My stuff

I am very proud to announce the release of my PS3 demo called retrostation.

I know it is a bit late compared to sony's decision to completely remove the Install Other OS functionality from the new firmware release of latest April 1st. However, I started this project more than two years ago, so I definitely wouldn't stop this until it is done. I also know about people who still haven't updated their system, because they are aware of what they will lose, so this is a way to show them what they can do with a ps3 system, even without hardware 3D acceleration.

The demo is an animation of different kinds of 3D objects. Some of these have been designed by Mic of Dune, who did a really good job. Others are coming from old Atari ST demos. I let you try and find out from which demos they come from ! Objects of the last kind are algorithmically generated: blobs and text in separately-animated pieces.

The music has been composed by Dma-Sc of Sector One, who also did a great job in the final design of the whole animation. I personally also use my own demoscene nickname in the demo, which is Zerkman of Sector One.

The demo runs on any PS3 system with a linux OS installed on it. It runs in framebuffer mode. Ensure you set the screen mode to 720p 1280*720, and disabled the Xorg server before running the demo.

I hope you'll like the demo as much as I liked making it.

The entry on the pouët.net website is here. From there, you can download a binary version of the demo, as well as a video of the demo (HD 720p, 60 fps).

Official PlayStation 3 firmware update files basically are uncompressed archives containing different subparts.

The pupextract program I wrote basically is a one-hour project which just takes a firmware update file as input, and separate the different subparts into different files. One of these output files, which I called update.tar, is a simple GNU tar archive, containing the (encrypted) files for the firmware update. Another one contains the end-user licence agreement (EULA), while some contain basic information such as the release version number, and others contain empty or unknown data.

Not sure it will be useful for many people, but I decided to release it under the GPLv3 free software licence.

Download source code of pupextract v0.01

Today we will discuss about basic Apache-based web server installation. This is a quite straightforward process on Debian systems.

I will also present the steps to setup the most commonly used Apache modules.

What best way to test a server setup than to just use a brand new machine dedicated for this purpose ? Unfortunately, not everyone has a spare computer dedicated to such activities. But there is at least one solution : use a virtual machine !

The virtualization solution I have been using is KVM, one of the most efficient ones.

This article deals with the different problems system administrators may encounter when setting up such a virtual server, as well as setting up the host computer (running a flavour of Debian GNU/Linux) to let it communicate with the virtual server.