Apr 302011
 

Hi All,

Decided to go and check out World Of Goo for you all.
The aim of the game is to build a tower out of little balls of Goo to reach this little pipe that sucks up all the Goo Balls.

Installation was a breeze, downloaded the .deb file and installed via dpkg.
Clicking on the icon to start it up brought me to this screen.

Clicking through to this screen lets me select the level.

With a fancy little cursor whizzing around, I select the first level to get started.

Building up and up…

And then there’s a finish screen which I neglected to take a screenshot of as I was dancing around shouting out to the fact that I finished the first level.

And then onto the second level !

All in all another entertaining game from another great Indie developer.
Cartoony graphics make for some great dynamics with the balls flailing around while I try to build a tower that won’t topple.
I look forward to going through more levels in World Of Goo, but for now onto other games !

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Apr 302011
 

Hi all,

Just a follow up post to the last post regarding modifying users in AD via Javascript.
You need a Domain Name in the following code snippet –


objUserDN.Init(1,"DOMAIN NAME HERE");
objUserDN.Set(3,"DOMAIN NAME HERE\\"+strUsername);

Now what if you wanted to use the script for multiple domains without having to modify the code to change the domain name ?
You can use ActiveX with a Windows Script Host function to get the domain name as well !
To get it, you can simply use the following code snippet :


wshell=new ActiveXObject("wscript.network");
var strDomain = wshell.userdomain;

With that code, strDomain will now contain the NetBIOS Domain name which is used here.

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Apr 292011
 

So I had a quick test of Shadowgrounds on a different computer and it worked perfectly.
Seems like it’s just my strange setup causing issues with Shadowgrounds.

Only got a few minutes of gameplay on Shadowgrounds before I had to get off the other computer but on first glance, the graphics look great. The first few minutes of me wandering around the start room with the flashlight was immersive, full of atmosphere on the 17″ CRT screen that I was playing on.

I was unable to gauge the feel of the game due to lack of time, but when I can get Shadowgrounds working on my main machine, I will continue this review.
At the moment I’m suspecting it’s something to do with my multiscreen setup 🙁

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Apr 242011
 

Hi All,

I’ve been making a few scripts lately to modify a user using Javascript rather than VB.
I prefer working with Javascript as it suits my purpose a bit better as I can use variable size arrays to make it do what I want.

I start off with the Distinguished Name (DN) of the object, which can be obtained with :

function GetDN(strUsername) {
var rootdse = GetObject("LDAP://RootDSE");
var objUserDN = new ActiveXObject("NameTranslate");

objUserDN.Init(1,"DOMAIN NAME HERE");
objUserDN.Set(3,"DOMAIN NAME HERE\\"+strUsername);
strUserDN = objUserDN.get(1)
return strUserDN;
}

That code will get the DN of the user in question. Whether you integrate it into the script itself or use a function that is seperate from the main script is up to you.
I have used a function in this case.

*Update*
I have posted a way to obtain the Domain Name for this script here.

After you have obtained the DN of the user, you will now need to create an object for the user so we can manipulate the user’s details.

var objUser = GetObject("LDAP://"+strUserDN);

We can now access the properties of the user via the objUser object.
To see what the properties contain already, you can use this :

var strUserDesc = objUser.description;

To modify any properties, the put method is used :

objUser.Put("description","This is the new description");
objUser.Put("profile","This is the new profile path");
objUser.SetInfo();

The SetInfo method is used to commit changes into AD.
Hopefully no errors will come up when you try to commit the changes, and you have successfully modified a user using Javascript !.

All the properties can be found on the MSDN (reference 4).

Reference :
1. IADsNameTranslate Interface
2. ADS_NAME_INITTYPE_ENUM Enumeration
3. ADS_NAME_TYPE_ENUM Enumeration
4. IADsUser Interface

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Apr 222011
 

Hi All,

I got Shadowgrounds last night via the Frozenbyte Bundle.
First try at installing :

Yep. Let’s click “Start”

Ok, I accept.

Looking good…

Oh Bugger.

So off I go trawling the net, apparently Shadowgrounds needs glade, so I install glade on my machine
apt-get install libglade2-0
But I still get the error !
It would seem that more is needed, so I use the ldd command to find out what libs are linked to the executable file.

$ ldd ShadowgroundsBeta12.run
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xb789d000)
libglade-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libglade-2.0.so.0 (0xb786a000)
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0xb7486000)
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 (0xb7469000)
libgio-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgio-2.0.so.0 (0xb7363000)
libgobject-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0 (0xb731a000)
libglib-2.0.so.0 => /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0xb7241000)
libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0xb722d000)
libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0xb713e000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xb7121000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7108000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb6fc2000)
libxml2.so.2 => /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2 (0xb6e97000)
libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0xb6dfc000)
libatk-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0 (0xb6ddf000)
libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 (0xb6db7000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/i686/cmov/libm.so.6 (0xb6d91000)
libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 (0xb6d86000)
libcairo.so.2 => /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2 (0xb6cd0000)
libpango-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0 (0xb6c8b000)
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0xb6c04000)
libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0xb6bd5000)
libgmodule-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0 (0xb6bd1000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0xb6ab1000)
libXcomposite.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcomposite.so.1 (0xb6aad000)
libXdamage.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXdamage.so.1 (0xb6aaa000)
libXfixes.so.3 => /usr/lib/libXfixes.so.3 (0xb6aa5000)
libgthread-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0 (0xb6aa0000)
librt.so.1 => /lib/i686/cmov/librt.so.1 (0xb6a97000)
libresolv.so.2 => /lib/i686/cmov/libresolv.so.2 (0xb6a82000)
libselinux.so.1 => /lib/libselinux.so.1 (0xb6a67000)
libpcre.so.3 => /lib/libpcre.so.3 (0xb6a2a000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb789e000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xb6a26000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0xb6a17000)
libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0xb6a0d000)
libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1 (0xb6a0a000)
libXi.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXi.so.6 (0xb69fd000)
libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXrandr.so.2 (0xb69f6000)
libXcursor.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcursor.so.1 (0xb69ed000)
libpixman-1.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpixman-1.so.0 (0xb6979000)
libpng12.so.0 => /lib/libpng12.so.0 (0xb6955000)
libxcb-shm.so.0 => /usr/lib/libxcb-shm.so.0 (0xb6952000)
libxcb-render.so.0 => /usr/lib/libxcb-render.so.0 (0xb694b000)
libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0xb6932000)
libexpat.so.1 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1 (0xb690b000)
libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0xb6908000)
libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xb6903000)

Nope, that looks all good.
Then it occurred to me to to check the file size…532 MBs. Eep ! It should be somewhere in the 780 MB region.
Looks like the download was corrupted, time to redownload !

Well that was a fast download, now when I try to install I get :

That’s better.

So that’s what the finish screen looks like.
And off I go to have a merry little gaming session.

And I’m not.
Shadowgrounds won’t start properly for some reason, the mouse seems to be stuck to the right hand side of the screen.
Time for some more investigation !
Continued here in Part 2 !

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