Recently in technology Category

i bought a gamecube a few years ago for mario kart:double dash alone
it met my expectations
but only just
the depth of the gameplay just didn't measure up to the n64 version that hooked me
in the first place
the majority of the levels lacked the demented imagination of the prior version
and there were fewer shortcuts
wrong turns
and surprises

so even if we were to be measuring it by that alone
mario kart wii exceeds that mark by a significant margin
the courses are by turns vertiginous
dastardly
strange
and fraught with opportunities for your enemies
to fuck you up

the number of times i cuss out yoshi alone
should be enough to explain how much better it is

but the true sign of how awesome it is is that it's got me
sitting indian-style on the floor
three feet from the giant television
holding the steering wheel at arm's length
like maggie's toy at the beginning of the simpsons
twisting and leaning this way and that
and getting my ass kicked by eight-year-olds worldwide

a word to crackberry addicts

if i can use capital letters where required on my iphone
then you can use them on your beloved toys too

especially in email trails that wind up in front of outside eyes eventually

this probably seems hypocritical to readers of this increasingly
idiosyncratic
web page

but my two readers know that even in text messages
i tend to spell everything out fully and punctuate appropriately
for the sole reason that it just doesn't require that much
extra effort

capitalization is right out
still
mind you

but that's for my own personal use
no less

so just because you're important enough to have a device that
vibrates your pants
when you get an email
doesn't mean that your terse
sloppy
and frequently rude
missives
don't reflect badly on you

• space shuttle processing and assembly, via boing boing. looking at those, it’s no wonder that it’ll cost thousands of jobs to retire it. but it’s still amazing, and i still hate the idea that we don’t have anything better than it ready now, the idea that it’s not that important to put humans in space, on other planets. maybe if we are facing recession, or even depression, it’ll be a pretty inexpensive excuse to create jobs that can’t be outsourced, in an area where american expertise is still preeminent. compared with the cost of running a war, it’s a bargain, and leaves plenty of money to fight the disease of the month.

• it pains me to say it, but pro/e’s sketcher is just plain broken, and not as good as solidworks’. i can make something more quickly in the sketcher in pro/engineer, but when i click done, it generally ain’t done. in solidworks, after i’ve finished it, i have much more confidence that what i see on the screen is representative of my design intent. in pro/e, basically since early builds of 2001, the sketcher’s use edge and trim functions have grown increasingly more broken. in far too many cases, if you pick a use-edge of say, a circular body, and draw a line across it, then trim it down to a ‘d’ shape, after you click the done button, it will reveal that the trimmed corners are not in fact aligned to each other, and that what you have is not a closed section of two entities, but two wholly separate and floating entities that only look like they’re touching. this was not always so. at this point, the routine is to take use-edged entities after trimming them, and drag them so they’re short of touching, then manually apply a constraint to stitch them up. this is unspeakably annoying.

• office 2008 has left me scratching my head so far. i rely on it at work a fair bit considering my ‘new’ computer is only partially functional. it can do CAD or it can print things, for instance, but one has to log in as two different people to have that work. so as with so many other things, i just do it on my lappy. i’ve come to rely on word’s notebook view as a replacement for my physical notebook, in the past few months. basically, i realized that though i might be better or worse at writing things down (this, like so many other things, varied inversely with how busy i was, guess what today is), i didn’t always go back to look for stuff, and seldom found it anyway. maybe those were linked. so far, this is better. a problem, however, is that of how poorly word 2008 plays with leopard. spaces confuses the shit out of it, and this is terrible. i’ve had to chase the document across the screen way too many times, and this causes it to get confused about its window focus as well, like when it’s the frontmost application, and can’t be made the frontmost window until you switch back and forth to another. or when the act of saving puts it behind a safari window or something. seems to me they should have ironed it out by now. it’s also slow to start, slow to switch to, and a memory hog. i want to embrace it, i really do, but it’s not up to snuff right now. maybe evernote (email me for a beta invite) will displace it (voodoopad, yojimbo, and omnioutliner all have tried).

• i’ll go to hell for saying this, especially since the month has just started, but between the magnetic ribbons, ubiquitous puzzle pieces, and overcooked news coverage, i’m frankly a little sick of hearing about autism. there are lots of bad things that happen to people. that’s one of them. but at this point, the overexposure has made me feel like, if two people came knocking on my door for a donation, i’d give my money to the other guy, who probably needs the help more. i’m a bad person who likes to kick puppies.

• although when i do kick puppies, i would probably toeball them. look the fuck out, bssc, the dreaded toeball is dialed in and i’m dropping it on people’s heads at will. it’s only a matter of time before my erratic aim returns and i shank the ball at obtuse angles again, but for now, people are actually deferring to me on free kicks. which is frightening.

getting a new computer is always nice (thanks, james). however, the downside of having a dedicated it guy in the office now is that instead of a relatively unshackled windows box, i have one that’s, er, maintained. which means that i get an access denied message when doing basically everything. installing programs, mucking around with the start menu, deleting desktop icons, installing fonts. to some extent this is overzealousness in protecting me from myself (and goodness knows i’m capable of damaging a windows box), but at the same time (wait for it), the division of what anyone can safely do, what anyone can do with careful consideration, what only administrators can do, and what no one should do is handled infinitely more gracefully in mac os x; why? because at no point am i prevented from doing anything that i need to do on a daily basis. it will take some work to put this thing right.

windows is dumb, and people should stop using it.

it’s one thing for a pc to stop working catastrophically. hard drive failure, bad ram, fried motherboard. this happens with macs too, and is something of a fact of life. a fact of life that sucks.

but there’s the other mode of failure, the soft failure, the slow onset of morbidity that resembles nothing so much as our own end-of-life. stuff just stops working. network connections drop out, programs suddenly just won’t start, or crash whenever you try something, or behave unpredictably.

of course, where the analogy ends is that it is a machine that plays by a defined set of rules, and that software doesn’t actually degrade. its performance is what degrades due to numerous and unpredictable interactions that allow one set of instructions to walk all over another, and over time, you’ve unwittingly done things that wind up breaking stuff. fundamentally, it is a certainty that whatever’s happened is my fault. but given that i haven’t really ever asked that much of this machine, and haven’t abused it excessively, i’m going to just say that it’s broken. it’s stopped doing some of its job, and now i’m using my laptop to do a simple task that it now can’t manage.

windows sucks, and people should stop using it.

i released spendthrift 3 a week ago tomorrow. it’s up on versiontracker and apple’s download pages (as an added bonus, on the latter, i’m download #4747!). it’s been downloaded according to the former, 342 times at the time of this writing. according to my webserver logs, it’s been downloaded 3,197 times.

whoa.

now i’m wondering what my bandwidth limits are.

perhaps the best news of all is that out of those 3,197 people, i’ve only received one email so far, and i think he was merely confused. or maybe that’s not good news. but i’d like to think that it means that it’s not buggy as hell, and that it’s working well for some number of those people, as opposed to all those people having rapidly given up on it. it’s a lot fewer emails than i’ve gotten with past launches, that’s for sure.

the really interesting part will be in finding out how many postcards arrive.

i picked up my copy of os x leopard last night. it was your typical apple store event, which i suppose, to some extent has spoiled me, considering it’s not every store you go to that has such boundless enthusiasm for the stuff they sell. the line reached nearly to the door, but was quickly pruned by roving people with handheld checkout doohickeys. i was out of there quickly. with a free t-shirt, too.

so far, i like it. there’s no difference in speed. outside of the new ‘cover flow’ view, the finder is noticeably faster; the cover flow view not the quickest way to browse things—i couldn’t use it all the time, but for times when i do need to preview documents, it’s already proven its worth. ironically, this would be most useful at work, which brings up a somewhat interesting question of just when that might become a reality for more people. for people who deal with word and excel and pdfs every day, i’ve got to figure that at this point, it’s a demonstrably superior experience on a mac. me? i’m waiting for the long-rumored port of solidworks. but overall, what i find most interesting is that it’s all come full circle, and the finder finally feels ‘the same’ as it did in os 9. which is not to say it’s anything alike, but more that it finally feels not like an application, but the basis and root of the whole system’s experience. if that makes any sense.

spaces are cool, but i think i’ll have to train myself to use them. mail is noticeably faster. quick-look is pretty neat. the changes to xcode and interface builder are vast and awesome, enough so that i don’t even know what to do with all of them yet (i let my adc subscription lapse). haven’t used time machine yet, but i do plan to once i buy an external drive.

conveniently enough, this has been a good excuse to finally push spendthrift 3 out the door. the website’s been updated, the last bugs have been squashed, the help files have been written, and it’s ready to be released into the wild. and yes, it works in leopard.

in other news, i’m headed down to the meadowlands tonight to watch the revs take on the red bulls on the road, which should be fun, although possibly wet. they’ve been pretty lousy lately, and don’t have a great history in the first game of two-legged playoffs, but we’ll hope for the best.

charlton have also been in rubbish form lately, which makes me just as glad that they weren’t showing their match at the phoenix landing this morning.

fortunately, my own team has won two out of our last three, and played four times in the last two weeks, so i’m a bit tired, but should hopefully have another game to look forward to.

any recommendations for a good bar to watch the sox in in north jersey?

unsurprisingly, the whiny masses got their way. good ol' uncle steve caved, and is giving me a $100 gift certificate as an i'm-sorry-you-bought-your-iphone-so-early present. boy does his pr department write good letters. i'm not the least bit bitter, actually. in the three months i've had my iphone, it's allowed me to do dozens of things that would otherwise be impossible, slower, or a pain in the ass, wherever i damn well please. that includes doing work from the back seat of a rental car somewhere in the midwest, checking on the sox from somewhere else, juggling phone calls and voicemails from the office, finding suz coffee and donuts west of st. louis, giving a guy in raleigh directions even though i had no idea where the hell i was, taking dozens of pictures of prototypes and random crap, ditching the laptop, surviving in an apartment that doesn't have cable... on that last point. comcast blows. it's bad enough that rcn wasn't available and we're now paying $15 more per month for slower connections and fewer channels, but yesterday they stood me up for an installation appointment, claiming their voicemail droid had told me it'd been rescheduled. a: fuck you for rescheduling it. b: have your jawas take a look at your voicemail bot. between the fact that i work a job that bills out my time, and the fact that i work goddamn long hours, i kinda begrudge them that four hours. kinda a lot. my time is valuable to me. more so when i think of how i could be wasting it in front of bad tv right now. so yeah, jessica and i moved to a new place. the old place was awesome in its way, but i like to think of it as a bold experiment that just didn't work quite as planned, kinda symbolic of the past year, now that i think of it. i am not sad to leave. this is a time for starting anew, notwithstanding the typical connotations autumn has. and it's really the best time of the year, and each and every year i remind myself to savor every time i walk out the door and find it bracingly cool, every time i wake up at 3 in the morning and roll back under warm blankets, every time the sun just looks a little less intimidating outside. but every year i look up and find that it's already december. i get to play soccer a week from tonight.

i have one. it's awesome.

before yet another red sox playoff game completely melts my brain, i suppose i'd better get a few lucid thoughts out.

number one. hooray, panther is coming! by all accounts, they've yet again managed to make it faster, and it sounds like even moreso than jaguar did. i think it's very telling that mac users expect their operating system to get faster, and windows users consider an upgrade a success if it doesn't degrade performance too badly. as an added bonus, the new version of ical is a huge improvement. i even updated the rpi hockey calendar, to which you can subscribe here.

number two. california. ugh. so, according to cnn's results, it appears that the nefarious republican scheme to undo the results of a fair election has worked perfectly. it took 4.4 million votes to recall davis. it only took 3.7 to elect the Governator, which, incidentally, is barely more than the number of votes against the recall. and that was the plan. it's easy to get people to say 'i'm unhappy', as was shown here, and that's all this was. i said it before, i don't necessarily have anything against schwarzenegger; policy-wise, as republicans go, there are many, many worse (at least until this week). but if he really wanted to earn the trust of the people of california, he shoulda had the balls to try and win a real election.

number three: color me disappointed in the oakland a's' reaction after the red sox' dramatic victory monday night. since we've been relishing every replay of it since, i honestly don't see what the objection to derek lowe's gesture after striking out the last batter was. and ramirez' home run trot was a: warranted and b: not atypical, really. but the real winner was their gm, billy beane's remark about how they coulda pulled it out with an additional $50m on their payroll, a reference to the red sox' relative salaries. not only does he overlook his good fortune in getting a windfall of great young pitchers (ergo, essentially free) all at the same time, but he devalues his own players who tried so mightily and failed. dumbass.

number four: al franken's new book is brilliant. highly recommended for anbody who likes a well-researched anti-hypocrite rant, or just a good laugh at the expense of more than a few idiots.

number five: r.e.m. is still amazing. they sound great live, and though i haven't been a huge fan of their last two albums, the older parts of their repertoire sound as good as ever. and better yet, not only do they play them live (a lot of them, no less), but they seem to enjoy the hell out of doing so.