Welcome to the ancient, mystic society of No Homers.
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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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.
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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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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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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Last night my computer started to really crawl. And I don’t exactly have a wimpy box. Here is what I do have:
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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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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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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What a miserable day yesterday was. I thought Apple Support was better then any other support I have had to deal with, but in the end that is the only part I am upset about. We verified that my laptop was fuckered, so I said i wanted to do a return. Because I ordered it online and made changes to it, like adding another 512mb RAM, that I don’t qualify for a normal return or refund. I have to take it to a certified Apple support center, have them verify the problem, then they can help me setup the return. The nearest one is in Salt Lake. So I drive my ass all the way up there and the main Apple technician has no idea what I’m talking about. Said they only do repairs there, which I could have done at a place 1 mile from my home. I told him everything I tried and that somebody in a forum said they had the exact same problem and it was determined to be bad RAM. He was way ahead of me though and already at the Memory Tester that comes on the Mac install disc. Almost immediately it failed. Lame thing is, he still has to ship it all the way to Apple. Can’t just swap it out right there.
Now here are three problems I have with that situation. First, the only way to order online is through the customization screen. Yet if you choose anything at all, you are negating the option for a return for exchange or refund. That’s a dirty policy. Secondly, telling me something that gives me 2 hours of driving in nasty weather and rush hour when it isn’t even remotely accurate. The support people should have told me straight up that I don’t qualify for a return, instead of tricking me into the repair solution. Thirdly, why the fuck don’t they run their own damn RAM test before shipping it to people? Sounds like this isn’t a rare problem. The guy at the Mac store said he gets at leat two a week with bad RAM issues.
But on the plus side, I should have my MacBook in good working order next week. Hopefully they’ll ship it to the house and not make me do that drive again. And after I got home I went to a real Mac store called Mac Something. “Something” is really part of the name, it’s not me forgetting like usual. Sweet digs. Had a gorgeous 30″ cinema display running with all kinds of sexy accessories. Sosacms came with me and he was drooling over everything. Karen’s work PC is a 900mhz, 256mb ram pile of shit. And once again Windows fucked over my folks. Second time they have legitimately bought Windows and had it disable because it was “pirated”. I’m sure it is some idiot with a keygen who actually registers his ill gotten Windows. So instead of spending more time and money on this garbage we went the Mac Mini route.
Brought it to work with me and put it on my 2nd monitor. It’s a bit noisy, unlike the pre-Intel ones, but I hear that will be fixed soon since it is just a software glitch in one of the patches. Doing updates now, hopefully that will resolve it. Other then that I am as happy with it as I was with my MacBook. And getting it from a local store will make any possible woes easier. I also had them upgrade and test the RAM when I bought it. The Mighty Mouse is wild. 4 button, 3D scroll mouse. Crazy thing is the button is actually the entire bottom of the mouse. So if you are a savage, you can just mash your entire hand down to click. Or you can do left and right clicking as it is pressure and position sensitive. Also has two side buttons that do some pretty neat effects in the OS. Scroll wheels works great too. And it’s nice to have horizontal scroll without having to hold down a keyboard button.
I think my mom will have a blast with this thing. She is a hobby artist, but damn good at it and definitely has that mind set most of the time. Have until Monday to have all her office needs setup on this thing. Should be fun for me.
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My Ruby book came yesterday. Much bigger then I expected it to be. The Ruby on Rails books is rather small, so I was thinking this would be similar. I guess it makes sense though. Rails is just a framework to aid the language, so can’t be too much you can talk about. I look forward to having time to be able to crack it open and get another great language under my belt. So I can join the masses and shout, “php is teh suxx0rz!”. And that is a big rant for another day.
I think I’ll be writing up my own blog sooner then I expected. This WordPress is OK, but already there are thing my fellow SGers and I are wanting that just aren’t here. Have been developing my own basic PHP framework, so it wont be much to get something up and running. Then I’ll work on a Ruby on Rails version as well as an AJAX heavy one.
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