Has it really been a month?

Things have been kinda busy at work and I haven’t had much interest in blogging lately. We’re finally nearing the end of a release cycle, so I’ll see what I can to do change that

 

What I’ve really needed all this time is a second computer

Tonight I began going through my unsorted photos - something I’ve been putting off for 2 years. I’ve been keeping copies of them on my iPod (the base files, not converted to ipod format) and was amazed to discover that while I had maybe 7 or 800 sorted photos from 2002-2005 I’ve got a whopping 5000 sitting on my iPod. Knowing my paranoid backup habits there are a stack of duplicates in there, but best case that’s still 2500 photos. The sudden rise in photo taking happened when I picked up a couple of 1gb sticks with my new camera in 2006, where the old one only had 64mb

Why did I leave it so long? XP didn’t have any good built-in photo tools, and I eventually got sick of using explorer + free image viewers. Vista does have a pretty good one, but I just never wanted to spend time on photos - and in the last week or two I think I’ve worked out why.

My desktop machine is powerful (or at least it was 3 years ago) and has a fantastic beefy case. But that’s exactly the problem - with this big noisy thing churning away in the corner I was always in the mood to make use of the power, not sit around sorting photos (It’s obviously no coincidence that I bought the machine in early 2006).

To further prove the point, I regularly go 2 or 3 days without even turning my desktop on now. It goes on, plays games, and goes off. I’ve lived with a single computer that stays on 24/7 since uni, and the silence has been a surprisingly welcome change

So as it turns out, my reason for not buying a mac had nothing to do with my needs and everything to do with perception. 20/20 hindsight being what it is, this free laptop has become more than just a convenience - it’s introduced me to a better way of life by using two computers.

My games machines have always been very close to top of the line because I multi task so much; I leave everything open while playing games so I can get back to whatever I was doing afterwards. Right now I’m pushing the limits so much that things are starting to crawl - mail, NetNewsWire, Adium, iTunes (with the chillcast playing), terminal, Safari (no windows open, just sitting in ram for quick googling) and iPhoto in the middle of importing a 3gb stash of photos from Thailand in 2006. Oh and I’ve separated my apps into 4 of Leopard’s spaces, plus I’m writing this blog post.

You can see where I’m going with this. Except for the photo tool such madness is normal for me, and then I ask windows to swap all that out while I run off and play a game. Vista handles my demands far, far better than XP did on the same hardware, and that’s one of the reasons I love it - but the games suffer as a result. Now I get all of my primary tasks in a machine that can actually sleep (my desktop case is too old to disable the noisy fans in sleep mode) and when I want to play a game I switch one USB cable, change monitor inputs and boot up the windows box.

As a result, two computers won’t really be more expensive - I no longer need a top of the line games machine because windows is doing nothing but games, and the money I save on that will get me a cheap underpowered desktop (not that the Mac Mini is really underpowered) to handle everything else.

This is the best of both worlds, and I have found the motivation to do more non-gaming activities (this week I finally watched an Anime series that I’ve had lying around for at least 2 or 3 years). I love it

 

Contact sync is trippy

I’ve been having far too much fun with contact sync in the last week or so. My mum has been very happy with her Plaxo account to sync contacts between Hotmail and her mac, so I decided to give that a go. I think it was mid 2007 when Microsoft released the upgrade from Vista’s mail client to Windows Live Mail - it didn’t tell me it was uploading my entire contact book to Windows Live but I finally had my addresses synced between home and work so I didn’t mind too much.

I’m not sure if that turned out for the best or not, because Plaxo’s contact slurp from Windows Live has a rather critical flaw. It totally ignores the messenger account address (despite having a field for IM accounts). This means that for my MSN-only contacts who had no name and no email address other than their messenger contact, Plaxo imported a blank field. I’d deleted about 10 people before I happened to reload MSN and it warned me that it was about to delete them from my contact list - luckily I was able to write them all down and re-add them.

I had to spend a couple of hours filling in names for my MSN contacts, re-importing them into Plaxo and having to manually copy over the IM address, but it all synced down to the Mac nicely. When it works, Plaxo is cool.

 

It was tonight that things got really trippy. About 6 or 8 months ago, I borrowed a USB bluetooth adapter from a mate to try syncing my Vista contacts to my phone. That crashed and burned horribly with no Vista driver for it and a discovery that I couldn’t use it anyway - Vista will only sync contacts with Windows Mobile. The phone’s PC software does support the old PIM standard transfer but the only worthwhile windows software that supports such a thing is Outlook.

Anyway, on a whim I decided to plug it into the mac (no BT on an iBook this old). 5 seconds later the BT icon had appeared in the menu bar, my phone connected without any issues and it was even recognised by iSync. That was when I realised I hadn’t finished fixing my phone’s contact book - I didn’t have any data cable for the previous phone so I’d used the SIM card to transfer all my contacts. People with multiple numbers had been expanded (SIM entries only support one number) and quite a few people were listed under nicknames so it wouldnt’ sync properly.

So yet more hours later I had used the PC software to move everyone to the Phone memory and update their info, and I was finally ready to sync. Even though iSync gave me a heart attack saying it had deleted the address data for about 20 people - I just turned off the Plaxo sync so I could check them against the Plaxo copy - it must’ve changed it’s mind because they’re all intact.

 

After all that effort, it was really trippy to see the phone numbers I’d collected automatically inserted into the address book entry next to the email addresses, and all of that data uploaded to my phone. It even managed to put my calendar data in the phone along with alarms - thanks to the odd combination of OSX, Plaxo and Microsoft I finally have my contacts synced to three places (home, work, mobile) which I’ve been dreaming about for years.

I don’t regret my decision to stick with Windows for the 10+ years I’ve been using it. But I am glad I’ve finally made the move to OSX and when I get sick of shoehorning myself into a dead laptop I’ll be buying a mac mini.

Not that this means I’ll never go back - one of the advantages of running everything off either a fileserver or offsite is that my contacts, mail and even documents folder are synced to both Windows and OSX

 

The furry elephant in the corner has left the building

I’ve done it. I’m ditching Vista for OSX. You may think I’m a switcher, you may think I was a fool for using Vista at all and if you’re like the rest of the world, you probably think I’m a fool for sticking with it for the 12 months I did. If you think any of those things, you’re wrong. I still love Vista, but have decided that it just doesn’t run well enough without a beefy dual or quad core cpu and I have no intentions of upgrading right now. So what am I using? Well bear with me, there’s a bit of background to this one

I am by no means a switcher, or if I am I switched years ago. Despite never actually owning a mac, I’ve been saying ever since I left uni that if I buy a laptop it would be a mac. Unfortunately, I’ve had absolutely no need to buy a laptop and my desktop machine is for games which means macs are out. I did however convince my mum to get a mac laptop in 2003, which she loved and has stuck with macs through to what is about to be a second replacement laptop.

Which brings me to today’s story.

Over the christmas break, the screen on my mum’s iBook G4 went dark. It didn’t take me long to figure out I could still see the screen if I used a torch, but a quick hunt around google revealed it would be a monumental pain in the arse to fix - most likely a broken inverter cable (an apparently common problem in this model of laptop after 3 years of use). The worst part is that in what I can only describe as a fit of stupidity, when I helped her buy the laptop in 2005 I neglected to make sure she bought the extended warranty which would’ve covered this.

I knew it would work fine with an external monitor, but mum doesn’t travel with the adapter nor did she want to buy a monitor and tether the laptop to a desk. So mum took the lappy to her local apple shop, they refused to believe it was the inverter cable and charged her $100 to say “We will only fix this with a new screen, which will cost you nearly a thousand dollars to fix. Buy a new laptop”.

Buying a new laptop is what’s going to happen, that’s for sure, but not from those idiots. Said laptop was sent down to me (including the external monitor adapter) via an uncle who was visiting Brisbane, and now sits on my desk. I’m heading up to visit mum later this year and my task is to buy a new MacBook and do all the data transfer legwork so the new mac has all the photos, music etc from the current one. In return, the iBook is mine to do whatever I want with.

So you can see why this was an opportunity I just couldn’t resist. I spent most of last week testing the water for using this laptop as my primary machine, and all I can say is it never ceases to amaze me how lightweight unix feels. I have a linux file server and MythTV box so this is nothing new to me, but we’re talking a 1.2ghz G4 with 512mb ram here. I have 6 apps running + a temperature monitor, this works because the only apps using more than 50mb ram are Safari and NetNewsWire. There’s no free ram but it has 130mb inactive and there is no swap activity as I switch between apps. Things can get hairy if I go nuts with installers or other cpu heavy tasks in the background, but I

Not to mention the fact that it has a 3 year old graphics card designed for a 1024×768 screen - but I’ve installed a hack to run the external monitor at 1920×1200 on my 24″ lcd. I figure it’d hate that for sure, but it’s surviving admirably.  Most of the fancy graphical effects are horribly slow due to using the CPU to render them, but they’re all either rare or avoidable.

 

Overall I’m amazed at how much this little machine can handle, which is why I’m migrating. I was already running my mail and documents off the file server and use Newsgator to sync my RSS feeds, so the only thing left to migrate is my iTunes library (which I doubt will be much fun, but I’m up for an adventure).

Having used a mac plenty of times, the only real issue I’ve had so far is the keyboard shortcuts. I was willing to put up with the pain of re-learning the text navigation keys, but while looking for a way to fix the terminal keys I discovered a way to enable windows-style keys (although making it work on leopard requires info from one of the comments). Yay for windows shortcuts and muscle memory! It even has old DOS favourites ctrl+insert, shift+insert etc.

I also need to buy a new blogging client, I’m leaning towards ecto but there are still a few options to consider. I noticed MarsEdit 2.1 making some waves on my rss feeds but I can’t stand editing HTML with tags anymore. I’ll rant about that later

 

As for my desktop machine? Well it was already dual booting to XP for intensive games due to the vista speed issues. XP will now be the only thing it runs.

 

Ace Attorney 4 coming soon! and other mindless ramblings

Having posted about my love of the Phoenix Wright series back in September last year, I was surprised when a few days ago I discovered that the english release of the fourth iteration (Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice) was due out in a few weeks and I hadn’t noticed.  I think the marketing for the game is only just starting to ramp up, with pointed release date announcements and a new dev blog.

I also had a nice surprise when ordering it from dvdboxoffice - my source for importing games that will take months to come out here, if they ever do - I had a birthday coupon code from last year that I’d forgotten about and gave me $2.50 off the order

 

Speaking of games that aren’t scheduled for release in Australia though (did I mention I love that DS games aren’t region locked?), the other game I’ve been keeping an eye on is Professor Layton and the Curious Village.  In the last couple of weeks Wired has had coverage of both the official trailer and this cool magazine ad showing off the quality of puzzles featured in the game.  It is due out in just over a week so I ordered that to tide me over until Apollo Justice (free shipping ftw!)

 

On a final note that could be a new entry but isn’t really worth it, this blog has been quiet because I’ve been hard at work on the next release of EditLive! and haven’t had much to talk about.  That isn’t likely to change for at least another week or two

 

I do the strangest things when I’m bored on holidays

I had a pretty good Christmas break this year; I always try to stay away from computers when I’m on holiday and for the last three weeks, I’ve succeeded (most of the time).  Funnily enough it’s on these breaks that I sometimes decide to get on said computer and join activities that I’ve been considering but trying to avoid.

Two years ago (or close enough to it), I sat down with my mum’s iBook while everyone else was watching TV and finally started this blog.

I absolutely refused to go near MySpace which meant there was nothing to do last year, but today I finally cracked and joined FaceBook (I hope that’s my profile link).  Unfortunately my mum’s iBook broke yesterday, so I had to borrow my flatmate’s laptop.  I’m still sitting in front of the TV tho

 

Welcoming another Ephox Engineer

Tomorrow  is a day I’ve been looking forward to for quite a few years.  Dylan Just, one of my best mates from uni, is starting at Ephox.  He’s not yet on Planet Ephox but I think we’re fixing that tomorrow morning

I’ve known Dylan since our first year at uni, he was living on the same residential college as me (and AJ, and 2 or 3 other people who have worked at Ephox ).  We worked really well together over the four years of our Software Engineering degree, but I took 5 years to finish after landing my job at Ephox and dropping back to 50% course load for the final two years.

That, among other things, meant that Dylan ran off and found himself a decent job when I wasn’t looking.  And basically ever since, I’ve been trying to convince him to give that up and come work with me at Ephox.  I was very happy when he finally caved and came in for an interview

It’s only a three month contract, but if he fits the team as well as I think he will I have high hopes that he’ll be offered a job at the end.  I’m probably jumping the gun a bit there but I can’t help it!  It’s going to be so much fun!

 

ouch

I could’ve made a better choice for the first photos of myself I post to this blog, but I think these are worth it - battle scars from skirmish yesterday.  These were taken only a few hours afterwards, they’re now even more purple particularly on my left shoulder

I also have a couple of small bruises on my back and one on each leg, but none of them hurt unless I bump something.  It’s my thighs that are killing me - I have to take the stairs reeeeal slowly

 

Seniority

The day has finally arrived, I’ve updated my email signature and blog info page… I am now officially a Senior Software Engineer

I’ve been aiming to achieve this for at least a year, and I never would’ve made it without the help of Brett, our Engineering manager.  He’s been a source of great help and guidance as I prove my abilities and I’m very thankful for his support along with the rest of the team.  Thanks guys

 

Apologies for the unannounced blog vacation

I didn’t plan to go a month between posts.  It was already creeping up to week or two between each brain dump which is slower than I’d like, but sometimes blogging just isn’t very high on my list of things to do.

At the start of August I fell sick.  I look after myself enough that I don’t tend to catch the yearly colds - only on rare occasions have I needed a day off work.  This flu however has been going around Brisbane and knocking everybody flat; it took me 5 days to recover.  Two of those were on a weekend so I only had 3 days off work, which is lucky because we’ve been quite busy.

That brings me to the reason I haven’t posted in the 3 or so weeks since then; work has been a bit crazy and I’m either too tired or just too lazy to make the effort.  I think we’re getting it under control, which will hopefully inspire some more posts.

So why did I pick today to return?  Stay tuned - some recent news has inspired me to get off my arse and start posting again.  I’m back, baby.