Sourcetrunk (Episode 012) : ddrescue

This episode will cover every block of your hard drive with ddrescue, give you a window into the free and online chess community with Eboard and warp you back to the good old days of Battlechess with Brutal Chess

I. system tools : Ddrescue
GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors.
Ddrescue does not truncate the output file if not asked to. So, every time you run it on the same output file, it tries to fill in the gaps.

The basic operation of ddrescue is fully automatic. That is, you don’t have to wait for an error, stop the program, read the log, run it in reverse mode, etc.

If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point.

www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue

II. games : eboard
eboard is a chess interface for Unix-like systems (GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc.) based on the GTK+ GUI toolkit. It provides a chess board interface to ICS (Internet Chess Servers) like FICS and to chess engines like GNU Chess, Sjeng and Crafty.
eboard is under development, and its primary purpose is serving as interface to FICS.

eboard is Free Software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

eboard.sourceforge.net www.freechess.org

III. the little extra : Brutal Chess

The newest release of Brutal Chess is now available for public download just in time for Christmas (direct download link). For now there is only a Windows installer and source tarball available. In the future we should have a Mac package and one’s for other Linux distros.

Next up is networking support for Internet chess servers and third party chess engines. As always, bug reports submitted to the Sourceforge tracker are always appreciated. When submitting them please include operating system, gfx card and drivers, and any other applicable information.

brutalchess.sourceforge.net

music from Atomica on music.podshow.com
theme from Brand New Sin on music.podshow.com

beer on this episode : Verboden Vrucht