Remember the game Mousetrap where you put together a trap that was triggered by a ball and wound through counter weights?
Here is that same idea on a huge scale — it seem to take up a warehouse. Really cool. Coordinating this must have been a nightmare.
I enjoy playing games: pen-and-paper RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons (yes people still play it), computer RPGs, MMOs, and all that fun stuff. Bioware, a game company, has a good track record producing RPGs (role-playing games). Bioware produced the Baldur’s Gate series a few years back, a well loved RPG.
Bioware recently released a game called Dragon Age: Origins for PC, PS3, and X-Box. I don’t have any of those machines, although I was considering getting a copy of the PC version to use with Cross Over Games (an application that lets you (kinda) run Windows games on OS X). I found a copy of Dragon Age for the Mac (surprise!) this week and it was 20% off. I couldn’t resist. Such a bargain!
The 9 GB download took 1.5 days to complete. Started on Monday and finished Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday afternoon I played for the first time just to get an idea of how it is.
Awesome doesn’t begin to cut it. Great storyline, good character development. Very well done. How else can you spend six hours enthralled in a game and think only two hours have passed?
New interesting feature in this game is the integration of story progress with a social network. As your character proceeds through the storyline, screen shots and quest updates are posted to the character’s profile social.bioware.com.
My poor little Mac died a painful death. What had apparently started weeks ago with random DVD drive openings, ended today with the machine going into an endless boot cycle.
Today was not a good day for this to happen. I was already annoyed from idiots on the drive home and from running errands. I was hungry and had had low grade-cramps all day.
When I first opened the case I smelled burning soldering wire. It’s a metallic, tangy smell. Not like burning, melting plastic, which is what happened when my old Windows PC’s motherboard short circuited and fried the hardware.
A friend came over and we disassembled the system: physically took everything out except the hard drives (which were disconnected). The machine still wouldn’t come up even to see the bios on a screen. Nothing appeared on the monitor because it never even got a signal.
This Mac (really a hackintosh) ran OS X 10.5.8 on a Shuttle SG35 barebones system with 4 GB Corsair RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 gHz processor, DVD-RW, dual 500 GB 8 MB cache drives, a JMicron IDE controller (which can be a world of hurt for a hackintosh), and a 384 MB nVidia 8800 GTS graphics card. Once the kinks were worked out of the system, it ran very well. (I always bought full copies of any software I installed on the Shuttle, including copies of OS X 10.5 and 10.6.)
From November to yesterday, it was almost perfect in fact. (With one blip back in December when it wouldn’t boot.) Aside from the internal and external DVD drives opening and closing some times, everything seemed to be fine. Until this morning when I came in and the machine was offline. It booted once when I got home tonight and that was it. After that, it was an endless boot cycle: power on, CPU fan and power fan came on, and then it would power down and start up again.
My friend and I concluded that the motherboard or one of the chips on it was dead/fried. On top of everything else that I’d gone through today and the hours of frustration spent on the Shuttle, I had had it. I had spent probably close to 100+ hours over the space of 18 months getting the system tweaked so the OS ran smoothly, digital sound out worked, Quartz Extreme graphics engine was enabled, and game window resizing didn’t freeze the system. Oh, and OS X never recognized the virtualization capabilities of the Intel Core 2 Duo, even though the chip supported virtualization. I never could run virtual machines with Parallels 5 (which checks the CPU for virtualization technology). (I might post the list of drivers I used, if anyone is interested.)
I learned a lot about Macs by creating a hackintosh. I feel confident that I could resolve most system problems on a real Mac because of my experience digging into different kernels, plists, drivers, and other internals. Good learning experience for being a tech writer in an IT department.
What I really learned was that I didn’t want to waste my time (and therefore my billable hours) customizing yet another hackintosh system. I wanted something that would work and be reliable. Or “stable” as it were…
So… I’m looking at a shiny new low-range iMac. The main terabyte drive has been reformatted and partitioned. The application/system partition is called “Stable,” the larger working file partition is called “Pasture.” I’m transferring my files right now (300+ GB from my old secondary partition, mostly mail, photos, videos, and writing). While that material slowly copies over via USB2 and 32,000 files download for Guild Wars, I’m going to head off to bed. (I miss the eSATA connection!)
Rest in pieces, poor little Shuttle.
Over the weekend I tried a new theme that had a section that looked like torn paper with pictures behind it. Unfortunately, the theme didn’t work in Internet Explorer. The pictures appeared on top of the torn paper images instead of behind. (Maybe it’s a layering issue in the CSS.)
Any way, I loaded this theme and we’ll see how it works. I would like to customize a theme with horse pictures. Most of the themes with horses I don’t like.
I’ve also started having a Twitter feed automatically post daily digests. If this is too much traffic from the blog, I’ll turn the auto update off.
I’ve had my N900 since the end of November. On January 19, Engadget published a thorough review of the N900.
The Engadget article points out some of the flaws with the N900: it’s not a polished product. The user interface isn’t as slick as the iPhone or the Palm Pre (but it is very pretty). The selection of applications is also limited, but being worked on. The Ovi Store for Maemo is buggy at best. There are glimmers of what the device could be with a little more refinement.
The N900 has one of the best implementations and integrations of Skype and regular phone address book. A Skype call looks just like a regular call. (In fact, Skype works over the 3G network on T-Mobile and not just wifi. The current version of the iPhone, until this past week, only allowed Skype calls over wifi.)
The N900 can’t be viewed as just a phone: it is really a mobile computer with phone capabilities. For example, using the OpenVNC application, it’s possible to remotely log in to a desktop computer or server. Like the iPhone, there are applications for writing blog posts, using instant messengers, and accessing most popular social networking sites. Unlike the iPhone, the N900 is unlocked: it can be used on any network and any available application can be installed. (The iPhone can install applications, but only those approved by Apple and made available on the application store.)
I’ve used the N900 for a few months now and have thoroughly enjoyed it. I’d highly recommend it to any of my geeky friends. (It’s so much fun pulling up a Debian console prompt and showing it to unix/linux sys admins. Their eyes light up.)
If you are interested in the N900, see if you can find someone to talk to who has one. Play with it. Read the reviews. If you want something you can use for email, blog posts, and have shell access for complete control over the operating system, the N900 is awesome. If you just want something to make phone calls that has a keyboard and a touch screen, you might be better off with an Android-based phone.
This is just hysterically funny considering that Apple just announced the iPad this week. (What was Apple expecting by releasing a product that is so closely named to feminine hygiene product?) Here is the Mad TV “commercial” about the Apple iPad with all kinds of innuendo.
As far as the iPad itself goes, I was rather underwhelmed. It’s like an iPod Touch on steroids. Why would I pay $499 for a device, however cool it might be, that is completely closed? Apple chooses the applications you can install, controls the books that are available, etc. It’s a closed system. Maybe on a phone that isn’t so bad, but on something that might replace a netbook or an ebook reader, that bothers me. I don’t like companies controlling (censoring!) the data I can access on devices. Apple makes great stuff but some of their policies suck.
Besides, the iPad (snicker) and the iPhone can’t stand up to the capabilities of the N900. Might not have as many applications, but damn I can do a lot more stuff on my phone (sorry my mobile computer with phone capabilities). Open VNC for remote desktop connection to my desktop? Check. Multitasking? Check. Integrated email, Skype over 3G, and seamless integration of Skype and phone address books? Check. (Fring just posted the first application that allows Skype calls over 3G. Prior to this, iPhones and iPod Touches could only make Skype calls using wifi connections.)
Enough of a rant. I need to go to bed.
I got a thank-you on an Open Office forum for my article on using page styles to create unique headers and footers in Open Office Writer.
One of my friends asked me why I bother writing documentation that no one will read. I told him I write for that one person who, at midnight while on deadline, encounters a problem and the only resource they have is the product documentation. I’ve been that person on deadline struggling to figure out how to bend an application (*cough* *Word*) to do what should have been a simple thing. (Why won’t this stupid graphic stay where I anchored it?!)
I try to be a user advocate and approach documentation and application development from a user-centric perspective. It is really nice to know that even one person found something I wrote useful.
Even if the thank-you was posted last year, it made my day. Thank you. 
(And yes, I love what I do.)
After blowing like eight hours trying to get my Mac to work, it finally started working randomly after a reboot.
I tried booting from the OS disk to restore from the Time Machine backups. That is what the backups are for, after all. Unless, after booting from the OS disk, the spinning beach ball of doom appears on the “Choose the backup drive” screen. At least I know I have to figure out what is wrong with the Time Machine backup system…
Repairing the permissions may have helped, but who knows? I’ve rebooted several times and each time the Mac has come up just like it should.
I’m just glad to have the system back. I’m using a secondary drive to mirror my primary drive so I’ll always have two bootable copies of the main drive and my data.
I installed several updates on my desktop Mac last night: Java update, another minor application update, and then two update packages for a firewall. I wasn’t expecting any problems… of course that’s when you get trouble.
The Mac will now come up to the point where the gray apple logo appears on the screen. And then it didn’t progress any farther.
I dropped in the installation disk to restore from the Time Machine backup. That would work fine, if the installation disk recognized the time machine backup drive. No clue why it quit working.
Luckily, I keep two hard drives in my machine, both with nearly identical copies. I have booted off of the second drive and backed the entire system up to my spare external drive. The backup finished in about two hours. I repaired disk permissions on both disks (just in case something got messed up).
After about eight hours of trying to figure out what was wrong, I rebooted with the OS disk in the external DVD drive and forgot to stop the bootloader from automatically loading the default drive. And it worked.
Go figure. Not a fun day.
A Twitter post today mentioned the Maps of War, a site that has history maps with time lines showing the progression of different events overlaid on a map. Two of the maps caught my eye: Imperial History of the Middle East and the History of Religion. I’ve embedded both of them here.
While not much of the site deals with ancient history, the maps do provide an interesting point of view.
The Flash files will load after the jump.
