06.01.06
Posted in Rant at 3:32 pm by Soabirw
Looks like the latest Ubuntu switched to the super pretty Mac OS X like interface. Almost enough to make me want to try Linux again. Let me just say that I do love Linux very much. But I’m not about to pretend that it is hassle free for the common user. The prettier X Windows gets the harder it is to install. I had a decent time with Suse and a few others. Unless you want a dual monitor setup, of course.
I love the comments too. You have the hard core Linux lovers saying how horribly difficult it is to get nVidia cards working with Windows XP. When it’s super easy with Linux. All you have to do is download the approprate kernel headers, run the right nVidia script (if you are using a mainstream enough distro otherwise there is much more compiling and configuring to be done), and then edit your X windows config. And if you want dual screen, plan on spending a lot of time in that config and bouncing between run levels. Hope your very familiar with the command line. I know my folks are rock solid with unix based commands. But man, that’s sooo much easier then Windows XP. To quote a comment: “Linux is far better at that and easier for the masses to adopt it.”. So true. All you need to install Linux is a very distro specific step by step guide.
Not that I love Windows XP. My hatred runs very deep. Hopefully I’ll be trying the happy meduim, Mac OS X, in the next month or so.
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06.02.06
Posted in Toys at 11:55 am by Soabirw
Whelp, I just took the plunge and ordered a MacBook. I wanted something cheap to try out this Mac stuff, but still functional. The MacBook ended up being the same cost as the Mac Mini I was wanting since I didn’t want a totally gimped one. So I sacraficed some power for portability. I want to be able to play with this thing at home and at work as well as take it around to friends and relatives who are also interested. And I’ve always wanted something I could even take around the house for random tasks. Sure, I have an Alienware. But that thing hardly qualifies as “portable”. I think they stopped showing the weight in the technical specifications because of that. Their new ones are approaching 20 lbs. MacBook is about 5lbs. My boss has one and it is great to work with. Grabbed all the adapters I would want too. This thing can do VGA, DVI, and S-Video. I have the MythTV box, so I don’t need to hook it up to my TV. But that sort of functionality always comes in handy.
Anyhoo, hoping it will be here next Tuesday or Wednesday. If Mac really impresses me maybe I’ll go all out and grab a few dream displays.
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06.05.06
Posted in Toys at 9:17 am by Soabirw
Apple lied to me. They said my precious goods would arrive tomorrow, but that’s only a half truth. The keyboard and video adapters will be here tomorrow, but the laptop itself wont until the 14th. God, that hurts so much. I’m going to take a warm, candle lit bath and then take a nap.
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Posted in Toys at 11:45 am by Soabirw
Came accross a few videos like this. Basically they are running every OS they can on their Mac and quickly, yet beautifully, switching between them. It uses something called “Parallels”, which I haven’t found much on yet. Some guys blog claims that on the dual core Macs it uses one core for, say, Windows and the other for Mac OS. So it is the fastest and most useable virtual machine setup he’s ever tried. I was going to try out bootcamp, but I might just got this route instead. I will still need Windows for the occasional this and that, like 3DVista. I’ll always keep my gaming rig Windows, for obvious reasons, but to be able to switch to Windows without switching boxes or rebooting is just dreamy.
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06.07.06
Posted in Toys at 12:28 pm by Soabirw
Was wanting to use my MacBook, and eventually, Mac Mini at work. When coding I need lots of real estate, not just so my code is HUGE, but because I have to run so many apps at the same time and I need quick access to them. And once you go dual monitors, it’s very hard to go back. But with the MacBook and Mac Mini, they don’t have out of the box support for such a thing. So it seemed my options were to either take my 19″ LCD from home and swap it with my two 17″ LCDs from work or use the tiny 13″ laptop display along with a 17″ or 19″. Neither of those options sound all that appealing. The only thing I do on my home PC anymore is play games, so I will rarely use a 2nd display and will prefer a large 19″. And when you are runing a dual monitor setup it really matters that your displays are as similar as possible. Even a 17″ next to a 19″ can be very distracting and offsetting. So a 13″ next to a 17″ or 19″ is just out of the question. Some day I would like to get a fany cinema display, but until I can justify that outrageous cost I would rather just use what I have. Especially since I bought those 17″ LCDs not even a month ago.
I think I finally found a pretty great solution. Looks like this will work for my MacBook and future Mac Mini as well as my current Alienware Laptop. Some of the true Mac lovers scoff at the solution, because in their eyes the real solution would be to spend just a few more grand on Mac hardware that will do this out of the box. Life must be grand when you have daddy’s credit card in hand. Maybe some day instead of getting a new car I’ll put that money towards a beefy Power Mac with a 30″ cinema display. I’m sure it will be the best $10k I will ever spend.
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06.09.06
Posted in Rant at 8:42 am by Soabirw
With all these recent news of pretty Xgl in Linux I decided to give Suse and Ubuntu a try on my workstation. Doesn’t run Windows all that hot and I usually prefer Linux at work. Lots of downloading all for naught. Neither Ubuntu or Suse detect either of my graphic cards. I have the usual generic onboard Intel 82865G and an ATI Radeon. I guess those are some very “rare” cards? Who’s ever heard of “Radeon” anyway, right? Makes me scoff even harder at the Linux fanboys that say it is easier and more user friendly then Windows. Windows doesn’t detect your graphics card any better, but it doesn’t spit you to a command prompt either.
On a happier note, my MacBook should arrive mid next week. From what I’ve seen of the Mac Mini here at the office, I think Mac OS will be the happy medium between Windows and Linux. Looking forward to it.
If I wasn’t about to receive such spendor, I would spend the day trying to get Linux working on my station. I’m not exactly a Linux n00b. Perfectly capable of resolving this, I just think it it unecessary and don’t particularly enjoy spending hours just trying to get a basic X manager to load. But, as frustrated as I get with Linux, once you spend all the pain and suffering to get it working, it does work much better then Windows in this environment. I would much rather be in Linux then Windows while developing.
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Posted in Development at 3:56 pm by Soabirw
Despite being a programmer for such a long time, I still haven’t been able to get comfy with regular expressions. I know they are very powerful and can solve your validation woes lickity split (and that’s no shit), but good gravy that is some cryptic jarble. When trying to validation some international phone numbers, I.E. “+555.55555555555×555″, it was actually getting silly with how many various explosions and manual checks I was having to do. So I buckled down and managed to write this:
‘^[+]([0-9]{1,3})[.]([0-9]{1,12})([x]([0-9]{1,4}))?$’
No Google action or anything. That’s 90% from my keister, right there. I did read the first few pages of the O’Reily book though. Literally this means “First I expect the beginning of a line, followed by one + character, followed by 1 to 13 characters of 0-9, then followed by a dot, then followed by 1 to 12 chatacters of 0-9, then optionally a x followed by 1 to 4 characters of 0-9, then an end of the line.”
I can’t wait until PHP has a strtoregex() function just like strtotime(). So I can type that big sentence up there and it will magically make my regular expression. 
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06.10.06
Posted in Rant, Toys at 11:42 am by Soabirw
Last night my computer started to really crawl. And I don’t exactly have a wimpy box. Here is what I do have:
- AMD64 2800
- 1gb PC3200 RAM
- GeForce 4 6800 Ultra 256mb
- Two striped 160gb SATA drives
So it is frustrating when Windows runs like total garbage. So I look at my page file usage and it is over 2 God damn gigs. I hard set it to match my physical memory, but it doesn’t seem to care. Now it only goes up to 1.7gigs and then Windows yells at me for not having enough virtual memory. Nothing in Task Manager is using more then 30mb or RAM. Just booting up Windows and looking at my memory usage, 50% of my physical memory is gone and the page file is at 500mb. This is before loading a single app.
So either I need some help making Windows not suck nuts or I need to buy 3 gigs of RAM. Which I’m not totally against, I’m just not confident Windows wont gobble all of that up as well. I am constantly running Spybot, Ad-Aware, and AVG and they never find anything.
I’ve been wanting to separate work from play, so maybe my 3rd option would be to dual boot Windows and Linux again. Only thing I don’t like about that is I like to quickly transition between work and gaming. 15 minute breaks here and there. Or I like to work while gaming. Slow CoH missions and I can get some decent work done. The other issue is my storage. Never found a smooth way to handle a dual boot. Neither OS needs all 320gb to itself, but they do need most of that shared. Only Fat32 is comfortably supported in Linux, but I wouldn’t even be able to rip a damn DVD if I did that.
Eventually the solution will be a Mac Mini on a KVM probably. For now, looks like it’s off to Newegg for 3 gigs of RAM. Will probably be my last big PC upgrade for a long time.
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06.12.06
Posted in Toys at 5:25 pm by Soabirw
It finally arrived today. Luckily I didn’t find out until right before I left work. Their estimate wasn’t until Wednesday or Thursday. Otherwise I would have been going nuts all day and gotten nothing done.
So far I can’t stop giggling. Everything about it is so damn neat. First off, I was able to one hand the box all the way down stairs. If I tried that with my Alienware I would be minus a hand. The laptop itself is very solidly built. First fun thing I noticed was the power cable. When I went to plug it in, as soon as I got near the plug-in point it sucked itself right in. Has a pretty tough magnet apparantly. That’s is a fantastic idea. The touch pad is funky though. Nice size, but just one big pad with one big button. Which shouldn’t surprise me, but neither should a one button mouse. But I’ll still stare at in awe for 10 minutes.
Next was getting it on the wireless network. This never goes as smoothly as it should. Especially with Linksys. Quickly read there was a bug in the Linksys products that make it hard for a Mac to connect via WEP. Changed to another mode and it is working just fine.
Going through the usual setup screens with it’s very pretty Cube roll over effects. Oh and now the iSight found me. Wants to take a picture of me for my account avatar.
Egad! No Home key. Home and End are shared with Left and Right arrow keys. Anyhoo, going to spend the evening playing and getting my usual software going. First thing is online chat with iChat.
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06.13.06
Posted in Toys, Weepin' Words at 9:01 am by Soabirw
MacBook is already dead. I left it copying music last night for work. When I got up this morning the screen was black, which I would expect and assumed it was just sleeping. But I can’t get it to come out. Been trying for an hour now. Even contacted Apple Support. I took the battery out and held down the power button for 30 seconds. Then put it back in and powered it on. Also tried holding command + option + p + r. No idea why, but support asked me too. Then tried hooking it up to an external monitor. Still nothing. Looking like I’ll be sending it in for repairs. Not sure if I should start to hate Apple or if I should just continue to hate all laptops. So far I haven’t had a decent one. Even my very expensive Alienware was sent back shortly after getting it after the USB ports all broke and cause a short. Maybe I’ll see if I can trade it in for a Mac Mini. I was really loving the OS last night. And the portability would be very nice, but not at the cost of hardware stability.
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