Thanks very much to Jorge Castro for pimping Terminator on his blog. I hope I get the flurry of patches he mentions!

Terminator 0.6 is out. As usual you can get all of the goodness from here or my PPA, which has the 0.6 package already.

While I was in the US recently I took advantage of the exchange rate to buy a handful of goodies for my PS3 in the form of a PS Eye camera, Call of Duty 4 and a Bluray disc of Pixar short films. To get it out of the way quickly, the Pixar shorts disc is great - I've always admired the work of John Lasseter and it's nice to have all the classics in super high quality, all in one place. Disney suck for plastering adverts and trailers all over the disc and stickers all over the box, but whatever. The PS Eye camera is a nifty bit of hardware - it's a good quality camera with excellent framerate and no boring focusing requirements. The games I've played for it so far (Creature Feature, Trials of Topoq, Aqua Vita and Mesmerize) are either amusing, fun or creative and pretty. Clearly the PS3 has the hardware to do good motion detection in real-time, so it'll be interesting to see what other concepts people can come up with to take advantage of it. Last, but my absolutely no means least, is Call of Duty 4. I picked up the 3rd installment of this series when I bought the PS3 and I was a little disappointed by it. It was mildly entertaining, but single player games rarely hold my interest for long, plus the engine had obviously been slapped together hastily and some things looked really stupid (eyes and teeth particularly). Plus it's yet another World War 2 game, which we've had quite enough of. The 4th installment is a totally different beast though - gone are the crappy wooden rifles and anti-German shouting. Instead this is a game based around modern warfare and you alternate between different people (at least an SAS new-recruit and a USMC soldier). Great weapons, interesting missions (including somewhere you get to be a gunner in aircraft), very pretty graphics and a slick overall presentation. The online multiplayer is good fun too. I really really like this game!

Terminator 0.5 is out. This is another bugfix release. This one includes some pretty major fixes and some new default behaviours. Maximisation of the window is no longer the default (but you can pass -m to do it). Additionally, you will just get one terminal when you start Terminator. Ctrl-shift-h and ctrl-shift-v will split the terminals (or you can still right click for a context menu). Ctrl-shift-q will close a terminal, and ctrl-shift-n/ctrl-shift-p will cycle through the next/previous terminals respectively. As usual, please head over here for the goodness. Gutsy packages will be hitting my PPA shortly.

Thanks to the hero Kees Cook Terminator is now able to resize its window smaller. A pretty stupid bug to have, but a fairly peculiar fix. Either way, it's done now. It's starting to feel like I just need to polish up some features, fix a few tiny bugs and Terminator will be widely usable (not that it will be used widely because of how crazy it is). Profile support is still a way off though, unfortunately.

Groovy. Airport. Abandons. Alaska. All your base are belong to us. Mooooooo!

A bunch of us went to see Bremner, Bird and Fortune being filmed on Friday. As luck (or embarrassment, depending on who you are) would have it, we ended up right at the front in some extra seats, so I made it on TV again! Clearly I had to post a screenshot from the airing today:

If you've been over to my Terminator page you may have noticed that I use Launchpad for basically all of the services of releasing. Taking this one step further, I have been building packages for Ubuntu Gutsy with Launchpad's excellent PPA service. Details for how to get your Terminator goodness from PPA have been added to the Terminator Homepage.

Terminator 0.4 is out. It's more of a bugfix release than the expected feature (per-terminal profiles). That is still some way off unless anyone feels like working up a patch? ;) As usual, please head over here for the goodness.

I use a docking station with my laptop. When it's in the dock it has a wired connection, otherwise it's just wireless. Since most of my work involves ssh and I tend to have several long running ssh sessions at a time, it's quite annoying if I quickly undock to go and work in another room and have to reconnect everything. Of course, this is entirely fixable in Linux (albeit by way of some slightly dodgy hackery). Network Manager is just about quick enough to pick up a new connection before TCP connections time out, and Linux's routing stack is somewhat forgiving about connections switching interface. So, with that in mind, and using a DHCP network - all you need to do to preserve a connection across switching interfaces is have the same IP address on both. Sure you could go and hack at the DHCP config to make sure it serves the same IP to both of your MAC addresses, or you could just have both interfaces share the same MAC. I'm quite sure this breaks all manner of rules, conventions and RFCs, but the point is that it works and it makes my life easier :) I'll happily take suggestions for a better way to override the MAC address, but this is how I do it: -(cmsj@waishou)-(~)- cat /etc/modprobe.d/localinstall ipw2200 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ipw2200 ; ifconfig eth1 hw ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX So in this case I am setting my wireless card's MAC address to that of my wired interface (replace the XX:XX bit with the MAC from your other interface). This worked fine for me in feisty, but was failing in gutsy and my wireless interface was coming up as eth1_rename. Obviously something new and strange was going on. It turns out that, in the same way we handle disks by UUID, we now handle network interfaces by MAC address, so udev was getting a little confused. A quick change of /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules to stop recognising them by MAC address and start looking at the driver name instead, and it's all fixed. This is how the file looks now: -(cmsj@waishou)-(~)- cat /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules# This file was automatically generated by the /lib/udev/write_net_rules# program, probably run by the persistent-net-generator.rules rules file.## You can modify it, as long as you keep each rule on a single line. # PCI device 0x8086:0x1077 (e1000) SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="e1000", NAME="eth0" # PCI device 0x8086:0x4220 (ipw2200) SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="ipw2200", NAME="eth1" I'd be wary about doing this on a desktop system where interfaces are more likely to change, but this is a laptop and I am quite certain the e1000 NIC isn't going to move on the PCI bus! So there you have it :) Update: It's worth noting that sometimes this will confuse some networks (e.g. I recently confused a hotel wired&wifi network into not talking to my laptop anymore and had to change both the wired and wireless MAC address to different addresses)