Recently I decided to whipe my harddisk and setup a 64bit system. I often heard people saying that it wouldn't give you any speedup but just enable more than 4 gigs of RAM.

However this opinion must have come from a Windows machine where there is no much 64bit software avaible.  Here on Ubuntu the whole repository is compiled against AMD64 so you can have the advantages of 64bit in every application. I instantly experienced an extreme speedup of the whole desktop when using it and am now pretty happy about my decision.

One thing that bugged me was that Adobe didn't supply a 64bit Flash Player. Luckily we have two alternatives in the OpenSource world: Gnash and swfdec. Gnash ran fine and fast but had some problems with video(codecs?) on youtube. So i decided to go with swfdec which fullfills all my needs. The side effect of this issue is that I now run no proprietary software on my machine what makes me kinda happy. I am also considering moving to and AMD GPU because they have much nicer (open source) driver support.

For you guys I can just recommend moving on to 64bit. With Windows 7 also Microsofts platform should work fine (and fast) with it considering that it is the last version supplying a 32bit-derivative.

Additionally I also switched my filesystem to ext4 which gives another speedup and defragmenting on-the-fly.

Again I wanna promote a german CC-Band: Shearer. They make kickass rock under a kickass license ;)

This will be my last blog of the week I think as it turns out to get a little boring.

This week i recommend Tombuntu for everyone using a Ubuntu Linux machine at home. It contains useful tips for the everyday user like me.

Today I want to recommend a really cool framework for 3D-accelerated 2D-Rendering: PhoenixGL

It is written by two really nice guys who are always open for suggestions. You will find everything you need to write a two-dimensional game: particle systems, scene management, various scene nodes and input routines!

Don't waste your time coding a framework yourself or using rather low level stuff like SDL or Allegro. Take the easy way and use PhoenixGL it could turn out to be the best choice you have every made in your whole live. [/ad] ;)

I just put a new logo, but something just doesn't fit. Maybe you know it?

I didn't use HTML for so long because i was occupied with conten-management -sytems all the time.

Now i started scritping a small page for Project Freedom. You can see it here.

I found HTML a lot simpler now. Mainly because i started to use CSS heavily. Before i used tables and so to format my page but now it is just div-elements and i feel the script is lot cleaner.

Enjoy the page!

This week i will recommend a german blog.
It's by a guy reading and commenting newssites from all over the world.

Read it!

Today I played around with Irrlcihts GUI and a snipped by "Klasker" to make it look nicer. But also it is really cool, because it allows the users of the app to define their own skin (some bitmaps and one config-file).

Just compare. Btw the image is made by one of my supporters not me.

Before:

After:

Another thing: There will be soon a bugfix release 0.2.1 of OpenNetwork as i found a problem in the connectionManagement. But before i want to use Valgrind and check for some memory leaks so its a really stable release.

But I will go to bed now and do all this on another day. I've to get up in 4 hours. Again I see how adicted you can get to coding ;)

I just wanted to say that i finished version 0.2.0 of OpenNetwork. It supports a working TCP port. What do you want more? :)

I am already planning for 0.3 which will contain encryption hopefully. Also i want to implent detection of peer-latency (because i need it for accurate movment syncronisation).

Maybe there will be a 0.2.1 release but at the moment im fine with basically everything though UDP isn't that nice for reliable messageing but it works somehow.

I played around with the wxWidgets-Editor in Code::Blocks (which is written with wxWidgets btw too :P) and find it awesome.

I spend some time wrting a simple launcher app including a browser and i can just recommend it. Writing apps with it is pretty easy and straightforward...btw it is cross-plattform :)

I enjoy simple designs you may realize.