Apparently at a local trade show around DC, someone dropped that Panasonic needs a developer to write a device driver for a Panasonic card reader type thing. I wonder how hard that would be?

I’m really not interested in a job but always wondered how people plug in some device and then “magically” make it work on an OS. Apple has a guide to get started. I’ll let you know if I answer my own question or fall asleep in the process.

In other Mac news, my laptop died with a filesystem error and I had to basically rebuild it. Not bad for a 4 year old Powerbook (never ever formatted or rebuilt) but I’m still confused as to what happened. I basically did a fsck and it fsck’d-it-up.

Today while doing normal house cleaning I realized my mac keyboard was absolutely horrifying. It’s really bad because it’s most clear so you can see all the crap (cat hair). So I followed this guy’s guide for maximum advice-ocity.

I did what he said, plastic bag of soap, plugged drain. It all went fine. Didn’t really think about how many pieces there really are to a keyboard (a ton). The keys came off really nicely and I didn’t feel like I was risking anything (unlike my mac mini upgrade). Is this news? No, of course not. But after it was said and done I managed to put all the keys on without the reference picture above except for the volume, eject and numpad math symbol keys.

Things are a bit stupid with video cards these days. I’ve had this discussion with several people. Yeah, I don’t want to be playing with LED lights and hanging out on overclocking forums for the rest of my life either (cue personal preference). But some small part of me today couldn’t get over an SLI setup today.

It’s not really the hardware that is cool but the “clip in magazine” draw. For some reason the last PC I built had a very satisfying “memory install click” thing going on. You put the DIMMs in like an ammo magazine. Is it worth it for some stupid clicking? No of course not. But that doesn’t stop me from somehow feeling the tactile clicking of two PCI Express cards in there whirring away. Especially whirring since the R600 fell on its face today.

I got started on this surfing thread since the 2900xt came out today and it’s pretty bad (as in bad). I mean ATI really lost focus or something. Unless the drivers turn around, I don’t see any reason to believe in ATI this time around. Which means Apple will likely be sticking with Nvidia (who knows) for the updates and Leopard. But the short and skinny of all the reviews on the net is “it runs hot, it’s not high-end and it’s late”.

Regardless of sanity, I priced out just a barebones upgrade including CPU, motherboard, memory, video cards to try and support Supreme Commander or whatever. It came to $1800 where $2500 is basically a new machine. SLI 8800gtx is $3000 with dual core. Add a Dell 2707 monitor and hey we’re at $4000 / Mac Pro territory.

1. What is out for DX10? Nothing.
2. Do I want to run a 800w power supply? No.
3. Is early adopting stupid? Yes.
4. Do I have enough toys? Yes.
5. Is my PC outdate? Not really if I lower quality settings.
6. Do I want to be a hardware guy forever? No and that’s already not true.

So of course this is all just playing around with newegg. But that still doesn’t shake the “ammo magazine” thing that SLI communicates to me. I don’t know why. It’s been a weird day, I thought the R600 was going to kick ass. Oh well.

For now, I’m happy enough with “software” projects and learning but at some point I hope I can click in a couple of GPU magazines and push forward with whatever the tech-de-jour is in 2008/2009.

Zod, in Izod, with iPod. Get it? — What.

Hard[OCP] is a PC hardware review site. They recently had a forum topic called show your LCD setups. Everyone posted pictures of their LCDs. Some are very standard and some are very elaborate.

Here is some of my favorites from the thread (from about page 280 to page 380).

When work is tough, the tough buy crap they don’t need.

My weekly trek of gas filling led me to my least favorite bastardization of retail stock-problems and parody of gamer culture. Best Buy. They had a few deals that only a desperate brick & mortar can offer but mostly they had instant gratification for sale.

Playstation 2: Viewtiful Joe 2 (2004) Capcom Entertainment
Metacritic Score: 85

This title seems to pop up in people’s memorable list. The 2nd one didn’t rate as high as the first one. Metacritic pretty much lines up with what I like. 80s and better are worthwhile. Side scroller cell shaded beat-em-up.

It looks zany and crazy and I don’t own anything like it. Cept Jiewtiful Voe and that’s completely different. Completely. Different. *ahem*

Playstation 2: Rogue Galaxy (2007) Sony Computer Entertainment
Metacritic Score: 85
Ack! The banner ads! Everywhere I go! Banner ads of Rogue Galaxy! Foul temptress! Atlus, oh creator of media for Okatus and Japanophiles, why do you mock me? Do I dare eat from your foul tree? Do I step through the dark door of burning outcasts clad in plate-mail made of undead souls? Atlus! Destroyer of social skills! Animator of manga frames! Ruiner of dental habits!

Oh my god. The hobby. It’s full of stars. *dies*

Playstation 2: Rule of Rose (2006) Atlus Software
Metacritic Score: 53
Yep. I deserve this. I’m the one who forgot the context. It had a reduced price at Best Buy and I was standing there thinking:

1. Ok, was this the game that was on that guy’s amazon list that was into the D&D crap and Baldur’s Gate:Dark Alliance for PS2 … which is totally sucking ass right now … god damn it .. even that was on sale for $7. I think I’d have more fun buying $7 of bazooka joe and sticking my ass to a speeding Gremlin … oh sorry kid who is now scarred for life
2. Or was this the game that has received rave reviews by all and all who have not played are mortal fools with foolishly held fool-money?

I chose #2. I chose poorly.

Playstation 2: Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (2006) Rockstar Games
Metacritic Score: 78
My PSP is never used. Except for Lumines, Loco Roco and as an online mp3 player. Sad really. This was a pretty cheap port. I’m finishing up GTA:SA and so I might as well tack this on to the end of the series. GTA clones like Crackdown (360) just won’t cut it until GTA4 comes out. And even if GTA4 does come out, it’ll likely be the best on the PS3 which is best bought at the end of 2007 when they get those 65nm parts in and drop the price by 20%.

Xbox 360: Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (2007) Capcom
Metacritic Score: 80
Chalk this one up to a complete lack of self-control. It’s pretty obvious that Capcom puts out the arcade style games and waits for you to write the backstory and the plot. I’m fine with that. Lost Planet is going to be a frozen shooter with a massive single player mission. I’m not interested in the online play, too many young kids and my Gold subscription is going to run out unless The Wookie (or anyone) wants to run some Gears of War co-op. Tim and I had a blast doing that.

It was 10 degrees here. How can a frozen planet not fit the bill?

Consumption In The Mail

Beginning Mac OSX Programming
This book looks pretty tasty. Has insight into the horrifically different world of Mac’s NSobjects and the like. I have another book that hits on a few of the Xcode topics in a better way than Wrox usually does but this would be a good read even if I fail miserably at digesting it all.

Xcode is a fantastic IDE and I’d like to know more about the platform. Apps like Acquisition, Xfactor, Textmate, Yojimbo, Handbrake and Writeroom are elegant and singularly available only on the Mac. Few are free. I would like to know if it’s too hard to write free or if it’s too specialized. Learning the basics might give me some insight and possibly enable me to fill in a gap somewhere (far, far, far down the road).

Wow, okay … less serious …

We3
Comic book about cats and dogs trying to get home. The art looks absolutely fantastic. And nothing soothes the wage-slave like a picture book made for retards. Oh, yeah, it’s artsy and crap. Has something to do with expression. *zzzz* Pictures!

I’d be happy to pass on it except for the robotic cat jumping out at my preferences. Yes, cat, I see you and you rule.

Playstation 2: Shadow Hearts: From The New World (2006)
Aruze / Xseed
Metacritic Score: 77
Ok so this is a bit of a risk. There’s two in this series before this one but I think I’ll just see how this one is. It’s probably going to be similar to Star Ocean (which I found kinda beyond my tolerance of plot/geekiness). But who knows.

Similar to this whole “jumping into a series”, is Metal Gear Solid of which I have no knowledge of. Of course, everyone goes to pieces at the mere mention of MGS. The PS3 is also riding a major piece of its reputation on this mystery title. All I know about MGS I learned from vgcats. Hilarious.

Playstation 2: Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria (2006) Square Enix
Metacritic Score: 84
This one was a bit harder to find out there. Amazon with its dark pacts of resellers managed to put up a reseller by the name of OMG_BAI4_GAMES_LESS with an amazing multi-thousand number of sales. This reseller partnership that Amazon has just wouldn’t cut it in the real world. A used car lot owned by MR_ROBOTO_4AWESOMAH_AUTOS would inspire images of spikey haired salesmen screaming ???! and running after me with large stereotypical swords.

Playstation 2: Ico (2001) Sony Computer Entertainment
Metacritic Score: 91
Ico. People can’t say enough about this one.

Yahoo Games said:

A subtle intoxicating journey, and one of the best games around.

Gamespy said:

One of the absolute greatest games you will ever play. With gorgeous graphics, sounds, and environments it’s easily one of the most aesthetically pleasing as well. The level and puzzle design is absolutely brilliant as well.

PSXNation said:

Ico isn’t a new type of game but rather one taken to near perfection. Rarely does a game gel like this and it[s simply the work of a master.

Well I can’t knock it until I rock it but it has a lot to live up to. Comments from sources like PSXNation just make me roll my eyes. They are a bit tied down with regards to their audience. “2007 Honda Civic Magazine says that the 2007 Honda Civic is amazing!” Right. Turning off the Comic Book Guy switch…

Playstation 2: Dark Cloud 2 (2003) Sony Computer Entertainment America
Metacritic Score: 87
Level 5 is really putting out the titles lately, or maybe its me just noticing the PS3 title White Knight Story. To diverge a bit, that White Knight movie floating around (penny arcade commented on it), it is likely just a bunch of pre-vis rendered stuff. I’m keeping my hopes up because the platform could pull it off. Who knows. Pre-release screenshots etc are always lies. Just look at Gran Turismo 4 on gamespot to see historical screenshots that are impossibly clear and massively huge.

Anywho, a few have commented that Dark Cloud is the PS2′s Zelda. Hmm. I’ll have to bounce that off Edgar … I think he’s still convulsing after beating Twilight Princess.

7167 7174 7177
The inside edge of the Mini has a slight valley in it. I folded a piece of paper around the outside and traced inside this valley border with a pencil and cut the stencil. Then I printed out a 8×10 picture.

718071837186
I taped the stencil and cut the picture. Not rocket science. The inside valley is what made it accurate.

Printed on plain paper. Looks ok for what the hack it is. Will probably fall apart in two weeks. Or my cat will eat it.

I have a gentoo linux box that shares out a usb printer. The shared printer through Linux lets us print with only one printer in the house. I make this happen with samba and cups. It hasn’t been the best because it has quirks and problems every once and a while. A network printer would be a better solution, however cutting edge printing technology doesn’t blow my skirt up. I’ve had the same ink slave since college.

Then suddenly, my chica couldn’t print from her mac laptop. She’d print something, the printer app “HP 812c” (the name of the printer) would pop up (similar as the printer icon in the tasktray) and tell her there was an error: NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE. The same thing happened with my mac a while ago but I figured it was just me. Now, she doesn’t update as often as I do and I read a post saying that people are having all kinds of problems with the smbclient and blah blah. So it’s possible that a recent update nuked her print ability, ahem, our print ability. She was our last hope. Our sole printer. Now no one can print mapquest directions and files named hee_hee.txt contianing important information like Your dumb face smells like stupid, hee hee..

Gentoo is a great OS. Linux is a great OS. But for a print server, it blows. It’s impossible to remember how to clear the queue, how to log in to administrate the printer classes and all the rest of the instructions that I had to keep in a text file to remind myself how to troubleshoot a home printer every 3 months.

I googled and googled for this NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE weirdness but couldn’t find anything. I played with samba and remember doing this kind of troubleshooting 3 months ago. Why does this crap work for a while and just break?

I threw up my hands and peddled to the Apple Store and bought a Mac Mini with the intention of sharing it out with AppleTalk or rendezvous for less home-stress.

The switch was easy. I booted it up. It asked if I wanted to migrate data. I said yes and connected a firewire cable to my laptop and the mini. 50GBs later, it booted up with my wallpaper, apps, bookmarks, passwords, wireless network settings, iTunes library, startup login items … everything. Except a few apps didn’t come over right. Subethaedit, Azuerus, DiscBlaze, X-Chat Aqua all had little ? icons in the dock. I found that all of them are PowerPC apps. So I downloaded new versions and everything was fine.

Then it really started to get slow. I was running updates, installing Xcode and doing lots of stuff. The screen would lag and freeze… it ran slower than my powerbook. I ordered 2gb of DDR2 memory off of Newegg and found some instructions on how to upgrade the mini’s memory. I’ll be getting a putty knife I suppose…

I named the Mini Stormbringer, as a new Transformers namimg convention. It beats my lame Calvin & Hobbes one. All the cables were there from my docked laptop, now my laptop can roam free.

I went through my ~/Apps folder (where I throw new installs) and I deleted all my PPC apps. They run way too slow and I was finding replacements for most of them. Firefox runs brilliantly, slaying my g4. All the Apple apps run fantastic. I also found a way to span three screens with my favorite reverse KVM (Synergy). I didn’t know it could do three screens but I guess it can. My XP box is in the middle, the mini is on the left and my powerbook is on the right. It has no problem copying the clipboard from the powerbook (right) all the way to the mini’s clipboard (left) even though it’s the XP’s keyboard and OS (center) that is executing the Ctrl+C (or Apple+C).

All and all, it runs faster than my g4 but doesn’t smoke my AMD PC (fx-57). But it’s apples to oranges, Vista isn’t exactly springy on my AMD box either.

I tried running World of Warcraft on the mini and it’s an interesting experience. It’s faster than running on my crappy powerbook but it’s not too much different than playing slow-pitch on Ether. The mini has this really, really crappy video card. It’s very similar to the business machines that dell loves to sell people in corporations. The mini has an Intel 960gma card in it. It’s very close to the ever popular Intel gma945 and gma950 card as I said many companies bought in the XP SP1/2 hayday. The thing is, Vista and less so OSX really won’t love this card too much. I’m not being a fanboy here, the mini gets by just fine in the OSX world. But then you fire up a game and it really shows its colors. In the Vista world, well, that’s why Intel released the 965 chipset. You’re going to have to upgrade to a minor gaming rig (very minor) and screw that $500 dell business junk. It’s not going to cut it. The corporate world doesn’t care about video performance. And yet, here comes Vista. Better get the intel 965 next time around in that Dell box. Or, just skip Vista until SP1 and WinFS.

Anyway, whatever card is in it, it’s only slightly better than my powerbook’s ATI 9700 which is a real dog. The 960 has no video memory on it! Yeah, that’s right, it shares system memory. This is bad. This is real bad! Video memory is usually super fast. It can do all these great tricks before it hits the slow lane cpu bus. Developers know it, hardware people know it. And consumers looking to save money (like me), don’t care. You cut a corner and bam, no video performance when it comes to games.

But that’s ok. The damn machine is like a drink coaster. It’s quiet (it spins up in WoW but not even 25% what my powerbook does), it fits in a tiny space on my desk and it actually shared out my printer correctly. I hope to god I can avoid the cups.conf file and just get on with my work/play when I come home. Anyway, I’ll let you know how the memory upgrade goes. It needs it badly.

Check that iStat dashboard widget to the right. See how it picked up the icon from the harddisk? Pretty cool.

The apple ads that have been running for months are fuel on the flame. It sparks a pointless debate among nerds and geeks about who beats what, who is better and other things that people don’t care about. Even though a spoof made me laugh and giggle, it’s woefully inaccurate and I think it’s because people forget what is actually wrong with Macs. People say games. And they are right in a sense. But the lazy person says games forgetting that Macs run Windows.

There are only a handful of PC games that are even worth bothering with. Everything else that is tasty is on consoles. I mean, what PC exclusive title is there? Oh sorry, what good PC exclusive title is there? Most of it is crap or can be found elsewhere.

Half Life 2. This is the only PC game that you should be worrying about when getting a Mac. It’s on the xbox but it’s not the same. And it’s not on OSX because it’s based on DirectX with no hope of OpenGL. But yeah, it runs fine on Windows, running on a Macbook. The Macbook Pro has an ATI X1600 video card in it and the X1600 is more than enough to power Half-Life2. Half-Life 2 runs nice on almost everything, so we’re not saying much here when we say HL2 runs fine on a Macbook.

But to up the ante, in terms of graphical complexity, something like F.E.A.R. would have a harder time running. But we’re talking about a laptop here, not exactly the best platform for these things. Laptops are built for portability. Even my old PC has a hard time with F.E.A.R. at many times and it’s much bigger, heavier and (at the time) more expensive than a Macbook Pro. Again, a bad comparison, desktop (PC or otherwise) versus laptop.

So then we hit the Mac’s desktop line looking for something more substantial. They have the iMac which is a poor solution for a gamer because it carries the same upgrade problems that the laptops have. They pack more of a punch but many would find the embedded screen a turn off. On the flipside, the iMac would be a great LAN-party machine but who does that but once a year? Moving up the product line, we reach the tip-top Mac Pro. Although a nice workstation, it includes mac video cards so you can’t just throw in a PC card and expect it to work.

No, Apples do suck for gaming but not completely. If you named a few titles, they either run on a cheaper console or they run fine using bootcamp. So this is not the way to mock Macs. What follows below is a guide similar to above.

How to Make Fun of Macs

The Mac Pro uses FB-DIMMs
Hey, want to piss off a mac zealot? Tell them to order a Mac Pro with 16gb of memory. The 16gb kit will cost you $5400 on the Apple store for the memory kit alone. It’s super fast server memory but it slays the Mac fan’s wallet trying to get to the magical 2-4gb configuration.

The Mac Pro is the only gaming rig
$2499 for a quad core box that only needs one core to game. Adding memory is crazy expensive. And, that’s not including a nice video card. Granted, Dell’s price for a workstation is about the same (or more) but I wouldn’t buy a workstation on Dell’s site for a gaming rig. Apple really has nothing to offer in the single-core, SDRAM category.

Mac video cards are not PC video cards
Macs have a special bios on them so you can’t just upgrade your machine with any card out of a retail store. Nope, you have to order a Mac video card even if it’s got a model name you recognize from the PC world.

OpenGL 2.0 support
Even the latest OS 10.4 has OpenGL footnotes. See, they bundled OpenGL 1.5 and provided all the extensions to essentially make it 2.0 worthy. But since they don’t include all the extensions, you can’t depend on it as a game developer. That means you are always checking for certain features not able to depend on the 2.0 spec. This is fixed in 10.5 when they fully implement OpenGL 2.1.

Updating video drivers on a whim
You can’t just go to nvidia.com and grab the latest nvidia drivers. Since OSX graphically accelerates the desktop, they have to be careful about breaking stuff. Apple releases their drivers after pinging them off Nvidia/ATI, which takes a while because they can’t pull the I’m Dell, do my bidding! crap.

AA and AF settings
You can’t control AA and AF without getting a 3rd party tool is OSX. Usually it’s ok because games started providing screens to configure this a few years ago. But if you have a copy of Madden 1949 around, you might have to download a tool to do what Windows does with the display properties.

Ruby on OSX is broken, Python is broken, more is …
OSX might be Unix but it’s a Unix with a broken leg. There are packages all around the net to replace crappy versions of Ruby and Python with real ones but what did I just spend a premium for?

Wrap Up

Hopefully these points will get the fanboy flames burning bright, annoying any decent and normal people around you as you flame the Interweb’s public message boards with inconsequential argumenative details. Certainly the lame arguments of “Macs don’t get viruses because virus writers make viruses for the biggest market” is the laziest technical analysis I’ve ever seen. The virus thing is a complex issue but I assure you it’s only partially related to market share. Sudo-model. Vista’s doing it.

The market share number is another metric that I find both laughable and tear-inducing. On the one hand, market share drives everything including the forementioned I’m Dell line. But on the flip-side is the thing Windows fanboys miss the most. Which is the simple fact that a large user base means more legacy support. Apple has been limping along forever at 5% (depending on your source) and although that’s depressing in one sense, it’s also bright in another sense. Apple is free to make major changes and innovate. Microsoft was supposed to make a major change in Vista but now that’s being pushed to Vienna. Never heard of Vienna? It’s just the smoking gun that Vista is XP SP3. From engadget:

James calls Fiji a sort of “Vista R2,” which should include most of those fancy features Microsoft had to cut out of Vista to get it released this century.
…
but Fiji has nothing on Vienna, which is purported to feature a complete overhaul of the OS, including a break in compatibility with “all applications,” though hopefully Microsoft will have some Apple-esque transition schemes in place before that time comes.

What engadget is referring to is the OS9 to OSX transition in which no old apps ran. The OS was rewritten and a legacy mode called “Classic” was introduced. You could launch your old apps but it would load a legacy layer first. Eventually people replaced their apps and now Classic hasn’t been used for many years. The same thing will have to happen with Windows in order to innovate. Anything less is DOS maintenance.

Speaking of Vista, here is Vista running in Parallels Coherence mode under OSX. Not a fake screenshot. The line is so gray, it’s just laughable when a ytmnd.com parody tries to make it black or white again. I mean, what do you call a Mac fanboy who runs Windows?

So I saw a story on slashdot that Vista 5728 had been released to the public. So, I signed up for another BS hotmail account, signed up for Windows Live and signed up for an RC1 key. Downloaded the DVD .iso, burned it and installed it on a blank drive I had.

So I realize that Vista is just an RC at this point, I realize that my views won’t change the world (hi, obvious) and I’m a Mac Fanboy Extreme. However, I’ve tried lots of OSs in my day and I really don’t like taking crap design or taking crap tech no matter what the brand is.

The installer was just lovely (seriously it is). It’s such an improvement over the old 80×20 DOS installers of the NT/2000 days. Finally an installer on par with most Linux distros, Solaris, BeOS and OSX. It certainly took them a while but you don’t need partition magic to sort out what partition is what or what disk has how much space. I nuked an unknown partition and installed on a blank drive very quickly.

The install didn’t take too long. I had to enter my serial number, choose my user icon (it’s this huge MS Live push) and some other “preferencey” options. Soon, the login screen was staring at me and I was impressed with the experience so far.

I added a few gadgets and this is what we ended up with. RC1 Vista ‘Ultimate’.

It’s a huge improvement to XP. It’s short of OSX though. The nagging popups are still there, “do you want to run this? are you sure?”. I couldn’t even edit boot.ini on my old XP partition, said “access denied”, although I could have messed with the NTFS permissions, it seems like the average user is just going to run as administrator again.

I copied WoW over from XP and fired it up, no problem. IE7 is nice but not as nice as Firefox. For some reason, MS just doesn’t get fonts. I swear. My site looks like ass and they don’t have the AntiAliasing any better than XP. Some apps just look like blurry XP apps. The services view is still the same as it was in 2000. Notepad still sucks.

On the plus side, I really, really love the Gadgets. They might be a total rip-off but the grab handles are pretty cool. Windows Mail is slick and Live Mail supports Gmail (it detects the domain and sets it up as POP). The control panel is a bit confusing, many times I felt like there were no new features and they just shuffled everything around for change’s sake. The screensavers are nice but there are some that suck and there are some that are so obviously ripped off from Apple (ribbon, I’m looking at you).

But most of all, the file structure is laughably ripped off. Let’s take a look at a user’s home folder on OSX:

$ pwd
/Users/chris


What is it in Vista?

> cd
c:\Users\chris


Rofl. Whatever. Vista has some things good about it but all in all, I think XP does a good and fast job without charging me $399 for “Ultimate Edition”.