Why eBay should disappear tomorrow

I have been using (or better: being affected by...) eBay for almost a decade now. What is my opinion?

It's the worst corporate-blind company in the world, not caring a dime about its customers and enjoying a de facto monopoly as much as they can.

Image courtesy of http://whyebaysucks.info/

This is the list of complaints I have for eBay:

• crappy user interface that didn't change in the last years, no improvement, no nothing. If the cash cow is milking well, why change anything, right?
• you cannot change the user interface language and it must be the same language of the nation you have a living address in. Microsoft has the same habit. The message I perceive is: we don't care about you people moving across country borders. How you dare!
• The HTML editor is...horrible
• if you save your item as a draft, and then save another item as a draft..*puff!* your previous item is gone. No warning, no nothing.
• where are our well paid government officials when it's about antitrust? By buying PayPal they created the best monopoly ever, and basically you are forced to use it when using eBay. There are little to zero alternatives, and using others you loose all the "protected customer" rights
• account verification is a joke. It has a lot of glitches, it keeps looping in a stupid sequence of 3 forms if you haven't yet verified your account from PayPal. So cheap for such a big company, and the problem has been there at least 5 years already!
• it doesn't matter if your item is conform to description. If the buyer complains, he will get the money back. You are on the weak side by selling on eBay.
• if you want to sell abroad, eBay will show you that you need 10 feedback comments and 90 days must have elapsed after last sale. But only after you completed the insertion, just to make it more fun for you.

 There are no sound alternatives that I know of, but I seriously hope that they will come to light...this online "service" already smells very bad these days.

odroid-wheezy-retro 0.8.1 released: ALL RetroArch cores & fixes

A new release!

• compiled RetroArch with NEON-optimized sound resampler (thanks to Squarepusher)
• enabled page flipping (DRI2_PAGE_FLIP) for smoother RetroArch experience
• added vim and missing packages for eduke32 and RetroArch-Phoenix
• removed modelviewer core, added all RetroArch cores
• added ~/libretro-super
• enabled all joystick drivers in kernel

Download Area

odroid-wheezy-retro: wishlist & work-in-progress

These days I have been hacking around the ODROID U2 to improve RetroArch performance and better exploit the device's features.

One important achievement is that DRI2_PAGE_FLIP is confirmed to not be negative (at least on 3.0 kernels), but instead gives a positive performance improvement, so please enable it in your xorg.conf configurations.

This is my current wishlist, in priority from most important to lowest:

• good GPU performance on 3.8 kernel, there has been some progress on this front recently but we are not yet there, 3.0 gives best performance so far Update 1 September 2013: there has been some progress :)
• G2D support on 3.8 kernel, a support comparable to 3.0 kernel
• G2D example usage, see also my hello-g2d-odroid and this forum thread
• G2D-accelerated X11 driver, this could definitively possible once we have a working example
• MFC-accelerated video decoding, there has recently been some progress on this
• VSYNC on 3.0 kernel, basically this patch needs to be back-ported so that VSYNC ioctl calls actually do wait for VSYNC - done! Thanks to mdrjr for the patch; it is however verified that VSYNC is not working because of a hardware issue with the HDMI PHY :(

The last one seems easy to accomplish, and the G2D example usage is definitively possible to complete, although nothing else is at my reach :(

G2D acceleration is important to achieve because it would help at scaling anything using the hardware acceleration SoC.

odroid-wheezy-retro 0.8.0 released: more RetroArch cores

I have been doing some usability testing with Squarepusher and I have applied some improvements that were missing, so here you are with the 0.8.0 cumulative upgrade release.

ODROID Debian Wheezy, retro flavour

• added following cores: BSNES(C++ 98), DOSbox,  gambatte, genesis plus GX, hatari, nestopia, PCSX-ReARMed, PrBoom, SNES9x-next, TyrQuake, VBA-next and the modelviewer
• switched to official RetroArch git tree (removed for now the poweroff patch, the button release patch and the input debugging patch)
• added RetroArch-Phoenix for easier configuration
• added eduke32, poweroff and retroarch-phoenix icons
• better desktop icons settings
• added /etc/asound.conf to solve ALSA sound issues on HDMI output
• added a custom udev script so that plugged gamepads are automatically readable by default user (no more chmod/chown needed)
• upgraded Debian packages

Download area

Windows Update NoNag

Most advanced users, sysadmins and developers that I know are extremely pissed off by the looping nag-screen that Windows Update shows after you install updates.

a bright example of an anti-feature

Although I have found online countless explanations about how to disable the above bastard dialog, they never worked quite well for me.

Since I am a developer, I switched to heavy artillery:

https://github.com/neagix/misc/tree/master/WindowsUpdateNoNag

You can grab the binary directly from here:

https://github.com/neagix/misc/raw/master/WindowsUpdateNoNag/WindowsUpdateNoNag-AnyCpu-1.0-binary.zip

Right after you see that lovely dialog again, run this with Administrator privileges.
NOTE: this tool will disable it only till your next windows update

ODROID forum members Monthly Award of June

Yesterday I have received news that my project has won the ODROID community Project Monthly Award! Yuppiee!!

One more reason to party :)

Many thanks again to mdrjr and Lisa from Hardkernel for this awesome award - this is really one of the best forum communities I have ever partecipated in. 

I always start trying to make something cool with Gimp, then I end up with some awkward graphics like this. Fair enough, I can't do better anyway :)

This means an extra U2 to play with :) However, I have already 2 and I am not greedy, so I started thinking what it would be the natural usage of such great dev board...

Got any idea?

RetroArch! I quickly decided to have the RetroArch project, in the person of Squarepusher, receive this hardware as a gift for the best of both our growing communities. I see potential for the combination ODROID+RetroArch and on the U2 RetroArch truly shines as a comet of power and great features (like the RGUI).

See how poetic and generous I become when I think about my beloved U2 and retro gaming? :)

More to see on this channel...

My commitment to ODROID community and RetroArch will now be even more motivated. I keep taking care of these releases and news because, as I said in the beginning, I would like to see a skilled development community grow up around these great hardware/software projects.

I have plans for better integrated releases and also tighter testing/development support of RetroArch cores..keep tuned and/or join the efforts if you feel the challenge :)

Duke Nukem 3D on ODROID

Chocolate Duke Nukem 3D: a sad story

I am a Duke Nukem 3D aficionado and I've recently read with interest Fabien Sanglard's review of Duke Nukem 3D source code. As he writes, the original source code was really horrible.

The Duke on his glorious cover - 3D Realms page here

Fabien also started a Chocolate port, so I grabbed it to try to run the Duke glories on ODROID/Linux.

I realized - in disappointment - that this was a quick hack to have it running on Mac, not a proper chocolate port.
Furthermore the provided Visual Studio solution files were referring to some previous version of the project, with non-matching paths and broken includes - making it also not possible to build it on Windows (this portable is not, my young padawan).

During my own quest to have it building properly on Linux I decided to use Canassa's patches, since they seemed to be done in the reasonable framework of a chocolate port, and then I wrote my own Linux makefiles because Canassa is apparently also a Mac user - thus no Linux portability efforts were added at any time.

My chocolate improvements

In my fork I have added proper CMake support, grab it here: Chocolate Duke Nukem 3D with Linux compile support

However the status of this codebase is almost hopeless:

• will not work on anything else than 32bit systems
• some glitch when player dies
• the 3D Realms logo has some palette quirk, doesn't look like it used to be

Me unhappy :(


If you try to run it on a 64bit system you get only the initial animation, then it goes on "Segmentation fault". That's kind of expected, given the waterfall of integer-to-pointer and pointer-to-integer warnings shown during compilation.

Next step: eduke32

I didn't start from this more advanced port because I wanted to use a faithful version of Duke Nukem 3D, however I am now pleased to see that customization of the built eduke32 is possible to an extent that most advanced features can be turned off.

This is perfect for our ODROID retro-goals! :)

I have done some fixes and prepared a build script, grab them here: eduke32 patch to run on ODROID + optimized build script

Diplomacy is the best feature of this game, as I remember

And enjoy Duke Nukem 3D - it runs flawlessly fast on my U2!

P.S.: I have added the eduke32 binary to release 0.7.3 of odroid-debian-wheezy, or you can download it from here (will only work with Debian Wheezy 7.1 ARM hardfloat)