Nuclex - The Art of XNA Game Programming

Courier not only is an excellent mail server, it also ships with a mailing list manager that can be used to build mailing lists without relying on a third party provider (which usually has the bad habit of adding advertising text to the emails being forwarded).

Here's a small tutorial that explains how to set up a new mailing list using couriermlm.

Please excuse the current flurry of Linux articles. I'm moving servers and this is my way of writing notes to myself and possibly helping out others. Normal service will resume shortly ;-)

This article is a follow-up to my guide on Installing Courier on Gentoo. As long as you have a working Courier installation on your system, there should be no issues following this guide.

Running a mail server without some kind of spam filtering is just insane these days. SpamAssassin is a nice solution, especially if you run SpamAssassin during the SMTP transaction to reject spam while it is being uploaded to your server.

On my previous system, I had used qmail (netqmail actually, which is qmail with some patches). Qmail is moderately difficult to set up and in its 3 years lifespan on my system, it has broken down on several occasions. That's why I decided to use another mail server when I moved my domains to a different system.

Because the Courier IMAP server has never let me down before, I decided to give the Courier Mail Server a chance. Lots of people are using Courier IMAP to access their mail but Exim, Postfix or Qmail to accept incoming emails. Even the Gentoo Wiki contains various HowTos for these combinations, but not a single one for a homogenous Courier setup. After trying out Courier, I don't see why, so this is my attempt to rectify the situation (and to remember what needs to be done for the next time I'm moving my domains to another system!)

If you want to download torrents on your Linux system, there are several clients to choose from. One of the nicest and fastest clients is rTorrent. It is full-featured, supports encryption, dynamic host table exchange and achieves fantastic download speeds.

But its best feature probably is that it isn't bound to any windowing toolkit. You can install one of its GUI frontends to manage it on your fancy KDE 4 desktop machine, but you can also run it on a headless system and manage torrent from a text-only console. And if you happen to run it on a home server like me, there's wTorrent, a beaufitful AJAX-driven web frontend that allows you to manage your torrents in your browser.

Installing wTorrent isn't the easiest thing to do, so, as when I tried to get the best out of my SSD, I decided to write this small article explaining how to do it. I'm using Gentoo Linux, but it shouldn't be too hard to apply this article to another Linux distribution.

I've got a small home server with a software RAID-5 for storing my files. It also runs a few virtual machines and acts as a NAT router for internet access. Nothing expensive, just some Frankensteinian patchwork built from old hardware left over when I upgraded my workstation. Nevertheless, I granted it a brand new Intel X25-M SSD last week.

Did I mention that this server is running Gentoo Linux? I thought this would be a good time to do a fresh install and get everything right that might have gone wrong the first time. Besides, installing Linux always is an interesting (and masochistic) experience, especially when your chosen distribution has no installer :)

Because getting my partitions and file systems aligned also proved to be difficult task, I thought why not make a small article out of this!

In just two days, "Risen" will be on the store shelves. Risen is the inofficial child to the excellent Gothic series, a trilogy of role-playing games produced by german developer Piranha Bytes.

Because of this special opportunity, allow me to revel in ancient times and take a look back at the series' previous games. I have played all parts so far, including all add-ons, with the exception of the publisher's cannibalization attempt that is "Forsaken Gods" (which means I played exactly one Add-On, "Night of the Raven" :P).

In my opinion, no other game can compare to this series, no Elder Scrolls, no Baldur's Gate and no Fallout. Read on to find out why I'm so addicted to the Gothic series :)

This is my personal list of must-play games in the post-2000 era. I find that often, my opinions differ greatly from the reviews in gaming magazines. For example, I liked DooM 3 because of its story, which I find immersive and fascinating, whereas most people regard the game as a tech demo for id's engine. And I totally don't get Call of Duty 4/5, the story (?) was uninteresting and has you incoherently jumping from place to place with scripted annoyance everywhere that prevents you from playing in your own style :)

If you're equally weird, maybe you can find one or the other insider's tip within this list to check out :D

(Spoiler free!)

I’ve just read my way through 3 of the finest books I’ve had the chance to enjoy in my life:

I have to admit that I have a certain bias towards fantasy stories set in medieval times and that, especially if dragons are involved, it’s hard for me not to give such books a bonus in my personal rating, but still, I think the books in the inheritance cycle are very well written and provide excellent narration.

Originally, my plan was to put together a new release of Nuclex.Fonts this evening, but there was a small hurricane in the area near the end of the week that uprooted lots of trees, creating a great obstacle course in the local forests. My favorite jogging route was totally buried. Well, I couldn't help but go out there every day since the past week. Today, I took my camera with me, here are some shots from the forest trail I used to jog on:

I haven't had such an intense workout with so diversified movements (due to the constant jumping and climbing) in a long time. Normally I can do the 10 km (~ 6.2 mi) in about 55 minutes (it's rough terrain!). Now, after 55 minutes, I barely managed to pave my way through about half of the trail. My heart rate often got close to 200 bpm, making it quite difficult to jump from tree to tree. Here's an image I tried to take of my watch's recording after the run:

196 beats per minute average(!) heart rate for 55 minutes. I'm not getting old quite yet :)

This shouldn't stall my projects for long, but it was immense fun!

Just in case you have never heard of this game, Sexy Beach 3 is an adult title sold exclusively in Japan. In the game, you take the role of some random guy who gets invited for a holiday on “Sexy Island”, a small vacation island populated with a handful of other guests, which, by mere chance, are all good-looking women. You can probably see where this is heading to now… :D

Right, Sexy Beach 3 is basically just another sex simulation game, only that the Japanese are miles and miles ahead of the stuff churned out by western development studios. The game features beautiful anime girls, deforming clothing, real-time skin tanning and realistic boob physics. Yes, really.
Getting this game to install in Windows Vista is quite a headache, so I took the liberty to write down exactly what I did to make it work in a western Windows Vista system.