Everybody Staze...

Nobody leavz...

You are here: Home / Archives for iOS

Secret of Mana (iOS)

By

I have been a fan of Secret of Mana for years. I played it when it first came out for the SNES, and I’ve played most of the sequels that have been released since (none really compare). So when I saw that it was available for the iOS, I jumped on it, and by and large, I’ve been happy. The software itself works very well, it hasn’t crashed on me once, and the gameplay is just as I remember it, with one exception: the iPhone doesn’t have a d-pad.

I don’t know about most people, but my thumb/fingers do not easily glide on the iPhone screen. They kind of “stick” or “drag”. So the fact that this is how you move around the screen, takes some real getting used to. What also takes time is figuring out the wheel interface when you’re used to the SNES controller. It’s not very intuitive for a touch interface, but I’m sure they just wanted to leave the screen nice and simple, rather than adding more buttons.

Is the game what I remember? Yes. Complete with the seemingly endless grinding of weapons and magic. Is it as good as if Square-Enix had ported it to the Nintendo DS? No, no way. Several older Final Fantasy’s, and ChronoTrigger have both been ported to the DS, and vs. the version on iOS, the physical interface of the DS is far superior to the iOS’s virtual interface. Maybe the current generation of gamers will disagree, but if Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft can all weather the storm of “OMG, iPhone/Android gaming!” and continue to release good products/games, I think they’ll be fine. People still play board/card games because the interface is better than a digital version of the same game (Settlers of Catan is a lot easier, more fun, to play on the table top, than on the iOS). Sure, those companies may need a reality check, but the interface that’s BUILT for doing something is always going to win out over the generic interface, virtual or not.

All and all, the game is great. The interface, through very little fault of their own, sucks. I just hope Square-Enix ports the game to an actual gaming device at some point. Maybe I’ll just pick it up through the Virtual Console store.

[xrr rating=4/5]

Mail.app and 32-bit signed integers

By

Mail.app does not like it when a mail server reports the NEXTUID to be greater than 2^31 (which is the limit for signed 32-bit integers). I could end this post here, but it’s worth explaining how I got here, and how I fixed it… just incase.

A few weeks back, a faculty member hit quota for his email. This isn’t unheard of, but for some reason, this faculty member hit quota in such a way as to cause Dovecot (the central mail server’s mail service) to rapidly increase the UIDs for his email. I’m guessing something like the following happened.

  1. User is near quota, and receives message
  2. Dovecot writes out message to Inbox, but lazily updates dovecot-uidlist
  3. Delivery of message causes quota full
  4. Dovecot goes to update uidlist, but can’t since the quota is full. Which causes a race condition where it tries repeatedly to write it out, and in the process, increasing the base UID each time
  5. After this repeats a few thousand times, the user gets below quota again, and we end up with a NEXTUID of 3829200751 (yes, 3.8 Billion).

Now, there are two things you can think about this. One, is “this is a dovecot problem”. Well, yes, but… they’ve warned users not to store the uidlist files on quota enforced volumes:

Dovecot can’t currently handle not being able to write the control files, so it will cause problems with filesystem quota. To avoid problems with this, you should place control files into a partition where quota isn’t checked. ((http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailLocation/Maildir))

[Read more…]

Mobile Theme

By

If you visit this site on a mobile device, you probably have just noticed that it looks a lot different now. This is thanks to the “WordPress Mobile Edition” plugin and theme from Alex King’s “Crowd Favorite”. Alas, install wasn’t as easy as it could be since the version listed on the WordPress site is old (non-WP3 compatible), and the new version has to be grabbed from svn.

All and all, it’s pretty easy.

Just CD into your wp-content/plugins directory, and do

svn co http://svn.wp-plugins.org/wordpress-mobile-edition/branches/wp3.0/ wordpress-mobile-edition

then go into WP, and enable the plugin.

You should then be mostly good to go. The only issue I have is the theme is really not up to WP3 spec… including having the wrong code for the “title” of the site for WP3, and especially using Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin.

[Read more…]