A while back I started playing Mass Effect 3 with my girlfriend. To be more precise that means I am playing the game while she watches, comments and sometimes asks to have something explained or translated (since she’s missing the context I have after playing Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2).

Since we have now been playing about 20 - 25 hrs I wanted to draw some conclusions.

Shockers

I begun playing video games more than a decade ago. I have played over 300 different games on an array of platforms by an even larger variety of developers. I consider myself quite knowledgeable given this experience.

That doesn’t make me immune to shocking moments when faced with elements of psycho terror or similar. It does not. However, I don’t find ME’s sections during which you are walking in the dark, only equipped with a flashlight that terrifying. They are also one of those pre-scripted sequences that are no longer scary when you’re playing the scene multiple times. Add to that the fact that I’m not as immersed in the scenario as I could be when gaming alone I’m hardly scared at all.

It seems to be different for my girlfriend though, who is neither used to that specific kind of scenes in video games nor a fan of horror fiction on any medium at all. She was a bit scared during those scenes. Also I noticed her flinching during several moments that weren’t scary but more sudden surprise effects, like soldiers being shot by enemy snipers.

I think that there is a certain feeling of being accustomed to gunfire and explosions during video games that one accumulates over the course of a video gaming career or even during intense playing of a game containing a lot of those.

About Game Mechanics

There are certain parts during ME’s gameplay which are designed to initiate a quick reaction. Those dramatic moments aim to drive the player forward a little faster and heighten the player’s excitement. Many such scenes are created by the voice prompts, telling the player to ‘go faster’ in order to build tension.

My reaction to that is to completely ignore those prompts unless they are combined with a meter displaying the remaining time as either an indeterminate progress bar or with a counter. I am much more concerned about me forgetting to collect a certain item or otherwise semi-important piece of (background) information in my quest for completion and perfection. Having played both of the game’s predecessors multiple times it is perfectly clear to me that the game’s developers do not use hidden timers when mission objectives are concerned.

Conversely her reaction is just the one the developers strive to achieve. She wants to press forward immediately, always being slightly worried that lingering around might trigger a bad conclusion of the presented situation. I think she’s not into the whole weapon/modification collecting thing and doesn’t care that much about leaving stuff behind that cannot be obtained at a later point in the game.
The worry about bad consequences of a decision is something I might have triggered by talking about how most of the actions you take in ME do indeed have consequences within this final part of the trilogy, be it story-wise or in gameplay consequences (as in not being able to achieve all the ‘Readiness’ points needed for the game’s final showdown).

Background Information

As I already mentioned in the introduction of this article, there is a need for me to pause so and so often or stop during non-critical moments in order to explain some things that just occurred on screen or translate more exotic words as I am more proficient speaking English than her.

I consider this an interesting factor since I have the opportunity to explain things in an easy way that happened in the two previous games or add a detail that I read in the wiki or one of the official novels. There are also events which are only alluded to during the course of the game since they happened in one of the comic books. Many times, events that transpired in the past and have been content of the previous parts are not quickly explained, like the genophage and the Asari bonding process.

She also told me that she read up on some specific topics like biotics and several persons of interest which were introduced in previous parts. I was quite surprised that her interest in the the game’s universe had become that big - on the other hand I might just be that my explanation was bad and incomplete or somewhat confusing. I try, though, I really try.

Speech Patterns

Now given the fact that my girlfriend isn’t as fluent in English as I am, I was curious to hear if there were differences in understanding the various speech patterns and accents that the characters and races in Mass Effect 3 display.

There are the humans, which - except for some specimen, like the autist David Archer (video) - have a very familiar speech pattern. The same can be said about the Turians and Asari. Others, however, like the Volus, whose speech is interrupted in regular intervals by their heavy breathing devices, the heavy accent of the Quarians or the highly technical choice of words of Legion, as well as the metallic distortion that accompanies those, are things that make it harder for a non-native speaker to understand everything clearly. The highlight of that has to be Mordin Solus (video). His hyperactive speech, spit out in rapid, short bursts of brilliant, though incomplete sentences made it extremely hard to almost impossible for my girlfriend to understand him.

Conclusion

I’m very curious how this little enjoyable experiment continues when we reach more content that I haven’t encountered in my last ME 3 run (excluding DLC).

Moreover it was quite funny to listen to her explain the plot and a great part of the setting to her sister when she inquired what was fascinating about ME3. I may or may not transcribe & translate my voice recording of that.

Summary: 4 novels, 1 podcast, 1 game, 1 video, 1 piece of research

Novels

• Firespell by Chloe Neill
• Hexbound by Chloe Neill
• Charmfall by Chloe Neill
  I came across the novels by Chloe Neill on my search for new urban fantasy material on Amazon. You have to admire Amazon's recommender algorithm for its accuracy. I have quite some trouble putting away a book again instead of finishing it even if I happen to dislike it. For some time that hasn't been an issue though since the automated suggestions were quite nice and I felt entertained, which is the point of most of my (novel) reading.
• Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas
  Throne of Glass is - for a little change - not urban fantasy, it's just fantasy - and good one, if I dare say that. This novel was a real pageturner for me and I look forward to checking out other stories set in this particular setting. I've seen there are already other books available.

Podcasts

• The Secret Archives of the Vatican Podcast 99 - Garden of Delights

Games

• Mass Effect 3
  Not much to say about ME3 anymore. Still playing with my girlfriend when (or rather if) we find time between assigments for university and the daily chaos. We're somewhat past Priority: Palavan.

Video

• Why Linux Sucks
  Unfortunately I can't remember how I stumbled across this 40 minute long presentation about the reasons Linux sucks, but it's worth watching as well as re-sharing and thinking about its contents.
  Summary: There are many points which can easily be improved and some which are not that easily solved.

Other

I’ve recently looked into Asperger syndrome since that topic came up in several articles I read and was sometimes referenced in a book. I haven’t quite had the time to check the more interesting linked resources on wikipedia, but there’s one .PDF that I already read which proved interesting.

Let me make it perfectly clear that the following is entirely my own opinion and by no way an objective view of the event as a whole.

It wasn’t all that great.

• Due to forgetting my notebook's power adapter I missed the keynote.
• I used the time I had scheduled for two interesting lectures in order to help Manfred with his entry-level workshop. Even though I had not planned to do so this year.

It was pretty frustrating. I hadn’t prepared anything since I spontaneously decided to help out. *sigh*

The session was full of fail.

The dreaded 'Canonical Partner' repository

The virtual machine with Ubuntu had the same problem that we already had a year (or was it two years?) ago: The live CD has the Canonical Partner repository disabled. Since one of the tasks the participants ought to solve was installing Skype this caused a problem. Did I say one? I meant some. What solutions for installing Skype could be observed?

• The preferred solution would've been to fire up Software Center, type 'skype' into the search box, hit ENTER, find the result and hit the 'Install' button. Turns out, it wasn't as easy. As in the previous years, the 'Partner' repository was disabled, and the data for the Software Center was absent, too. Even manually enabling the repo didn't help and neither did the fact that the VMs were painfully slow.

• Another solution was to download the correct file from the official Skype homepage. Unfortunately that made the assumption that the participants had to know which file was the correct one for their architecture. Given that I arrived late and wasn't part of the prep team for the workshop neither did I. But even after that problem was resolved the Software Center refused to install the 'multiarch' file provided by the website.

openSUSE troubles

Now, another take was to use the VM running openSUSE. If only that had worked. The virtual hard disk created for the VM was of insufficient storage capacity. One could not perform an update of the package index and therefor installation of Wine wasn't possible. Too bad that was one of the required tasks for the workshop. Since the other one was installing Skype and the instructions on their community wiki weren't as helpful for new users as one would wish for the other task was hard as well.
Oh yeah, also being able to refresh the package cache would've been helpful when installing the Skype dependencies by hand. I know I'm right in my comfort zone when using Ubuntu but with the PPAs they make keeping one's software up to date pretty easy if you're not keen on waiting for their biyearly releases.
Similarly the VMs froze for about 70% of the participants when trying to install Skype, forcing us to either reset them and have the users repeat their work or suggest using a different distribution.

Fedora to the rescue?

I have no idea, honestly. There wasn't enough time to try and help all the participants with the trouble we already had as well as giving Fedora a shot.

Conclusion

I'm a little sad that everything turned out so chaotic and almost everyone of the users had trouble somewhere. I'd also suggest Canonical shipping with the Partner repo enabled, but they probably enabled that when installing with the switch for proprietary software enabled.

Summary: 1 game, 3 novels, 3 podcasts, 1 movie, 3 episodes of TV

Games

• Mass Effect 3
  After Citadel , the final piece of DLC, was released and I was sure that this time it was really the last DLC for the game I decided to finally play it all the way and complete as much as possible. Interestingly my girlfriend decided that Mass Effect 3 was a fine cinematic experience and we're now trying to complete it together with her as spectator. That's something I definitely didn't expect.

Novels

• Daemon by Daniel Suarez
  Daemon was in fact a suggestion of Leonhard when I told him about the novel accompanying Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It has some similar concepts and is a worthwhile read. Additionally, some ideas and concepts of the novel were very handy when writing an article for university, so I didn't only benefit in terms of entertainment.

• Freedom by Daniel Suarez (which I've misspelled "Freedom TM" until recently)
  While I wasn't quite in my element when reading Daemon, Freedom was much more my style, with its focus more leaning towards gamification of everyday life and society as a whole in contrast to Daemon's focus on conspiracy and pseudo-spy action.

• Callous Frigid Chill by Jari Winberg
  What a strange book. I've stumbled across this CC published novel while browsing art on Deviantart and found myself downloading the e-book version. Way later I came around to reading and found myself continuously wondering. The setting, the characters, it's all very strange - making me scratch my head in confusion. However I can state that the novel - when viewed as a whole - is indeed entertaining and worth a recommendation if a slightly confused impression throughout doesn't turn you off.

Podcasts

• The Crossover 1 - You just got curated
• The Crossover 2 - The Fight for Attention
• The Secret Archives of the Vatican Podcast - Lost Worlds

Movies

• Tintenherz (EN: Inkheart)
  Watched with and after suggestion of the girlfriend. Had a nice story and some enjoyable characters, was not kitschy. I think I would've preferred to read the book though as I would've had the chance to dream the characters, their outfits and behaviors up myself.

TV Series

• Better Off Ted, episodes 1-3
  A friend of mine introduced me to this show and although I didn't enjoy all the jokes, some of them were really hilarious. I'm not convinced I'd watch it on a regular basis.

Recently I was provided with the unique opportunity of attending the famous CeBIT in Hanover. Indeed it was an interesting chance for me given that I was provided with both a ticket for trade visitors and a part of my travel fees. In order to qualify for a subvention I had to write an article containing at least 6000 characters. At first I was a bit intimidated, given that I had a minimum amount of characters and an assigned topic instead of my usual free writing style. Another thing that made me doubt for a few moments before agreeing to the conditions was the requirement for the article to be German. While German is my mother tongue I prefer to jot down notes, thoughts and pretty much everything else in English. For some reason my thoughts seem to flow easier when I stick to English.

Well, turns out that 6000 characters isn’t much when you have a lot to talk about. I already wrote more than said limit when talking about the main topic I had volunteered for - the lab area. By the time I had finished writing a short part about the interesting presentations I attended the article was well fleshed out and I was forced to sum up some smaller presentations into a single subtopic in order to try to make the deadline. I am terribly sorry that I missed the deadline for handing it in by about 10 minutes but was quickly assured that it wouldn’t matter and everything was fine. The reason for the short delay was my unwillingness to send an article I hadn’t sufficiently proofread yet to a client.

You can read said article at the homepage of the Basisgruppe Informatik & Softwareentwicklung (student council of Computer Science and Software Development) or at the homepage of the Basisgruppe Telematik (student council of Telematics).

I had considered writing an English article for this blog, but I don’t think I’ll get around to do that in the near future if ever.

What got my attention most were the lectures. I think I’d enjoy giving such a presentation to an attentive, interested audience myself. The keynote for the day I was at the convention center - Friday - was by Aaron Levie, Co-Founder and CEO of Box and particularly interesting because he tried to look at the future of work in this Post-PC era. I want to bring attention to Levie’s outfit sporting a suit and blazing red sneakers. You don’t have to adhere to the strictest rules in order to be respected and successful. Dress code isn’t everything.

Also I thought I was going to test iOS’s Passbook for the first time, but given that I would’ve had to change lines and get in line after about 10 more people although I had already waited but was in the wrong line for digital tickets I gave up that particular endeavor.

Summary: 4 games, 1 let’s play, 1/2 of a novel

Games

• Ghost Trick (NDS)
  I took another short dive into Ghost Trick and found some parts that were indeed a bit harder than expected, but I’m still enjoying that particular game a lot.

• Terraria (PC)
  For a few minutes I attempted to get back to Terraria, but my addiction to this particular game seems to be cured. Got bored, switched it off again.

• Fable 1 (PC)
  After being fed up with Terraria I decided that I wanted to finally play Fable 1. I never quite managed to finish it despite two previous attempts that came pretty close to its end. Let’s see if there will be any annoyances like the need to reformat the computer this time.

• Castle Crashers (XBLA)
  Had a little Castle Crashers Xbox party with three friends and completed CC once again. Always fun, especially with three other people since the whole screen tends to get extremely crowded and you keep hearing panicky screams of your teammates. Fun times.

Let’s Plays

• Avalon Code
  This entire LP is gold, pure gold. The LPer rewrites a lot of the dialogue in order to fit his style of narration but ultimately manages to deliver an interesting piece full of character that might be better than the original narration.

Novels

• Netzkinder gegen Offliner: Danke Internet (German) by Alexander Fuchs
  Got around to reading the second half of this book. Will probably post some short thoughts about it anyway, so no long comment here.

• Daemon by Daniel Suarez
  A tip I got from a friend during the winter holiday. I’m only a few pages in.

Summary: 5 games, 2 novels, 1 movie, 1 podcast

Games

• Puzzle Agent 2 (PC)
  Puzzle Agent 1 left me expecting a lot more from its successor. The humor wasn’t the same and many, many puzzles were far easier than the ones in part 1. Except for the three involving numbers, those were off the chart and at least one of them had nothing to do with numbers at all.

• Final Fantasy Tactics: The War Of The Lions (iOS)
  This purchase was a personal failure. Don’t get me wrong here. I adore both Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance and Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance 2 - Grimoire of the Rift but those were nice games. They featured explanations where applicable without requiring you to read hours and hours of content in a separate ingame help. Neither had they values such as Faith and Bravery which could get a unit to leave your service if too low or too high.
  What ultimately made me give up on the game however was its controls. If I tap anywhere but the button which currently has focus I don’t expect the button to be pressed. I expect the game to register a “Cancel” action, not a freaking “Confirm”. I mean, I am not even pressing the button! This behavior is fundamentally wrong on a touchscreen device and drives me insane.

• Wordament (Win8)
  I’m not sure how I heard about this game. It might be that it was the first game to get Xbox Live achievements on iOS. I tested the Windows 8 version and found it to be a nice casual game. I’m astonished by the fact that I’m way better playing the English version than the German one - whereas German is my mother’s tongue.

• Terraria (PC)
  I’ve saved writing the part about Terraria for last. During the first two weeks of January I played a lot of Terraria. More than 48 hours to be precise. I was kind of sloppy and let a lot of work slip during that period. I’m not sure what prompted my addiction to Terraria but I’m willing to bet it has something to do with the ability to build all the structures you can imagine easily (well, as long as they conform to the gameplay rules). Initially I couldn’t grasp the depth of the game but as soon as I skimmed some of the wikis that grew around it I was captured. There are so many things to see, so many things to craft and the overall playtime and fun I got during playing Terraria made me think that this is one of the games I paid way too little during a Steam Sale. I’m still proud of the huge apartment complex of glass which I built above the ocean.

• Ghost Trick (NDS)
  Now, Ghost Trick was a lucky pick of mine. I loved Time Hollow and felt reminded of that game. A puzzler on the NDS is something I really adore, especially if it comes with a fascinating story. I don’t care that much for gameplay in those cases, but Ghost Trick easily beats Time Hollow in terms of game mechanics and can be recommended to a lot more people due to less restrictions in terms of creative situation solving. Which doesn’t mean it’s not linear, because it is.

Novels

• Touch Of The Demon by Diana Rowland
  By now I expected nothing but excellence from this author and was not disappointed. It’s a whole less urban-fantasy due to this part being set almost entirely in “the demon realm”. However, Rowland uses this to conjure even more amazing elements and side characters. It has some exciting plot twists and I can recommend it to anyone who liked the previous books of the Kara Gillian series.

• Netzkinder gegen Offliner: Danke Internet. (German) by Alexander Fuchs
  By the time of this writing I haven’t completed this book yet. It sure seems like a huge rant against those people who don’t “get” the Internet (the offliners) but I have to agree with a lot of the points the author introduces and am looking forward to reading the other half of it.

Movies

• Step Up 2: The Streets
  So yeah. I like the Step Up movies. Mostly for their soundtracks and the urban style they exude and not so much for the actual dancing, I have to admit. In particular Moose stood out pretty much from the cast of this one, he was a very likable character.
  The movie was quite enjoyable even considering the extremely kitschy scene after the party. I mean, it was a certainly a nice scene, I won’t argue that. But nevertheless I thought I had to force myself not to skip it. But since I wasn’t the person in control of the remote, that wasn’t an option anyway. That, by the way, also meant watching the movie with German audio.

Podcasts

• Mac Power Users 121 - The Website Show
  This episode of MPU focused largely on publishing and blogging platforms as well as the tools to work with them or administrate said platforms. In an attempt to check out alternatives to WordPress I listened to the show but quickly realized that one of the main topics was going to be WordPress. Another point was Squarespace which I haven’t checked out yet, but being a database oriented model again, I’d probably have little love for the service. I prefer having my own data on my own domain.

Since this term at university is nearly over - well, except for the exams - I wanted to elaborate a bit on the setup and the applications I used on my Macbook in order to accomplish the tasks given.

Before delving deeper into this subjects I have to spell out something since you might miss it otherwise: It is probably not possible to do everything using only OS X given the requirements of certain courses. I had to use a Linux VM about which I’ll talk a bit later in this post.

Course: New Information Systems¹

Requirements:

• php enabled web-server
• mySQL database

OS X has an Apache server built-in which only needs to be enabled prior to use. However since Web Sharing - which is the Apple term for the Apache server - no longer ships an entry in the Sharing Preferences in 10.8 Mountain Lion it is necessary to either use some Terminal commands or install this handy .prefpane courtesy of Tyler Hall which brings back the ability to en-/disable the server via a GUI. I also suggest checking out this tutorial on how to prepare your Mac for web development since it also contains instructions to enable the builtin PHP of OS X. The mySQL database installation can be obtained from their site and installation is straightforward. They also provide a .prefpane item which can start and stop the server.
In theory. That prefpane didn’t work well on my machine. It might also be worth looking into streamlining the mySQL update process by installing via homebrew, my package manager of choice for OS X.

Since I didn’t have any relevant experience using mySQL I wasn’t comfortable just using only the mySQL command-line tools or PHP in order to do the required work. Initially I intended to use phpmyAdmin due to its popularity and cross platform compatibility but since I couldn’t figure out how to set everything up properly after several attempts of using the installation wizard, writing the configuration file manually and even one attempt of copying over the required file from my coworker’s XAMPP installation I was forced to look into other options. Thankfully I found Sequel Pro which worked beautifully and is a native (Cocoa) application for OS X. It’s available for free but donations are welcome.

Course: Introduction to Structured Programming²

Requirements:

• C compiler (preferably GCC)
• C debugger (preferably GDB)
• cmake (can be obtained via homebrew)
• Valgrind (or equivalent, preferably working and therefore not Valgrind on 10.8)

This course has pretty strict requirements on which tasks are to be completed, which specifications are to adhere to and which C standard you may use as well as some particular criteria for grading (like “no warnings when using gcc -Wall”, “no hits in Valgrind”, etc).

It’s easiest to just use a virtual machine for testing all those requirements. I’ve previously used a Ubuntu installation from which I’ve stripped all the packages I don’t need as well as the GUI. I set up public key authentication and used SSH to access the files in there. For transferring files I used Cyberduck since Ubuntu ships with Avahi enabled. Moreover I used Cyberduck’s “edit” mode in which the file can be edited locally and is written back to the server on each change that is written to the file system.

My daily work flow consisted of:

• starting the VM, minimizing its window
• firing up Terminal, SSH into the machine
• updating the files from the SVN repository
• opening Cyberduck; (select all source files, enter “edit” mode)
• editing using Sublime Text 2 on the host
• compiling and testing via SSH and Terminal

While I couldn’t use clang for building the project I extensively used Clang’s syntax checking features via clang -Wall -fsyntax-only in order to get simpler as well as clearer error and warning messages than GCC would’ve given me. After fixing those I built the project using the provided cmake configuration. I’ve included a comparison between GCC and Clang output as image for illustration.

The course also required that the program has no memory leaks. Diagnosis of those is a specialty of Valgrind, however Valgrind on 10.8 is in an unusable state. The following is quoted from its output:

WARNING: Support on MacOS 10.8 is experimental and mostly broken.
WARNING: Expect incorrect results, assertions and crashes.
WARNING: In particular, Memcheck on 32-bit programs will fail to
WARNING: detect any errors associated with heap-allocated data.

This was the main reason for not working on the host OS X system. I’ve recently been told that there is no direct equivalent for Valgrind as command-line tool but I may start Xcode’s Instruments from the command-line. I haven’t looked into it with dedication, but I remember that the last time I tried this I failed. It may however be possible to find quite some leaks using the static code analyzer, which I’ll explain later.

For debugging purposes I used GDB since I didn’t compile the project with Clang and as far as I understood LLDB wouldn’t have been any help in that case.

Special Recommendation: Subversion / Git

All group projects should use a repository. Even a lot of single user projects immensely profit from version control. The course team recommends Subversion since it’s probably easier to wrap one’s mind around than git, at least for beginners. I prefer using git whenever I have the choice though. The TU hosts our private SVN repositories, but does not offer private (nor public for that matter) git repositories. If you have a valid student e-mail address, you may obtain 5 private repositories from github/edu.

At the TU we’ve reportedly seen horror scenarios like mailing source code to each other as well as exchanging flash drives containing source code in order to keep all participants’ copies up to date. People not using version control have a significantly lower chance to pass this course.

I used SvnX on the host and the command-line in the virtual machine. For git I use Gitbox, which is paid software. There are several great commercial SVN clients out there but I haven’t considered buying one for the simple reason that I prefer git anyway.

Special Recommendation: Clang

The lecturer and the tutors tell you about GCC. I prefer Apple’s default compiler Clang to GCC. As shown in the graphic above it’s output is more helpful, it’s faster (though at the scale of the course projects the difference might be infinitesimal) and I prefer to work with the built-in tools as long as I don’t consider them completely crappy. Clang is an Open Source project based on LLVM and available for Linux too. At the time of this writing clang has a newer version in the Archlinux repositories than the one Apple ships. I’d love to use that because -Weverything also has -Wdocumentation in said release which is really helpful since the course requires doxygen-style function headers.

Special Recommendation: Scan-build

To further go down the line with Clang, one might also want to use the Clang-Analyzer, which is a static code analyzer. This tool will help you find coding errors without actually executing your program by analyzing the program flow. It can be incredibly helpful for beginners to see how exactly a bad situation can be produced. The scan-build command produces a website that can be opened in the browser and interacted with. The reports for individual errors are quite detailed and I’ve included an example below.

Changes: Guest Operating System

I haven’t stuck with the Ubuntu machine however since I got annoyed with the effort needed to slim it down every time I upgrade things. I’ve spent several days crafting just the perfect installation of Archlinux for my needs and now run that VM with VBoxHeadless -s and just SSH into that box for development.

Course: Computational Mathematics³

Requirements:

• LaTeX distribution
• Sage distribution

This course has us typeset LaTeX documents and calculate quite some mathematical problems using Sage. Since Sage’s scripting language is Python and I happened to get a good impression of that during my summer project that wasn’t so hard as long as I was able to understand what the task really consisted of. There’ve been multiple complaints that the task descriptions haven’t been on a level that a student in the first term can easily grasp and I strongly agree with that sentiment.

Using LaTeX on the OS X is probably easiest using the MacTeX package. The full package contains several GUI applications.
TeX Live Utility is a package manager for all your LaTeX needs. It’s updated frequently via Sparkle and recently got support for Notification Center. BibDesk is responsible for managing your bibliography. I can’t comment on that since I had no need to use it. It’s a Cocoa application, however, so that’s good. Also, Sparkle-enabled. LaTeXiT allows you to quickly typeset snippets of LaTeX code and export it for use in other applications, like a Keynote presentation. Cocoa, Sparkle. Never used it, since we were to show our .tex files anyway. For editing purposes the package contains both TeXShop and TeXWorks. TeXWorks is cross-platform and might be worth figuring out if you prefer sticking to one program for all three platforms, but it has its drawbacks. For example it can’t use Cocoa’s native spell-check and therefor the package gives you Excalibur, a dedicated spell-checker which I’ve had no need for since I used Latexian. You may use TeXShop and stay in a Cocoa application which is certainly okay if you prefer to stick with free applications. Check this thread if you’re unsure what the pros and cons of the editors are. As a side note the time of this writing the latest version of Excalibur is almost four years old…

Special Recommendation: Latexian

For beginners and lazy people I highly recommend using Latexian, since its Live Preview feature is easily the most helpful thing I can imagine. You type and the document gets converted to a preview instantly. Since you basically have no idea what the command you’re typing does when starting as a beginner the live preview saves a lot of time when experimenting. Be aware that this is paid software and still requires you to have a TeX distribution installed.

For the second part of course a local installation of Sage is recommended, although one could either use a public server or the one provided by the university (https://sage.tugraz.at, using the standard TUG credentials). I’ve used a local copy and tested the .app version. That one broke with the 5.5 update for me and I wasn’t able to shut the server down any more without manually killing processes. After that I switched to the regular build and symlinked the binary into my PATH.

Course: Logic Programming⁴

Requirements:

• swi-prolog

For this course only the swi-prolog binary is needed which can be installed easily using homebrew:

brew install swi-prolog

Additionally I recommend using an editor which has support for the Prolog syntax. In my case that was a plugin for Sublime Text 2, my editor of choice for every style of editing I do, both coding and blogging.

Addendum: Homebrew

If you have recently used either a Linux distribution or Valve’s Steam, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a package manager. There’ve been several successful attempts to create one for OS X, amongst them fink, macports and homebrew of which I like homebrew best due to its simplicity and the fact that it doesn’t require your root password for its tasks. No sudo here. This article has a nice comparison of the three.

Summary: 2 games, 9 podcasts, 1 movie, 4 videos, 3 novels, 2 different manga

Games

• Fruit Ninja (and HD)
• Fruit Ninja Puss In Boots (and HD)

Developer Halfbrick was generous and offered their whole iOS catalog for free for one day during Christmas 2012. I downloaded all of their games but since I neither like zombies nor shooting things for the sake of shooting I found bliss in Fruit Ninja. Especially the Puss In Boots episode of Fruit Ninja is adorable.

Podcasts

• Irish and Celtic Music Podcast 124 (1/2)
• Irish and Celtic Music Podcast 132
  I had the sudden urge to listen to something different during December and Irish music just happened to be the first thing that came across my mind. Most of the songs in the podcasts were pretty nice, but A Man’s a Man performed by The Duplets stood out in particular. It’s calming and very relaxing to listen to.
• Build & Analyze 105 - Service Plans for Cables
• Build & Analyze 106 - Outlasted The Daily
• Build & Analyze 107 - The Eldest Programmer (1/2)
• IRQ Conflict 46 - NSEror
• Secret Archives of the Vatican Podcast 101 - Cultural Wisdom
• Mac Power Users 112 - Self Publishing and iBooks Author
• Coffee With an Author - Feb 1, 2012, Jennifer Estop
  Well, about that interview… It was bad. Really, really bad. The interviewer was not prepared at all, kept stating incorrect facts about the author and moreover showed amazing disinterest in American geography. One should at least know if a state is in the north or the south of the country. Moreover the interviewer repeatedly used phrases like “tell me now” and “let’s go back to” which made her sound even less prepared.
  Nevertheless it was interesting to hear about the habits and writing process of a real, published author. Even though Jennifer Estep is not that popular (yet?)

Movies

• The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - wiki / imdb
  After having read the novel a while ago I decided to watch the movie too. Since I wanted to try out iTunes’ movie service anyway and had time after having finished my university assignments in the 11th hour I did just that. Surprisingly I was not disappointed of the movie even though that seems to be the normal reaction if you’ve read the book and seen the movie on the same content. There were deviations from the book but nothing controversial. I’d say that it was done for the same reason Lord Of The Rings had its alterations done: To fit the full movie into one piece instead of pulling a Harry Potter. I can recommend watching this without doubt.
  I watched the Hollywood edition, not the Swedish one.

Videos

• Wir sind alle Teil der Netzgemeinde
  I was really late watching this video since it has been lingering in iTunes’ podcast section for quite some time. It’s a funeral for online privacy which died when Austria introduced the “Vorratsdatenspeicherung” (eng. Telecommunications data retention). The concept is quite interesting and the short movie is well done.
• RSA - The Power of Outrospection
• Standard.at - Warum die Wehrpflicht abgeschafft gehört
• Windows 8 - The Animated Evaluation
  This video is done in a style resembling Zero Punctuation and tries to inform about Windows 8’s shortcomings in UI design and usability. I agree with a lot of its points even though I didn’t think it was this bad. On the other hand I really like experimenting with new technology and software and therefor don’t mind searching for things. If, however, one has to jump in and immediately be working productively I probably wouldn’t recommend Windows 8 without at least one mandatory course for beginners before first usage.

Novels

• The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
  After having watched the first part of the Millenium trilogy I immediately rediscovered my interest in the series and bought the Kindle version of the second one to read on the train. Which I did. I like Larsson’s writing style. The slow pacing, the tiny spikes of action between slower passages make the style interesting and somewhat difficult to write in my opinion. I find it rather amazing that he manages to keep the reader from losing interest.
• The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson
  Some time after starting the third book I wondered why I was reading at a pace this slow. I had read for an entire evening and only managed to get to a third of the book. Then I realized that the third part of the trilogy was considerably longer than the first two.
  It is a worthy, lengthy conclusion to a modern, serious and entertaining trilogy.
• Crimson Frost by Jennifer Estep
  Great improvement on the already good series, taking into account my previous criticism about not showing other types of warriors. Neither were there many repetitions or sequences that reminded me of the previous books writing too much. Overall a great work of urban fiction.

Mangas

• Hunter X Hunter (1-8, 9-13, 14-20, 21-24, 25-26, 27, 28-32) (fin)
  This series is either canceled or on hiatus. I’ve read as far as possible.
• Naruto (611, 612, 613, 614)

Summary: 1 game, 12 podcasts, 2 presentations, 1 novel, 2 different mangas

Games

• Don’t Starve, PC, Beta It’s a survival game. You will die. A lot, probably. But the sound design, the visual style and the strange sense of humor behind all the madness in Don’t Starve’s wilderness immediately caught my eye when I played the demo which is don’t via Chrome’s Native Client technology. I decided to support further development of this game which is only in it’s beta stage by buying two licences on STEAM.
  Though Ron and I had quite an argument whether excessive playing of a game before it’s official release spoils all the fun and whether one might miss out vital details that may have been hidden during the test phase I still plan to invest quite some time into this little game. Also, I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of the OS X version on Steam, since the FAQ says there will be one.

Podcasts

• Build & Analyze 97 - Grapefruits Everywhere
• Build & Analyze 101 - Looting Siracusa County
• Build & Analyze 102 - My Quotes Are Curly And My Dashes Are Solid
• Build & Analyze 103 - Denial Haircut
• Build & Analyze 104 - Hammertime
• Hypercritical 92 - The Tim Cook Era
• 5by5 Specials 10 - State of the Union 2012
• IRQ Conflict 44 - Where In The World Is Justin?
• IRQ Conflict 45 - Finely Charred
• Secret Archives of the Vatican Podcast 93 - Seventh Voyage
• Just Talking 107 - Opposable Thumbs
  I tuned in to this podcast that I had postponed long ago due to my interest in Ben Kuchera’s opinion. He was in charge of Ars Technica’s Gaming section before joining Penny Arcade and starting their PA Report Gaming section there. I love his writing and I admit unsubscribing from Ars Technica and following him to PA Report for that reason.
• Paging Dr. Nerdlove 13 - Sex for Beginners
  Not as funny as expected, was rather topical and less comedic than I hoped. From the impression I got from the Doctor’s website I was expecting something more well, funny. I wasn’t aware that this series and podcast really is dedicated to bringing information about love, relationships and sex to nerds instead of being a rather good parody. I guess I should’ve researched properly.

Presentations

• Apple Special Event, March 2012
  New iPad and stuff. Swallowed down a bit of buyer’s remorse for not waiting for an iPad with Retina resolution before buying mine.
• Extra Credits, Season 5, Episode 10 - Demo Daze
  If you’re curious why there are less and less demos of video games nowadays this episode of Extra Credits has you covered.

Novels

• Glennkill by Leonie Swann (German)
  I’ve read the German edition of this very strange book since one of my friends lent it to me. It’s about a flock of sheep solving a murder. It’s fun. Not terribly so but amusing.

Mangas

Most of the reading time this month was spent on mangas instead of novels. I tried to catch up on Naruto as much as possible and started reading Kenshin after I remembered that I liked that a few years ago. This list here is modelled after my reading schedule. Those are several multi-hour sessions of Naruto.

• Naruto 23-33
• Naruto 34-53
• Naruto 54-61
• Naruto chapters 588-610
• Kenshin 1-6
• Kenshin 7