Category: Geek

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Unreal Tournament

Stopped by the gaming section at MacWorld today and stumbled on an Unreal Tournament tournament. Out of curiosity, decided to stay and watch for a while. If you’re not familiar with this game, it’s all about shooting anything that moves with high-powered weapons, except that you’re not killing mere computer-generated characters — you shoot at the other people in the room with you, who are playing over the network. I was speechless. All I can say is that anyone who wonders why we have Columbine-style disasters today has their head in the sand. Base and degrading violence aside, the motion was so herky jerky and clumsy it seemed like game technology has barely improved in the ten or so years since I last played (Descent?). Very disorienting and un-fun looking. Hard to figure out what the appeal is, or how something like that can be called a “game.”

Music: Sid Vicious :: My Way
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WebDAV, NetBoot

Attended a session on WebDAV today, which I’ve thought of implementing to allow students remote access to their files. The session itself wasn’t awesome (the speaker from Thursby was dry as a bone) but I did learn that there’s little advantage to deploying WebDAV unless you have a specific need to provide collaborative behaviors in the filesystem. NFS and SMB are just as universally supported across operating systems, and client implementations are more mature. On the other hand, if you do WebDAV now you’re ready for whatever collaborative things your peeps come up with in the future. It was interesting to see what Adobe has done – all of their new generation apps have a “Workgroup” menu item with special options built in to connect to and work with WebDAV volumes shared by groups. Very forward-thinking.

Next attended a seminar on NetBoot and got more than I bargained for. Wanted to learn the fundamentals of disk imaging and restoration, either locally from FireWire drives or over the network, but they assumed an audience with 10 years experience using rsync, revrdist, ASR, and friends – it was the most technical Mac conference I’ve been to. The author of Carbon Copy Cloner was on the panel – fascinating guy, and so committed. Good timing – I’m about to image and restore all the Greenhouse Macs, and this was a perfect intro.

More than 90% of people who attend trade shows just wander the booths, never go to the seminars, but there are so many smart people running the sessions. If you can pull the bread together, it’s usually worth it.

Music: Norah Jones :: Seven Years
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Gift Horse in the Mouth

Does the fact that all these iApps are free mean that I have no right to point out their flaws? Aren’t I being ungrateful, looking a gift horse in the mouth? How can I complain about free products? I’m at liberty to go pay for a competing product, right?

Umm, right. Except for one thing. Like I pointed out in Tales of a BeOS Refugee last December and as Andy Inhatko says in this month’s MacWorld, there is no competition possible in the fields occupied by the iApps. Or precious little anyway. What incentive does a software vendor have to create a kick-ass audio database for OS X when Apple already hit that one right out of the park?

None. It’s exactly the same as the situation under Windows. Who can make a living developing Office software, or a mail client, or a browser for Windows? Microsoft has completely sewn-up and extinguished those markets. As good as the iApps are, Apple has to realize that they’re doing the exact same thing – cutting off limbs all around them.

That said, there are older image database apps out there, like iView MediaPro (the “i” does not imply Apple kinship) which I may try out soon.

Music: The Clash :: Mensforth Hill
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iPhoto, iTunes Falling Down on Library Size

ORA blog: iPhoto, iTunes Falling Down on Library Size

I’m not steamed because there are bugs. I’m steamed because Apple announced a whole raft of iLife features today — great features, no doubt — but made no mention of addressing the one thing that thwarts the very people who take the digital hub sales pitch seriously – media library sizes greater than “just beginning.”

More…

Update: I’ve been MacSlashed!

Music: Old and New Dreams :: Augmented
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On Safari

It’s funny – an Apple-branded web browser is the last thing I thought I wanted out of Expo, but I’m already head over heels for Safari. Earlier this morning I was wondering why they would have chosen the lesser-known KHTML rendering engine over Gecko, but after feeling its speed and reading that the codebase is less than 1/10th the size of Gecko’s, I get it.

Safari’s bookmarks implementation is a thing of beauty. I’ve wondered since the mid-90s why no one ever seemed to get bookmark management right, but think Apple has finally cracked the egg. The one aspect of bookmark management I miss from BeOS is the ability to add keywords to bookmarks and then find similar bookmarks via live keyword queries. But if you make sure you give good descriptive titles to your bookmarks, the existing Find function works just fine.

They copied all the hotkeys over from Explorer, so everything works as expected. Even the almighty Cmd-click to open a link in a new window.

I’m always surprised to see how many people gripe about the brushed aluminum look. Personally, I’m sick to death of looking at white stripes and would be happy if every app on my system went brushed aluminum. However, it does seem like Apple has violated their own guideline to use brushed aluminum for apps that replace real-world devices. What device does the browser replace?

Music: Sham 69 :: If the kids are united
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Steve Jobs Keynote Notes

Just walked out of Jobs’ MacWorld keynote. As always, if you let the rumor sites get you too cranked up, you end up disappointed. No home entertainment digital hub centerpiece, no x86 processors. But what did emerge was still way cool. Apple releases their own browser, Safari – now the fastest and cleanest browser on the Mac. “Keynote” is Apple’s new presentation software. Final Cut Express is a slimmed down version of FCP. Updates to iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, now all integrated with each other under the name iLife. Two new aircraft aluminum (not Titanium) PowerBooks, in 17″ and 12″, with all the Wi-Fi receptivity issues ironed out, and FireWire 800. Read More for my raw notes, blogged from the Speaker Center at MacWorld.
Continue reading “Steve Jobs Keynote Notes”

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BeView Archives

More thinking about the disappeared content on Byte.com, more discussion with other Byte editors and writers, and I finally decided to go ahead and post complete BeView archives here on birdhouse. Left behind the new subscription curtain, the articles are effectively hidden from search engines and the rest of the world, and no one is going to subscribe to CMP just to read my crusty old nuggets. A piece of computing history will be lost forever if I don’t crack them open. So the archives are now open for all, in all their occasionally embarrassing glory.

Music: Orchestre Murphy :: Hymn to the Sultan of Brunei
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Nielsen on Complexity

Web usability expert (I know he’s controversial) Jacob Nielsen has some good observations in a CNET piece on Flash usability:

Most mistakes are the results of designers and developers overestimating the average person’s familiarity with technology and trying to cram too much onto a Web page, Nielsen said.

“If we leave developers to their own devices, they create complexity,” he said. “It’s in their genes to love creating new features. You end up with software that’s mainly accessible to other geeks.”

Hmm… sound familiar?

Music: Gong :: Foghat Digs Holes In Space
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Searchling

In the past few weeks, Searchling has risen to the status of “most useful software on my computer.” Sits quietly in the menu bar. Responds while in any application to Cmd-Opt-/ hotkey with a small popup text field, cursor already positioned, ready to search Google, IMDB, VersionTracker, Dictionary, MacOSXHints, or pretty much any site (choosable with a picklist, configurable with a text editor). Search results sent to the preferred browser.

If there is such a thing as software Zen, this is it.

Music: Lounge Lizards :: She Drove Me Mad