Do you know what your bears do at home with your XBox console when you’re at work? Admit it that you don’t. So me and Darkman decided to hide ourselves one day and capture them in action. These guys really can do some 1337 laptimes in Project Gotham Racing. Now if they would only stop nagging for us to buy an XBox 360 so that they can play the third in the PGR series…

Links :
Flickr Set

While Kraftwerk is mostly regarded as the ‘creators’ of electro pop, they also had their belgian counterparts : Telex. Telex is best know for their hit ‘Moscow Diskow’ and their 1980’s Eurovision Songcontest entry ‘Euro-Vision’. The last full album came out in 1988 with remixes and boxsets following this release, until today.. Because (drumroll please) : there is a new Telex album ! (all cheer). The single ‘On the road again’ has been a hotshot at Studio Brussel some weeks ago but finally here is the new baby called ‘How do you dance ?’

This number is filled with the Telex trademark of songs, namely that they take an existing song and slow it down as much as possible. On this album the treatment has been given to ‘Jailhouse Rock’, ‘La Bamba’ and Sandra Kim’s ‘J’aime La Vie’ – Belgians 1986 Eurovision winner. All versions are in the same style of ‘Rock Around The Clock’ and ‘Ca Plane Pour Moi’ so you know what to expect. On the other hand the title track ‘How Do You Dance’ and ‘Nr 1 Song In Heaven’ are funky and uplifting and the electro bips and bops are not forgotten in ‘White Noise’. A weird yet nice balance between all the different styles.

But also check out the website. For a start you can view the ‘On The Road Again’ video in extremely nice pixel graphics style, and just look at the first few frames of the video – doesn’t that look very MAME’ish to you ? Nice detail and props for putting this in. In the Audio section you can also find 3 (at time of writing) downloadable Podcasts of about 10 minutes each where the Telex guys explain their stuff and let you listen to funky music, their even is an RSS Feed to keep track of new Podcasts. Finally don’t forget to check out the ‘On The Road Again’ EP with some bad-ass mixes you’ll be hearing on a dancefloor near you very soon I suppose.

Links :
Telex
Mameworld

Had the weekend to myself most of the time so I came up with the wonderful idea to play some old adventure games start to finish, with as looking as little as possible to the solution…

First problem that popped up is that most of these games don’t really run anymore on a PC running Windows XP as the best adventures were made in the MS-Dos age with some exceptions having compatibility for Windows 95 but there it kind of stopped. So say hello to new interpreters.

Fans of the LucasArts games already have a well established and pretty fully featured 21st century interpreter called ScummVM that will run close to all the cool LucasArts games (Indiana Jones, Zack McCracken, Day Of The Tentacle, …). The situation gets a little bit different if you want to run the Sierra games of way-back such as Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest etc. The reverse engineering of Sierra’s SCI interpreter only started quite recently, compared to ScummVM, so the compatibility is limited.

I tried FreeSCI first playing Police Quest 2 and Leisure Suit Larry 3 and sadly enough the game could not be completed. . In PQ2 quite late in the game when the terrorists are supposed to walk forward in the airplane, LSL3 stopped when watching the show in the casino pretty early in the game.. Bummer.. Some work certainly needs to be done here. Sadly the Win32 port is not up to date with the current Unix/Linux builds so this might fix some stuff as well.

As my FreeSCI trials were not that successful I loaded the talkie version of LucasArts The Dig into ScummVM. I never played this game before but recently got this from Mad Lunatic so what better to do on a lazy Saturday afternoon then start a fresh adventure game. I kinda enjoyed the game drawn in the ‘hand painted and then scanned’ graphics style with nice character animation. Puzzles were also straightforward with basic ‘open one door after another’ setup. Only for the “turtle puzzle” I had to take a peek in the solution. Very irritating and unforgiving that one… But in the end a nice adventure that I got from start to finish in about 7 hours of gameplay.

I also discovered ‘DosBox’ that generally tries to emulate an x86 DOS session that will allow you to run the original versions of the games, instead of throwing the old datafiles at new interpreters. This one will be to try out in the near future, as I do want to have another go at Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry…

Links :

ScummVM
FreeSCI
DosBox
Adventure Gamers

Some people must have seen the previous post and said to themselves… ‘If it can be done with a Smart ForTwo, it hell sure is possible with a PT Cruiser’. Or ‘How to make an already ugly car even uglier.’

Links :
Rat Fink’s photos @ Flickr

Walking around in the little village of Geldrop (Holland) during my lunch break yesterday I spotted this awkwardly looking SmartForTwo. Yes those are extra spoilers, extra wide rims, low profile tires, an extra air intake and to top it all off a double exhaust for that ultra powerful 1200cc engine.

Some people…

With my years of Citrix administration behind me, there is a single thing that you learn really quickly when administrating those environments: “Do NOT use client printers”. Mostly because they don’t ever work, secondly as you will end up in driver hell before you know it.

The old-fashioned solution for this was to ignore all client printers and put all printers that your users required on the network, use as less drivers as possible and hope it just works. Autocreated printers is a nice feature but this one also maxes out at about 1000 printers (Been there, done that).

Introduced in Metaframe XP (version 2) was the Universal Printer Driver but it didn’t really work that well.. This UPD became usable in Metaframe Presentation Server 3 (MPS3, version 3) and was further improved in Presentation Server 4 (MPS4, version 4 - obviously). Together with MPS4 came an entire rewrite and overhaul of the printing system, something that would do no harm. Well, unless you are used to administering MFXP and MPS3…

The issue I had with a recent setup of MPS4 is that, while you could do group-based autocreation of printers in MFXP and MPS3 this option had disappeared from the Citrix Management Console (CMC) as the entire printer management had moved to the Policies section of the CMC, again this is not a bad thing as such – just not very clear.

So how do you get group-based autocreated network printers in MPS4 ? It took me some time to figure it out but here goes :

• For each printer you have to create a policy, give it an obvious name such as “Create-*printername*”.
• Enable the “Session Printers” option, add the corresponding printer to the list, change settings as required for your environment
• Apply the policy to a “User filter”, set your corresponding access group that goes with your printer

This will ensure that the printer is created at logon for each user of the corresponding access group that is located in your domain.

Now the problem remains that these printers are created at logon and deleted at logoff. This means that, should a user select a default printer in his profile, these settings are not saved as the printer objects are deleted before the profile can be saved.

To prevent this you have to set an additional registry key that will either prevent network printers from being created at logon (you don’t want this) or being deleted at logoff (you DO want this). The key to create set is HKLM/Software/Citrix/Print with DWord value ‘DefaultPrnFlags’. A DWord value of 0×00400000 will prevent printers from being created, a DWord value of 0×00800000 will prevent them from being deleted. Obviously the second value is the one to go for.

What you have done now is that printers are created at logon and no longer deleted at logoff.. If you add a user to a specified access group that controls a printer being created this printer will be added to the users session at next logon to your citrix server. However when you remove the membership the printer will not be removed automatically from the users profile, as the existing printers are not removed at logoff.. If this really is an issue you can always set printing permissions on your printers, this way the printer will still be visible but the user will no longer have any printing rights to it.

Links:
Citrix Support : Imported Network Printers Do Not Retain the Default Printer Setting

Let’s get into a dangerous you-should-not-go-there zone… Browser wars… Well, to start there isn’t really any, now is there.. Each person has the right, and the possibility to choose their own browser, regardless of the operating system. Windows users have – obviously – Internet Explorer but don’t forget Opera or Firefox. Linux users have a plethora to choose from : Konqueror, Netscape, Firefox, Mozilla. Mac users also have a selection between – at least – Safari and – again – something Mozilla based. And to continue Amiga has aWeb and iBrowse, C64 has the Wave or Contiki, even BeOS has multiple browser.. So you see, enough choice !

Now where’s the problem ?

Some people will actually FORCE you to use the browser of their choosing. An example that pissed me off is the new design of Fallen Angels “Denktank”, designed by MrVazil. The CSS will not work in Internet Explorer whatsoever and the blaming is just done onto the Internet Explorer CSS interpreter… To go on with the politics there is a “Stop IE” button in the sidebar but to totally top it off, there is a fake, viral and utterly misleading “Internet explorer is not rendering this site correctly, please click here for more info” (the reason why I noticed something fishy is because, although my regional settings caused the banner to be displayed in Dutch, my system is configured in English. Many users are used to this banner popping up because ActiveX controls have been blocked (that is good) but this leads to a site called BrowseHappy, a site that tries to convince you to use something else.

Is there something wrong with websites trying me to convince another browser ? Hell no.. What DOES bother me is that some people will force you to use another browser in order to get their site shown correctly. It makes you no different from the top argument you use against Internet Explorer, namely that people are forced to use it.

Yes I am an Internet Explorer user, yes I use Opera as well, yes Firefox is a piece of bloatware. And the “Internet Explorer is more/less secure” argument is a no-go as well, as each browser has bugs – on any platform.

Links :
Konqueror
Opera
Mozilla and its derivates (Firefox, Thunderbird, …)
Internet Explorer
Safari
aWeb
iBrowse
Contiki
Browsehappy
Fallen Angel’s Denktank

Yesterday was my first evening again at Het Depot in Leuven meeting up with Darkman and Manuel, who came from shooting Thé Lau at the city theatre. With the closing down of the Kulturama festival bands Racoon, Abrand and Woodface played some music for the low entrance fee of 7 euro’s. Admitted the singer of Racoon has an extremely strong and powerfull voice, second band A Brand has a radio-hit on Studio Brussel here with “Hammerhead” and that song is pretty nice to hear and sing along on the radio, sadly enough the rest of the liveact is just “ramming away” on the guitars and the songs really lack some ‘oomph’ to survive a live audience – but I’ve got no doubt that they’ll get there in the end. Woodface is the new band of Gert Bettens, once-half of K’s Choice. Nice music, nice lyrics, nice atmosphere but again not my cup of tea.

After all the photography we dove into the Irish pub in Leuven, sat there untill about 3 in the morning, drove Manuel home and was home around 4. Not too shabby for a Saturday.

Links :
Kulturama : Racoon, A Brand, Woodface
Kulturama : Thé Lau
Darkman’s hideout
Manuel’s hideout
Het Depot fotostream @ Flickr

Some things should be shot, burned and then shot again.. One of those things that fall into this category is Office 97. Lately I had to install this software at a customer’s site that, sadly enough, could not go around it as the application in use here only worked in Access 97, with no immediate upgrade in sight.

So you’re stuck with it… Better live with it then.. Now this had to go on a Citrix server running Metaframe Presentation Server version 4 on a Windows 2003 Server. Yes, that is Office 97 that goes on there.

Downside is that for Office 97 you need something called an “Application Compatibility Script”. These are not new and were distributed as long ago as NT4 Terminal Server Edition. But this is 2006 and I need those files now, not 6 years ago.

Problem is that you cannot find these files ANYWHERE anymore. Not on Microsoft download, not on Google, not on the WayBackMachine or whatever you want. And you can kiss you ass goodbye that you can find them on a Windows 2003 server CD, even a Windows 2000 Server CD does not contain the files. And of course everyone has a NT4TSE CD lying around to copy the files from, right ? Wrong !

But ! (yes, there is always a but). With a stroke of luck a colleague at another customer’s site was about to format and reinstall an NT4 Terminal Server… As timing has it I was able to contact him just in time before the final erasing command was given to copy off the included Application Compatibility Scripts. So I have them.. Woot !

I’ve linked to the files below here, as it seems that I’m not the only one looking for them. Oh, and they’re protected against deep linking ;)

Links :
NT4 TSE Application Compatibility Scripts (Copyright Microsoft, don’t use without a license)

Since a couple of days I noticed various popup alerts in my browser when opening the site and even got a pop-under once, while I never included any code that could generate it. So the culprit had to be external… Some external code is loaded in from Flickr, Nedstat, Dreamhost and other monitoring stuff that runs in the background so I started to remove each one of them one by one in the html/php code.

In the end it turned out that the popup was caused by my Nedstat tracker so I had to remove my faithful tracker that was providing me statistics for the various incarnations of this site since 2002. To be honest I was starting to doubt the results it was giving me for some time but well, I’m not a statistic-nut so I didn’t really care.. That is until you begin to throw popups and pop-under adds to other sites.

This is why since yesterday you’ll notice the new Statcounter button at the bottom of the page. I actually like the new stats as they provide much more information the Nedstat has ever done me. And no, I’m not going to export it all into CVS and populate an MS SQL Server 2005 database with it for some helicopter-view application…