Return to Flight : Minor snags.

posted 2010.04.08 at 16:29  | comment

I bought a spindle of Memorex DVD-Rs when xeno and I were at wal-mart last week, to do an ATC backup with. I started the backup yesterday with the mini-spindle I'd bought the last time Martin and I were shopping, and burned 27 DVD-Rs without a hitch. When it came time to use the new spindle - same media, mind you - none of them would burn. Or rather, the first three in the stack wouldn't.

So I'm burning off what I can - the base TD2E pages, and whatever I can fit of the reorganized TD1E data structure - using the last of my TDK spindle. It should last through the critical bits.

A backup is important for my peace of mind - I can offsite this stack of media at home or a friend's house and access it if needed. Which will be a load off my mind, to put it mildly. This is the first substantial ATC backup in almost two years, the first backup of the reorganized (merged) data structure, and more importantly, the first time TD2E has been moved to offline media.

Yeah, it's all backed up on other hard drives. Doing this will free one of them up for other material I need mirrored, which will free disk on my primary partition, which will, in turn, let me get back to portfolio grind. Which will lead to being gainfully re-employed, etceteras. It's the last bit of Old ATC Business that doesn't directly relate to the website - once this is off of my plate, I'll be out of excuses - and back into production.

Erlang

posted 2009.11.30 at 00:50  | comment

21:45 < mdxi> hahahahaha
21:46 < mdxi> erlang lets you specify an arbitrary radix for numbers, and it just keeps using letters for the extra digits
21:46 < mdxi> (so base 17 is 0-9A-G)
21:46 < mdxi> in base32, "BONERS" is a valid number
21:46 < mdxi> <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Soul of a New Machine

posted 2009.04.08 at 20:36  | 2 comments

Thanks to Newegg and an unusual run of sobriety, Athena (my Mac Mini) has been squirted with pimp juice.

The internal hdd was an 80g/5400rpm, now 250g/7200rpm. Dunno how warm it'll get - I'll have to remember to check after tonight's photoshop session. The OEM drive was carbon copy cloned to the new disk using a cheap USB enclosure.

Ram has gone from the default 2x512 modules to 2x2g modules. While the OS sees the full four, the hardware can only address a hair over three. I did some extensive reading on this and after a price comparison, figured the 10-15% performance increase I'll be getting from a matched set will give me ridiculously more value than the half shot of whiskey I'd buy with money saved by buying 1g and 2g modules.

Anyone who tells you all you need to pop a Mini is a putty knife is either lying or using a metal one. The plastic putty knives I bought through Amazon are pretty thick (somewhere between a sixteenth and an eighth of an inch) - I started the pry-open using the bottle opener on my swiss army knife and then, once I'd opened a big enough gap, used the putty knife to wodge it open the rest of the way. This procedure used two putty knives and worked exceptionally well. One of the case tabs got bent a bit, but otherwise... the thing was harder to put back together than it was to take apart.

Tools note : There was no way in hell the screw bits on my swiss army knife would have fit into the phillips heads in the Mini. A regular screwdriver (I have a few, including a big honkin' short sword of a driver clearly designed with home defense applications in mind) doesn't cut it. Fortunately I'd kept the blue-handled long-necked driver that had been included with the processor upgrade I'd bought for one of my G4s from Small Dog. It's magnetized, and the head is the right size to get the job done. This upgrade would have been a miserable pain in the ass without that little piece of kit.

Bit of advice : If some piece of kit you buy comes with tools included, don't throw the tools away! Screwdrivers, allen keys, extra screws, wingnuts, bubblewrap... trust me. Some day, you'll need 'em.

Three gigs of ram!

I CAN RUN PHOTOSHOP AND A WEB BROWSER. TWO, EVEN!

I may die.

Total price : ~$160 with shipping. ~$80 for the drive, ~$18 for the enclosure, ~18$/module for the ram. $0.70/each for the putty knives. Free shipping for Amazon and around $20 for FedEx second day for the Newegg bits.

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

posted 2008.12.25 at 01:21  | comment

William Anders (Lunar Module Pilot)

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Jim Lovell (Command Module Pilot, Commander Apollo 13, pilot of Gemini 7)

"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Frank Borman (Commander, Command Pilot of Gemini 7)

"And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth."

Theology is one thing.

This - Apollo 8 - surpasses theology. If you're of a more established tradition, the above transcript isn't a new thing. If you believe that there is no God but Man, however, then at this moment - December 24, 1968 - god SAW the light.

And it was good.

(The relevant portion, 1.2 meg .WAV)

<@_Lasar> MORE LIKE CRAP-TCHA

posted 2008.12.11 at 16:59  | comment

13:48 * solios just extracted approximately 1000 comment spam from DCR*
13:48 <@ejp> \o/
13:55 <@_Lasar> I invented an awesome method for warding of automatic spam. (At least I haven't seen this method mentioned anywhere else).
13:55 <@xeno> unplugging the modem?
13:55 <@solios> _Lasar: ?
13:55 <@_Lasar> I just do this: Enter your first name: <input type="text" name="email">
13:56 <@_Lasar> Then I check if the "user" entered an email address.
13:56 <@_Lasar> If so, spam.
13:56 <@_Lasar> The end.
13:56 <@_Lasar> Works like a fucking charm.
13:56 <@solios> :O
13:56 <@ejp> huh
13:56 <@_Lasar> I should probably copyright that or something.
13:56 <@solios> JEENYUS

* 470+ of which had attached themselves to a single DCR strip. The unfortunate downside of The Great Thursday Spam Purge is that I accidentally deleted the only comment my sister's ever left on my blog. Burn, spambots, burn.

MOAR RAMS, GIGS, OWC LURVE

posted 2008.09.04 at 19:21  | comment

For future reference:

1gig PC-2700 stick for 12" G4 Powerbook : $89 from Ramjet. $44.95 from OWC.
Would move Knave from 640 to 1184. (128 meg soldered to mainboard)

2x2gig PC5300 DDR2 667MHz matched DIMMs : $85.99 from OWC.
Would move Athena from 1g to 4g. Ramjet sells a 2x1g kit for about the same price and as of this timesink does not list a 4g kit.

Putty Knife : ~$6.
Required for any form of surgery on Athena. Which looks to be a major pain in the ass any way you cut it.

Superdrive for Athena : ~$100 from OWC.
If I'm doing Major Surgery, I may as well go all the way. Though Maniac and Minerva both have 16x superdrives in full-sized ATA bays. And those drives, should one go belly up, can be replaced for $20-40 and a bit of sweat. Oppose the Total Butthurt of working on Athena.

Searching for 2.5" HDDs reveals that a 3.5" in an outboard is going to offer MOAR GIGS for the same price, where "price" includes hassle, butthurt, surgery, backups, data transfer, etc.

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro USB2/FW400 500g drive : $135.99 from OWC.
Empty ("0g") SATA enclosures retail for about $70, so getting the thing with a 500g drive is a good balance of price/convenience. More options here. 320g 7200rpm 2.5" drives start at about $150. No contest.

Looks like an OWC order or two is in my near future - probably one for RAM (soon) and another (later) for the disk.

Which reminds me, I still need to file COA with my bank.

Battery.

posted 2008.09.04 at 18:30  | comment

So far the only technological problems I've had with the move have been minor. The big one is a marked lack of internet, though I'm happy to report that I'm adapting well to a life without the traditional staple of Porn Before Bed.

The one probably silly thing I did at the outset was to cable up all of the machines and peripherals before running ethernet. Maniac (the media machine) powered up just fine; Athena (the intel mini) came up, Minerva (the storage locker) wouldn't power up, so I set it aside for a few minutes while I brought Gridlock (which is, among other things, the DHCP server) online. This involved a bit more patience than usual - at present there's no means of plugging a monitor into the machine*, so waiting on fsck - usually a maddening experience - was made trivial by tending to Minerva.

Before Gridlock came up I plugged in the switch and ran cable. Without a DHCP server, hairpulling resulted. Maniac was fine, Gridlock lit up, but Athena's switch port remained dark.

Long story short, "jiggle the handle" works as well for ethernet as it does for toilets.

Some dicking around with the Network preferences on Maniac and Athena was then required to unfuck everything back to normal. My tech fu has always been questionable at best - and after years of not seriously needing it for anything, the skill has grown a pretty thick coat of rust and I'm now making my skill checks at a -3.

Minerva's stubborn refusal to power up was head-traced to the fact that the machine's CMOS (or PRAM for you old mac-heads) battery has been dead as a doornail forever. I'm of the understanding that simply leaving the machine plugged in for an indefinite period of time before powering it on can solve this, though I found my own solution much more viable for an immediate "must make sure it works!" fix - I pried the battery out with a screwdriver and instead of LED light-up, light-out, nothing.... light-up, startup chime, power up. Finally.

Minor remaining nits : Getting plumbing connected to The Intertub, and figuring out how to get the scanner's lightbar to shut off when it's not in active use**. The current solution is to simply unplug the thing, but I'm sure that if it's anything like my old piece of shit Umax, there's probably a software utility that does the equivalent, sans effort.

After the initial financial strain of the move blows over, I may finally be able to afford some much-needed upgrades - namely MOAR RAMS for my powerbook and mini, and a faster (and larger) OS drive for the mini (undecided as to internal replacement or adding outboard storage). RAM can be had for a drinks tab - disk upgrades are another hassle entirely, as the primary hurdle with replacing the onboard drive is the fact that it's on board, which implies a good deal of juggling to get the user data and applications shuffled off to a useful location.

* Gridlock is a beige G3. The expansion slots are filled with two SCSI cards and a 10/100 ethernet card. Or maybe one SCSI card, the ethernet card, and a case cooler or something. I forget. The machine's internal video is the old 25-pin mac standard and fuck if I know where my mac-to-VGA adapters ran off to. All displays in the new place are either VGA or DVI and the old Mac CRT and keyboard I'd use to troubleshoot Gridlock on the rare occasions it needs serious attention are in storage.

** You'd think I'd already know this, right? Well, no. I've been scanning my artwork at work for years. Taking a bus, waiting for the machine to free up, scanning, transferring the data, etc. was vastly faster than letting my piece of shit Umax chew away at an image for a few hours. The scanner in question is an Epson (perfection 600 I think, but it's at the house and right now I'm not), and is the only item Left Behind by a previous roommate that I've been able to make use of. Though it'll be a few days (or weeks) before I'm able to do more with it than see if it works.

Everything Must Go. (Round One)

posted 2008.08.02 at 09:50  | 4 comments

If I can't find a roommate within the next week, I'll be moving in a month. And these monitors are too damned bulky to take with me. I upgraded to LCDs awhile back and always figured I'd find someone else to pass 'em off to. Turns out that 'someone else' will be either a craigslist user or a chunk of pavement on bulk night. If this initial craigslisting pans out, I'll probably be unloading similar items using the same method.

Point of clarity : These are both Apple monitors. That means they have the bulky 25 pin connector. I may have a couple of spare adapters, but they're first come, first serve.

Monitor One : Applevision 1710AV : 20$.

Bought this awhile back at Goodwill computer. It'll pull 1280x1024@60hz and various resolutions below with decent quality, and was my primary monitor before I acquired the Psychic TV. The color quality and brightness are quite good for its age. As for the rest of the Applevision "features," it's a road apple - don't expect the built-in speakers to work very well (or at all). If you have an old System 7 (or up through 9.2.2) mac with 25-pin video and an ADB port, then you'll be able to access all kinds of incredibly slick calibration options. If I still ran 9, I'd include screenshots. Trust me, it's neat. The monitor's a bit touchy (hence the price) and if you're using it with a VGA adapter you'll have to test for your preferred resolution through trial and error.

It's big, it's heavy, it's cheap. And it can be yours for one of those spiffy green portraits of Andrew Jackson. I'll even throw in a VGA to Mac adapter if I can dig up a spare.

Monitor Two : 20" Apple Trinitron (aka The Psychic TV) : 40$.

An enormous beast of a CRT. Base snacked on by Cookie Monster - it's missing a good-sized chunk but it doesn't impact stability and as far as I know the ADB passthrough built into the base still works. Can't confirm that, as I haven't used any ADB kit in a good long time. Display is a bit dim and the color is a bit flat, despite brightness and contrast being cranked to the max. But it's an old display, so that comes with the territory. Comes with free Psychic TV and Einstuerzende Neubauten stickers for your aesthetic enjoyment. Given the size and overall quality, would probably work best as a recreational video device attached to a Mac Mini or similar - I played most of Final Fantasy VIII with it, using a Beige G3 as the passthrough. The display is optimal at 1280x1024@60hz. It will do 70hz if you insist on it, but that refresh rate comes with a funky wub-wub-wub-wub effect in the lower righthand corner that you probably won't enjoy much.

I'd've included photos of the stickers (port and starboard) but they didn't come out. So it goes. Yours for forty george washingtons and the force you'll exert getting it to wherever you want it to be.

Pickup only - I'll carry to the front door and maybe to your vehicle if my arms don't explode. All sales are final. I can't refund your money and I'm definitely not liable if the equipment explodes or mutates into a giant Toyko-destroying hyperbeast.

12:06 <@ejp> wordy fuck, ain't ya?
12:06 <@ejp> my CL ads tend to be "17" CRT, has all cords. Works."
12:06 <@ejp> you want more? buy something more expensive than $20
12:10 < solios> yeah, well.

I have a ton of other Apple kit lying around that I still need to get rid of and may list later if this goes well. Or I may sell it to you at a reasonable per-pound rate at the time of sale of the above goods, if you're interested.

Perian

posted 2008.07.09 at 05:47  | comment

Perian is a multi-codec package that enables Quicktime to play back a host of file formats that most people use VLC and MPlayer for.

Unlike current VLC and "current" MPlayer builds, the Perian package correctly downsamples the irritating 5.1 (or 3.1 in the case of the file that done pissed me off so much I had to find a solution for it) AC3 audio codec to something that actually gives me voice on stereo speakers.

Without - I hasten to add for those of you who'd otherwise be all "$App can do that! Just do this, that, edit this, use the CLI for that, etc" - an enormous amount of undue hassle.

As one who strongly believes that things should just work, this makes Perian pretty spiffy in my book.

Software is hard.

posted 2008.01.23 at 21:02  | 2 comments

Left: 10.5 on the video workstation. Right: 10.4 on my workstation. Both machines have the same versions of the same software load, though 10.5 seems to have (obvious) issues with this version of Compressor.

Two of Leopard's 300 new features.

posted 2007.11.10 at 02:47  | comment

First up: a new size for the TextEdit window!

Deleting the preferences fixed that, just like it fixed a recent problem I had with Final Cut Pro wherein the app would bounce a few times in the dock and then disappear instead of loading like every other well behaved app does.

And if that wasn't enough, there's this nifty little bit of Chinese Water Torture that Safari kicks out every time a field manifests a scrollbar (and yes, this happens on sites that are not my various CMS backends, so I know it's not just Safari putting a hatin' on Moveable Type):

Update, 20071115 - the TextEdit problem cropped up again, and seems to have stuck. Leopard's TextEdit malfunctions horribly with plaintext. I tried Textwrangler, but it doesn't behave properly either. Same problem, actually - Text Does Not Appear. My sister had a similar problem under 10.4 in which ALL text on the system - menus, finder, error messages, buttons, etc. were completely blank. A reinstall fixed that nicely. In this case, I figure I'll hold out for 10.5.1 and if that doesn't fix things then I'll try a format and reinstall. The afflicted machine (my over-upgraded g4 733) started off with a botched install, so starting over may be the most optimal solution.

In other Apple news, my G4 2x450 seems to be acting up - two crashes in less than 12 hours, both with VLC running, both when VLC changed from fullscreen playback of a file with one aspect ratio to fullscreen playback of a file with a different size/aspect - video output dies (prompting a "no signal" message on the display), and sound continues for a few seconds before the machine locks completely. The only thing that's changed on maniac over the past several months is that the machine is now reading files from a Leopard client server instead of a 10.4 client server, so it's either some new breed of software wonkiness, or the old girl is finally starting to lose it in the hardware department.

Leopard (Day 5) : Live Free or Don't.

posted 2007.10.31 at 02:02  | comment

Things Apple should prioritize for 10.5.1 but probably won't:

1. Spaces : Over a decade of UNIX virts implementations and whoever implemented Spaces apparently learned about them through a handful of spied-upon smokeroom conversations. While doped to the gills on cold medicine. Behave like what your target user group (nerds with solaris/irix/linux/bsd experience) is expecting or get the fuck out.

2. Panic On Wake : I'm not the only person who's had this problem. In fact, I'm not the only person who's come close to voiding his bowels upon being woke from a sound sleep. The difference is that Leopard goes the extra mile and occasionally blasts excrement all over the place. More not than often but that still needs fixing, asap. It would be lower on the priority list if more people did like I do and set their Energy Saver preferences to "NO" but they don't. So.

3. "SHARED" Sidebar Tab : Is it a network browser or isn't it? It's disappeared on bda's machine and it's not visible on my home box unless I connect to a server, yet it's plainly visible regardless of network activity on my laptop. On or Off, motherfuckers. Consistency. DO YOU SPEAK IT.

4. The New Finder : Would have made it really easy to organize my porn if the "use as defaults" toggle worked worth a damn. Thank you, Apple. It's also still a braindead shit about numbers:

Not the most elegant or accurate of examples, but Finder isn't the most elegant or accurate of desktops when it comes to listing files with numerical names.

5. The Dock Hack : Works fine on machines that display the gaybar, but glitches out on either my powerbook or machines that don't - my powerbook being a machine that doesn't. Radeon 9600 seems to be Gaybar Minimum, but it's not like I have a wealth of machines to test on.

6. Moveable Type 2.x Preview/Save/Delete Buttons : Are grayed out in Safari 3 for some damned reason. They still work, mind you. They just look like they shouldn't. Since they appear like they damned well should in every other browser ever released in the entire history of the human race, I conclude that this is in fact a fucking BUG as opposed to, say, a feature.

7. Adium 1.1.2 : Apple-A (for "select all") in the text input window produces the error sound effect. I'm reasonably certain that wasn't an issue under 10.4, but damned if I'm going to reinstall an OS just to find out.... and damned if I'm going to run iChat, either way. Fortunately, 1.1.3 fixes this nicely.

Karn Evil 10{.5} - First Impressions

posted 2007.10.29 at 20:14  | comment

With two hours to kill at 30th street station, what else is there to do? This is just a list of off-the-cuff opinions and observations of Leopard on a minspec Powerbook - for a more detailed, more betterer review, plz to check out the Ars Technica in-depth coverage.

In no particular order:

1. So far I've only used it on rjbs's old powerbook, a 12" G4 867 which meets the minimum requirements and not much else. I haven't had the opportunity to use the 10.5 Finder or Preview in conjunction with any data that actually matters, so this is more of a "hm." than a "huh." as it were.

2. The install took just over two hours, and probably would have taken a lot less if I hadn't installed language packs with 10.4. There was no option to not install them in 10.5 - it was Upgrade The Existing Language Packs Or Don't Install At All - this resulted in a twenty minute "about a minute" at the end of the base install.

3. My hardware doesn't seem capable of displaying the translucent menubar that everyone who's installed 10.5 on intel kit has complained about. I've met nobody who thinks this is an improvement over the last 23 years of Apple operating systems. The fact that my kit doesn't display the translucent bar may be due to either its "advanced age" (re: video hardware) the fact that it's a PPC machine, a software glitch, or some combination of the three.

4. The new Finder folders are very low contrast and require some serious squinting to differentiate on a 12" 1024x768 screen. I didn't mind the old icons and I don't mind the new ones - what I do mind is the addition of a "Downloads" folder in the home directory that "can't be modified or deleted because it is required by Mac OS X." The loose upside of that is I can can the "Safari" folder I've used as a downloads dump for the last several years.

5. Just Like Platinum : The new Finder LOAF* is now a balance of Windows widgets and oldschool MacOS 8.0-9.2.2 slatey goodness. No complaints here - every release of OS X brings the overall feel closer to that of 9.2.2. Maybe they'll add windowshading back in with 10.6. By the same token, the addition of ACLs (Access Control Lists) and the revamped Sharing controls handle a lot like they did under the old MacOS - this makes it easier to use Client as a basic file server without additional third party software, such as Sharepoints. Very nice.

6. The new dock is just as annoying and nigh-useless as the old dock, only Now With More Eye Candy. The command line switch to toggle between the Eye Candy and Functional docks works fine, but the Functional dock displays oddly at the bottom of my screen for some reason, so I've been running the Pointless Eye Candy on the assumption that I'd rather have a bloated OS that looks like it works than a streamlined OS that looks like it doesn't. Call it peace of mind, or something. The new "stacks" thing in the Dock does nothing for me, as the only reason I ever had to keep a folder of anything in the Dock was obliterated when Quicksilver was released.

7. Software : Quicksilver needed an update to get its icon out of the dock, and I had to upgrade to a version of SSHKeychain more recent than 2004 to get that to work. For some reason my keychain was "damaged" and required several "repairs" and "verifications" from inside the Keychain Access utility to get everything back. coconutBattery (v.2.5.1) doesn't work under 10.5 - it'll show the charge bar, but none of the battery information it displayed under 10.4. Front Row is only as useful as Quicktime's library of codecs, which is to say that Front Row is useless for almost all recreational TV viewing. The base Quicktime Player still has every useful feature locked out by default.

8. Finder still doesn't cache thumbnails of the previews it generates, which is something Windows has done since the time of the Civil War. Get with it, Apple. This is especially glaring with "cover flow," which isn't just useless eyecandy, it's useless, slow eyecandy on this machine. It's a cute effect and works okay with moderately sized directories of images, but it just kind of sits there and shits its pants in the Applications directory. I hate to see what it would do with a large amount of data, like, say... one of the 15,000+ jpeg directories of timelapse data I've been working with lately. Quicklook is kind of nice, but (much like finder thumbnailing) works best with webscale images. It also handles like the "get info" window does if you activate it on a multiple selection - it'll focus on anything you select until the window is dismissed.

9. "Open this page in Dashboard" in Safari? Thanks for eating up a chunk of Safari's URL bar, Apple. At least you can drag that off from View -> Customize Toolbar. Also on the list of things I'll probably never use - Dashboard is still at the top, Expose is still in second place, and Spaces is now a distant third. Years of ingrained single-screen work habits do not change overnight - and all of the UNIX-bred geeks I've talked to have stated unequivocally that Spaces is practically useless for a variety of reasons. Maybe I'll have a use for it after it's had some time to mature.

10. The networking control panel has been nicely overhauled, and the network "browser" in the Finder is much less brain damaged - though at this point I've only had the opportunity to use it on a small home network of four machines - I have a feeling that work's network will be a different matter.

11. Safari behaves much more like Firefox, which is mostly a good thing. Where it's a bad thing is that the new built-in spellcheck goes for massive totalitarian overkill, underlining things like domain names and email addresses - it's completely oblivious to the context of @ and .org .net .com etceteras. I imagine that'll get fixed at some point - but in the meantime, 'solios' and 'amongthechosen' have been added to my powerbook's spelling dictionary.

12. An exciting new feature : Core dump on sleep! Running on battery, anyway - this machine has always had issues waking from sleep while on battery, but in the case of 10.5, I popped open the lid and was greeted with a stream of panicy unix text instead of the usual dead black. Not sure if that's an improvement or not. Not sure if a reformat will fix it or not, but I'll be in a position to try one in a couple of days.

13. Apple-shift-4, the command to capture a selected area of the screen, now displays screen coordinates in the bottom right quadrant of the crosshair.

14. Preview has the good sense to open all of the (tiny, minimal) datasets I've tried so far in numerical order, instead of the arbitrary anything-but-numerical it's opened them in previously. Select-and-Drag into photoshop CS still opens things in anything-but-numerical order, whereas opening a multiple selection from the application's open/save dialogue. Not sure if this was always the case or not, as this is the first it's occured to me to do that; but if drag-to-app-icon-and-open-in-order works for preview and not photoshop, then doing so must be an application-level thing. As mentioned previously, the base Quicktime Player still comes with everything useful locked out, so I can't test how it opens image sequences at this time (noteworthy in that I've had some divinely serious problems with this over the past couple of weeks). That'll have to wait until I start using Leopard at work.

15. Loss of Classic support doesn't affect me on this machine, as it's too slow and too small to use for serious image manipulation - so there's no point in keeping Photoshop 5.5 around. However, I still use Photoshop 5.5 quite a bit, and Illustrator 9 for a few things here and there, so I'll have to see if Leopard in any way fixes some of the useability issues I've had with type display in PSCS - type has this irritating habit of disappearing or displaying only the first few characters while being edited, which means that I'm effectively typing blind, making CS useless for comics production. I'm not sure if this is still a problem under PSCS2, as I'm one of those assholes who thinks that fast hardware ought to damned well mean fast-loading applications - and the OS boots faster than CS2, CS3, or DVD Studio Pro loads. On my work machine, Classic + 5.5 also loads faster than CS2. This is mildly aggravating when you consider that the only things CS, CS2, and CS3 do that 5.5 doesn't (as far as MY needs are concerned) is run natively.

Then the train came and I spent the next seven and a half hours reading Homicide and trying to ignore the cel phone conversations of the woman next to me. Horseshoe Curve for the win.

* LOok And Feel.

Degaying the 10.5 Dock

posted 2007.10.28 at 10:58  | comment

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

Nukes the new silly shiny 3d 10.5 Dock and replaces it with the Dock that displays when you stick the thing to the left or right side of the screen.

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO
killall Dock

To set it back to the default silliness.

Thanks to esch for linking that.

I hate you, Finder.

posted 2007.10.21 at 01:56  | comment

find /Volumes/mnh-edu-es1/Newhall_3-12-07_to_10-11-07/con2wc07042? -name \*.jpg -exec cp -v {} con/ \;

Fully loaded real-world example. "con2wc07042?" in this case being directories con2wc070420 through con2wc070429. Incrementing the digit before the ? and renaming "con" to the actual target, then replacing it with a new "con" is the only way this project - respooling a few hundred thousand jpegs from a network mount - is getting done.

I did it wrong the first time and it was faster - MUCH FASTER - to copy the quicktime movies I'd already generated off of the disk and FORMAT IT than it was to rm -r the data. Or worse, try to toss it in the OS X trash.

Much love for bda for cutting copies from 20+/month to 4/month.

Use Of LaCie Considered Harmful

posted 2007.10.15 at 18:21  | 2 comments

The LaCie d2 Bigger Disk Extreme is a 2tb RAID0 in a big, bulky, industrial-grade metal enclosure. The enclosure is an awesome doorstop or bludgeon. That's the good. The ungood is that they're apparently filled with drives from a Maxtor discard pile at the bottom of a septic tank, and whoever signed off on the controller is selectively deaf when it comes to the word "quality" in close proximity to the word "assurance."

You'd think a 2tb RAID would be awesome, right? Awesome for sorting and working with huge amounts of data, right? Well, that amount of space is handy. Just not on this hardware. Never, ever on this hardware. I've gone through THREE of these this year. The first two worked fine for about six months, then both died within a week of each other. The third lasted less than two months, then just suddenly stopped working without notice. We're talking "was working fine, had to reboot the server because Finder Sucks, drive was Gone on startup" degrees of "without notice." It's making the usual dead hard drive whine - which is the only noise these things make other than the beeps which indicate that the controller has shit its pants.

That's four out of four LaCie products I've used over the course of the last five years that have died within a year. Five out of five if you stretch back to 2001, when one of their firewire drives went up on me.

So. Forget LaCie. Back to homebrewed kit built using reliable components.

Appended : Forgot we have two LaCie optical enclosures at work. One came with an NEC optical drive and works like a charm. One came with some offbrand optical drive that works okay about 70% of the time, hinky 25% of the time, and not at all the rest of the time.

Still a pretty impressive failure rate, all things considered.

Tablet PeeCee

posted 2007.09.19 at 00:18  | 4 comments

Snagged an 800mhz/768 ram Fujitsu st4110 on ebay for cheap. Cheap for a reason - the digitizer is a drunk moose at worst and a drunk bee at best. Calibration dies every time the aspect is changed, calibration drifts on a whim, Wacom drivers fight with Fujitsu drivers, Photoshop 5.5 doesn't launch and Photoshops CS2 and CS3 can't be used in Portrait mode (half the tools in that damned top bar are offscreen), and no Adobe apps actually work with the digitizer. Alias Sketchbook (what the above doodle was sketched out in) listens to the Fujitsu drivers just fine, however. And it runs in portrait mode. If I can get the pen to actually calibrate with any degree of accuracy (hah, hah- the "calibration" utility asks you to point at a section of screen the size of a dime), I might actually have something here.

I still have to try running the kit with Wacom drivers installed and Fujitsu drivers removed, but ultimately it looks like this thing will be a cheap, ultra-portable rendering node, if nothing else. Makes me wish Apple would get off their fucking ass and haul the Newton - the original "tablet pc" - into the modern age.

Regardless of your opinion of my drawing skills, it's a real bitch to "ink" when your cursor is constantly an eighth of an inch in any direction from where it ought to be. It's like drawing drunk, only without the pleasant fuzziness about the headmeats.

Silo (first real-world impressions)

posted 2007.09.05 at 10:11  | comment

Detailed commentary at some hypothetical "later date."

07:08 <@xeno> ...
07:08 <@solios_> silo++
07:09 <@xeno> waaaaay too much time on your hands :P
07:09 <@xeno> go read a book or play a game or something.
07:09 <@solios_> only took about 16h total
07:09 <@solios_> and that was LEARNING the app.
07:09 <@xeno> ...
07:09 <@xeno> fagbot: doot solios
07:09 <@fagbot> it's time i started acting more like a MAN and less like a STUPID SHITHEAD
07:09 <@ejp> LOOK MA, NO NURBS!
07:09 <@xeno> asdfjkhasdjklfasdklfj

Points:

1. I don't do organic modelling. Yet. The vehicle looks real purdy all subdivided 'n shit, but "curvy" isn't on the spec sheet. That's for guys who work in the movie or video game industry. I need 3d for environments and vehicles. Spaceships - or this spaceship, at any rate - are supposed to be hard-edged and chunky. Especially this one, which is set to be on scene for a couple of pages of DCR and - stripped down - as an "extra" in Transitional Voices. You don't spend weeks doing a high detail super-awesome film-grade model of a ship that's got less screen time than the commercial break - you save that time and effort for the real star of the show - in this case, the interior of the Daedalus. Which I should be working on but am not.

2. The ship took less than two "days" (read : work periods) to model, with most of the work taking place on the second day. I downloaded Silo late last week and spent more time floundering about trying to think of something appropriate to model (MBO-1? No. Daedalus bridge? No. 'gheny floorplans? Easier in Max, oddly.) than I did actually modelling the Hemera.

3. So. Less than 20 hours combined work in Silo and Max, and it's in max and I have a pipeline worked out and I've already got the thing worked over with smoothing groups. All that's left is texture mapping, and it'll be at least a year before I actually need to get that bit checked off.

4. The base "doughnut" geometry started in max. The rest of it started off as a 3x3x3 faced cube in silo. I'm sure I could have generated the centrifuge in silo, but it's one of those deals where four minutes in max trumped hours plonking around in silo.

Hard Disk, Tape

posted 2007.03.31 at 18:38  | comment

Bigass writeup on why DVD+R is great, and a nice writeup and reasoning on the best media to buy, regardless of format.

After a weekend hassling with a pair of DVD-R burners - both write Memorex media just fine, one writes TDK just fine, the other has hissyfits and general attitude problems with same - I think it's noteworthy just for the media recommendation.

But then, I have around 220 gigs of my own material, and I'm itchy about keeping it all organized and backed up. Redundancy only goes so far when the media has an optimum five year lifespan.

Work DNS can blow me.

posted 2007.01.08 at 11:25  | comment

sudo /etc/hosts : New line, enter the IP address of the server the website is ACTUALLY RUNNING ON followed by the website's address.

lookupd -flushcache to flush cache and make things Work.

So now I can actually see and edit ATC from work, even though work's DNS servers STILL think ATC is at the old location. Despite Eric updating things earlier this weekend. :P

Zune

posted 2006.11.09 at 14:39  | comment

14:22 * ejp points and laughs
14:32 < solios> "The Zune is about 60% bigger and 17% heavier than a iPod. It comes in brown. All considered, we could be looking at the biggest consumer electronics flop in recent history here. "
14:32 < solios> IT COMES IN BROWN
14:32 <@ejp> and not a carmel brown either.
14:33 <@ejp> more like a fudge.
14:33 < solios> :o
14:33 < solios> fudge++
14:33 <@ejp> like fudge you've PACKED. into a BRICK.
14:35 < solios> ejp: XD
14:35 < vai_> (soon to be available in Felch Cream and Santorum Suede)

Aleph : Last of the V8 Interceptors

posted 2006.10.25 at 07:01  | comment

Technically, last of the G5 Workstations. But Mad Max is cool, dammit.

The only major hurdle with the upgrade was getting my system configuration and user data pulled off of idoru's root disk. I figured I'd do what I usually do - yank the source drive, plug it into a spare bay in the target, and go nuts. Then I {realized|remembered} that idoru's a bitch - both 450g drives are seriously, pliers-and-clamps stuck in the drive bays. No way in hell were they coming out - and one of the JOYOUS bits of the first generation G5 design is that you have to pull the "b" drive in order to remove the "a" drive - something they've since fixed. What proceeded was a grossly inconvenient ghettohack.

SATA data line from idoru's / through a PCI slot in aleph into the "b" slot on aleph's motherboard. You'd think that's no big thing, until you realize that while the transfer is going on, idoru sounds like this (288k mp3).

Good thing my headphones are insulated.

The funky thing about a firewire or local disk transfer of user and system information is that some stuff doesn't move over for some reason, and some things get wonky - my monitors came up in reverse order (expected) and with a wallpaper I haven't used in a year (unexpected). Energy Saver was set for install defaults (blink and the machine sleeps, expected but still high on the "this is a BUG NOT A FEEJUR" list*), and for some reason Soundtrack barfs because it can't find G4 hardware. Odd, seeing as how I never installed it on one. Fireworks demanded to call home and Final Cut Studio wanted the serial number reinput. Photoshop forgot all of its palette layouts (it does that), and it turns out that the cute little CPU Monitor I've been hanging onto since Jaguar can only see two processors.

Aside from that, the hardware is a lot quieter than idoru.

Off the cuff observations on the new kit:

The third USB port on the back is a nice addition, or will be for one of my coworkers. The modem port is gone, and the ethernet port has moved to the top of the motherboard and cloned itself. I found this a little odd at first, but dual NICs out of the box has a few advantages - servers, routers, stuff like that. There's now a strip of plastic under the case latch, which I assume is part of the liquid cooling system. The video card is pretty sweet - it's an NVidia (bias - I have a preference for ATI) and handles the Doom 3 test nicely. Dual DVI means I finally don't have to worry about blowing the video card in the event of a power surge.** I haven't used the optical drive yet, but Toast 5 picks it up, for great justice. The mega mega happy is the tweaks to the drive cage - the A drive can now be pulled without having to remove the B drive first. <3.

Oh, and the Firewire 800? Finally using it, with a bigass LaCie drive. Well, four 500g drives in a hardware RAID 0. Not something to keep permanent data on, but more than enough space to work with on Big Video Projects.

* Nothing like having to babysit a workstation through a 180 gig file copy. You'd think you could just kick it loose, walk away and come back in a couple of hours, but nooooo. Hell, the OS X operating system installer fucking falls asleep during the install. To "make up" for this chronic narcolepsy, the power button on the front of the machine is now heavy-breathing degrees of hair trigger. It may well have been hair-trigger on first generation hardware - see above re: energy settings.

** This has happened three times. Two G4/733s and one G5. Two at work, one at home. At work, the mobos went kerplooey as well and the whole mess was replaced under Applecare. At home, the mobo survived and OWC replaced the video card for cost of shipping it back to them.

Sputnik III

posted 2006.09.30 at 18:57  | comment

Sputnik III is a fifth generation player, 60 gig iPod video, black, slightly scuffed (a "refreshed" product from the Apple Store in Shadyside). It has enough capacity to be really really useful as a data transport, which was something I was never able to do with previous Sputniks. That's the good thing.

There's a few quirks, however. Some of it's adapting to a non-mini, some of it's probably "features" that all color/picture/album art capable iPods share - why the track options go volume -> placement -> album art -> rating instead of volume -> placement -> rating -> art is beyond me. Why some indication of track rating isn't given on the playback screen is also beyond me - there's plenty of space for some indication, even if it's just a few dots in the corner. It would be nice if the time would stay in the title bar, instead of switching to "iPod" when the interface is contacted - I think the mini did this, but my sister's got Sputnik II now so I can't do a quick side-by-side comparison. These two points are useage gripes - I use the iPod as a clock, and many's the time I've whipped it out to make a track rating only to find that I've already rated it at some point in the past.

Fact is, as functional as the interface is, there's more that can be done with it. And I don't mean turning the thing into a portable Atari, either. I mean things like picking up my system Appearance and Highlight settings - this thing is Aqua defaults with no apparent way to change to anything else. It's a really minor nit, but that sort of OS -> iPod integration is something Apple is definitely capable of, and it would be nice to see.

The only problem I have with video playback is that iTunes 7.0 (I'm updating to 7.0.1 as I write this, hopefully it gets fixed*) occasionally - irreproducibly - forgets that I have video on the iPod, and deletes it or renders it inaccessible or something. This has been cause for irritation on the few occasions I've wanted to use the video functionality - 99.9% of the time I'm using Sputnik for disk and music, so it's no big deal if this glitch never gets fixed.

Photo handling is nothing to write home about, as I almost always have larger, higher quality hardcopy of anything I want to show off stuffed in my notebook. It's basic, it's useable, and I found out the hard way that ATC's filenames and constant tweaks and revisions have made the jpeg pile a real mess.

The final bitch is that the thing doesn't come with a belt clip, which is a standard feature of the iPod mini. 30$ for an Agent 18 videoshield, and one of the clips broke right out of the box. Some Gorilla Glue, a clamp, and four hours later and I'm preferring the Video Shield and belt clip to the case protector and clip I was using with the mini - it rides lower on my hip and makes for a more comfortable - and more industrial** - experience.

The capacity is a handy upgrade. Sound quality is fine. Video and photo features may some day actually be useful. The biggest win - aside from the 10x increase in disk capacity - is that my sister has inherited Sputnik II. The mini and ipoddisk and she's an extremely happy camper.

* It didn't - I plugged Sputnik III in for sync on 20061002.14:09 and iTunes 7.0.1 decided I don't have any videos, again. :P

** What with the epoxy and all.

~Sehkz.

posted 2006.09.30 at 17:01  | comment

Old kit:

Left to right : A 15" Trinitron at 1024x768, clear but slightly dim and very sepia, VGA. A 20" Apple-branded Trinitron at 1280x1024, slightly dim and slightly fuzzy, DB-25 to VGA to KVM, which is plugged into VGA to DVI adapters. A 15" Apple-branded Shadowmask (?- non-Trinitron for sure) at 1024x768, excruciatingly fuzzy but very bright with excellent color, DB-25 to VGA.

New kit:

Two 19" Hanns-G 1440x900 DVI monitors and one 20" 1680x1050 VGA Acer.

The Acer is great for the price, but the KVM doesn't like it - in order to run it at the correct rez, it has to be plugged directly into the machine. So the KVM is now a KM, which is a bit meh. Color is great, contrast is good, viewing angle is sweet, and the brightness came factory default at Supernova - fine after toning it down a bit.

The Hanns-Gs are a slightly different story - the viewing angle isn't nearly as good, color had to be adjusted somewhat, and the righthand display has one dead pixel. DVI works fine, though I can't get full framerate fullscreen video using the PCI bus (probably because I'm running the OS off of a SATA PCI card). For the price, the Hanns-G is pretty good - but the next time I'm in the market for monitors, I'll be sampling a different model or manufacturer.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the new gear. Massive improvements in contrast, color, and overall clarity.

Other, off-screen upgrades:

Replaced the dead 160g SATA drive in maniac with a brand-new 320, replaced minerva's optical with the same model drive and moved the replacement into maniac (so both machines have 16x dvd burners). Mucked up the configuration of a Linksys WRT54GL - I'd be irritated about that if my low roll on the nerd d20 wasn't overshadowed by my sister's iBook dying the same night.

SAB salvage : Duo Dock floppy drive

posted 2006.09.15 at 16:16  | 2 comments

SAB salvage : SSHkeychain

posted 2006.09.15 at 16:13  | comment

SAB went blooey (which explains why the spam at my metaserver account has all but stopped). Even though this article is a bit off, it's something I reference every time I set up a new box. So it's being dumped here for posterity, etc.

Read the rest of SAB salvage : SSHkeychain.

Sputnik II

posted 2006.05.12 at 16:46  | comment

Went to the Apple Store with the carcass of sputnik, talked to Arvin and was forwarded to an open employee. Described the symptoms sputnik was experiencing - he confirmed this (and was o_O that I'd described the current status of the device exactly), did some tappy-tap on a powerbook, handed off to another employee. A storeroom trip, some more tapping, and a print-and-sign later, I have a brand new silver 6 gig mini with three months left on the warranty (option to buy applecare at academic rates before then).

A completely painless process that didn't cost me a dime. Gotta <3 Apple service!

Disk Mount On Boot

posted 2006.02.21 at 15:59  | comment

12:50 <@ecronin> defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool true
12:50 <@ecronin> been trying to find that string for months
12:53 <@bda> Heh.
12:55 <@ecronin> now my greedy leaching friends won't bitch when I reboot mojo and they can't get to their precious video and music
12:56 <@solios> ecronin: ??
12:56 <@solios> does that just paste into the CLI?
12:56 <@ecronin> yeah*
12:56 <@ecronin> makes firewire** drives mount at boot, not login
12:56 <@solios> because I've got a mini here with a few firewire drives that don't mount unless I'm logged in.
12:56 <@solios> OH THANK GID.
12:56 <@solios> I love you man!
12:57 <@ecronin> yeah, its annoying as crap
12:58 <@javaman> why is that not a control panel option.
12:58 <@ecronin> because steve's mom is stupid

* As root or using sudo.
** Any non-OS, non-fixed disk; Firewire or USB.

Screw you bleeding edge losers, Ah'm goin' home.

posted 2006.02.17 at 01:18  | comment

22:12 < mdxi> hah
22:12 < mdxi> 10.4.5 corrupts any firewire drives connected during the update
22:12 < solios> mdxi: !
22:12 < solios> mdxi: I USE THOSE.
22:12 < solios> a lot.
22:12 < solios> like, all of ATC is on one.
22:12 < solios> *all*
22:12 < solios> :|
22:13 < mdxi> then ferchrissake, don't leave it plugged in while upgrading macos
22:13 < mdxi> well, one person says no trouble. many others say "OMG FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUCK"

What an interesting SMELL you've discovered.

posted 2006.02.08 at 16:06  | comment

I'm using an NEC 16x DVD+/-R burner, at home and at work, model 3520A.

The drive works beatifully with Memorex 16x DVD-R media of model series CMDR476-CTMWM01-033.

The drive/OS/Toast fails to recognize Memorex 16x DVD-R media of model series DRSF60-00352.

The model "series" numbers are on the platter side of the disc. The CMDR476-CTMWM01-033 is plainly readable, while the DRSF60-00352 reads like the eye-defying kill-your-brain lightbendiness of a Windows install CD. Toast screams about an unstable connection, Disk Utility chokes and spouts a useless error message, and you won't find either CMDR476-CTMWM01-033 or DRSF60-00352 on Google as of this writing. Nor will you find these numbers on the Memorex packaging, nor can you check the media for these numbers without opening a spindle. Disc labels (the logo/DVD-R/specs/write-on area) are identical between runs.

Naturally, NEC doesn't offer firmware for MacOS X.

Update : Here's the Toast error:

My coworker Lorraine went and did her research/troubleshooting/bullshit digging thing on this, as she has the same model drive and five dots in troubleshooting to my four - it turns out that on the list of "supported media" for these drives, Memorex is conspiciously absent.

Either that list is extremely up to date, or we've just been "lucky" until now - we're shifting to TDK 16x media for testing purposes and will be dropping Memorex from the reserves.

All I can say is that Memorex media has worked beautifully until this halfassed DRSF60-00352 media came along.

Zoom.

posted 2006.01.18 at 23:38  | comment

For anyone else who has the 0 mhz problem, it turns out that Sonnetcache will fix OWC boards.

This comes as no surprise - a lot of Sonnet gear is rebranded from other people - their gigabit ethernet cards are Realtek and their SATA cards are more expensive purple versions of Seritek cards. I noticed that the Sonnet boards on OWC are the same specs as the OWC boards, only more expensive - so I figured it was worth a try*, and hey - yay! - it works.

As usual the biggest pain in the ass was checking ROM revision. My MacOS 9 fu is getting rusty - I expected a stripped down Classic system to actually boot. Oops. Also, it turns out that OS 9 will boot in the presence of a Radeon 9600 - you just have to force-quit on desktop to clear the ATI Video Accellerator extension, as it's shitting its pants... and you'd better get your monitor rez right on the first try for the same reason.

NOTE : If you're one of those assholes who uses Classic applications (like I do, Every Single Day), it seems that Photoshop 5.5's AltiVecCore extension totally hates this thing - I had to pull it out of Photoshop's extensions folder for the thing to start behaving properly. And by properly I mean "not crashing eight seconds into a file open." Pity my shading and masking technique can't be done with Photoshop CS. :P Update : It can, actually. It's largely a matter of turning off all kinds of stupid-by-default settings. Turns out CS is shweet for quite a few things... but for every :D there's a Brand New Stupidity, such as obfuscating the location of the 'new view' function.

G4 Digital Audio. Came with a 60g maxtor drive, a Superdrive, the zip drive, and 512 ram. I bought the machine in early 2005 and have been aquiring parts for it here and there since.

G4/1.4ghz with 256k l2 cache and 2meg L3 cache [up from 733/256/1]
Radeon 9600 64 meg AGP 4x [20 Apple trinitron @ 1280x1024x60xmillions]
Radeon 7200 32 meg PCI [15" Apple multiscan @ 1024x768x75xmillions]
Sonnet SATA board
      250gx7200rpmx8meg cache Maxtor : Minerva : OS drive
      250gx7200rpmx8meg cache Maxtor : 250 : Data dump
Internal IDE bus
      NEC 16x DVD {+|-}R**
      Zip-250 (YAY!)
      120g Seagate data dump
160g Seagate drive in a Venus DS-3 firewire enclosure
1g PC-133 SDRAM (2x256, 1x512)
FIDDYSIXKAYMODEM
Gigabit Ethernet

* Also worth a try would have been saving the extra couple of hundred bucks for a mini, but hey - the only thing I wasn't spanking the mini on was clock and everything else would have been a big step backwards. I got needs.

** Also 48x CD-R, 32x CD-RW, 8X DVD+R DL, 8x DVD+RW, 16x DVD-ROM, 6x DVD-R DL, 6x DVD-RW, 2m cache and it works with Toast 5.2.3 and OS X 10.4 no problem kthks, 40$ at newegg, squirt-squirt.

Rejecting the RDF

posted 2006.01.12 at 10:38  | comment

Some lovely evidence in this Unsanity blog post and this mailing list post to support the idea that Apple's badly-named Intel laptop and the new iMac are not, in fact, the bee's knees.

Key points : SSE is balls compared to Altivec*, which doesn't bode well for any of the Pro apps (or any form of video playback, among other things). The Intel laptop has lost a couple of features, the Intel macs use EFI instead of the BIOS (that's actually Good, but it means I'll be paying a hell of a lot of attention to the state of VMWare, VPC and so forth) and last but not least, disk partition maps for bootable volumes are Different (read: incompatible)- so while your binaries might be universal, your / isn't. Good job Apple.

Oh, and there's no Classic support (shock.), and none of the major productivity software is shipping Universal Binaries yet- so these things aren't going to be all that useful for at least another six months to a year.

In other words the platform is now a real mess. But hey, new iApps. Look at the shiny, try not to listen to the massive sucking sound coming from Cupertino.

As usual, the hardware will eventually "catch up" - and maybe in ten or fifteen years it'll be as responsive as it was in 1998. Until then, the world of computing is becoming progressively less of an "oooh, what next?!" and more of a "grit your teeth and bear it." - at least until the dust clears.

Some of the more vocal developer commentary is along the lines of "we'd rather be adding feejur support instead of dicking around with SSE optimization" - clearly The Mothership has convinced developers that performance isn't one of the bullet-points that people are looking for these days. Bummer.

* See the mailing list link if you think I'm being my usual opinionated self. SSE is a 1999 sequel to MMX, while Altivec (developed '96-'98 at Apple) is an in-house thing.

From the wikipedia entry:

Altivec as implemented on the G4 and G5 PPC processors can perform 8 32-bit FLOPS per cycle and SSE as implemented processors by AMD and Intel can perform only 4 32-bit FLOPS per cycle (x86s are also capable of 2 64-bit FLOPS per cycle using SSE-2, whereas AltiVec is not). The obvious implication is that SSE would need a clock 2 times the frequency of Altivec to perform the same number of FLOPS per second.

Supersampling

posted 2005.11.17 at 17:13  | comment

13:44 < xeno> THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS.
13:44 < xeno> Picard++
13:45 < solios> THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS.
13:45 < solios> AND THE NUMBER OF THE LIGHTS SHALL BE FOUR.
13:45 < solios> Not three lights, neither shall there be five.
13:45 < solios> fucking a supersampling makes a huge diff.
13:46 < mdxi> wtf is "supersampling" anyway?
13:46 < solios> it's kind of like a cross between standard anti-aliasing techniques and a Gunstar.
13:46 <@ejp> o_O
13:46 < solios> It also takes for fucking ever. :|
13:47 <@ejp> you just need MO POWAH
13:47 < solios> it increases the sampling area and makes things really amazingly SMOOVE.
13:47 < solios> as opposed to normal AA, which makes things Not Jaggy.
13:47 < solios> Smoove != Not Jaggy
13:48 <@ejp> mdxi: this is, of course, the highly technical explanation. I hope you can follow along.
13:48 < xeno> Smoove++
13:48 < solios> essentially it's a More Prettier feejur and I don't use it for most shots because it's honestly faster to over-render (render big with standard AA and scale) and mung it up a bit in PS than it is to sit here and wait the extre hour or seven that a good supersampling shakedown can take.
13:48 < solios> I can provide samples after five if you'd like a comparison.
13:49 < solios> (eg see what kind of a diff it makes)
13:49 <@ejp> DOWNSAMPLING IN PS MAKES THE BABY JESUS CRY
13:49 < solios> it does now.
13:49 < solios> the new version or next version or whatever hangs onto the original instance in case you upsample.*
13:49 <@ejp> o_O
13:49 <@ejp> that's not kosher dude.
13:49 < solios> so if you take a 1000x1000 thinger and shrink it to 350x350 and then decide you want it at 500x500 instead, it downsamples the 1000x1000 to 500x500.
13:50 < solios> all previous instances of ps would upsample the 350x350 to 500x500.
13:50 < solios> since they didn't retain the 1000x1000.
13:50 < solios> this is in fact a Really Sweet Feature.
13:50 < mdxi> isn't that what "undo" is for?
13:50 <@ejp> if I haven't saved the 1000x1000 as a seperate file, I deserve to be punished with Teh Fuzzy.
13:51 <@ejp> PS has a list of things that aren't undoable.
13:51 < solios> mdxi: yeah, and there's the history, but workflow isn't always like that.
13:51 < solios> I might decide I want Raven to be closer to the camera in frame, when I've been working on six other panels for four hours.

Anti-Aliased on top, then Anti-Aliased with Hammersley sampling. Not the best example (the Daedalus is a fantastic example) but it's the file that was open and test-rendering during the discussion.

As you can see, there's not much of a difference in the super-sampled version:

However, rendering time is orders of magnitude larger - which is why I only use it on stuff that Obviously Benefits from it, such as the Daedalus.

* I could be talking out my ass here. I remember the feature being discussed for either PSCS, PSCS2, or some future version. I agree with Eric and practice the "hang onto the original" method myself, as Photoshop is stubbornly refusing to gain anything in the way of performance with successive releases. I'll be flogging my copy of 5.5 until I can't find a PPC to run it on.

Apache log view (realtime)

posted 2005.11.16 at 21:57  | comment

18:54 < solios> what's the command to tail the apache log in realtime?
18:54 <@ejp> tail -f
18:54 < solios> I'm going to blog it this time so I don't forget.
18:54 <@ejp> "man tail"
18:54 < solios> o_o
18:55 -!- mdxi changed the topic to: <@ejp> "man tail"
18:55 < solios> ejp: pwnt.

The span tag.

posted 2005.11.09 at 01:17  | comment

22:08 * mdxi gets in an argument with #emacs over why you can't center a <span>
22:08 * mdxi has to explain the box model to get anyone to understand
22:09 < solios> O_o
22:09 < solios> why can't you center a span?
22:09 < mdxi> because spans aren't boxes
22:09 < mdxi> they're inline
22:09 < solios> O_o
22:10 < mdxi> only boxes can have their content aligned
22:10 < solios> so a div is a box?
22:10 < mdxi> yes
22:10 < mdxi> and a p is a box
22:10 < mdxi> and table parts are boxes in boxes
22:10 <@ejp> it's like you can't center em/strong/etc
22:10 < solios> yeah
22:10 < mdxi> and headers are boxes
22:11 < mdxi> muse mode attempts to center things in xhtml output by doing <p><span style="text-align: center;">
22:11 < mdxi> the style needs to be on the p.
22:11 < mdxi> i am trying to make them understand this
22:12 < mdxi> kudos for not using <center>
22:12 < mdxi> but...
22:12 < mdxi> apparently no one else has every TRIED it
22:12 < mdxi> because it DON'T WORK
22:14 < solios> I never used span.
22:14 < mdxi> it has its uses. that's not one of them.
22:14 < solios> since I could never figure out what the FUCK it DID when I was plonking with MT templates.
22:14 < mdxi> blah blah <span style="color: blue;">OMFG THIS TEXT IS BLOO</span> blah blah
22:15 < mdxi> arbitrary style application
22:15 < solios> well now.

Gear

posted 2005.10.30 at 21:46  | comment

From left to right : Factory's Highly Advanced Cooling System; some weird chunk of Factory electrical gear, and a television-sized switch in the harbelhaus. Industrial strength nerd toys.

Inquiring Minds Want To Know

posted 2005.10.25 at 15:35  | comment

Think Secret thinks 10.4.3 is imminent.

I hope so. Maybe it'll fix a few of the stupider things, like Finder's inability to draw every file selected in a drag operation:

Or maybe Safari will finally be able to drag-and-drop text, the way Firefox or Mac versions of Internet Explorer or most Mac apps do? Or is the inclusion of more basic functionality we had back in the 90s going to be a 10.5 thing?

Regardless, Finder's been one of the hardest things to come to terms with in OS X, and while it continues to improve, it also continues to suck - usually in new and interesting ways.

For some things, anyway. But Finder (9) had more than 10 years of polishing and spit-shining before it was retired, and Finder (X) is still in its single digit years.

Ultimately a Lighting Demo.

posted 2005.10.24 at 18:57  | comment

I'm done putzing around with Doom 3. I finally got around to "breaking" Delta Labs, and I think I'll be stopping here - I'm busy for the rest of the week and after this, there ain't a lot of "fun" left to be had. Doom 3 is ultimately a prettier version of the Doom and Doom 2 "gameplay" of FIND THE BLUE KEY CARD TO PROCEED PLZ, and pretty can only do so much to cover up a formula that runs just fine on a 486.

Delta Labs is where it starts to wear thin for me- not only do you have to slog through Where The Wild Things Are to get a part for the teleporter, you wind up teleporting a whopping three meters. Maybe five. I don't know - I suck at metric.

The best thing is that if you noclip through the window instead of using the door, it fucks up the teleporter guy something fierce.

Additional D3 goofiness : A few frames of that guy's chair parking itself (244k, Quicktime), and a Pinky demon wiggling its ass (484k animated gif and 494k Quicktime).

As I've said previously, modern games are heavily scripted. Further proof of this came about when I turned on Doom3's notarget mode. Turns out it only applies to enemies that are already in the environment, just chillin' out - like certain Pinkies and Cacodemons. All of the triggered beasties still run your ass down and try to pry it off with fireballs, claws or whatever - and it turns out that pretty much every single damned enemy in the game is triggered. Doors, health packs, ammo, doors, being too far away from doors.... imp, imp, cacodemon, imp, revenant. We're talking predictable here, folks- open the door, step back, unload a rocket, wait for the screaming to stop.

It happens so often that it's more of a surprise when it doesn't, and the predictability gets damned annoying after awhile. I can't see why anyone would bother running through the game without using either god or give all or both - the play experience ultimately gives way to throwing on the codes and wandering around gaping at the detail of the environments.... something you can't do with Halo, since the assholes at Bungie got it into their heads that running through the entire game backwards while being chased by a shitload of aggro zombie-fungus would be a good time, and something the player would be so engrossed in as to not want life or ammo codes, ever.

The persistence of cheat codes is why I stick with iD titles for singleplayer FPS "fun." Lack of them is points off any FPS, especially Halo - a game that's extremely enjoyable until the shotgun shows up.

Genre frustrations aside, I prefer iD titles to the rest - specifically iD licenses, as WolfET is the most fun I've ever had on an iD engine. I'll be playing through Quake 4 as soon as I can get my hands on it, and the Doom 3 expansion whenever that makes it to the Mac. Hopefully somewhere in there I'll even be able to do it at home.

Until then, Philadelphia followed by a few months of being cold and doing comics.

The action takes place in a science-fiction environment.

posted 2005.10.24 at 00:07  | comment

The recently released Doom 3 demo actually ran useably (at low settings) on my home G4/733. Until the Radeon 9600 smoked itself in a power failure - now I'm back down to a GeForce 2 and I'm really not interested in seeing what Doom looks like on that piece of shit.

So I played the full version at work instead, for the third or fourth time. If they actually made games for the Mac, I'd play those, but they don't.* So I make due. In the course of making due, I've noticed that modern "games" are HEAVILY scripted. So heavily that breaking off the rails can often have strange results. Take this "shortcut" down the reactor shaft, for example:

If you run through the game the way you're supposed to - getting your ass scorched off in a million-year elevator descent - this bad boy plonks down out of the well as you step off the elevator, triggering monster spawns, spooky music and all that other silly shit Doom is filled with.

Until you hit that trigger point (or you waste 'im, which is what I did), he's just kind of sitting here, chillin' out. Which is what I'll be doing with my non-{work|comics|drinking} time until Quake 4 gets a Mac release.

Edit : Went digging for some DCR-worthy dates and timeframes, took some screeners and changed the title of this entry to the first line of the Wikipedia entry for Quake II. Quake was released in '96, and Quake II in November of 1997 - something I intend to note in DCR when the story gets around to it, as Whitehouse has "inherited" my appreciation for the series.

To give you an idea of just how far things have come since the Dark Ages of the late 90s, compare the above Doom 3 shots to Quake (left) and Quake II (right):

Intense.

I'd blither about how much I'd love to do texture maps for a game company, but iD hires real artists - they're the kind of portfolio target that can afford to be picky. With my luck, if I got a job in the game industry my first assignment would be something like this, which is all the incentive I need to persue any other career.

Also noteworthy : Quake II is the only FPS I've played that lets you pick which hand your weapon is in - left or right. Early FPS and Quake had it centered; Q2 defaults to right and everything else just sticks it there for good. Of course, around the same time that happened, weapon models and animations got a hell of a lot more detailed and some wit decided it would be neat to put the ammo counter on the weapon, so doing a flat-out mirror Legend-Of-Zelda-style for a quick-and-dirty "left" just doesn't cut it. It's noteworthy but it's not something I'm going to kick up a "woe is me" stink about like I would about scissors ($%^!@!!)- while I eat, draw, masturbate and lead with my left, it's also the trigger finger - I'm right eyed, so I hold a rifle (and a mouse) with my right hand. I remember shotgunning off of my left shoulder and being very "both hands down the middle" with a pistol, but we're talking isolated fragments here, as it's been awhile.

The last time I handled live ordinance was July of 2000, when I did some target shooting with my dad's .22 rifle. I still have the group in a notebook pocket somewhere. It's fairly telling- there's a reason I prefer flamethrowers, mortars, rocket launchers, BFGs, artillery and air strikes to machine guns, pistols and sniper rifles, and that reason is I need sandbags and yoga to hit better than the broadside of a barn. Don't matter if it's live ordinance or software - I think like a glacier and putting the crosshairs on a moving target requires either intuiting its motion or actively processing the propabilities, and I suck ass at floating-point math.

Math of any kind, really.

Skill aside, the sheer economy of wasting a dozen zombies with a single rocket without having to chase 'em and possibly miss... I like that. Pistols and assault rifles are too on/off for my tastes** - it's a hit or a miss. With splash weapons, there's a nice big "maybe" factor, the "did I get it close enough to count?" and that's the bit I'm decent at, the "maybe" - aim at the feet and suddenly a 25% chance at a hit is a 25% direct hit, 50% indirect, 75% chance you're going to take damage, just a question of how much, roll 10d6 against your ED*** plz. Or more anal-retentive and statistically accurate numbers.

These kind of numbers, for example:

The best thing about the killgames, aside from the not-dying-for-real bit, is there's no smell. It's going to be a very long time before they can get that element integrated.

* Yeah. I know. I'm not paying a monthly fee for fantasy crack, folks. Not until my home hardware can handle it, anyway. And spending an hour trying to find a Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory server that doesn't reject a Mac client just isn't my idea of a good time. On the rare occasion I can get on a server, WET is the most fun I've had with a video game since Puzzle Fighter. Hard to see the appeal of pointy-eared level grinding when MP-40s, smoke grenades and mortars make me so very, very moist.

** Nevermind you "HEADSHOT!!" kiddies - people like you are why people like me have the rockets and the 110% mortar accuracy ratings. Try that with bullets.

*** I stopped playing Hero way back with 2nd Edition. For all I know they've switched to d10 or otherwise changed/streamlined the system by now. I kind of hope they haven't - Hero was so over-the-top math-heavy that the process of getting the system out of the book and into my head hauled my math scores up from the D- and F+ territories into the C+ range. The system provided some actual incentive to learn math. Makes me wish there was some concrete, tangible benefit to picking up budgeting skills - "less drunk now so you can be even less drunk later, when they raise your rent, raise bus fair, raise the "you work in pittsburgh!" tax, hike the take-out for health benefits and fail to give you a cost of living increase for the fifth year in a row!!" isn't much of an incentive, really. Especially when the price-to-performance ratio on new or near-new gear keeps getting more and more favorable.

Attitude Adjustment

posted 2005.09.18 at 22:54  | 2 comments

Sputnik seems to be pulling a charge off of the USB 2.0 PCI card mounted in minerva*. I say "seems to be" from the standpoint that it's displaying the battery charge animation - the last time I did this, it Didn't.

The odds I was smoking crack with the original assessment are pretty good. Though Sputnik's had a few bits of teething oddness, I have a history of being fabulously wrong on occasion - almost always involving technology or concepts I'm not completely up to speed on.

Also, my kit is often as prone to mood swings as I am.

* Minerva is a g4 Digital Audio I bought earlier this year and have been beefing up a piece at a time. She still needs a modern processor and eventually a drive transplant from my current home box (2x150g SATA drives). If Tritton ever offers mac support for their USB 2.0 SVGA adapter, I'll just buy a mini and be done with it.

podflesh

posted 2005.09.16 at 13:33  | comment

A few points after almost a week of iPod useage:

(a) The headphones hurt a bit. Not in the "my ears are ringing" sense- they hurt in the "wow, these are surprisingly uncomfortable" sense. Sound quality still spanks my Sonys, new headphones are still a priority, gotta pay bills first etc.

(b) The fact that audio adjustments made in song info seem to be both copied over and double-pumped is odd. Godflesh tracks Suction and My Own Light are still quieter than everything else in the iTunes library even after volume adjustments - for these tracks to be skull-splittingly loud on the iPod is entirely unexpected and finds me scrambling for the volume controls while parkskwirls give me funny looks.

(c) I've been listening to Godflesh a lot (big surprise, that.), and the podphones have given me a new appreciation of Hymns. The album has a nice rolling, rattling signature "crunch" to it that calls to mind the basslines of a couple of the less whinier Korn tracks I've been subjected to- though a quick comparison leaves Korn sounding wimpy and emasculated beneath the skull-wrenching THUD of Godflesh. You can keep your pussy "I've got issues, mommy!" Hot Topic grunge-metal, kthx. I'll stick with the tectonic rock golem orgy that is J. Broadrick And Friends.

(d) Guilty pleasure : Informatik's hilariously awful cover of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song. While industrial-bands-doing-mainstream-covers is a great way to showcase the shortcomings of the genre, this track is just totally above and beyond the usual Cleo-comp crapfest. It transcends.

(e) Battery life on the iPod mini is TEH AWESUM.

(f) Silence is still preferable to poddage at a few points in the Golf Course Loop. Sputnik's a damned spiffy people-filter, but there aren't any people at certain places in the park... which is exactly why I spend hours stomping around the place, sweating like a maniac. I've taken to using the iPod as a sort of first-stage booster to rocket my bitchass out of Natural History, through CMU or Flagstaff Hill or Phipps and out into The Quiet - at which point the Reality Filters have done their job. Cut in the boosters, ignore the screaming of the blisters and Enjoy The Silence.

Headphones.

posted 2005.09.13 at 14:30  | comment

From Eric and Ryan : Sure E2c Sound Isolating Earphones ( Amazon ). The obvious downside is the list price (the used and reseller prices are an improvement, though still a bit high for my tastes- the kind of people who spend >100$ on mobile headphones are just as irritating as the kind of people who think name-dropping The Mars Volta gives them cool points- it doesn't. If you know fuckall about fillintheOgilvie and think your poseur-prog leanings give you some sort of conversational superiority, it's time you stopped hanging out in a fucking goth club, bucko.), but both Ryan and Eric speak extremely well of the E2cs, so.

My Sonys have long since lost covers and pads and have no bass; the iPod earbuds are pretty decent but they hurt like a bitch after prolonged use.

Yet another in an endless series of hardware upgrades, to be budgeted in sometime between October and June.

11:20 < ejp> they live inside your ear
11:21 < ejp> think babelfish with a speaker up its ass

Sputnik

posted 2005.09.11 at 12:36  | comment

A couple of weeks ago, Arvin - one of the guys I frequently drink with - mentioned that the local Apple Store sold refurbished stuff as well as the usual high priced first-cut Mac cocaine. Stop in and ask for pricing and so forth. Disclaimer, Arvin's an AS employee and is the kind of person that would know these things, etceteras.

To cut a long story involving Jason, the waterfront, Target not stocking pants in my size and Eides short : The Apple Store isn't next to a Banana Republic. It's next to a Rite Aid (it may actually be near a Banana Republic, but I didn't see one). It's disturbingly clean and looks like it was designed by Stanley Kubrick. There were a hell of a lot of people in it for 8pm on a Friday night, most of them college kids, the rest of them either employees or the sort of people who don't know much about computers (eg the so-called "Target Market"). Talk to Arvin about refurbs, start leaning in the direction of a 30 gig Photo but hey, look! A 6g mini, silver, refurbed (with warranty, etc.)- for the price of a 2g nano! Sold!

It was financially irresponsible of me - mindalteringly stupidly irresponsible - but after the hour or so of ROD STEWART and fucking SOUL ASYLUM (I hate that single, so very, very much- just thinking of the band gets that whinyass thing stuck in my head, makes me want to stab my brain with a fork) I suffered while pants-hunting, after the drooling inbred honkings of yinzers exploring the uses of public transit as a dating service, I found myself more than willing to pay anything to end that pain forever - anything at all.

Next time I stomp into Target to not find pants, I'll have Whitehouse, Joy Division and Gridlock to filter out the badness. I will have an easy and painless method of filtering out meta-corporate focus-group "taste" and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the thrill of victory gives me an erection. No sir.

No point in going into details - you've either already drank the kool-aid or you're thinking about it or you can't afford it or you think the whole fad is for fags or whatever. The iPod is a work of art, the interface is great, the learning curve is as close to horizontal as it's possible to get in a piece of consumer electronics, and just by existing the thing underscores just how horribly, skull-fuckingly retarded every non-Apple product designer on the face of the planet is. We're talking massive congenital neurological impairment here. Look at any Motorola product, any Sony product, and compare form factor, features, functionality and interface and you too will be wondering what sort of crack these high-paid retards are smoking. I hate the price tag on Apple kit but I'm still wishing they made a cel phone, since I have yet to find one that hasn't been designed by a special olympics team doped to the gills on PCP.

I use Apple kit because at its worst it sucks less than everything else on the market and at its best - and believe me, the iPod is easily the best example of Apple engineering - it points out just how bad all other product design is. Doesn't matter if it's software or hardware, kiddies - you pay that extra few hundred bucks for underpowered kit because the people that put it together actually care about what they're doing more than they care about making mortgage payments or getting laid or what's on O'Reilly tonight.

Straight up.

The only real downside is that the thing came with a USB 2.0 cable, which doesn't seem to want to charge from the USB 2.0 PCI board in my home G4. Grr. I'll need a Firewire docking thinger (MSRP : 30$) to get the maximum bang for the buck with my home and portable kit - in the meantime, Sputnik gets tethered at work. Both Arvin and bda have offered spares. It'll be cool if one falls into my lap, but I'm not counting on it. // Update - cables are like five bucks on ebay. Kids these days!

Oh, and those dorky white earbuds have better bass than my old rotted out Sonys. Bonus.

Flight of the Behemoth

posted 2005.09.08 at 13:50  | comment

Boxed up for shipping and in transit on the 54c. A garbage bag felt like a pretty gauche transit shroud, so I opted for my never-worn You know what your problem is? You're stupid. shirt.

In the Smithmobile and the last stop in Pittsburgh. The FedEx guy was pretty cool, and shipping was ridiculously cheap - I spend more on comic books.

Shipping weight : 11.65 lbs.

Pismo hits Philly on Monday and will be heading to Baton Rouge, Louisiana shortly after that.

iTunes 5 (THOUSAND)

posted 2005.09.07 at 17:30  | comment

1. NFI why Apple didn't push the dmg out to Akamai. 3.4 k/s when I dumped 4.9 onto a Windows box at 2450.0 two weeks ago? Kids these days.

2. I skipped 4.9 out of a general disinterest in podcasting. I don't do the podcasting thing. I can work and "think"* with music but I can't work and think with talking going on, and the icon's pretty glaring. So I stayed on 4.8, and did a "test install" of 5 on a spare machine. Podcasting can be turned off in "Parental Controls." Bonus.

3. The interface isn't Puffy And Sluggish anymore. Not only is it visibly faster on older (and current) machines, it gets rid of a whole bunch of unused chunkiness that was just eating space.

So the starboard head looks like this now:

Yes, ATC has character specific playlists. As well as two "Dualist" playlists. DCR is split into Metal and Everything Else, and the Godflesh "smart" playlist eats a lot of eartime.

4. The "shine" on the play display makes the song title harder to read, at least to my smeared-out eyes.

After a quick grab-and-poke, it's obvious that the text itself isn't any different - creating the impression that the output is layered "over" the display rather than "under" it. Goofy.

Oh, and apparently the "make folders in the Source pane" thing is new to 5. I didn't mention it previously because I thought it was one of those things I'd just totally failed to notice. I can't tell you how nice this is for iPod syncing and the like.

* In much the same way a GPU "thinks" about barfing textured and lit polys onto the screen. Heavy lifting in photoshop or FCP is a matter of sinking into a trancelike state where the work just flows. It ain't problem-solving- that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

Bowels of the Carey Way Technosarlaac

posted 2005.09.07 at 14:12  | comment

People scoff when I say I live in the Fight Club House.

"Live" is too strong a word, but it's easier to spit out than "watch Doctor Who, shower and sleep," so hey. Live it is.

Awhile back, my friend Sean lost interest in computing and moved. I wound up with a lot of his kit, thinking I'd have a use for it. Turns out I mostly didn't, which has made the basement one hell of a mess.

That isn't all of it, unfortunately. The USPS boxes are full of cables and equipment and there's a few more boxes of Keyboards And Shit in my room, along with several machines, all 68k and PPC, and all very much useless for any application beyond, say, old versions of Office and versions of MacOS that don't handle iTunes.

I try not to think about this mess. Mostly because I like thinking about other things and don't like the idea of hundreds of pounds of obsolete Cupertino emissions harshing my mellow.

Obviously I'm going to have to do something about it at some point - I've already given functional machines to Ben, Amy, Ann, Roy (he got two), Randy (also two but hey, one died), Ray, Drew (cursed him with a 4400), and Theresa. So the decent PPC kit has already been shipped out.

I'm wondering if ebay is worth the hassle.

Freezerburn

posted 2005.09.07 at 13:49  | comment

Yes, those are Return of the Jedi sheets.

I reformatted and reinstalled Pismo last night, and became somewhat irritated when I noticed that the batteries weren't charging. At all. From Classic or 10.4.

I'm assuming Hunter actually needs the professed ability of the machine to remain functional at great distances from a 110VAC source, so this is, as they say, an issue.

It's a given that if you leave a powerbook unplugged for a few months, the batteries are going to discharge. If you've got 69 month old (har har. Thus spake coconutBattery) lithium ions, one of which had a ten minute charge the last time you used it, the other of which held for three hours, they probably aren't going to come back. Unless it's the power management unit (see below), you're looking at at least 140$. 280$ to replace both batteries, 320$ to splurge on a pair of the the 7200mAh "high capacity" versions. Pismo hardware doesn't allow for "battery reconditioning" software to work its mojo, and if I had a Lombard on hand (same batteries, but a logic board that allows for softwar battery recondition) I'd be cartoning that for FedEx.

It's also a given that NVRAM batteries typically have an active life of 5 years. While this isn't much of an issue for desktops (3.5v lion, looks like a third of an AA cell, roughly 12-15$ at 'shack), it's a 40$ replacement part. In the event that the PMU is fried and needs replaced? That's another 60$.

Cosmetically, the hinges need replaced. That's a whole lot of ebay and a shitload of work.

At the very least, the machine needs a new battery and a new PRAM/NVRAM battery. MSRP 180$. To put this in context, I paid 400$ for The Last Of The G3 iBooks, cherried up with some light case wear- a machine that's twice the speed of pismo and a hell of a lot lighter. Admittedly a sweet deal, but it underscores the fact that I got a whole new machine for twice the price of what it's going to take to make my old one mobile - which is still quite a bit less than what new kit is going for.

If Hunter can actually use it, I still intend to ship it to him - it's packed up and ready to lug to FedEx - but something tells me that this isn't exactly what he needs at this juncture.

===============

Update : Turns out that despite the warts, a working and portable OS X machine trumps a win98se tower any day of the week. Pismo ships out Thursday or Friday, FedEx.

Good thing I kept the box.

posted 2005.09.06 at 11:49  | comment

Since I upgraded from a Pismo-series powerbook to a 900mhz iBook a few months ago, my battle-worn pismo has been sitting on my bookshelf, gathering dust. Waiting for a mission.

Then bda asked me if I had any spare laptops. His friend Hunter - a man I've met all of twice - is from Baton Rouge and is currently preparing to head down and help with cleanup and relief efforts.

And Hunter needs a laptop.

I initially begged off, since Pismo is battleworn and the hinges are floppy and deep down I'm a selfish bastard who's loath to give up kit for any reason, ever - especially when I'm emotionally attached to it. And that was that, for an hour or two.

Then I realized I couldn't stop thinking about the situation, and that the decision had, in fact, already been made. Hunter's the kind of guy who leaves a lasting impression.

Friday my old laptop heads for Baton Rouge by way of Philadelphia. Earlier if I can swing it.

MYSQL dump/import (sab mirror)

posted 2005.09.01 at 16:06  | comment

Everything I need to know about the process, at least at this point. Mirrored from my original entry on the Secret About Box, which has been neglected due to my loss of interest in hardware-as-a-hobby.

Read the rest of MYSQL dump/import (sab mirror).

IRC (stop trying to reconnect)

posted 2005.09.01 at 16:01  | comment

Because efnet can't keep a connection for longer than a week without something somewhere breaking horribly:

12:55 < solios> how do I tell irssi to stop trying to connect to a server?
12:56 <@john> /help rmreconnect
12:56 < solios> I mean, /quit works real good and all, but there's got to be another solution.
12:56 <@john> or rather /help connect
12:56 < mdxi> do a /server to see the server list; it probably won't have the name you expect
12:56 <@john> look for something like rmreconnect
12:56 < mdxi> then /disconnect servername
12:56 < solios> hm.
12:56 < mdxi> prolly be RECON-1 or such
12:56 <@john> /rmrecdonns
12:56 <@john> /rmreconns
12:56 <@john> rather

I should note that I've been using irssi for a few years and just now thought to ask. :P