Nerd Expo

I tried out the Nintendo Wii this weekend and it was pretty cool. They only have the 1 cheezy driving game, but I'm interested in trying out some sports and fighting games. I think my 2 and 3 years olds will like it so I hope the contols aren't too expensive and can take lots of abuse.

This is a multiple platform SCC. It runs in Linux, Solaris, Windows, and probably other platforms, but those are the ones I use.

Everything is pretty intuitive except how to add an existing view in Windows.

Start->Programs->Rational S/W->Rational Clearcase->Administrator->Regional Sync

This will show you all the view in the vobs that are currently mounted on you machine. Choose the view you want and click "Import".

Now start Clearcase Explorer. Click View->Refresh View Shortcuts, and the new view should appear in Explorer. But they do not appear on you view drive, that you access through the standard Windows Explorer. To do this, you need to click on the icons for the new views in the Clearcase Explorer's View window. Then these views will be visible in your "view" drive.

Now you can use your favorite Windows IDE to development. Mine is VIM, but I needed to do this to use the QNX IDE to debug and gather runtime statistics on my target. There's also a Linux and Solaris version of the QNX IDE. The Solaris it dated so I didn't bother trying to use that one. The IT department don't trust hacks like me to have Linux machine on my desktop. Maybe they still remember the time I ran Nesus on the network.

First, your video card needs to support dual monitor. When you first connect both monitor, they may both work but are duplicates of each other. Here's how to fix that problem.

Startup the Dispaly configuration as follows:
(Bottom Left)Start->Setting->Control Panel->Display

In Display Configuration, click on the Settings tab. If your video card supports 2 monitors, the picture should show 2 monitors. Click on the 2nd monitor to select it. Now select the option "Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor." by click the box next to it. The 2nd monitor is part part of the desktop. You can access it by moving the mouse to the right.

Say your 2nd monitor is on your left, you can drag the 2nd monitor icon and move it ot the left ot the 1st monitor.

The 2nd monitor is probably on 8bit color right now. Select the 2nd monitor, left click them mouse, and choose properties. You can configure this monitor to the way you want it.

I originally had hope to play games and have another application running at the same time, but that generally doesn't work as the game will take over and shut the 2nd monitor down.

Go download MSVDM utility form the Microsoft site. Installing this utility will gave you 4 virtual windows and works pretty much the same as an UNIXie desktop. You don't even have to reboot XP after installing this to use it. This even works well with 2 monitors.

This pretty lame, but I had a difficult time figuring out how to configure MAME32 and MAME vPinball controls to work with my Hotrod Joystick.

MAME32 was based on DOS, so it was non-intuitive for a GUI guy. Anyways, after the games starts up, press the "Tab" key on your keyboard to see a configuration window. For some games with 2 joysticks, it'll show a specify one joystick as left and the other as right. So if you see "Left-Left", that means left on the left joystick. This didn't click with me until I looked a picture of the controls for some game(maybe Assault).

For single player Robotron and Smash TV, it's best to use one joystick for movement and another to shot. But Smash TV is only fun for 2 players. So I reammped the shooting control to the 6 bottons on the Hotrod and it worked out well.
Right Up - top center button
Right Down - bottom center button
Right Right - the right buttons on top and bottom, but individually
Right Left - the left buttons on top and bottom, but individually
The left/right bottons and top/down bottons can be used in combination.

Assault is a futuristic tank game. You use both joysticks to pilot a tank. Mapping the joysticks sticks properly. Left - means your left joystick. Right - means your right joystick. I'll refer to left joystick as LJ and right joystick as RJ.
To flip the tank to the left: LJ (left-down) & RJ (left-up)
To flip the tank to the right: LJ (right-up) and RJ (right-down)
I sort of remember from the arcade that you can pull both joysticks away from each other and shot a power shot, but I haven't been able to do that so far. It may be that I'm just getting old.

MAME pinball was different than MAME. There's a MAME Pinball editor that's always running. You need to configure the Keys in the editor and restart the table. The obvious choose for the new keys on Hotrod is to map the flippers to the keys on the side which were designed for pinball. But this made it hard to access the rest of the controls which are important to "bump" the table. The alternative mapping is to use the joystick for the flipper and bump. This works well, but takes a while to get used to.

1. Go to the directory you wish to access and issue
> df .
svr01:/fs3/projects

2. Resolve the machine's IP address from its name
> nslookup svr01
Server: dns-xxx.abc.com
Address: 192.168.1.10

Name: svr01.abc.com
Address: 192.168.126.250

3. I'm not sure if this is some strange misconfiguration, but I actually need to mount the DNS's IP address?!? So on the machine where the mounting is needed, issue the following mount command to mount to the local /projects directory.
> mount 192.168.1.10:/fs3/projects /projects