Lost in Translation

ADI64 has sent me a link to this page yesterday. It allows you to batch translate text through many languages and back to English with Yahoo’s Babelfish engine. As you may guess, the results are rarely the same as the beginning input. Here’s an example:

Original English Text:
lost in translation

Translated to Japanese:
変換で失われる

Translated back to English:
It is lost with conversion

Translated to Chinese:
它丢失与转换

Translated back to English:
It loses and converts

Translated to French:
Il détruit et convertit

Translated back to English:
It destroys and converts

Translated to German:
Es zerstört und konvertiert

Translated back to English:
It destroys and converts

Translated to Italian:
Distrugge e converte

Translated back to English:
It destroys and it converts

Translated to Portuguese:
Destrói e converte

Translated back to English:
It destroys and it converts

Translated to Spanish:
Destruye y convierte

Translated back to English:
It destroys and it turns

What the hell?

Libnotify and Amarok 1.4.x -> LibnotifymaroK

Today I googled for libnotify and amarok in order to find a script that displays information from the OSD with libnotify (this is the gnome notification library mumble for example uses), so that it fits my gnome desktop better. There are a few scripts out there, the closest one to what I wanted here. But as soon as I installed it, I found a bug: The „body“ part of the message is empty, if there is a „&“ sign somewhere. So I fixed that bug (along with translating < and > ) and modified it a lot. A few hours later the script looks really nice:

LibnotifymaroK - displays English and German language

I decided to rename the script, because there are already so many „amarok libnotify“ scripts out there and put it at kde-apps.org – (thats right, here’s the download!). Enjoy!

kdemod: amarok displays information from wikipedia again

In the previous kdemod build of Amarok I have been using, there was a bug, which stopped amarok from displaying wikipedia articles about the music (artist, album, song), but now they fixed it and it works again

Crashday: fix for „blendTimePassed >= -0.001″

Last week a friend and I wanted to play Crashday. We already did so a few years ago and it worked more or less fine – its a buggy game. This time I am using my current Arch Linux only setup while he has both Arch Linux and Windows installed. The first suprise was that the game was working better with wine that with Windows on my friend’s setup. Sometimes the game starts, sometimes it doesn’t. But with wine it always works.

Anyway, we both tried wrecking bots and it worked fine, but as we tried multiplayer, my game (his one ran fine) always crashed shortly after the game was started. To be exact after the countdown of the game.

The error message I got said:

!!! Fatal error !!!
Assertion failed!
blendTimePassed >= -0.001

(file ..\netplayers\host_remotecar.cpp, line 253)

Trace stack:

(It doesn’t say anything after Trace stack, propably because they didn’t compile the game with debugging symbols)

My friend told me that we should be able to apply a hack on their exe in order to make the game work. So i started up my vmware’d XP and Crashday.exe in ollydbg (which doesn’t really work with wine). The error we had can be found as string two times in the binary and I started to take a closer look on the first one. In the code, it compares some value with -0.001 and if it is below that, it jumps to an address where it shows the error dialog (and kills the game).

Ollydbg, fixing Crashday

The trick is to remove a FSUB which substracts the value that will be compared with another one. This way it will stay over -0.001 and the game continues.

I don’t know if this error happens only with wine, but if you follow this tutorial, you should be able to fix it.

Oh and please note that the addresses on the screenshot will propably differ from your one.

Have fun with that awesome game