In Computing on
8 June 2009 tagged Apple, freeze, issues, leopard, osx, problems, sleep, wake with 2 comments
I managed to fix the wake-from-sleep problem that I originally suffered from on my MacPro. A reboot (or two) seemed to fix it and it sleeps without waking up now. I am still seeing some pretty weird issues with other areas though, particularly the Finder. Mapping drives through Finder seems prone to issues, often taking a long time to list available drives under a particular machine. Seems to happen with both Apple File Sharing and Samba.
I also experienced a lockup on my MacPro using the Computer Name screen saver. I locked the screen, walked away and when I came back, had a black screen with a mouse cursor on it. Couldn’t bring up the login dialog or connect to it through SSH.
Hopefully Apple releases another fix for these and whatever other issues are lurking under the covers tomorrow when they talk about the Snow Leopard release at WWDC.
In Computing on
17 May 2009 tagged Apple, osx, problems, sleep with 3 comments
Also known as the 10.5.7 sleep problem.
There are a bunch of reports of Mac OS X 10.5.7 update breaking sleep on a variety of machines ranging from PowerMac G5s to MacBooks. I can personally vouch for having issues with my MacBook Pro and MacPro*.
The recommended fixes range from resetting the SMC on MacBook Pros to pulling all external USB and Firewire devices from the machines. As usual, a number of people are running the Repair Disk Permissions voodoo with little effect other than the feeling of well-being you get from taking a strong, well-documented placebo. Other suggestions include resetting the PRAM and NVRAM.
None of these suggestions have worked for my MacBook Pro. It’s incredibly frustrating and is going to make my laptop essentially useless if I can’t put it to sleep and wake it back up. Note that I get one free sleep by closing the lid. Subsequent attempts to sleep the machine cause it to freeze in a kind of blacked-out state. It seems to be running, but the display stays dark. I’ve heard reports of people being able to put their machines to sleep manually, but I haven’t tried this yet.
Worse, I tried running a system restore from Time Machine with an install disc. When the installer finally loads, the backlight turns off. Using a flashlight(!) to see the contents of the screen, I’m not given an option to select a restore point from my Time Capsule backup. I might be able to do a full install and restore up to my last safe point, but this scares me.
I strongly urge people to avoid 10.5.7 like the swine flu and stick with 10.5.6 until this is fixed.
* the MacPro issue is separate and involves it waking up sporadically from sleep
Update: this Apple Discussion thread describes the problem and a fix. The problem appears to be related to wireless network locations with disabled ethernet ports. Re-enabling the port seems to fix the issue.
Update 2: The fix worked. Re-enabling the Ethernet port seems to have fixed the sleep problem. Weird, but glad to have an answer. Thanks to the intrepid and persistent people in that apple discussion thread. I’ll keep looking for a fix for the issue with my Mac Pro.
In General on
20 April 2009 with no comments
Last Friday, I tried out the free Twitter app Nambu.
I can not recommend this software to anyone in its current state. Yes, they say it is beta software right up front, but there’s “beta” software and then there’s “BETA!!!*” software. This is the latter.
While diagnosing a problem on my system, I took a look through system.log on my machine. It was loaded chock-full of exceptions from Nambu.app. Also, perhaps humourously, my Twitter credentials were pasted in there, in plaintext, on every single post I made.
Why bother storing my passwords in Keychain if some douchey app is just going to paste them all over my system? Thanks for the fun-times. I may check back later.
In Computing on
17 April 2009 tagged applications, osx, social, Software, twitter with 1 comment
I’ve seen the awkwardly-named Nambu mentioned a couple of times this past week, initially as an alternative iPhone twitter app, and then as a desktop app for OS X. I usually use TwitterFox and find it pretty reasonable so I haven’t felt too compelled to change. Many people use the popular TweetDeck application which hasn’t really interested me due to the annoyance of having to install Adobe Air and suffer yet another Adobe updater experience. But a native app I will give a shot.
Installation is painless. They’re shipping Nambu as a zip file which you can drop in your Apps folder. Currently FriendFeed and Identi.ca support is disabled adding to the “beta-ey” feel of the app. It may be a little rough around the edges. Some other features seem unfinished. Twitter Groups, for example.
What does work is pretty cool. Nambu presents three different views. A combined view showing a straight-up list of tweets, an Outline view, with a tree on the left showing different types of communications, and a multi-column, browser-like view similar to that of tweetdeck. The People group in Outline view presents a list of thumbnails of profile pictures and hovering over them shows a dark iPhoto-styled palette with additional information about the person.
Another nice feature that should be built into Twitter itself is automatic short-url previews. Hovering over the domain name shows the full link and the link-shortening service in a popup. Nambu provides tr.im and pic.im as integrated options for link-shortening and pictures and calls these part of the “Nambu network”.
Searches show up as a new group in the Outline view or grouped with your friends tweets in the Combined view. A way to hide these would be useful as they can overwhelm your friends pretty easily. They get updated so it’s easy to track specific topics in real-time.
Growl support and badges on the dock icon provide ample notification options.
I don’t think I’m quite ready to replace Twittelator Pro on my iPhone yet, but I’m definitely going to give this a shot on my desktop.
Update: after a day, Nambu’s become inoperative on my laptop. I saw two entries in my Twitter accounts, possibly a result of my MobileMe preferences sync. Deleting my preferences file for Nambu had no effect. Maybe I’ll try it again in a month or so, though, after Neilio’s recommendation yesterday, I may just install Tweetie on Monday.
In General on
2 April 2009 tagged bsg, cylon, reviews, tv with 2 comments
Like most other scifi nerds I know, I’ve been enthralled with Ron Moore and team’s reimagining of the classic tv show. An amazing cast and some of the best writing on tv and film surpassing typical genre fiction have made this an unforgettable experience. Now that they’ve finally wrapped it up, I have a few thoughts about what made it great and a few more about what I found annoying.
One annoying bit that has irked me from the get-go is the relative inefficiency of the Cylons to completely destroy the humans. It would have been a short series if they were more effective, but let’s be reasonable. Artificially intelligent robots, with biological brains or not, would have some pretty impressive advantages in the realm of killing. Cavil in the final episodes lamented his human physiology. Having to watch a star go supernova “with these eyes” was a great disappointment for him. The mechanical cylons presumably have a wider spectrum of vision, highly-augmented hearing and a whole host of other sensors and doodads to make their given tasks easier. And more efficient.
Some of the scenes from the earlier seasons when humans were on the surface of some planet hiding in the woods and cylons were walking past without noticing them smack of silliness. Also, one of those same cylons with an integrated machine-gun for an arm missing a human at anything inside kill range is similarly ludicrous. They should be able to throw bullets as easily as any human can throw a rock and far far more accurately.
Still, the mechanical cylons were pretty damned awesome. In the episode “Boarding Party”, a group of cylons crash into the docking pylon on Galactica and start raising hell on the ship. One particularly vivid scene where a centurion dives into a group of people, guns-ablaze only to be shot down by a nerves-of-steel Lee Adama was one of the most memorable action scenes in the entire series. They could be terrifying in their swiftness and capability for violence. I only wish they’d been depicted like that more frequently instead of the plodding, inaccurate machines they usually were.
Similarly, the cylon Raiders weren’t piloted they were the pilots. In the episode where Starbuck finds the downed Raider and climbs aboard the gory interior remains, you fully-realize how incredible and alien these things are. Each one is an individual. We knew this from the episode “Scar” where Starbuck and her band of pilots have to contend with a particularly malicious and devious cylon raider in an asteroid belt, but it isn’t until you see the biological interior of the raider that you realize, hey, these things aren’t just spaceships with a chip or a cylon head bolted to a console – they are the ship.
Earlier comments about why these things aren’t capable of killing humans apply 10-fold here, but I’m willing to make allowances for how awesome the space scenes were. Still, most of the scenes were distant shots of squads of vipers plowing through cylon raiders by the hundreds. Each cylon raider should have been a more than capable adversary and this was never really felt.
Cylons were at their scariest when humans screwed up, which, I guess, they owe their entire existence to. Only when the humans made the mistake of linking their computers together did the cylons really come into their own. They seemed capable of taking down any computer system at will, not even requiring a physical connection to it. The Mark VII vipers were immediately made ineffective because of all the linked computer systems onboard. I guess it’s hard to beat machines with machines. Then again, the human Raptors were full of computerized systems. The Galactica had a bunch of separate computers to manage individual systems, only too primitive for the cylons to fully take over. Apparently cylons required a certain degree of complexity in order to take over a ship’s computer. Maybe it’s a warning about ubiquitous wireless technology.
The humanoid cylons could go one further and even interface directly with the machines on board Galactica. Sharon, aka Boomer and Athena (another Sharon)… Model 8 could plug light pipe from the ship’s systems into her arm and take control of that system. The cylon hybrids could do this as well and lived their gooey lives connected to the cylon base ships. That was never really explained, but surely they’d require some sort of physiology to allow that to happen. That should have made the earlier efforts to discover which humans were cylons easier. You’d think.
But wait, I hear music…
All Along the Watchtower. It’s a great song. The cover by Jimi Hendrix appearing in the final scene of the show may even be superior to the Dylan original because of the fantastic guitar solos. But, for all Bear McCreary did to vary it with piano and the “eastern” arranged version, is this really a piece of music that would echo through time and space calling humanity and cylons together? Wouldn’t a grander bit of music have been more appropriate? Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”? Maybe something moody from Liszt? Miles Davis’ “So What?” Anything other than a simple three chord folk tune, really. Integrating the lyrics into the show was a cute trick.
What was with 6’s glowing red spine (in the miniseries)? Never explained or repeated. We can assume it had something to do with her “joining” with Baltar or creating that weird mental image of herself in him. Those were never really explained either.
I can kind of forgive the Starbuck is an angel (/unknowable entity/ghost/alien/…) disappearance at the end. By that point I was like, “sure. Why not?” It kind of fit and the sudden disappearance was almost Kubrickian, though I would’ve liked a bit less of a reaction from Lee when he turned around.
Which brings me to the final, annoying bit. The really annoying thing about BSG: The religion. They had prophets. They had visions. They had ancient prophecies foretold and told again in ruined chambers buried on distant planets. Their mythologies roughly equivalent to Roman were superceded by the cylons’ weird monotheism. There was talk earlier in the show’s life that the writers were writing about the lost tribe of Isreal and the whole thing was the Story of Mormon. I don’t know if that’s true or not, and I tried to ignore as many of the religious themes as I could, possibly because that’s the way I deal with it in everyday, non-tv life. In any case, it was frequently annoying. Frequently broke the illusion that I was watching a piece of science fiction. And very frequently provided an easy out for the writers to provide a “reason” for something impossible to happen. Finding a planet? Sure, it was part of a prophecy. Being led to Earth? Starbuck had the Arrow of Hercules in her belt so she knew the way. The president’s having visions? Well, sure, it was prophesyed. And so on. If it were less frequent and maybe a little less intrinsic to how they managed to get around space, I’d have been happier.
So when people say that they couldn’t stand that Starbuck just vanished at the end, I say, “so what? You put up with it for this long”.
With all that said, I have to say that the final wrap-up with the “opera house” was fantastic and powerful. For all the times that I was annoyed in earlier episodes that they were showing me these cryptic visions, in the end I really thought that bit worked. Full props to the writers for that.
Overall, it was a great show. The fact that they didn’t overwhelm the show with the religious aspects and merely made it a part of the story was a good thing. And why not? Having 50-odd-thousand stragglers trying to make it across the blackness of space with no destination while a seemingly limitless army of sentient machines is trying to kill you might require a little help. It would have been easy to be heavy-handed there, but they managed not to be. There was enough to hold my interest throughout that I didn’t really mind the plot devices they used to get from Point Caprica to Final Destination. The varying stories about humans on their last legs struggling to stay alive were compelling, terrifying, frustrating and heart-wrenching in varying degrees, frequently all at once. This is what good story-telling does, it pulls you in and makes you feel it on an emotional level. The journey was a good one and I will miss it.
(also, no Boxey)
In Meta on
30 March 2009 tagged Meta, n3wblog, themes, wordpress with no comments
This blog’s theme has been bugging me for awhile and was due for a change. With apologies to kev, I’m shamelessly lifting Derek Powazek’s Depo-Skinny theme. I’ll be tailoring it to my own tastes over the next couple of days so if stuff seems broken, it probably is. You’d think I’d test this on a separate installation or something.
This theme should hopefully look decent just about everywhere. Mobes included.
In Web on
30 March 2009 tagged last.fm, Music, social, Web with no comments
The Future of Last.fm Radio APIs – Last.fm Web Services Discussions – Last.fm
Last.fm has never had a public radio API, although we’ve tolerated third-party clients using the undocumented calls that our client uses. This is finally about to change - we’re going to make a public, documented streaming API available to everyone who has an API account.
This will block out existing apps like Songbird and Fire.fm to name a couple.
Way to go.
In Web on
26 March 2009 tagged last.fm, Music, social with 6 comments
The popular music site Last.fm was a fun experiment for me. They announced a couple of days ago that they were going to start charging a subscription fee for use of their streaming music. US, UK and German listeners will still get the full service for free.
I don’t envy them their position of having to deal with the recording industry (to which they are closely connected via parent company CBS). I don’t expect it’s easy to run a company that gives away music when the RIAA is doing its damnedest to squash file-sharing. I do find it annoying that they’ve carved out three large populations and said, “you can play for free and we’ll just make our money off of these other countries”. I was always under the impression that giving Last.fm our music listening data via scrobbling was all the payment they required. That data’s valuable for tracking what people listen to, how often they listen to it, and I’m sure they can do all sorts of interesting statistical and probabilistic analyses on it to sell it back to the music industry. I guess that’s not the case.
About that data. Knowing that I was shipping listening information to Last.fm made me aware of my listening habits in an unusual way. I was always cognizant of the fact that my listening was being sent upstream to another entity. I was interested in increasing the number of songs I listened to. I was aware when I was listening to certain music “too frequently” and would try to curb that to a degree. I wanted my played music to be representative of my entire collection rather than a few favorite albums. This is subtle, but it changed the way I listened to my music, and not necessarily in a good way. It’s like I was listening to my collection for other people and not just myself.
What did I get out of this? I did get a few very solid musical recommendations. I sent some money to iTunes to buy albums from *stellastar, Cut/Copy, The Helio Sequence and others directly based on Last.fm’s recommendations. The social aspect never really panned-out for me though. I don’t pay attention to what my friends are listening to in any meaningful way. The discussion groups were not interesting to me. It doesn’t really feel much like a “community” in the way that Flickr and other social sites do.
To be fair, $5 per month isn’t a lot of money. I pay that for Xbox Live, but I would have to say that I get a lot more for my money on Xbox Live. Or Flickr Pro. Being able to stream low-quality music over a Flash-based player is not a good value for me considering I always have an iPod of some type close by.
So there we have it. I’m sorry we can’t be friends anymore, Last.fm. I may be back from time-to-time to check in and look up some music. Maybe I’ll take a look at Blip.fm to see what that’s like… If you’ve got a favorite music service on the web (don’t talk to me about Pandora. They don’t like Canada) that works in Canada. Drop me a note in the comments.
