim down the css files to bare minimum.

You can say that I’m satisfied with one day work on my own blog including redesigning, debugging and testing.

Though I can call it a day, but the blog still have some rendering bug with Internet Explorer 6, I dont have access with other version of Internet Explorer though. The css standard is not equally implemented across the browsers.

Next, I’ll implement the Mozilla prefetch optimization on selected links in my blog, to enhance users experience while using my blog.

Till the next time….