This is a very small update for SymSteam that fixes two bugs you probably didn’t even know existed. The first, a simple spelling mistake in an error message. The second, a cock-up with pointers that meant that if an error occurred while deleting an old symbolic link an empty error message would be displayed. Not particularly helpful.
Since releasing the first version of the script I use to deploy this blog to S3, I’ve iterated on the script a little bit and made a few changes. Most of the changes in version 2 of the script are syntax changes to the script itself that make it a little bit easier to read1 however there are a couple of functionality changes.
If you’re the type of person who likes to read the footers of websites (who doesn’t?) you’ll have seen that this website is “powered” by Jekyll. In case you haven’t heard, Jekyll is a static site generator that is especially useful for generating static blogs. That is, you run the Jekyll program on a computer, point it at a “source” directory for your website and let it generate a load of HTML files that you can upload to practically any web server that serves files. There’s no need to install PHP or Rails and no need to get a fancy server that can run them. Jekyll is a really awesome utility and that is a terrible description of what it does. You’re better off checking out the GitHub page and seeing how that describes Jekyll.
After building a new computer recently I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 12.10 on it alongside Windows. Since the computer doesn’t have a wireless card and isn’t anywhere near a router, I bought a cheap Wireless USB adapter so that I could connect to my wireless network. I actually bought the adapter several years ago and used it on a computer running Ubuntu 10.04 that was in a similar situation. The adapter I bought was a Belkin F5D8053, the v6 revision. I bought this adapter because I’d been told that it had good compatibility with Linux and I remember it working perfectly well in Ubuntu 10.04. I was surprised to find then that when I used the adapter with my new installation of Ubuntu 12.10 it was very unreliable. The adapter worked but after arround five minutes of usage, the connection speed would drop substantially and anything, be it on the internet or my local network, was incredibly slow.
It may have taken nearly 9 months but beta 2 of SymSteam is finally available for download. This is a huge update for SymSteam that completely changes how it works and fixes many bugs as a result. SymSteam no longer manages drives based on their names, rather, it relies on the UUID of a drive to determine if the drive is the Steam drive. This makes SymSteam more reliable in situations where you have drives with the same name but it does introduce a new requirement. The drive you’re storing your games on must have a UUID which essentially means that the drive must be HFS+ formatted1.