LAN party pics are here!

-Oliver

Oh man, LAN party was a blast… thanks Andrew for being a good host. =)

Highlights:

• Andrew opening his “Doom 3.”
• Sam opening his “Doom 3.”
• Doom 3.
• Nice FarCry multiplayer.
• Sam playing Doom 3.
• Back massages. =)
• First draft of the apartment’s Constitution. =)
• _ _ (aka Viraj) shirts.

I will try to get pics from Nancy soon…

-Oliver

This blog is dedicated to Andrew, known infamously throughout Sun as the “Java Sucks” intern. For a brief moment, Andrew’s hate for Java trickled throughout the vast internet and was aggregated by blog aggregators (like PlanetSun).

That is, until Sun’s Big Brother caught him and now Andrew is known as Java Joseph.

-Oliver

So, I’ve gotten more used to the CMD+W/CMD+Q thing. Here’s my experience with the browsers:

Safari

Good: Nice integration with OS (ie. FTP links open in Finder, allowing easy download of folders, multiple files, etc.).
Bad: Slow w/Gmail.

Camino

Good: I like the way the tabs look. Haha.
Bad: Nothing that really stands out… seems to load slightly slower than Safari.

Firefox

Good: Extensions rock. =) Just good ‘ole Firefox.
Bad: CMD+M is b0rk3d, it loads Mail instead of minimizing.

For now, I’ve been using Camino… but I have all three in my dock and I change pretty frequently. =)

Some of OS X’s “just works” stuff is kinda nice. It’s nice that they give you (for the most part) nice defaults that most people would want… however, it freakin’ ticks me off when you can’t change those defaults. For example, when you plug in an external monitor, it automatically extends the desktop. Okay, that’s good. I like that. However, what happens when I don’t want to use the laptop LCD and I just want the PB to use the external monitor (with the laptop LCD open to use keyboard, touchpad)?… that’s right, I can’t do it (without some hacking, at least). So anyways, the best I can do for now is to mirror the display, but then I’m stuck at 1024x768 on the external monitor. Ugh.

Anyone know how to set your own profile in iChat? Yeah, I can’t figure that one out yet.

My CPU temps hit 66.8C today while compiling KDE. I flipped the PB on its side now (bottom of PB is perpendicular to table)… it cooled down to <65C… heh.

I had a big experience of inadequacy when it came to free “native” (as in, not using gFTP or something through X11) FTP clients for OS X. So much so, that I started to look into writing my own. I found that UT gave us Fetch for “free” (w/Bevoware) though, so I’ve played around with that and it seems like it would do the job. Perhaps I’ll write my own eventually anyways though, might be a nice little project to undertake.

Hmmm… oh, I LOVE Synergy.

-Oliver

Max temps:

CPU: 65C/149F
GPU: 65C/149F
HDD: 49.8C/121.64F (it used to max at around 47.8ish I think)

Yeah, I don’t like having this thing on my lap when I’m compiling large projects. lol

-Oliver

Alright… so the new HD is in and boot time and application launching is faster. I still don’t have that “snappy” feeling to the UI though. shrug Guess that’s what happens when you have a power-hungry eye-candy-filled GUI. I think the G5’s have that “snappy” feeling… but I guess my 1.33 G4 is far from a dual G5. =)

I need to find a good graphical FTP client. I tried one out, but I got frustrated with it cause it was screwing stuff up so I just went over to my A64 box and did what I needed there. Fugu is supposedly pretty good, but it only supports SFTP and not regular FTP… at least, that’s what I can gather.

I did this when I first got the PB, but after the reinstall, I forgot and it took me freakin’ forever to figure it out again. In .vimrc, do this to fix delete key:

set t_kb=^?
fixdel

Where ^? is CTRL+V+DELETE. I wish Apple set their vim defaults to something nice by default like virtually every Linux distro out there.

Oh yeah, if you format the iPod for Windows, you can use it on both Windows and OS X as both an iPod and removable hard drive. Hmmmmm… what else… I haven’t made too much use of Expose yet, so I won’t say much about that yet. The CMD+W, CMD+Q thing still bugs me a little, but I’m slowly getting more used to it.

I’d say my iPod experience has been more enjoyable than my PB experience thus far, but I definately need to get used to some of this stuff (coughFREAKING ONE BUTTONcough). Thank goodness for SideTrack or I would be really really not liking this. Default touchpad speed and acceleration is also a bit slow, Sidetrack fixed that for me too. Right now I have the tap on the touchpad being the right click, which is working okay for me.

I like how Safari opens FTP sites in Finder, but it doesn’t seem to like Gmail very much and waddles through that much slower than Camino or FireFox. I made Camino my default browser for now…

iChat is kinda fruity, so I made it even fruitier… that’s the only way I can use. The bubbles are kinda growing on me, I blame Brook for this one. Terminal is the lame. I very quickly replaced it with iTerm. However, there is a “make delete send backspace” option in Terminal which is nice (this makes the above t_kb thing in .vimrc unnecessary).

Hmmmm, let’s see… what else… oh yeah, Chad, you can turn on the ability to tab through alert buttons and stuff in System Preferences->Keyboard & Mouse->Keyboard Shortcuts->Turn on full keyboard access. I don’t know why this isn’t on by default… oh well, at least it’s there.

Alright, well I’ve got a ton more stuff to play with, so I’m off! =)

-Oliver

The 7200RPM drive comes in. W000 w00!!!

I have noticed that the PB doesn’t get very good wireless signal compared to my Dell… I wonder why… couldn’t they just attach the antenna to the all alluminum chassis??

-Oliver

I have had fun making my iChat really really girly. I stole the background from Kathy’s Xanga. =)

On another note, Ochs’ dad called me a fruit for getting an Apple.

-Oliver

Today, I am going to buy some more RAM for my PB. It is disturbingly slow at the moment swapping like crazy with the slow 4200RPM drive right now. It is almost unbearable, especially compared to my new A64 3200+, the Pentium-M 1.7GHz, and P4 2.8GHz workstation I’ve been used to for the past few weeks. Actually, it is unbearable… but I am getting through it by telling myself that I will be replacing the slow parts soon (hopefully). Soo… I’ll see how much an extra 512MB of RAM will help.

Kingston 512MB PC2700 DDR SoDIMM from BestBuy - 10% - $20 MIR = ~$87 after tax.

-Oliver

I feel I must blog about my new PowerBook. First, I will give you specs:

12” PB
1.33GHz
60GB 4200RPM hard drive
256MB RAM

Umm… yeah, that’s about all, you can “guess” the rest. I also got me a nice little 20GB iPod (new 4G one), but I have done little with it other than plug it into the wall and place it on top of a laundry bin. lol

*I plan on replacing that hard drive with either a Toshiba 40GB 5400RPM 16MB cache one or a Hitachi Travelstar 40GB 7200RPM one. I’m not quite sure which one to go with as of yet. I could get a 60GB, but I doubt I’m going to be needing all that space (especially with the 20GB from the iPod) so I’d rather save the money. Also, 512MB RAM from Crucial is in order…

As for the “Mac experience”… I don’t really have too much to say as of yet, mostly because I haven’t done that much. VJ is a freakin’ Smallville Nazi and if you even try to blink when you’re “supposed” to be watching Smallville, he will attempt to rip your intestines out through your ribs. Which reminds me, VJ VJ VJ VJ VJ VJ VJ VJ VJ VJ.

So, I’m going to withhold comments on my “Mac experience” until I finish upgrading the little thing, but I will note that I managed to freeze it within a few hours of use and had to hold the power button thingy down to restart it. Booooooo. That’s nothing compared to Andrew locking up a G5 in the Apple store though. What can I say? We’re masters.

-Oliver