Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Terraria vs Mumble Conflict

There is currently a problem starting Terraria when you also have Mumble running.

Apparently that a lot of people have problems starting the game, but no one seems to be sure of the issue. Some say it's because of the .NET or XNA framework and others say it could be a conflict with creative sound cards.

Of course, you should check if you have the latest .NET and XNA framework installed. Be sure to have the latest Creative drivers for your card (mine installed automagically with Windows Update optional updates). You could try verifying Terraria game cache integrity under Steam.

I was getting a "Terraria stopped working" window with the follwing details:
Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:    APPCRASH
  Application Name:    Terraria.exe
  Application Version:    1.0.4.0
  Application Timestamp:    4eea0a07
  Fault Module Name:    RTSSHooks.dll
  Fault Module Version:    0.0.0.0
  Fault Module Timestamp:    4d4fb7eb
  Exception Code:    c0000005
  Exception Offset:    0000a5f2
  OS Version:    6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
  Locale ID:    3084
  Additional Information 1:    0a9e
  Additional Information 2:    0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
  Additional Information 3:    0a9e
  Additional Information 4:    0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789

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A workaround is to stop Mumble, start Terraria, then restart Mumble. This conflict could very well happen with something else than Mumble. I have a Creative sound card (good old Audigy 1), but I don't know how to fix this issue so I am unsure if it's related.

What kind of sound card do you have? Did you have the same issue using another sound-related software?

EDIT: Not just Terraria! Grand Theft Auto 4 also crashes on start if Mumble is open.

Friday, August 12, 2011

start programs rapidly

Windows, linux
launchy
enter launches most common item
ctrl-shift-enter launches it elevated
F5 rescans the catalog

linux, BSD and others?
dmenu

Monday, June 6, 2011

hidden scheduled task

When running a batch file or ruby script (even .rbw) or anything that does not have a GUI, a cmd window normally pops up. This is surely unwanted when scheduling a task with those kind of programs. Sadly, I don't see any checkbox to hide the window at runtime in the scheduled task wizard.

The best way I found is posted at http://serverfault.com/questions/9038/run-a-bat-file-in-a-scheduled-task-without-a-window.

Schedule a .vbs script containing something like:
Set WinScriptHost = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WinScriptHost.Run Chr(34) & "C:\Scheduled Jobs\mybat.bat" & Chr(34), 0
Set WinScriptHost = Nothing

There are other tools like hstart and cmdow that lets you do pretty much the same thing, but I prefer using built-in tools a lot more.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

events/

Debian Squeeze on my new (used) T61.

events/1 take 50% cpu for some time every 2 secondes or so.

Seems to be related to Wicd. Doing a "ifconfig eth0 down" solved the problem, but I still don't know the root cause.

T61 specific problem? Lots of posts on forums about this. Lots of people also "fixed" this by removing the battery for a couple of minutes... Pretty strange.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

SSHFS on Windows

or secure file sharing, a replacement for samba (windows client, accessing files on *nix server).

DokanInstall_0.6.0.exe Dokan library (http://dokan-dev.net/en)
dokan-sshfs-0201226.zip for installer and explorer context menu
dokan-sshfs-0.6.0.zip take DokanNet.dll and DokanSSHFS.exe and replace in 0201226.

Advantages secure, read/write, easy to install.
Drawback easily bottlenecks at a few MBps on slow CPU. Not multi-core. Shows bad size information. Unstable?