01.22.07
Posted in General at 4:19 pm by Soabirw
Finally got sick of bringing in my personal laptop to use as a workstation at work, so I threw myself together a box from various parts we had around, mostly from the MythTV box. I started off trying Linux since I used to run that exclusively for work for a few years and was very happy. Not so much the case anymore. Took me a few evenings just to get it to the point where I could take it into work to replace the laptop. And even then, I spent nearly a month fighting with it. Some of the fights was me being silly and wanting OS X features. But some of the fights were me just wanting to run and use a common application, like Thunderbird. Or playing sound… I have a big list of frustrations. I have been spoiled by the “Just Works” mentality. As opposed to the, “Will work eventually, with enough trouble shooting, RTFM, and cursing. But when it does work, it *should* stay working.” I used to not mind that mentality since I had enough free time and it was still more stable then Windows.
But I have become increasingly weary of all the time I have to sink into an OS just to get mildly comfortable. With as open as Linux is and as popular as OS X has gotten, I figured it wouldn’t be too bad to incorporate some features. I was horribly, horribly mistaken though. It is possible, but it’s not easy nor is it remotely stable. I have spent weeks trying to get various Docks working, for example. Not a single one behaved like the OS X dock, although they did look similar enough. Even without my failure to make Linux look like OS X, I was frustrated almost daily with some other issue. Things that I can even easily get setup in Windows seemed like a chore in Linux. Yum/Yast/Apt, etc help a lot, but they don’t cover everything and often add their own complications. Like not having the right repos or have two that are really good, so Yum wants to install from both of them. Making your packages a jumbled and instable mess.
So I finally threw in the towel with Linux and decided to go back to Windows so I can have that “Just Works” back. Even if it is and unstable pile now and then. At least a re-install only takes me an hour or two and then I’m back up and running. And at work, I doubt my XP install will crumble as fast as it does at home. While I was at it, I looked into making it look and feel like OS X. I actually found some pretty slick stuff. Here is a screen shot of my current setup.
And here is the breakdown of software I used, took me less then an hour to get this all setup.
- FlyakiteOSX - That is one impressive site. He also made a pack that runs a wide range of tweaks to Windows to get it setup like OS X. Includes a Dock, Splash screen, Windows OS X Theme, various app skins like Trillian, WinDVD, OS X like programs (RKLauncher for the Dock, WinRoll, etc.), etc. Made this very easy.
- StudioTwentyEight - This guys just has a lot of really well done themes for Windows. He even had an OS X one for Vista, but MS made him take it down. Guess there have been enough comparisons between the two that they didn’t want to add anymore fuel to that fire.
- Launchy - This is very much like QuickSilver in OS X. Great way to launch your apps without dealing with horribly inefficient menus. You can even add directories for it to index if you install your programs outside of the default.
- Expose - Normally I would link to some software bundles that I was trying out, but then I updated my mouse software to the latest IntelliPoint and it turns out MS did this already. It was normally just for Vista, but now works in XP too. So far I’ve only seen a way to assign it to a mouse button, which doesn’t really work for me. I like to use the scroll button as a middle click. So I just set it up so in explorer.exe the scroll button does their expose, but in everything else it is middle click. Just have to middle click on the desktop for expose to kick in.
Might have been a few other things I’m forgetting, but it was all easy to find and I hardly spent any time at all tweaking. And I do realize how silly it sounds for me to profess my love of OS X, but then move to Linux/Windows only to try and make them look and feel like OS X. But the big flaw for OS X for me is the hardware. Right now I don’t really want to buy yet another Mac for work. Especially when I have perfectly good hardware laying around the house. My goal is to be back in OS X relatively soon though. Even with all these great tweaks to Windows, I still prefer to be in native OS X.
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12.14.06
Posted in General at 2:18 pm by Soabirw
Been so insanely busy at the new job (funny how it still seems so very “new” even though I’ve been here 7 months). So I haven’t been able to touch No-Homers. Even had this Rails version mostly functional 3 months ago. Then never had time to do anything with it. Now I’m working on a Ruby on Rails + Flex version that will be delicious.
Everytime I use Expose at work I get warm fuzzies. I behave very differently in OS X then I do in Windows. In Windows, if I wasn’t going to use an app for a while I would close it to free up resources and make my task bar more manageable. In Linux I would just do a lot of virtual desktops. But in OS X, your app management via the Dock and Expose, makes it so damn easy to just load up on apps and always feel like they are at your finger tips. It’s memory management is so much better then Windows too, so I can actually have all sorts of apps running in the baground without taxing the machine too much. Here is a screen shot of my average Expose at work. That’s running on my MacBook with a measely 1GB of RAM. And on top of that I only reboot once a week when I take my laptop home for the weekend. What really kills me is this is nothing compared to our designer running on a Mac Pro. He probably has 3 times as many apps running. When he does Expose, my head almost explodes.
I was always very productive in Linux as well, especially in Enlightenment (or any other non-Windows-like manager). But I think some of the polish and features of OS X makes me even more productive, even without virtual desktops (which you can have, I just don’t see the need in OS X).
In conclusion. I <3 OS X.
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10.14.06
Posted in Gaming at 4:54 pm by Soabirw
Even though I was exhausted after my camping excursion, I wanted to try out some new games. Been very busy the last year or so and haven’t been able game like I used to. So I tried out Company of Heroes for while. That game is pretty amazing. I only got through the first mission, which was the beaches of Normandy. Follows the Battlefield series concept of flags, in a way. When you take over a capture point, you have control of that area and will get more resources. So you are constantly having a back and forth for these capture points.
Speaking of Battlefield, we also got the Battlefield 2142 demo. The three of us hoped on the same server (made God damn easy with their new Buddy List) and before we knew it, it was 3:00 a.m. Was still pretty pumped from the game, so I had to force myself to go to bed. You can do the usual flag maps, but they also introduced a new game type where each group has a massive Titan ship. You take over missle silos to take down the sheilds, then you can board it to do more damage. The first person to blow up the enemy ship wins.
So far my favorite thing about the game is vehicles. There is a good variety and they all have their strenghts and weaknesses. Unlike Battlefield 2, where it was more of an “armor is armor” and some things had a lot of it and others you could destroy with rocks. They also have more incentive to have other ride in your vehicles with you. Most of the really powerful and handy weapons aren’t accessible to the drivers. In Battlefied 2, nobody would wait for anybody else. We would always joke that they thought APC meant Armored Personal Carrier instead of Armored Personel Carrier. We are very clever, we know. But we can’t count the times one man has taken off in a vehicle that holds 6+ as his team mates run after him screaming, waving their hands, and even firing their weapons.
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Posted in General at 2:39 pm by Soabirw
Did our “Developer’s Retreat” last night. For some reason my company is really into group bonding and such. So since we have a fresh new development team, they figured we would speed up this bonding by going camping. Not sure why they thought a bunch of computer geeks would love the thought of roughing it in nature without any technology.
Now, I’m an Eagle Scout and all that, so I’ve done all sorts of hiking, camping, etc. Even to the extreme of sleeping in an igloo I made myself. But all that was neary 8 years ago and I’ve turned into quite the sissy since then. The first thing that I found very odd was we had to go buy our firewood at the local grocery store. Then we drove up a highway to our camp ground, which had fully paved roads, street lights, etc. I wonder if southern Utah is like this too. I remember camping being a lot more rough then this. I imagine it is because there are just too many people up here. Most of these camp grounds you have to reserve 2 or 3 months in advance. Sometimes a full year in advance.
The gang threw around some questionable items while I sat in the shade, growing tired by just watching them. They tried throwing things at me once or twice, probably because they hate me, and it usually ended up smashed into my face. Despite my flailing limbs attempting some sort of monkey style defense. Then they decided to up the stakes and throw them over a river and even back and forth from the bridge. That’s when we took heavy losses to the raging river.
The rest of the afternoon was spent talking about our favorite Sci-Fi shows and strumming the guitar to Tenacious D. Once it got a little closer to dinner time we prepared our “hobo dinners”. You basically wrap raw things, like meat, hash browns, carrots, onions, etc in tin-foil, as you would a Christmas present. Then you throw it in the hot coals for 20 or so minutes. While we waited we taught the n00bs how to play poker with my 180 lb poker set.
That was a really fun part of the trip and I hope to do more poker with this group. Unfortunately we didn’t get to play much, by the time we were done eating the son was going down and it started to get cold very fast. By 8:00 p.m. we were ready to call it a night. Luckily, because it was so very cold, we just went home to sleep in our warm, comfy beds instead of miserable sleeping bags and tents.
All in all, it was pretty enjoyable and I wouldn’t mind spending another afternoon with this Nature. Although, I fully support the Uber Industrial Complex and it’s goal to eliminate as much nature as possible, all in the name of progress.
P.S. I also have a picture of a mountain.
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09.27.06
Posted in Toys at 6:32 pm by Soabirw
For the most part the Mac Pro is overpowered for me, but then it comes with a measely 1GB of RAM. Reall expensive, obscure RAM. So I finally bought another 2GB. Hopefully this will help Windows perform a bit better, especially with my long City of Heroes sessions. I find it funny that what really drove me to the upgrade was the small percentage of time that I spend in Windows. Never really felt a big need in OS X.
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09.25.06
Posted in General at 1:17 pm by Melfyk
I think I’m pretty funny. 
[12:54] Fellow Employee: why am I not able to send mail? do I need to reset something?
[13:00] Me: you might have a unicorn in your cd drive.. try ejecting it and you email should start working
[13:00] Fellow Employee: what is unicorn
[13:00] Fellow Employee: I have Kenny in there
[13:00] Me: a tiny mythilogical creature with one horn
[13:01] Fellow Employee: he is not tiny
[13:01] Fellow Employee: I have heard he is pretty bigh
[13:01] Me: if he fits in your cd drive then he is pretty tiny
[13:01] Fellow Employee: whats going on
[13:01] Me: why are you keeping unicorns in your computer anyway? shouldn’t you leave them at home?
[13:02] Fellow Employee: no…I need some company
[13:03] Me: email work yet?
[13:03] Fellow Employee: yes…you fixed
[13:03] Fellow Employee: it
[13:03] Me: dang unicorns anyway
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09.18.06
Posted in Media at 2:26 pm by Soabirw
Now and then you see our youth in action and get really worried about our education system and our future. But then when you go back a bit you see that our future has been doomed for a very long time.
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09.05.06
Posted in Gaming, Toys at 6:41 pm by Soabirw
I was working so hard to get Boot Camp working just so I could see how game performance would be. Trying to read reviews on the internet about this is a complete waste of time. If you don’t have a Core 2 Duo Extreme, quad SLI video, 8 gigs of RAM (even though Windows XP only detects 3 or 4gb) and killer nics then your PC is garbage and can’t handle any games period. My “old” PC is far from these requirements, yet I can play all my games with max graphics. Even new demos like Prey. Not perfectly, I’ll admit, but definitely well enough for me. So the Mac Pro needed to do at least that much.
My first tests were City of Heroes and Titan Quest since those are the two games I actually plan on playing. City of Heroes is on maximum graphics (%200 textures and such) and it runs like a dream. Incredibly smooth, even when running through crowded cities with Super Speed. Which on my old system would hiccup now and then. City of Heroes isn’t the most graphics heavy and gorgeous game, but it is fairly processor heavy because of the large world. Titan Quest also ran great with full graphics and that one is a pretty new and intensive game. I haven’t spent more then 10 minutes in the game so far though, so jury is still out. Next was the Prey demo and the new Flight Simulator X. Prey ran great at max graphics even on the multiplayer maps that had you jumping through all sorts of portals and switching you upside down like crazy. Never a single hiccup. When Intendant cranked Flight Simulator X to max it really put the hurt on his PC. He loves his flight sims, so this was a real good test for him. With everything on Ultra High our flight was smooth as silk. Water effects were amazing too.
And this is with the base video card and RAM. I eventually plan on either doing SLI or upgrading to a beefier video card. And I am definitely getting more RAM. I’ll wait until this thing starts to have problems with games before I stress about the video card, but the RAM will be in the near future.
While I was having fun in City of Heroes I decided to do a little recording of me and 8th (Sosacms) doing our usual encounters. Hopefully this will get a few of the resistant savages hooked. VirtualDub actually detected all 4 processors just fine, so it was encoding to Divx at 100 fps. That was pretty damn neat.
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Posted in Toys at 12:17 pm by Soabirw
Since I already dedicated nearly two days to Boot Camp, might as well dedicate a post. Boot Camp is a very impressive utility. It does a very good job making dual booting easy. It will even “Partition Magic” your drives for you. I wanted to use a lot of space for gaming without cutting into my main Mac drive though, so I just threw Windows on one of the 160gb SATA drives I had from my “old” PC. I still put Windows on the main Mac drive though, but in a small 10gb NTFS partition. Then on the other drive I split it into two partitions, a 32gb FAT32 “shared” partition so I can quickly send things back and forth between both OSes and then the rest of the drive is just NTFS, which OS X can read, but not write. So far I am liking that setup. Windows has plenty of room to grow and so does OS X.
Unfortunately, getting to that setup was a painful task that took most of my blessed 3 day weekend. The problem with the Mac Pro and Boot Camp is SATA. Windows doesn’t have the right drivers at install time and even if you update them post install, it still doesn’t work. So your SATA II drives only get about 3-4 mb/s transfer rates instead of the 60-70 mb/s you would expect. Not sure if Apple is working on a fix for this or not since I don’t really see how they could. To fix the problem you have to modify the XP install disc, which I don’t think Boot Camp will ever do. Fortunately (kind of), somebody threw up a guide on how to “slipstream” all your goods onto your XP CD. Although, the reason it tooke me a day and a half was because of the poor instructions.
Instead of listing instructions to fix the Mac Pro SATA issue he decided to give a much larger list of instructions to include his personal preferences on hot-fixes and sketchy hacks from sketchy sites. So what could have been a 1 or 2 item list of instructions was more like 12 and you had to try and customize it to fit your needs. Combine this with my inexperience with slipstreaming and there was a lot of room for error. I didn’t have a Windows box to do this with anymore either, so I needed to use the broken boot camp to make my new XP ISOs. Since SATA is transferring so slowly it takes about an hour to install XP. Then I have to install updates like .Net Framework and all my needed software, nLite, Nero, etc. Once I add a driver or make a change to the ISO then I have to use it to re-install XP and start the entire process over again. So even if it is only 5 or 6 attempts that will destroy an entire day.
I eventually started completely over, trying very hard to stick with the instructions and trim as little excess as possible and was able to get a working install. Beyond the SATA, everything works great. You pop in your driver CD, it runs an installer, and you have audio, video, mac to windows friendly keyboard, etc. And now that I have the slipstreaming done I have made a really amazing XP install disc. nLite really lets you tweak things out. Every little thing that bugged me about XP had tweak options. Like not making Thumbs.db files, going to a Windows 2K appearance, etc. Some of them got pretty nitty gritty too. I also was able to make a fully unattended install. Every question the installer asks you, including the CD Key can be entered into nLite. So I am now using this as my official XP installer for PC and Mac.
So a miserable time, but I came away with something pretty worth while. And now that it is done I can just work away on my Mac Pro without any trouble.
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Posted in Toys at 11:32 am by Soabirw
Cracked open the Mac Pro this weekend so I could throw in a pair of 160gb SATA drives for Boot Camp and backups. The picture is awful, but that’s what you get with a camera phone in the hands of a jackass. The quality of this case is astonishing. I’ve never worked on any PC case that was this well laid out and rock solid. Even when I spend upwards of $200. To get inside you pull on a lockable lever on the back and that will release the holds on the case as well as the SATA drive bays. The side plating is very heft and has padding around the edge to lower noise from vibration and keep the case as airtight for the airflow.
SATA drives are very easy to install. Just screw them onto the enclosure and slide it in. The power and communication connectors are mounted on a plate in the back and it clicks right in. The RAM looks to be similarly simple. I haven’t done the RAM upgrade yet, but those daughter boards slide right out. Each one has 4 DIMM slots. The video card is nearly impossible to see, which is fine since it’s just a boring video card. It rests right on top of the RAM area so it gets hit by the front fan. You can add another video card right on top of it as well to do SLI mode.
All in all I am very happy with my purchase. A very hefty price tag, but the quality is outstanding and I think it will last me a very long time with the amount of upgrading I can do. It’ll be a long time before Quad Xeon and up to 16gb of RAM just doesn’t cut it. And surprisingly enough Windows actually detects all 4 processors. They each show up in Task Manager with their own load graphs and all.
When I get home I’ll post about some gaming. Even made some fun videos with CoH. Which was a nice excuse to use Final Cut Pro.
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