yiic webapp ..\testdrive

Unfortunately, for most users this will result in an error along the lines of “bash: ./yiic: Permission denied” unless you first make yiic executable.

The easiest way to do this is to run the following command in your framework directory:

chmod +x yiic

The x simply means “eXecutable”.

Not to mention the OEM copy of XP MCE sitting in a draw that I’d lost track of (I think the system is now using a regular XP Pro license) or the miscellaneous systems that have affixed OEM licenses but for which there is no (misplaced) physical media.

Accordingly, if I want to obey the OEM sticker directive, I’ve got to download a CD ISO from a torrent site (because I don’t fork out for MSDN). But MSDN is increasingly attractive; it effectively offers the desired outcome. Unlicensed, unactivated systems that work perfectly well on a subscription basis… sure, subs suck, but whenever they stop their XP activation servers we’re all going to be screwed, anyway, so it hardly matters.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here making a list (on paper, which I’ll store with the physical media) of all the licenses in use, and roughly where. Thanks to the unauthorised rebuilding of systems that I own and have built from scratch so often (resourcefulness in anyone else’s book, evil work of a pirate to the draconian OEM overlords) whatever descriptions are attached to aforementioned systems is likely to be rendered completely untrue in eighteen months time when I once again get around to the wholesale slaughter rebuilding of them all. Intermittent reinstalls will probably happen, too, unless I’m driven so insane by the inability to discern one license from another I end up, as I do now, simply taking out the lot and shooting them all a new install.

To Microsoft: whatthehelldoyouwantmetodo? I am so not forking out the at-least-$2000 you would have me pay for retail Vista licenses for this lot–it’s that much because Vista Business retail licenses come in at a delicious $500 each. Say it with me: hell no. I’ve heard from a reliable system builder source that you’ve been telling them that the new OEM rules work in their favour as it’ll bring them more business. Sure, but it’s pretty crappy business if I don’t say so myself. I have absolutely no interest in becoming a Microsoft certified system anything, simply because it’d mean dealing with your crap in a professional capacity, and I deal with it quite enough in a professional capacity trying to do other sorts of development as my job, thankyouverymuch. I’m not going to pay a Microsoft tax twice (first for certification, second for individual licenses) just because you claim that your crappy system builders do it better than DIY-ers.

Whenever the time comes around to upgrade to Vista, if I ever deem it worthwhile on the other home desktops here not for any commercial pursuits (still running Business in response to the crippling networking capabilities of all Home line products), I’ll be making a trip to my local store, who, for what it’s worth, don’t even offer retail Vista Business for sale on their website, but mention the OEM edition an awful lot, with the token “(only sold w/ new system or to a system builder)” tacked on to placate anyone from officialdom who comes looking. I haven’t had the pleasure of breaking OEM conditions-of-sale (that’s all they are… are such things even legally enforcable in this country?!) just yet, but have no doubts there will be ample places that want to take my money when and/or if I do.

I’m actually in the position of having one spare XP license (two if you count XP MCE) at this point, but am sorely tempted to install Linux on at least one of the three systems I’m taking care of tonight just to avoid having to deal with these mediocre attempts at extortion in the future. It’s not morally defensible to refuse to acknowledge system builders as “original equipment manufacturers” when they are, in fact, conducting exactly the same tasks as their so-called ‘certified’ builders. Clearly, it’s not being pursued for retail sale: the only retail products that belong in an operating system product mix are upgrades for people who enjoy having computers that don’t work (i.e. most of the population, anyway).

It’s an indictment upon the difficulty of upgrading/reinstalling Windows that so few people take this route: quite frankly, the products don’t work. Everyone who is unqualified (in the literal, capable-of sense, not some arbitrary didacourse, paidMSsomemoney sense) to build a computer, in my experience, is unqualified to successfully install Windows independently. Even if they succeed at booting from a CD, negotiating the installer prompts (admittedly better than they used to be), manually answering questions about daylight savings and other such things that should long since have been dealt with automagically (c’mon, we’ve had GeoIP products for what, ten years now? Longer?), or at least correct from the outset (two HP machines last week were insistent the default timezone should be Singapore. They shipped in Australia. Is it so bloody hard to pick a populous east-coast state zone as the default?), chances of users correctly installing things such as drivers in post-install stages are slim to none. Nearly all phone a tech-saavy friend (I know no-one who’s ever called the Microsoft support line for OS installs… more should, but few do).

The point stands: retail licenses are for newbies, OEM licenses should be accessible to everyone who doesn’t give a crap about shiny packaging, manuals, and shooting their wallet to bits.

Here endeth the rant.

Turns out it doesn’t use Eclipse’s HTTP Proxy settings, but needs setting elsewhere.

On Windows XP, this will be in your Application Data path under Subversion. Mine is as follows:

C:\Documents and Settings\joshs\Application Data\Subversion

I haven’t got a Vista machine to test on, but it will still be the Application Data\Subversion folder within the user’s path. (I will confirm this next time I’m on a Vista box.)

Linux users, look in ~/.subversion/

Open the file “servers” (no extension) and scroll to the bottom section, [Global].

Un-comment and edit the http-proxy-host and http-proxy-port settings (and user/password if required, it wasn’t for me) as appropriate and everything will start working. You don’t even need to reload Eclipse.

Productivity just soared!

There are other hardware projects I’ve got cooking, yes, but none so immediately useful or easily implemented. The great thing about this is the hard work (read:software) is essentially done already. At worst I’d need to hack some kind of interface driver, but, really, it’s pretty much functional as is. And, because it’s already been ported to Linux and BSD, it’s really trivial to build a barebones system upon which to base it all. Preserving keyboard + mouse input is a totally necessary design parameter anyway (for reasons of network stream integration, titling(!!), etc.) so hardware can be periodically switched on as it becomes available. I’m tempted to pull apart my languishing Athlon XP, but it feels too powerful for the task (not even kidding… this thing is lightning fast) and I wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of the RAM in it. My biggest concern is tracking down capture hardware that’s Linux or BSD friendly. Ideally there’ll be a security capture card that does PAL at full frame rate and has 4 inputs, because essentially that means it’d be trivial to add a few extra cards and, all of a sudden, it’s quite foreseeable to have a 12 input vision mixer that will key and title away til the cows come home.

One concern I have is that the mixer component only takes two sources… which is much the same as on any hardware mixers I’ve used (two buses: select source on A + B bus, mix buses), but it feels really inflexible. I’d chain them together but think that might necessitate extra genlocking time and increase overall latency. I can’t actually think of a usage scenario for this one, though, so it’s not a big deal. Because keying exists independently of mixing it’s not a concern of 2 sources + keyed source, and that’d be the main situation in which such a thing would be at all necessary.

The other cool thing about this is you can mix digital and analogue sources with impunity. Need SDI? Sure, get an SDI capture card and add an input source. Firewire? Done deal. Same goes for output: because you can output via FFMPEG, your “vision mixer” potentially also encodes an IP-distributable stream simultaneously with realtime output to a monitor.

This is an inestimably cool piece of software, but the most brilliant thing is it isn’t really anything new. I discovered it because I was looking for EffecTV which I’d last used in a production context over 12 months ago… Gephex uses existing open-source filters and processing solutions and just provides an excellent means of chaining them together. You can create some excellent motion artwork with it, but the most exciting thing for me is that it enables use of cheap and disposable x86 hardware in place of hideously expensive and proprietary (read: more expensive, but also inextensible and not particularly flexible) solutions that the ‘pros’ use.

Increasingly I’m disinterested in ‘professionalism’ about this sort of thing, because that’s way out of my price league and, to be honest, the most common place I wish this technology were applied is in church and Christian event contexts, where (even if there is money) no-one is interested in effective communication through applied technology. So we continue to try and push forward with no money and a bunch of innovative and irreverent (to the pros) solutions.

Ultimately, it’s about achieving excellence in the quality and nature of the work done to share the gospel and build up the body of those who follow Jesus — but excellence can be attained without even a smattering of ‘professionalism’.

That said, I’d still love to own an MX-70.

Video was annoyingly bad in the entire first half, because the vision switching was rubbish, the cameras were inappropriate for the task, and the camera ops had not the foggiest idea how to pull focus, adjust iris, or obey cues. Alternatively, the person calling the show was just really bad at letting people know when they were clear to start moving. I’d say somewhere between the two. Given there were only four live vision sources by my count (centre at audio desk, centre right (stage left), stage right, organ loft) it’s not exactly as though it should’ve been too complicated. The first two were house cameras and generally pretty okay. The third was an XL-1 or –2, whilst the camera at the organ was probably a XM or maybe a compact Panasonic camera. Both cameras 3 and 4 had serious aperture issues. The third was often too dark (failing to compensate for dim lighting in the room), whilst the fourth was waaay too far open. Apparently someone must have set it up when house lights were on and the organ was not: accordingly, it was absurdly bright against the other 3 cameras (zebra bars, anyone?).

Part of the issue also stemmed from having two different classes of projector in use in a configuration where the primary screen (called A) is ~18x9” and two secondaries (collectively, B) are perhaps half the primary screen’s dimensions (that is, a quarter of its size). All three were rear-project and I’d imagine that projector A was vastly more powerful than projectors B. Accordingly, camera 4 appeared on B without losing details, while on A the sheet music was a vast white expanse. This is why it’s important for video nerds to look outside their little control booth sometimes — preview monitors lie.  Also, the larger screen was one of the dirtier fast-folds I’ve seen used, with clearly visible lines three-by-two across it becoming especially apparent in bright, high-motion segments.

Somehow video redeemed itself in the second half (maybe different cameramen, maybe the person calling shots got a clue in intermission, or maybe my hypercriticalness subsided somewhat), but I wasn’t left amazingly impressed.

Lighting, on the other hand… delightful. Eight 5kW fresnels with Colourset scrollers gave a nice wash to the stage above and beyond what the (more) intelligent fixtures could provide. I couldn’t pick the movers on the back bar, but I’d venture a guess at MAC600’s for the sides. Also four per side, as with the fresnels. Five along the back bar, though I’m quite sure they were a different kind of fixture. Lighting didn’t help out the cheap Canon video cameras, though the house cameras dealt with it admirably… there were a few really beautiful shots in there from those two.

Audio worked. The 6.1 (which I read about somewhere but now can’t find, and for which there were puncy little speakers about the size of SX100’s set up in their appropriate positions) was useful for drowning out the organ at one point and making percussion come from weird directions, but other than that I didn’t particularly notice it. Which is good. Either they weren’t using it, or the sound was just swallowed by the room. Quite a lot of mics and those sound partitiony things (they surely have a name, but I don’t know it), which would tend to indicate they were being quite ambitious about either recording the concert or mixing to surround and didn’t want audio leaking between microphones. Hence (in part) my frustration at the single mic on Yamaoka’s amp… redundancy is important where one instrument is that important, especially in a high-traffic area like that (conductor walks around more than anyone else on stage). There’s always the possibility to re-set mics in intermission, but if either Yamaoka or the conductor were to knock it on entering after the intermission? Stuffed. It was a decent sized amp, but it’d hardly carry throughout the building very well. Aside from that… well, I don’t really know what I’m talking about with audio, anyway. It sounded good.

I shocked myself by remembering large swathes of Zelda. This makes me think I must’ve had Butterfly-Effect-esque blackouts in my childhood, but oh well. I’ve also decided I want to buy a Dreamcast, difficult though that may prove, because I really wanted one when they first came out (on account of that whole Linux thing, Internet connectivity, the brand’s relative innocence — hey, maybe that’s why it’s gone now –, and a handful of delicious looking screenshots from games which got great reviews) and never got around to it before they stopped making them.

Konami are morons. Everyone else gives their game footage gratis, quite reasonably understanding that such coverage is only going to boost the value of their brand, yet Konami apparently insisted on a watermark on some footage provided. I’ve never been a fan of many of their games anyway, but that watermark pissed me off enough that I’m exceedingly glad they’re mostly stuck in arcades with aging picture tube consoles, anyway. About the same decade as their marketing saaviness.

As much as I will always whine about anything visual (I “enjoy” or “dislike” regular concerts without too much analysis, because I can’t), it was a good night. It made me miss productions enormously (live vision especially), which is funny because I think the desired effect was to make people miss video games instead. Claud had fun laughing at the geeks getting all dressed up. We both laughed as certain members of the audience were baffled by performance conventions! All in good fun.

Michael’s pulling the plug on the server that this website has run on since 2003.

The ‘server’ has changed dramatically in constitution since it all began way back when, but… wow. An astonishingly large part of my teenage years. For the longest time, it seemed as though the Internet had altogether ceased to exist everytime Dale’s connection went out. In the early days, we were all running servers on port 1200 to circumvent ISP restrictions on port 80. phpBB was the order of the day, running Apache — on a pirated copy of Windows 2000 (those were the days in which “legitmate software” constituted an oxymoron). Operating on an early ADSL link with 64kbps upload, forum emoticons were hosted on free web space provided by iiNet in order to conserve bandwidth. You laugh now, but the speed boost was incredible. Every time iiNet dropped out (to future readers: that’s what happens when the internet goes out for a couple of hours, none of this occasional connection time-out rubbish), an irate explanatory post from mwdmeyer would emerge and life would continue as normal. Until parents discovered the server running and turned it off again, which would spark an effort to conceal yet another computer in a room crowded full of equipment. About halfway through 2004, they gave up searching.

These were the days (for me) of NE2000 clones powering Smoothwall/m0n0wall routers, recycling hardware, a subscription to Atomic before all the other kids (I bought more geeky magazines than anyone I know–I think it was that strange meeting place of compters, creativity, and cant that I later became comfortable with), when GeForce 2’s and Pentium 4’s (the first ones with RDRAM that everyone despised) and DDR-supporting Athlons were still zippy. When frame-based redirects passed for domain names — .tk, anyone?

Mostly, it was about the forums… but as for personal publishing, this was no small resource. My first dynamic website was a blog hosted on that server — I don’t think it yet had a name — we all rolled our own web software in those days (it’s not that long ago). Some of us still do. The first domain name acquired was Dale’s, in March 2004, co-inciding (more or less) with the forums’ first birthday. Twelve US dollars later (Joker.com’s prices still haven’t changed), we were all still using frame-based redirects — static IPs were the stuff of pipe-dreams, and Dynamic DNS, though around, was outside of the experience of most of us. Steve ran a notoriously-flaky IIS server with real domains and Exchange, but paid about $150 a month for the privilege: static IPs being available only on business grade internet connections.

These are mere details. The forums themselves constitute an amazing chronicle of the lives of mwdmeyer, ucosty, Sammy, i_am_a_n00bie, Smile:), smKz, n|cktangents, angelicdeity, baibai, Sphinx^, ludvikas, and a handful of others over a fairly tumultuous time. There is so much not recorded explicitly that surrounds the nearly 16,000 messages from these eleven users alone. Some has been suppressed, other parts forgotten, but all of it inextricably linked together in the momentum of time. There are some things about that time which will never be shared with those who weren’t around.

The forums didn’t survive post-school. This shouldn’t be surprising, given the amount of research that says this will be the case for any given relationships faced with that manner of transition, but it was still bizarre witnessing what would have been several months of time spent on a single website evaporate into (not much). The server moved from Balmain to Marian Street, eventually finding its way into a rack there. This is where things get hazy for me. I think the last time I saw Michael might’ve been New Years’ Eve 2005/2006… I feel some sense of guilt about that, but recognise mutual busy-ness had a role such that neither of us should be blamed alone. I don’t believe that a blameless “but things changed” is ever sufficient when talking about close relationships. I’m fairly certain my closest friend for about two years at school is someone that I no longer have anything to do with, but can’t explain why. And I know that I can’t in any way blame him, because I’m so guilty of failing to keep working on relationships myself.

I suppose the point of all this is that the computer formally known as ‘Metro’, now ‘Loki’ (I don’t know how it got that name — Loki to me is an amazing contributor to Linux-based gaming, 2000–2002 RIP, but it could just as easily have been named after the Norse trickster and Odin’s wily accomplice!) isn’t just the latest in a series of bits of electronic gear that some markup and pixels have been piped off for a couple of years. This is just one step closer to a complete closure of a very large chapter of my life… and, yeah, that’s incredibly sad.

Please don’t for a minute consider this to be my arguing that Loki should stay switched on — it’s about something far greater and more personal than a startlingly reliable FreeBSD web server that just happened to host a website for free for a long time.

There aren’t too many people you can make sit in the back of a car on their 18th birthday, much less who will laugh along with as it happens.

This isn’t an obituary, just a poor expression of remorse at the (human) disconnection and ‘drifted’ relationships of that era. Michael, once all this stupid uni crap gets out of the way (maybe after you move again?), I owe you a fairly large drink.

Thankyou.

I haven’t had a great day with Firefox. Well… I spent 3–4 hours in meetings today, so I didn’t even have that much time with Firefox! Still managed to let me down twice, though.

Damn its indisposable development tools *sobs uncontrollably*

I think I’ll switch back to Opera for all non-development Internet-related activity for a while… unless anyone has any other browser recommendations? I’ve seriously thought about IE7, but its rendering is still just a little too patchy for me to be able to live with myself as an Internet user.

Bleh. Let it be observed: even high-profile open source does not always lead to a good product. Its memory management is nothing short of repulsive. It will regularly use more memory than Photoshop and Illustrator combined — admittedly, I use Photoshop mostly for web production and not high resolution print stuff (though that does happen a few times a week, and it won’t often go far beyond the 350MB that Firefox seems to manage fairly regularly)

I’m still using CS2, so there aren’t any magical CS3 memory management advances that make such a claim possible… Firefox just sucks :P

I’d blame Windows being in need of a reinstall (it’s been running since October… more than six months without death :P Plus I started out not being happy with it because it’d been installed from the guy I bought the computer off, I just hacked it to use my CD key instead of the one he’d used to test things… so it’s never been perfect), but really, it’s not that bad for any other application. I normally do a reboot once a week and things are fine… heavy duty graphics editing, occasional video editing, constant mail and occasional wordprocessing… and of all those things it is a web browser that can’t get it right. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so derisive about it seeing as I make a living off developing in this relatively simple world… but I am.

The flip side to all of that, of course, is that I’ve been trying to live (more) like a normal user the past few years. Essentially, recognising that it’s simpler to buy software than write it (WordPress, Flickr), using hackably-open technologies instead of truly open ones (WMA Lossless sans DRM), and a general abandonment of open source principles in favour of vastly improved productivity (Photoshop, Premiere, Office 2007, royalty-free stock).

It’s certainly paid off in terms of professional development and enhanced creative potential… but there’s something lost in not being able to hack visualisations hooked up to a webcam together on a command-line anymore. Admittedly, that sort of thing only comes around half a dozen times a year! But no matter, it’s all good fun. Given more friends who were into that sort of thing and some good music, I’d so live in the party house. I’ve not figured out how to do the same command-line video tricks using Windows just yet, so next time I’ll probably use Windows for visualisations (woo particle emitters!) and a separate Linux-powered laptop (maybe?) for webcam trickery. Then I’ll take webcam stuff straight out into Windows capture and skip my vis mixer altogether for once… I gotta learn to travel lighter anyway!

I’ve not used this much on anyone else’s system, but haven’t done anything particularly crazy with it and it still sucks… soooo… I blame Windows. I’m almost certain mainstream Linux distros can handle this better, but know nothing about how OS X deals with it… shrug.

When they announced it a whole bunch of people were getting a little grumpy about how it didn’t work with Windows update — a few of the same were getting grumpy about how Microsoft didn’t release a version for Linux, but no further comment required on them… you’re all of an intelligent enough bunch to realise aforementioned people fall into the category of … well, you know.

Obviously, it’s no big deal — the whole point of that image it is that it hasn’t (and won’t) update, allowing you to keep testing on older platforms.

But then, this afternoon, I go and shut down the image (I know, suspending is faster, but I was trying something different) and all of a sudden it goes and says it’s installing 7 updates before it shuts down. In usual XP fashion.

So what gives?

I found myself yelling at it “you’re not even a real operating system! Don’t you get it? You’re going to be used and trashed in a couple of months anyway! Why do you care if you’re virus and spyware ridden by the end of it?” Possibly a strange response, but there we go.

Got me thinking about (human) clones, actually. Much musing to be had there. Maybe I’m just strange…

I would be interested to know, because regardless as to how it works exactly, their levelling kind of sucks. I’ll admit I haven’t used a library programme to manage my music for a while, but seem to recall things on Linux being that much more consistent. That was before I tottered off to CD land several months back (long story, involving a missing road case and a messy office… things still aren’t quite back to normal, that’s one of my summer projects), where you’re expected to flip the volume control backwards and forwards with alarming regularity. I don’t know if this problem would be any less prevalent if I didn’t have such a smattered collection of tracks from different genres… one would think that, in the same way all pop is mixed to sound identical, surely it would be mastered in a similarly stereotypical fashion. Or perhaps not.

So this is week #2 off work, with a fair amount of uni also not-attended so far this week (I managed an impressive three hours yesterday afternoon, and a lecture for the grammar english course on Tuesday evening, and managed to deliberately avoid, sleep through, or decide against attending the rest). I’ve a decent attendance record in most courses so far this semester so I didn’t bother with certs for the first half of the week… but then I had to go see a doc this morning about the eye and I’m supposedly on these meds for a week now. So, assuming they work in appropriate time, I’d still be rocking up to uni with a notoriously contagious thingy for the first half of next week… which means I might even end up missing more class. Which is ridiculous. Anyway I’ve got a lull in assessment at least… I was trying to write a pres earlier this week between phlegm-filled breaths, and ended up giving it unable to really speak… it’s about Renaissance thought in early modern Europe; unfortunately there was no opportunity to work in any plague allusions ;-)

Speaking of early modern Europe, there was the annual bookfest at University of Sydney from Saturday through to yesterday (Wednesday) which was so awesome. I say speaking of early modern Europe because I now have a collection on the subject (sans journal articles, etc., but there’s always Gale/ProQuest et al.) on par with that of Fisher library. The uni gets rid of low-circulation books, and also sells donations from the box you’ve probably walked past a thousand times and not really thought much about (if you’re a USyd student who at least pretends to study) on the way into Fisher on the left. Everything is dirt cheap… I went with Selo and we both by pure chance spent exactly $33, which netted us two A4 ream box sized piles of books. The first few days are prices as marked, but Tuesday it’s $10/A4 box, and on Wednesday it’s down to $5! I really wanted to go and have a look at what was left but wasn’t quite up to it. Everything is put out on Saturday so the collection would have seriously diminished by Wednesday, but given the sheer scope of it (it’s in the Great Hall of the Quad, and imagine if you will the entire floor space in there covered about three layers deep in books and you have an approximate starting number) chances are there’d still be some gems for the uncovering!

Yeah… so $33 would normally buy me five books, less if they’re academic reference/not classics/M&B (kidding). Did seriously well.

In other news, I’ve spent my recovery time battling with Wine to little avail. I tried installing it a few times (insert alcohol related jokes here) and got increasingly no-where, or sort of did, but then ended up hitting a brick wall (passed out in a pool of my own vomit, so to speak). So I installed Steam and spent $9.95 (USD! Tim was wrong, or at least Selo quoting Tim was wrong… either way, my receipt says USD) on Counter-Strike (to which I have moral objections, because the idea of spending money — even $US10 — on a free mod is preposterous) for the MCE computer which kicks butt (well, kicks butt once I figured out how to check the blindingly obvious “Widescreen” box).

Then I bought HL GotY pack on eBay that comes with four CDs or something and will hopefully install on Linux fantasically without Steam. Or, sort of with Steam but in a less-dependent-upon-it kind of way that makes everything run slightly happier. Good fragging times ahead, hopefully. Worst case I buy a decent wireless keyboard + mouse (yeah, one of those five-button things, I’m sold!) and use the MCE box instead… it’ll just mean higher framerates at the expense of having to walk downstairs, and probably a better gaming experience (can you say 5.1 and 32″ screen?) anyway. But it’s on Windows, and… insert idealistic rant here. Sigh!

After zero-config, installers work magically, 3d engines function, and everything is generally incredible. I read this on someone’s blog earlier today: “with that I was able to install the latest Wine (0.9.18 at the time of this writing). This comes with better support for HL2 and WoW.” and consequently was afraid the version in non-backports Ubuntu would be ancient, etcetera, and generally useless.

No, the author is correct in saying “better support” — there is intrinsically fantastic support for pretty much everything. It’s incredible. Now I’ve just got to get some time in which to play various games. Linux, apparently, is no longer a barrier to entry, and Loki Games (R.I.P.) would face an ever-diminishing challenge as compatability layers keep growing in their sheer brilliance.

I’ve yet to try productivity applications, but am content with having tentatively embraced the gamer side of geek for one weekend. I’d love to give Dreamweaver a whirl, but am unlikely to be doing enough development work to justify it for the next couple of months. MS Office would be a pleasant addition to the repertoire, though OpenOffice is excellent for most applications. I’d never go back to using Word for preparing real documents, but perhaps for things requiring collaboration/versioning it’s the best choice. I’d probably get MS Office for creating Powerpoint templates/editing other people’s work before I had any real need for it myself, so these things are still pretty unnecessary. It’s just fantastic to think that it is, all of a sudden, a possibility.

The irony of all this is that I’m waxing lyrical about closed-source apps when the actual intent of this post is to extoll the brilliance of F/OSS’s progress. Purists would argue otherwise… but they’re wrong :-)

Noticing a downwards Getting-Stuff-Done trend. Meh. Lecture is cancelled tomorrow so I’ve got more time to try and be productive in. Now I’ve just got to not wake up too late… not even the 372 will save me if it’s not a going-to-uni day (haven’t had one of those in a while now, nice!)

And yeah, I’m sure it’s all great quality and magically never crashes and all the rest of that marketing crap. Good for you guys. I’m gonna wander back over the other side of the room here and install Windows on my equally-powerful system for, oh, about 40% of the cost. And don’t get me started on the absurd cost of your monitors. I can pick up an equivalent Dell 30″ for $600 less than your offering… and if I’m content with a meagre 23″ then I can get a 24″ Dell for $400 less! Even the 20″ screens are $500 apart. Seriously, it’s completely unjustifiable and no-one in their right mind should be prepared to spend that much more for a brand.

Sigh.

I need to open a buy-a-new-computer account and start putting money into it. Well not really… I just need a new harddrive and various software licenses I guess. I think I’d miss Ubuntu too much (maybe)… I don’t even know why, nearly everything I can do here I can do in Windows (haha — does anyone else notice the beautiful inversion of that argument? I actually think I’ve been running Linux for too many years now to have posted about it in any currently-stored online blog entries! Crazy) except anything requiring a terminal. That’s almost definitely my greatest frustration, but no matter. I need software that doesn’t run in Linux and is too intensive to work well in virtualized conditions. Best option for me would be to get a whole separate computer, but then… well, this thing can feel flaky after being on for two weeks. Windows I’d probably get that every two days or so, but at least I’d think to reboot. Here, I just kill processes and at worst logout. Kernel patches are the only thing taking this down, basically.

Moral of the story… something like don’t waste your money on a shiny new Mac.

You can also export to PDF from here, but that’s boring. Same caveat applies when printing PDFs, by the way. I think Acrobat defaults to scaling, and I imagine evince, et al., would also… possibly not. Alternatively, find a Windows PC with Irfanview on it, which is excellent for these kinds of things.

This post, of course, avoids the possibility of Photoshop and others of its kind for a reason. If you can afford it, you should know how to use it to print…

This brought to you by the hurriedly-assembled long-overdue Matthias Carols copy I promised someone at church ages back. Actually, I only did the cover as a way of apology for it taking me so long ;-) Shrug.