November 2007 Archives
Finally, I managed to test Need for Speed ProStreet on my new mac. It runs in full screen resolution almost smoothly (I did not have time to tune it yet) but the game disappointed me. The thing that made me love Need for Speed, and to be the only driving simulator I liked to play, have changed.
Games like Collin Mcrae had never enthusiasm me because you are driving a street instead of a car. You turn right, the car view angle changes a little, but what really moves, is the street. Now, Need For Speed has the same problem. You control the street, not the car. Probably that is why they call it 'Pro Street'.
Oh well, now is time for GTA IV come out and disappoint me as well.
Games like Collin Mcrae had never enthusiasm me because you are driving a street instead of a car. You turn right, the car view angle changes a little, but what really moves, is the street. Now, Need For Speed has the same problem. You control the street, not the car. Probably that is why they call it 'Pro Street'.
Oh well, now is time for GTA IV come out and disappoint me as well.
One more time, I am writing about something that happened to myself, but with something that can be generalized, and learned, specially for computer programmers. Yesterday I was unpacking a DVD image in my new MacBook Pro (you know, that one where I installed Windows) under Windows.
After unpacking the rar files, I mounted the DVD image with DaemonTools. While the files seem to be there, the executables did not work, and the text files were all empty. It took me some time before I could find out what was the problem. Can you guess?
After unpacking the rar files, I mounted the DVD image with DaemonTools. While the files seem to be there, the executables did not work, and the text files were all empty. It took me some time before I could find out what was the problem. Can you guess?
Continue reading Silent errors.
Got the Leopard disk, booted MacBook Pro with the Windows OS, inserted the Leopard DVD, and it started installing drivers. I think it took about 20 minutes to install drivers, but at the end I got everything working.
Unfortunately Apple did it in the wrong way. Instead of creting a set of bundles, accordingly with the hardware (it could detect the laptop model, or just ask the user), Apple installs all the drivers, for all the hardware Apple machines had during time. So, although my MacBook Pro includes an nvidia video card, it includes in the disk the Intel and ATI drivers as well.
Fortunately, I am not running out of disk space.
Unfortunately Apple did it in the wrong way. Instead of creting a set of bundles, accordingly with the hardware (it could detect the laptop model, or just ask the user), Apple installs all the drivers, for all the hardware Apple machines had during time. So, although my MacBook Pro includes an nvidia video card, it includes in the disk the Intel and ATI drivers as well.
Fortunately, I am not running out of disk space.
As you noticed with my previous posts, I own a MacBook Pro, I installed BootCamp, and now I am running both Windows XP and Leopard on it. So far, so good. The installation of windows did not work at first, as you know, but I finally installed it. Now the curious thing is that Mac hardware should be quite strange (or there is something on the machine limiting Windows detection skills). It is very strange, that Windows did not detect the ethernet, the video card, the sound device, the wireless... at least it supports the maximum resolution of the LCD.
Now, I just need to find the Leopard disk to install the drivers. I just hope it runs the Need For Speed later.
Now, I just need to find the Leopard disk to install the drivers. I just hope it runs the Need For Speed later.
I have a friend that likes M&M's. Well, who doesn't. But she has a particularity regarding M&M's. She doesn't like blue M&M's. In fact, I am not sure why. But what she says is that blue M&M's use a strange colorant that makes your mouth and tongue all blue. I never experienced that myself, nor have seen the result of eating one of those M&M's. But I am quite curious.
Anyway, I need to lose some weight. Thus, no M&M's.
Anyway, I need to lose some weight. Thus, no M&M's.
Well, I would love to say so. Why? Because I have a friend that loves to annoy me saying that Perl sucks, that Slackware and Arch Linux suck, that Mac OS X sucks, and so on. But I will not say that Debian sucks. Probably it does. Probably it doesn't. But for now I just want to give an hint related to Linux and support of new hardware.Basically, I tried to install Debian stable on a new machine. The conclusion was that it didn't detect my SATA disks. I tried all modules for SATA (including the VIA one that should work), but it didn't. After talking with that same friend, I decided to try the Debian Testing version, that detected correctly the disks.
Unfortunately to freeze software with the idea of making it stable is not just a Debian issue. Slackware has the same problem. Fortunately kernels are updated more often. But for instance, I changed to Arch Linux because Slackware was using Apache 1.3x about one year and half after Apache 2.x being available.
It is true that some new software is unstable. But a Linux distribution needs to have update policies. Kernel updates are required. And they should be periodic. We know that new bugs appear, but a lot of others are corrected.
Probably I've posted about this previously, but I think I should repost it. First, it all started with Project Gutenberg. It was all Michael Hart idea: to preserve literature. As you might know, copyright does not give you a chance to preserve recent books, and given that, Project Gutenberg stores old books, that are now free. These books are preserved in digital format, but not as images. Texts are typeset again. As this requires a lot of work, a nice website named Distributed Proofreaders was created, to make individuals able to help the project by free. I will not describe how Distributed Proofreaders work, as there are lot of resources on the web about that.
I will just talk about the Open Dictionary project: a wiki dictionary that is being boot-straped using as base an old dictionary from 1913. The dictionary is a two volume monster, each volume with more than 1000 pages. At the moment, the first volume was fully typeset on the first Distributed Proofreaders round.
So, you if you are interested to help, just search for the 'Novo dicionário da língua portuguesa' under the Portuguese books on Distributed Proofreaders.
I will just talk about the Open Dictionary project: a wiki dictionary that is being boot-straped using as base an old dictionary from 1913. The dictionary is a two volume monster, each volume with more than 1000 pages. At the moment, the first volume was fully typeset on the first Distributed Proofreaders round.
So, you if you are interested to help, just search for the 'Novo dicionário da língua portuguesa' under the Portuguese books on Distributed Proofreaders.
Today I gave a try (well, two tries) to BootCamp. First, if you read my previous post, I needed to remove the NTFS partition on my disk, that was using all the space available. For that I tried to use the DiskUtility from the Leopard DVD. Unfortunately that tool did not help. All options were shaded, and thus, I could not restore my disk. Fortunately, the Leopard DVD also includes a terminal, and fdisk is available. Although the Mac fdisk seems worst than the usual Unix version, it includes an option to correct/restore a MBR, and using it on the disk helped. In the next reboot DiskUtility was able to remove the partition and create a new one.
After some reboots I finally managed to get Leopard installing on a partition with the size of the full disk. Installation went OK, as expected. Then, tried bootcamp again.
But this time I had some other precautions. First, I run bootcamp, asked it to create the partitions, but I did not install Windows right after that. I canceled the procedure and asked Leopard for a reboot. After the reboot, I run bootcamp again. It detected the partitions, and thus skipped to the next step: reboot using a Windows XP SP2 CD. This time Windows detected some partitions, and I selected the correct one for it to install windows. After installing the basic system, windows tried to reboot, but gave a "Disk error" error. Oh shit, second try did not work.
Fortunately this time I did not lost Leopard. Thus, I rebooted the laptop under Mac OS, and tried BootCamp again. Did everything as I did in my previous try, and the installation worked out without problems.
As we say in Portugal, "à terceira é de vez" that can be louslly translated as: at the third try, it will work.
After some reboots I finally managed to get Leopard installing on a partition with the size of the full disk. Installation went OK, as expected. Then, tried bootcamp again.
But this time I had some other precautions. First, I run bootcamp, asked it to create the partitions, but I did not install Windows right after that. I canceled the procedure and asked Leopard for a reboot. After the reboot, I run bootcamp again. It detected the partitions, and thus skipped to the next step: reboot using a Windows XP SP2 CD. This time Windows detected some partitions, and I selected the correct one for it to install windows. After installing the basic system, windows tried to reboot, but gave a "Disk error" error. Oh shit, second try did not work.
Fortunately this time I did not lost Leopard. Thus, I rebooted the laptop under Mac OS, and tried BootCamp again. Did everything as I did in my previous try, and the installation worked out without problems.
As we say in Portugal, "à terceira é de vez" that can be louslly translated as: at the third try, it will work.
My first attempt with bootcamp was a failure. First of all let me say that Apple tools to manage disks really suck. First, DiskUtility is quite counter-intuitive. I needed about five tries before I could create a second partition named 'win' and not 'macosx_2' as the tool insisted (just because the first partition name was macosx). When I finally managed to name the partition correctly, noticed that I cannot format it in a file system that's not HFS. But, ok, continuing on my odyssey.
Next step was to start the bootcamp assistant. What the hell of assistant is one that wants to do all the job and not assist me doing it? What I mean is that bootcamp does not like that someone (namely, me) create the partitions. It wants one single partition, and wants to do all the job by itself. Closed bootcamp, started again DiskUtility, removed the second partition, and extended the first one to fill up the entire disk.
Second try with bootcamp. It got all satisfied that it could create the partition by itself. Asked to insert the Windows disk (used a XP SP2 disk), and rebooted correctly. The first moment when I noticed something was going wrong was when the Windows setup detected a disk of 140 GB instead of the 20 GB I gave it. After all this, and given I had anything important in the disk, I accepted. The windows setup formated the entire disk (well, at least I think so), installed the auxiliary files, and started the reboot process. I removed the CD, and got a... blue screen? no... a gray screen. Without any text. Without any information. Fear the gray screen of death!
I think I need to install my laptop again. And I wonder what I did wrong, before testing again.
Next step was to start the bootcamp assistant. What the hell of assistant is one that wants to do all the job and not assist me doing it? What I mean is that bootcamp does not like that someone (namely, me) create the partitions. It wants one single partition, and wants to do all the job by itself. Closed bootcamp, started again DiskUtility, removed the second partition, and extended the first one to fill up the entire disk.
Second try with bootcamp. It got all satisfied that it could create the partition by itself. Asked to insert the Windows disk (used a XP SP2 disk), and rebooted correctly. The first moment when I noticed something was going wrong was when the Windows setup detected a disk of 140 GB instead of the 20 GB I gave it. After all this, and given I had anything important in the disk, I accepted. The windows setup formated the entire disk (well, at least I think so), installed the auxiliary files, and started the reboot process. I removed the CD, and got a... blue screen? no... a gray screen. Without any text. Without any information. Fear the gray screen of death!
I think I need to install my laptop again. And I wonder what I did wrong, before testing again.
I have a new MacBook Pro, 2.4GHz, 4GB of RAM and some disk space. Installed Leopard. That was probably an error, but I am still testing it. Let me say that this bitch is fast. A friend says that if I install Linux it will be faster. But trust me, this one compiles very fast (OK, OK, I am used to my old PowerBook G4).
For now I did not try much software. Basically installed Leopard, downloaded iStatPro so I can monitor temperature, and downloaded Thunderbird and Firefox, but didn't run them yet. To test temperature, downloaded MacPorts and put it compiling some software.
For now my main complain is GPU temperature. Got it about 70 without running any kind of graphical software. I'll just test it for some more days before porting my data from this PowerBook.
For now I did not try much software. Basically installed Leopard, downloaded iStatPro so I can monitor temperature, and downloaded Thunderbird and Firefox, but didn't run them yet. To test temperature, downloaded MacPorts and put it compiling some software.
For now my main complain is GPU temperature. Got it about 70 without running any kind of graphical software. I'll just test it for some more days before porting my data from this PowerBook.
Ratatouille is one of the best animation pictures I have seen if the last times. It doesn't have just a great animation quality, but it has also a nice story. OK, it is not that original. But it has a good story anyway.
Let me say that what I liked more in this movie was the little mouse. It is quite funny and fluffy. It has a nice and cute face (probably this is not the correct word as he is an animal, but I do not have any dictionary handy). Let me say that I would probably buy a stuffed Ratatouille if there was one.
Let me say that what I liked more in this movie was the little mouse. It is quite funny and fluffy. It has a nice and cute face (probably this is not the correct word as he is an animal, but I do not have any dictionary handy). Let me say that I would probably buy a stuffed Ratatouille if there was one.
This night Apple updated the MacBook and MacBook Pro families. Unfortunately it was a basic update. MacBooks now have a better graphics card, and MacBook Pros are now a little faster, and have a slighter bigger disk.
And now, what do I do? I buy a standard PC and maintain my PowerBook G4 for the Mac OS software I bought? (an optical music recognizer and an ocr). Or do I buy a 15.4" MacBook Pro? Or do I trust on fairy tales and wait for apple to release a smaller MacBook Pro?
Damn choices.
And now, what do I do? I buy a standard PC and maintain my PowerBook G4 for the Mac OS software I bought? (an optical music recognizer and an ocr). Or do I buy a 15.4" MacBook Pro? Or do I trust on fairy tales and wait for apple to release a smaller MacBook Pro?
Damn choices.
