Author Archives: George

Failed to load steamui.so ?

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Recent Steam update switched it to SDL2, so unless you have the very latest libSDL2 installed, you’ll get an error while trying to load Steam: Fatal error: Failed to load steamui.so The short test will quickly tell you the problem: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/Steam/ubuntu12_32 ld $HOME/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steamui.so which will print a bunch of lines starting from: ld: warning: libSDL2-2.0.so.0, [...]

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Installing Steam at the unsupported Linux which is not Ubuntu

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Today at Feb 14th Valve released Steam for Linux. At this moment it officially only supports Ubuntu. However it is easy to run it on any other Linux distribution, in my case at OpenSuSE 12.2.

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Preventing WordPress comments spam

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There seem to be an easy way to prevent a significant number of WordPress comment spam. The majority of spam comments nowadays come with either a bunch of URLs, or with a generic message such as: Hi there! Just discovered your site while i was browsing and i must say that i found it quite [...]

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In Re: LivingSocial class action

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Or what to do if you stuck with a LivingSocial voucher which has expired? Usual disclaimer – I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Use it at your own risk. A few months ago I purchased a “voucher” from LivingSocial for a Golden Gate Park Segway Tour. LivingSocial presented the voucher as [...]

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Help to fight Internet censorship!

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Since Nov 1st 2012 the new Russian law implementing the Internet censorship comes into effect. This law allows several agencies of the Russian government to add any Internet site they consider “harmful to children” into the government-mandated block list. Russian Internet providers are legally obligated to block access to the sites which are present in [...]

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Reverse-engineering the KaraFun file format. Part 4, the encryption

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So far the files we have seen had no encryption. However some of our users pointed out there are some files which are encrypted. While the encrypted KFN files were still analyzed and dumped properly, the resulted files were unreadable. Of course the player need to support those files too, so this is something which we need [...]

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Reverse-engineering the KaraFun file format. Part 3, the Song.ini file

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This is quite simple. We look at the song.ini file and it is obvious immediately where the text and the timing information is as those are the only lines with enough numbers.

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Reverse-engineering the KaraFun file format. Part 2, the directory

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In the first part we found out the header format, and that it does not provide us with the directory location. However we know there must be a directory, as the KaraFun application must know where exactly in a file the files are stored, and how large are they. At minimum there should be the directory [...]

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Reverse-engineering the KaraFun file format. Part 1, the header

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Several of our users have expressed disappointment that our Ulduzsoft Karaoke Player for Android does not support the popular KaraFun Karaoke format. This format seem to be very popular in some countries, and unfortunately there seem to be no player on Android capable of playing those files. Even the KaraFun Android application does not play those files [...]

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Ulduzsoft Karaoke Player for Android is out of Beta now!

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Today we released Ulduzsoft Karaoke Player for Android version 1.12. It has been a beta for close to nine months, and it is labor time. The application seem to be well-received, with a competitive functionality and the most bugs seem to be fixed. We had a long discussion about the app monetization and decided to [...]

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