I recently tried to install Tomcat 6 and deploy the BIRT runtime on my mobile phone, and it worked !
But it was still a little bit slow to serve pages…

Now I’m waiting to see when I’ll be able to run Eclipse on the N900 and do some software development

Since I also want to contribute to the free and open source world, I have decided to make one of my child dreams come true: write my own video game and publish it !

When I was about 8, I started learning Basic because I wanted to be able to write my own games. Later I also learnt Pascal and had some books about how to use assembly and some graphic card hacks that enables to make video games. We were four friends and multiplayer games were not so popular. So I created a game that looks like Enigma, but where the goal was to create a base and kill the other players. Each player controls a ball and is able to modify the whole map by creating floors, walls and holes. The game was in split screen up to four players on the same computer. Unfortunately, I lost the source code… I will maybe write more about this on a separate blog post.

Fortunately nowadays it is much easier to write video games thanks to all the open source libraries like SDL, Allegro, to name a few. So recently I decided to try again to create an open source video game. Its name is Tuxomania and is heavily inspired from an old Amiga game called Clown-O-Mania (see the link for screenshots). It’s a tile-based platform game in isometric 3d. Here is a screenshot of Tuxomania:

You must control Tux the penguin and help him to collect all the pearls to finish the level. Each level may include puzzles, special objects, monsters, etc… In the current version there is only one test level and two types of special platforms: the red one is a teleporter that will transport the player to the next teleporter. The blue platform is some kind of trampoline that makes the player jump and reach the next platform above.

As you can see, the game board itself is only in 2d, but it use a visual effect to make it look 3d by making the ladders join two platforms.  I drew all the graphics by myself using Gimp.

The game is still in an early stage, and I will publish the game in SourceForge as soon as it is more playable and extensible. I already created the project page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/tuxomania/

Tuxomania is written in C++ and is based on SDL and OpenGL. I intend to use OpenGL to create particle effects and other to make the game look more fancy. The game will be cross-platform and will also work in Windows. I will post an update here once I am more advanced with its development.

I know there are plenty of people like there like me who still enjoy such old-school platform games

Rotating the screen

I have already shown you how useful a trackball can be compared to a mouse, especially in this kind of situation. You might have wondered how I am able to use my laptop computer while lying on my bed. The fact is that I have changed the screen orientation to match my lying orientation. If I wouldn’t, reading the screen would be rather painful.

Some screenshots

Here is a screenshot of my KDE desktop:

My KDE desktop

Firefox

After changing the screen orientation to the left, it will look like this, from my lying point of view.

My KDE desktop rotated to the left

Firefox rotated

It looks nice, doesn’t it ? The nice wallpaper is Inverted Reality from Phade01 from the Deviantart web site. Actually, it’s a vertical picture, so it fits even better when the screen is rotated.

Now here is a picture of me in “live action” surfing the web. If you look closely, you will see that the screen is oriented to the left.

Lazy Vincent surfing the web

So how to do this ?

In GNU/Linux

If you use GNU/Linux, you have at least three ways to switch the screen orientation:

• In KDE, open the display settings, go to “Computer administration->Screen orientation”. Then select an orientation.
  

• In Gnome, go to “System->Preferences->Display”, then change the rotation.
  
• On the command line:

  xrandr -o orientation
  

  where “orientation” is replaced by either “left”, “right”, “normal” or “inverted”. This is the quickest solution and can also be set up as a shortcut on the desktop, or even a key combination.

If none of these solutions work, or if the dialogs don’t let you change the orientation, you might have to change your display driver configuration. For the NVIDIA graphic cards, you need to add the following option in the “/etc/X11/xorg.conf” file:

Section "Screen"
   ...
   Option "RandRRotation" "True"
End Section

I don’t know whether this works for other graphic cards.

In Windows

If you are using Windows, you can try using the key combination Ctrl+Alt+Arrow, where Arrow is the direction to which you want to rotate the screen. If it doesn’t work, check the display control panel or the driver’s specific control panel or applet, it might have an option to change the screen orientation.

How to type in lying position

Sometimes you have to type something (for example search keywords), but don’t want to get up. Still using your trackball, you can use an on-screen keyboard.

KDE's on-screen keyboard

In KDE you can simply add the “Virtual keyboard” to your task bar, and you will see a keyboard icon that can be used to pop up the on-screen keyboard. Another one is “viki”, which is also available as package in some distributions.

Have fun, and… don’t be too lazy

Logitech Trackball

So I decided to buy a new trackball. Instead of buying the same Logitech model again, I took a look at other existing models in Taobao, the Chinese Ebay. Unfortunately, there is not much choice, and many trackballs don’t look comfortable, because their ball is on the middle instead of the side. After some research, I found the Youmouse company (in chinese 优鼠) which sells trackballs in China, and also to other markets like USA and Europe, according to their website. I am a little surprised to find it because it seems that trackballs are not common at all in China (at least here in Shanghai), and most of the people never heard of trackballs before. Anyway, I am glad to see that some companies are trying to improve this market, and by the same chance provide me with a shiny new trackball

I bought the USB “Hand-held Trackball Optical Mouse” from Youmouse. Here are some pictures I made:

Youmouse trackball

In trackball mode

As you can see you hold the trackball with the ball on top and use your thumb to roll it. The left and right mouse buttons are on the right side of the ball. The device also has a scroll wheel, but its position is not between the two mouse buttons as usual. It is situated on the part below the ball, right under your thumb. This means that you can’t use the ball and the wheel at the same time.

The trackball itself can also be used like a regular mouse. For this, it has two separate optical sensors, one for the ball, and one the part that can slide on a flat surface.

On the table, like a regular mouse

Optical sensor for mouse mode

Mouse mode by moving, trackball by rolling the ball

Holding the trackball feels alright, but is not especially comfortable at the beginning. It takes a few seconds to take it in the hand, find the right position for your finders, and get used to it. This is not convenient when you need to often switch between mouse and keyboard, so it can slow down regular desktop use. This problem applies to both trackball and mouse mode.

Both optical sensors are hardwired in a way that creates a conflict between each other: it means that if you roll the ball and move the mouse at the same time, even in the same direction, the first one that moved has priority over the other, there is no accumulation of the movement. One issue I have met is that from time to time the mouse pointer doesn’t respond to the ball and stays stuck, especially if I put it on a surface. This might be related to this conflict, as the mouse-mode sensor might have detected some very small movement while I was using the ball.

Also, the two optical sensors seem to both send the same signal USB-wise, and it is not possible for software to distinguish between ball rolling and mouse moving. If that would be possible, one could use 4 axis of movement instead of 2, which would be a nice feature for gaming and for multi-mouse/multi-pointer applications, similar to what the Multi Pointer X server and CPNMouse are achieving.

Logitech Trackball and Youmouse Trackball side by side

The Youmouse Trackball looks and feels more like a gaming device, compared to the Logitech one. From my experience, it is actually very suited for gaming, and also as a remote control (with laptop linked to TV), and any situation where you always keep the trackball in your hand. I especially like to use it when I lie down on my bed, lying on the side, and surfing the web . In this position, it wouldn’t be possible to use a regular mouse.

Vincent in "lazy mode" using Youmouse Trackball

With the Logitech Trackball, since it is right-handed, I could only lie on one side (the left one), because it must stay flat for the ball to roll properly. The Youmouse Trackball, like I said before, can be rotated in any direction, and the ball can still roll properly, so it can be used by lying on any side.

To sum up, the Youmouse Trackball doesn’t feel to me as good as my previous Logitech Trackball. But even though it is not very convenient to use it for desktop applications where you want to switch between mouse and keyboard, it is still a great device for gaming, as remote control, and also for “bed surfing”.

My name is Vincent and I’m a French computer geek. This means that I enjoy spending most of my time tinkering with computers, like trying new software, and finding new ways to improve life through computing.

Since 2003 I am a happy openSUSE user (formerly SuSE), one of the best GNU/Linux distributions out there. I would like to help spreading the word about GNU/Linux to the world through this blog, and also to help making it more popular, especially in places where it doesn’t seem to be well known, like here in China where I currently live.

In this blog I will mostly post about my experiments with computers, interesting ideas or hacks, hints, and anything that will hopefully be useful in some way to you computer users out there.

Enjoy !

Vincent