Author: rakkar

It’s about time I put RakNet under source control. I wasn’t able to figure out how to host my own SVN server so after a few tries I got it approved by Sourceforge.

The upload process is very complicated and confusing. Right now I am stuck here:

I created the following directory structure.

RakNetSVN
RakNetSVN/branches
RakNetSVN/tags
RakNetSVN/trunk

Then I unzipped RakNet.zip, which has all the distribution files, to RakNetSVN/trunk

Then I right clicked on RakNetSVN, selected import for TortoiseSVN, and entered https://raknetjenkinsso.svn.sourceforge.net for the subversion server. I get a similar error to the one above.

Anyone know what this means?

Am I supposed to run Putty?

** EDIT **

‘renchap’ helped me with this.

The correct URL is https://raknetjenkinsso.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/raknetjenkinsso
You have to first checkout to the directory with your files.
Then you add your branches, tags, and trunk

He also helped me setup a bunch of other cool goodies.

1. Fixed the makefiles
2. Release notes automatically emailed, sent to RSS, and sent to IRC
3. Stopped hosting the Wiki myself

Sourceforge is very powerful!

I needed a static IP so installed Cox Business Cable. It’s $200 to lease the modem, $300 to install, and $120 a month for 1 MB upload and 8 MB download. I thought that was a pricey, so I asked the sales rep. if there was anything special about the modem. She said there was, but actually it is just this . Prices for this modem on Google range from $50 to $78. The installation was two guys coming to my house, unplugging my existing modem, and plugging the new one in.

I think we need some competition in the Irvine area.

Economics is a fascinating subject to me. I heard about Fair Tax on the radio today, a tax scheme supported by Huckabee. It is a national sales tax with a fixed amount returned to taxpayers every year to offset it from being a regressive tax. It is supposed to be a simpler replacement for income tax.

I found an informative and honest article on factcheck about it. The main points I got were:

1. The proposed rate of 23% is deceptive because it is 23% of the total cost of a good/service including the tax, not 23% added on as is customary for sales tax. This makes the number look smaller than it actually is.

Let f = the fairtax percentage, or the tax applied to the total cost paid. If we paid 50 cents on a $1 item, then this would be 50 cents out of the total price $1.50, or .3 (one third)
Let p = The pre-tax, e.g. percentage of the tax actually paid. If we pay 50 cents on a $1 item, then this would be .5 (one half)

The fairtax is then the percentage of the tax actually paid, divided by the total amount paid. Here 1 represents the percentage of the retail price, while p is proportionate to that.

f = p / (1 + p)
f = 1 / (1/p + 1)
(1/p + 1) * f = 1
1/p + 1 = 1 / f
1 / p = 1/f -1
1 / p = 1 – f / f
p = f / (1-f)

So for a fairtax rate of .23, the equation yields .2987. With significant digits, this is .30 or a 30% tax.

2. The 30% rate is a low-ball figure and likely insufficient to break even. 35% is more realistic. It also assumes 100% compliance, which is unrealistic.

3. This tax applies to all goods and services (food/rent) not just things we are normally taxed on.

4. Criminals tend to end up paying tax when they spend their ill-gotten gains, where before they did not.

Some points the article didn’t bring up, but occur to me, are:

5. Business as a rule try to avoid/hide making a profit since they have to pay tax on profit. In the game industry this is evident in the publisher business model. The typical model is to give very bad deals to game developers such that publishers make nearly all the profit on a blockbuster. However, this is offset because 90% of games fail. The failed games are write-offs and for tax purposes make a queer sense because then taxes do not have to be paid on the profit from that one blockbuster. In the national sales tax model publishers would be taxed on expenses, rather than income. The first thing I believe this will do is to make it now make sense to buy and run moderately profitable companies. This would otherwise be undesirable because the money would be tied up in slow gains, rather than shooting for the big payoff. It’s sort of like playing the penny slots vs. the $20 slots. The second thing I believe this will do is to make publishers more risk-adverse, since they no longer get ~30% of their money back.

6. Currently one of the difficulties of lying on taxes are that there are two records. I don’t want to report my income because my incentive is to not want to pay taxes on it. My employer wants to report my income because their incentive is to use it as a write-off. So both of us have an incentive to rat each other out, and thus both of us stay honest. But when taxing expenses only, the record is one-way only, with a strong incentive to lie about it.

7. According to this site it costs taxpayers 22 cents for every dollar collected. This system is much easier on the taxpayers, since you no longer have to save receipts and so forth. It’s just a higher payment on your final bill.

8. The goverment is very good at hiding taxes. Rather than hitting a 100K earner with a 33K tax all at once, it’s taken out evenly over bi-weekly paychecks over the year. And the cost is split up into different categories (Social Security tax, etc), so it’s hidden even further. What is funny is people are excited to get a refund of their own money back, while neglecting to notice that they are just paying less. My point is that most people don’t notice just how much they are getting taxed on income tax alone (don’t forget you also pay inflation tax, tarrifs, subsidies, etc!). But with Fair Tax, that $40,000 car you wanted is now listed for $52,000 and you are going to be freaking outraged at the $12,000 tax on the car. This is a good thing, since more transparency is good, and I think will reduce compliance and put tremendous pressure on the goverment to reduce taxes. Or then again maybe not so good, since they will just hide the taxes elsewhere.

I think I would support this system. It’s more transparent, it’s simpler, and the economic distribution is roughly the same. Of course I still hope Ron Paul wins, since no income tax is even better.

Yesterday was a dark day. I was hoping that Ron Paul would win the Iowa caucus by a landslide. Ron Paul is the first politician I’ve ever read about or watched that tells the truth, defends personal liberty, and gets his funding from private citizens over special interests. Instead he only got 10%, as opposed to the Huckabee with 34%.

People are so stupid it makes me mad and depressed. How can anyone not vote for Ron Paul? He has bad points, such as being religious, but he represents what this country should stand for and exactly what we need in our current dark days. Instead the usual flip-flopping and pandering wins out. People give up their own freedoms so easily. If Huckabee wins this means another 8 years of Bush-like crusades, financial insolvency, and further destruction and erosion of civil liberties.

I’m going to vote in the CA primaries and I just hope people get a clue and things turn around. Get out there and vote!

Netbeans is working out well as an IDE. I was able to build a static library for RakNet in about 20 minutes including the learning curve. The UI is intuitive and I didn’t experience any bugs. It also automatically creates makefiles and is the first GUI based tool I have found that does so.

I did experience a few design problems. The first is that the C++ project settings don’t expose the C++ compiler settings the way Visual Studio does. Instead, you can pass command line options to GCC. Of course you could do that with Visual Studio too, but nobody I know does. Second, it makes a project directory, rather than a project file. This is bad because you can ignore files with unknown extensions, but directories you have to look at because directory names are not standardized. Lastly, it doesn’t have the concept of solutions with many related and interdependent projects. Because it uses project directories with a fixed name, you can only have one project per directory. The best you can do to emulate a solution is to make a bunch of subdirectories under a common parent directory, have each subdirectory contain a project file, and to just assume people will search for and find the project directories.

Other than this Netbeans is good, doubly so when compared to KDevelop and Eclipse. I’m going to try building the Galactic Melee server on Linux using Netbeans.

I installed Netbeans this morning and the interface is astoundingly better than KDevelop and Eclipse. I’m surprised anyone uses the other two with the difference in quality. It even had a real installer. I was able to run through the sample and actually run and debug a program! I’ll look at this more later tonight but it’s quite likely I will add a Netbeans based project for RakNet and use this for further Linux development.

For the last day or so I have been actively trying to code on Ubuntu. I took some notes on my experiences.

Ubuntu:

On bootup in order to get internet through the wireless network, I have to go to System / Administration / Network, open the Wireless connection properties, and retype my password every time. I believe what fixes the network is not that though but something internal to the the “Changing interface configuration” screen. The funny thing is that didn’t work this morning. Every other time I did this I already had my Windows XP computer already turned on (which uses a cable to the wireless router). As a guess I turned on Windows, tried again, and now I could connect to the internet. Is it an IP confict? Is Windows providing DHCP?

I like Synaptic Package Manager, it’s very nice having instant download access to so much software. However, it’s hard to tell what you are getting or where it installs to. For example, I installed subversion but I can’t find the executible svn when I search on disk so I don’t know how to start it as a server. I also installed Eclipse for C++ but it just seemed to have gotten some files, I couldn’t find an executible to run.

I like the update manager. It just works and works for every package as far as I can tell. This is an improvement over Windows.

Searching for files doesn’t seem to work. I figured out how to fix it by searching the bug reports. You have to change System / Preferences / Indexing preferences and install some package the name of which I no longer remember. People in the bug report were complaining about this and I agree with them.

Under Applications / Programming I have dead links to KDevelop and I don’t know how to get rid of them. I also don’t know how to add Evolution to the menu system, which I downloaded independently.

The application installer and update manager shouldn’t take focus away from what you are doing. It made me die while playing Chromium.

When I click switch desktop in the lower right gedit won’t stay on the desktop I left it on, but follows me to the new one. This is true even if I deselect it. The desktop icons also stay around.

I wish the File Browser had a button to open the Terminal at the current directory I am looking at.

gedit:

I like it! Much snappier than notepad but with more features.

Cmake:

I tried CMake on Windows. It seemed to me I’m just replacing one set of text commands with another set of text commands, when what I actually want is a GUI.

Evolution:

The reason Evolution didn’t work originally was g++ and various programmer packages were not installed. This should have been noted in an error message when trying to run it the first time rather than giving a cryptic message when you first try to compile. Better yet, it could have installed this automatically.

Evolution has a better interface than KDevelop but it’s an order of magnitude behind Visual Studio and not as good as the Windows interfaces to Code Blocks or Dev-CPP. It didn’t seem to make a project file like KDevelop does and didn’t modify or create makefiles as far as I could tell.

It took me about an hour to figure out how to add files to the project to get them to compile. It’s not intuitive to me to import a file system.

If you create the project in an existing directory, such as RakNet, it adds every file, not just source files or just the source files you want. You can exclude directories but if I exclude the root directory of Samples I can’t individually unexclude the sample sources I want. Also the icon indicating what is excluded is inconsistently shown. They should have just did it the way Visual Studio does, where I add the files I want and if I want to add a directory of files I type a filter for the filename (*.cpp) select them all and hit OK.

Once I copied the sample I wanted out of the excluded base Samples directory I was able to build. However, when I tried to run the application said it couldn’t find an executable. When I looked under /Debug there was an icon with the name of my project whose properties said it was an executible, but double clicking it did nothing. I gave up at that point.

In order to test my program I copied the sources to one directory and typed g++ *.cpp -l pthread and ran ./a.out and it worked. I knew to do this because I took a class on Linux in college.

Code Blocks:

I tried to install the nightly build of Code Blocks on Ubuntu 7.10. I got as far as installing the wxwidgets source and then the instructions got too complicated. I didn’t know for sure what steps I needed to do and I didn’t know if it was compatible with Ubuntu 7.10. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time guessing only to have it not work in the end. So I gave up.

KDevelop:

In KDevelop, if I hit Project / New Project there is no option for a static library. So I’m not sure how to make RakNet as a static library. The equivalent with g++ is three commands, assuming you are already at the RakNet download:

cd Source
g++ -c *.cpp
ar cq libRakNet.a *.o

So in KDevelop I tried selecting C++ / Automake project / Empty Autotools template and tried to place it where I have the RakNet download at present. But it wouldn’t let me as that directory already existed.

It took about 20 minutes to figure out how to add files to the project. It’s on the right side under Automake manager, which you can figure out as it’s a tooltip on one of the buttons. There is already one item in the listbox there (Header in noinst) but I have no idea what that is.

One of the buttons is to add a directory of existing files. This is good since I have RakNet/Source. In the dialog, unlike Eclipse, there is no filter to not add the the .o files, CMakeLists.txt, configure.ac, and some others. Rather than remove those one by one I deleted those files in the File Browser with the dialog still open in another window. However, this deletion didn’t get reflected in the dialog box. I hit cancel to do the process over again, but that crashed KDevelop. I gave up at that point.

I was reading how PC World named Vista the #1 technology disappointment of 2007 and having used it I agree.

Performance: In my opinion the point of an operating system is to run your programs, and the OS should be as lightweight as possible. My new laptop uses a “AMD Turion(TM) 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology TL-66 (2.3 GHz, 512KB+512KB L2 Cache )” with “2GB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm)” and it is noticeably sluggish. Usable, but sluggish.

Compatibility: Right off I wasn’t able to install Visual Studio 2005. Plus, DX10 is not backwards compatible, which has already created hassles at work because all work needs to be done twice. On my own 3D engine I’m just sticking with DX9.

Security: Are you sure you want to do this? [Yes] Are you REALLY sure? [Yes] Absolutely sure? Your average user is just going to click yes 3 times in a row. It’s not like he’s going to click yes twice twice and then reconsider running “XXX girls now!”

DRM: Read this article

The only positive thing that I can think of over XP is I like how you can have multiple windows occupy the same slot in the task bar.

On the other hand, Ubuntu on my old computer, a 2 GHZ Athlon with 1 GB of memory, runs quite well. There are some delays due to the 5,400 RPM harddrive but I ran some of the games on it and they were fine. Ubuntu was easier to install and I think the interface is cleaner. I especially like that it automatically downloaded updated drivers and security packages for various programs. I also like that it’s open source – not that I want to contribute so much as that I can feel confident it doesn’t have malware or backdoors.

Once Ubuntu gets or I find a decent IDE, on par with Visual Studio, and Open GL is optimized to be as fast as DirectX I wouldn’t mind doing cross platform with all my games to it.

One thing I like about Ubuntu is the networking system is much better than Windows. To this day I still don’t really understand how to setup windows networks, but Ubuntu was able to connect to my Windows system almost automatically.

I also like the add/remove programs feature that downloads programs from the internet. It ought to automatically take care of dependencies though. When I got Eclipse for example it wouldn’t run because I didn’t have the java runtime environment.

I’m confused about Eclipse right now. When I created a project under the RakNet directory it automatically added every file there to the project. With Visual Studio you have to select the files to add. This seems bad to me, because it added non-source files.

It also won’t seem to build even if I create it in a clean directory.

I’m not sure what’s going on.

Two years ago when I tried installing Linux my audio, network, and video cards didn’t work. Now I tried again using Ubuntu 7.1 and everything worked except I couldn’t get on the internet until I figured out how to setup my wireless access. So this is good news, as it is the first time I’ve successfully installed Linux. It installed much faster than Windows and comes with Firefox, which I use over IE.

If I can keep this server running I will put subversion on it for source control, apache (?) to host my webpage for Galactic Melee, and then move the Galactic Melee server to that. It will save me $150 in hosting fees each month on be on a faster computer too.

Now I have to find an IDE equivalent to Visual Studio, meaning I don’t have to write makefiles, and I can trace and debug while running.