I’ve received a few more e-mails and blog comments containing input and information about the famous DirectDraw palette problem which messes up colors in older games.

In particular, Windows contains compatibility entries in the registry, and Jari Komppa has written a ddraw.dll which wraps DirectDraw.

I’ve updated …

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A few days ago some of my programs stopped showing their icons in the Windows (7) notification area. A quick peek at the Task Manager revealed that they were, in fact, running.

Changing the notification settings and peeking around in the task bar configuration revealed nothing.

It turns out that …

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Number One:

Replace C:\Windows\system32\sethc.exe with cmd.exe (e.g. by renaming and/or using a repair CD: with the Vista repair CD you can open “notepad” in the command prompt and execute file manipulations from the Open Dialog).

Restart. At the login screen press “Shift” five …

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Because I always forget these commands and end up double checking them…

Client (Me) - Listening:

vncviewer -listen PORT

(Using UltraVNC on Windows.)

Server - Initiating:

x11vnc -connect IP:PORT

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Using Python and Beautiful Soup. This updates the previous script posted on this blog.

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from urllib import urlopen
import re

CATEGORY_GAMES     = '998'
CATEGORY_VIDEOS    = '999'
CATEGORY_DEMOS     = '10'
CATEGORY_MODS      = '997'
CATEGORY_PACKS     = '996'
CATEGORY_DLC       = '21'

html_text = urlopen('http://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=&sort_order=ASC&category1='+CATEGORY_GAMES).read().decode …

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Just a note for myself, a list of interesting Python tools for my next web scraping project:

• urllib2: extensible library for opening URLs
• PyQuery: jQuery-like traversing and selecting for Python
• mechanize: stateful programmatic web browsing in Python
• Beautiful Soup: not supported/maintained that much anymore. Latest versions are rather slow …

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…to remind myself because I always seem to forget how to.

1. Put the contents of the CD somewhere (e.g. /tmp/heroes).

2. Install:

/tmp/heroes$ ./setup.sh

3. Download and run patch with --keep:

/tmp/heroes$ wget ftp://mirrors.dotsrc.org/lokigames/updates/heroes3/heroes3-1.3.1a-unified-x86.run …

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(This is the second and final part in the University Of Waterloo CS Club Tron Challenge post series. You can find the first part here.)

Now that the contest is finished, congratulations go out to the first place winner: a1k0n, well done!

I also wanted to pass on a few …

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(This is the first part in the University Of Waterloo CS Club Tron Challenge post series. You can find the second part here.)

The Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo is currently organizing an AI challenge, sponsored by Google. I’m (as always) a bit late with my …

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Update: see herefor a new version which works on the new steam site.

Using Python and Beautiful Soup. Just a quick (ugly) script thrown together for future reference.

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from urllib import urlopen
import re
import codecs

html_text = urlopen('http://store.steampowered.com/search/?advanced=0 …

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