This is a widget off Microsoft’s gadget site. It really has no point and kind of meanders to life as an ironic creative sophomoric attempt. All these community sites deteriorate into a cesspool just as the gadget site is starting to. Eventually either moderators and quality content silence the squeaky wheels or the squeaky wheels start hitting the Top50 pages. If the Top50 sucks, then the population of the community sucks at which point complete suckage is achieved.

“Pop some bubbles” it says. I assume that when you click on a bubble, it plays a sound. I really wonder if the bubble animates or “pops” but honestly I don’t want to support their efforts in a HTTP download count increment. Maybe HTTP download count excrement.

Apple’s site is conversely filled with slightly higher quality content but it’s had more time to do so. With the greater amount of content, Apple can pick (or just have) a better Top50. However, there are some real stinkers in there. There’s a bunch of useless toys as well as countless website plugs.

All in all, it’s the same as Vista. 80% polish, better than the last release.

Check out that screenshot above. It’s a Nvidia tech demo. My new 8800gts video card still has lots to test and tweak still. Not really a smart buy on my part. DX10 is nowhere around except demos and even the runtime is married to Vista (ahem $399). I’d say that the above picture might impart some static benediction for my reckless consumerism even when stricken stupid by a massively-multiplayer-northern-virginia-mortage-game (MMNVMG).

Oh right, stricken stupid.

Brak. Grawk. Meat. Grok, grok. Meat good. Grrrr. Mongo think gooch shading pretty played out these days. Brak.

UPDATE: Ran into this little gem. It’s off windowsultimate.com where they say I can download a wallpaper just like the retail box that is “displayed on my mantel”. I’m not impressed by the fake blog, as arstechnica has already covered, it’s a sad attempt to justify the $399 price tag maybe?

An Ultimate-centric wallpaper showing off the “strands.” Just like the ones you see on the Ultimate box you have displayed on your mantel, and that grace the front page of this website. 30″ widescreen edition (2560×1600 pixels)

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”.

Apple is announcing a $2499 desktop.

“8 fully buffered DOIMMs, an incredible design and beautiful, simple access to it all. We’ve had a lot of fun building great configurations for our customers. One standard configuration… Dual 2 2.66 dual core Xeons, 1 GB, 667 MHz FB-DIMM. 250GB HD. Nvidia geforce 7300GT, 256 MB and 16xc superdrive for $2499. I know what you’re thinking. Apple makes the best computers but they’re expensive. We’re going to bust that myth. Similar configuration about a thousand dollars less than Dell.”

Rofl. The cheap mac is here.

After reading a terrible, horrible Vista review on a Windows review site, I can’t help but laugh at Vista-ish promises. And I’m not turning a blind eye. I want Vista to be good, just as Paul Thurrott said. He’s not bashing Vista. After all, winsupersite.com has to be pro-windows right? But it seems even the fanboys are not falling for it.

Why do I see a vaporware review on gamespot? What’s up with the blatant windows logo placement all throughout the article? I feel like I’m in Windows occupied Germany here! Why is this being featured right next to an Apple bootcamp article? “Oh, they’re being fair. Featuring a Windows story and a Mac story.” Yeah, fine. I’m all for fairness. But Vista isn’t out yet and Bootcamp is. Obviously, bootcamp is a pretty simple app compared to an entire OS. But again, to the ends of vaporware, I banish you gamespot. You are getting paid for this Vista feature. You are getting paid in a major way.

What do I say? What do all my friends say?

“I use XP for gaming. I only game on XP. The only reason I keep a PC around is for games. Without games, I wouldn’t have a PC. In all the things I do with my PC, there is very little that I do outside of gaming. I guess PC iz t3h game is what I’m trying to say.”

Yes. Great. So no wonder why Microsoft is sprinting to gamespot throwing money at them. It’s all so clear now. No one is buying your Xbox360 so you better start making false promises and Vista compatible banner ads. That way, people will wait a long time for Vista to deliver us from evil and dry up the revenue stream of AAPL. Except winsupersite.com didn’t bite. And neither am I.

When AAPL releases their Intel desktop, I’m buying one. It has WinFS on it. It’s called spotlight. Every time I write a file, the OS indexes it. So there’s no Windows search dog and a 5 minute wait. “Yes! Just what I wanted! I always wanted a companion when I’m searching for my .txt file with Bobby’s phone number in it!”

Hey! Where is that .zip I downloaded? Hrm, what feels natural … what should I tell the computer to do … give me an animated character! Everyone knows that cartoons search filesystems! O_o

Anyway, look at the gamespot picture up top. “If this is DirectX 9, imagine how Unreal Engine 3 games will look in DirectX 10.” This is the most stupid thing I’ll hear this month. Thanks gamespot. Now I know things can’t get any dum-ar. What a relief.

1. The graphics API has as much do to with how pretty a game looks as skin has to do with how pretty a person is. “Oh, but pretty people have skin!” Not relavent. DX10 can make games look nice, shiney with all kinds of fireworks but only if you design it that way. DX10 isn’t going to be something you type in: “enable_dx10=true! go!”, and then Quake4 starts blowing your mind.
2. This is juvenile. “The Dodge Viper has 500 horsepower. Imagine a car with a million horsepower! Wow!”
3. Like Hic said: showing off a game’s graphics is like bringing your dog’s hair to a dog show.

Group think is a bitch. Even if Vista completely sucks, everyone is still going to buy it. Because, that’s what we run at work. That’s what everyone else is using. Bill Gates is rich, he must be smart (actually he is smart .. but he’s lucky too). Everyone runs Windows so everyone runs Windows. Fine, run what you want. But wave your finger at Gamespot for stuffing their ears with Gates money.

Jesus fucking Christ, I’m choking on my own rage here.

I have a billion messages but OSX Mail always was showing (333) in the Inbox, meaning 333 new messages, even if they are all read.

A friend’s adventure into Gentoo/IMAP made me want to get mutt (command line email) working with IMAP again. It gave me some BS error 333 times. I tried my other account, it worked. Ah! Two clients hating my account! A pattern!

I backed up my mail directory to a .tgz. Is 51MB. I searched for patterns. WTF is the difference?!

Eventually I saw 443 old files named susie.fuzzylemon.net. Hrm, not exactly the number I was looking for but close. I deleted them. They were probably after I renamed my domain and crap.
My server isn’t on that old domain name, maybe courier was trying to resolve those files.

I tried again and mutt likes it. Shows 940 messages (approx. right). I will try Mail.app tonight and posty an UPDATED: line.

Anyway, I thought the way Firefox packaged their app was cool. In OSX, you can package and store folder background images, icon sizes, all kinds of stuff to really polish your ‘installation’. I put installation in quotes because installing under Mac is as easy as dragging and dropping. Which is exactly what Firefox is depicting here …

They want you to drag the .app file (which is a self contained application with everything you need usually to run it) to your Applications folder. Although you don’t have to do this. You could run it from you desktop or wherever. But that little folder with the gray “A” is supposed to be your Applications folder. Without any words, it’s clear they want you do drag and add (plus sign) the application. Clever! No words! No documentation changes across languages! Nice!

Also they appear to have changed the default icon for the .dmg file that gets mounted. How polished.

I don’t remember any of these details on 1.0.7 or earlier but I could be mistaken. Correct me, scold me, abuse me in the comments section. The safety word is watermelon.

Thread on slashdot about CrossOver Office 5 and Wine 0.9 Released, just thought I’d mention that I have World of Warcraft working perfectly with Cedega under Gentoo. I’ll have to post some screens of it. There’s a very vertical picture of the updater on the right there. The only real issue is that the bittorrent updater for WoW probably won’t work, so you’d probably have to manually copy WoW over from your Windows partition every time an update came out. If that sounds horrible, you could give this a shot. I did not try getting the updater working. The updater works fine, after it downloads an update it just relaunches and starts bittorrent’ing (verb?). That guide is good, I followed most of it bit by bit. I didn’t have to disable the death effect. Meh.

I’m very impressed with Wine recently. And the bottles concept sounds really neat.

My nvidia settings don’t stick but I’m sure I could script it to pick up FSAA settings and the like on boot up. Just haven’t done it. The nvidia drivers I am using are:


unicron ~ # ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" emerge -pv nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild R ] media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.7676 0 kB
[ebuild R ] media-video/nvidia-glx-1.0.7676-r1 -dlloader 0 kB

Total size of downloads: 0 kB


And that’s even on AMD64 arch. I can’t believe it all works. Good job Blizzard on ‘portable’ code (or at least wineable stuff) and good job to Codeweavers.

Here is a video showing the process.

vmware-snapshots.swf [2.3M]

First, we do some proof that the box is working normally and we take a snapshot. Some GUI weirdness because I clicked too much and then we remove the entire /etc directory. The file /etc/passwd is gone so `id -a root` fails. Weird that the `su` doesn’t fail. The sytem continues to run although we’ve severely messed it up. On a normal box, we’d restore from tape or another machine maybe.

We log out and we can’t log back in. Doh. What’s really funny is that the error message goes into caps when I try to log in as ‘AAAAAAAHHHHHHH’. The machine is yelling back maybe?

Click on snapshot manager, selected the snapshot, it took about 7-10 seconds for it to catch up (I think it’s just reading the deltas from within the virtual hard-drive image). The window state, filesystem state, memory, cpu … the whole machine state is restored. It’s amazing. Like an emulator state. Of course there is some work going on in the background.

Recording the movie on the same machine had some overhead, count that in when you are judging speed.

The files are there, nothing was lost.

I was trying to mess around with public key authentication (for an easy and secure way to log in) on Windows. I’ve done it many times on Linux -> *nix but I never messed around with Putty. Putty is a great program with a terrible, terrible interface. Case and point, I got my public key working but it was still prompting me for the username. Where do I put the username?!

There’s a text box called hostname that you can put the username in (makes sense right). See below

Very confusing.

Recently I had noticed that my DSL line was slow. At first I didn’t think much of it because in the past I’ve had this problem often. There have been many things in the past that have made my site slow: line noise, people downloading files, me downloading files and other stuff I don’t know about.

I was checking web usage graphs and it dawned on me that I never set up logging for my old pictures site (now gone). First off, I wanted to change the name because squarism is kind of my professional blog (suitable for family and peers) and hexameter is my “screw around” site (not suitable for anyone). I moved the domains around making squarism an alias and more imporantly I started logging hits for my photo gallery.

Immediately I noticed people were hotlinking images off my site, meaning they were putting an [img src="my site"] sort of tag right in their page instead of downloading the image and serving a local copy. Many call this bandwidth stealing and other sorts of mean things.

I searched around for quick fixes with my current setup but eventually realized that Gallery 1.x couldn’t really help me. Nor could I do any black magic with mod_rewrite (very hard). So I decided it was an application problem and looked at Gallery 2.0.

Happy day! They had planned and implemented a feature called Block Hotlinking that solved my exact problem. So I followed the upgrade instructions (which weren’t that great at first thought) and the install was really, really easy. Way to go Gallery Project! I soon had my old pictures online.

I had even found a great plugin to WordPress for Gallery 2. But, I hit a major wall with this plugin. Basically, Gallery can’t handle subdomains so I can’t have Gallery on xxx.domain.com and have my blog on blog.domain.com, yyy.domain.com or domain.com. Bah!

So I had to completely re-org, screwing over all the people who had pictures off my gallery as their avatar or stealing my images for use as their background for their webpage. Oh well, they shouldn’t have hot linked.

If you are one of those people, just download the image you miss so much at my shiney new gallery. Or see the images that you liked so much right here:

wallpapers/stinkoman_1.jpg
wallpapers/domokun/domo6.jpg
wallpapers/domokun/domo10.jpg

However, the old picture site won’t be up. The new one is here. The link is also up top — called “pics” as usual.

Also to the right is a little latest photo block, displaying and linking to the latest picture I’ve uploaded to the gallery. It’s a Sproinky Thing™.

(>’-')>