Number Geekery!

April 22, 2005 Timothy Sanders

I was looking at the online demo for "Monsters Menace America" - an upcoming game. The part that made me laugh was that it's a big Flash monstrosity and every time it switches section you get a loading screen with the standards progress bar. Underneath it says what percentage is complete. As I transition to the second section it briefly claims it as "NaN% complete" DAMN YOU ZERO AND YOUR TRICKY NON-DIVDING WAYS! (shakes fist) (If you didn't get this entry don't worry. Unless you're a programmer. That would be bad. To sum it up for the laypeople - there are certain numeric operations that make no sense - the resultant value is Not A Number - often written as NaN. The most common one is to attempt to divide by zero - you ask the computer "What is 7 divided by 0" and it says "Not a number". Yes explaining it does suck what (little) humor there was right away, but hey! This here is the educational portion of the show!)

Republic Commando

April 19, 2005 Timothy Sanders

So I Gameflyed Star Wars Republic Commando and played through the single player campaign. I enjoyed it - the squad command mechanic was pretty cool although I never quite figured out the logic when it cancelled previous commands. Another thing I thought was odd was that the story lays out things like "This guy is a slicer and this guy is a sniper, and the other guy is the heavy weapon guy". As far as I could tell it didn't make any difference - all four squad members (counting myself) could slice a given terminal in the exact same amount of time. I was finishing it and thinking "WTF was Chuji on about? This is going to be a perfectly acceptable ending - we'll destroy this bigass ship and we're done." I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but let's just say they had a PERFECTLY nice ending and then they stuck this ending movie where they introduced two major plot twists and then ended the game. Goofiest ending I've seen in a game for a while. If you're into Star Wars or into FPS's I'd say it's a good game to look at. And the squad thing was cool (I haven't played Band of Brothers so I can't compare them.) I never would have personally bought it, but I enjoyed the Gamefly rental. (Muwahahaha! Watch me destroy the industry. DESTROY it I say!)

Kool-Aid is Back - Long Live Kool-Aid!

April 15, 2005 Timothy Sanders

So indeed my trusty sidekick checked out of AppleCare yesterday and appears to have a clean bill of health. I've been able to install and patch a few things that weren't working right - including the much maligned MSOffice patch that was the first thing I noticed wasn't working right. Pic_A_Day should resume shortly now that I have Photoshop back. In more comedy FedEx delivered the promised external drive that Apple sent me yesterday. (sigh) So now I have the 300 Gig drive I bought, and a 160 Gig drive they sent me. So we're awash in external storage here at Casa De Sanders. I installed Virtual PC last night - it took a while and I'm not sure what my impression is yet. Kool-Aid locked up once this morning while I was running VPC in the background (I was letting MTGO download images). I don't know that was VPC's fault but it's my guess. And VPC itself got SCREWED by it - the virtual FAT drive got borked. I'm installing iWork now.

Note from the Future

April 14, 2005 Timothy Sanders

So yeah it works. I can actually boot Karin's Powerbook with my cloned HD and everything is fine. There is some way apps can tell - iTunes made me accept a license agreement and iPodderX mentioned it wasn't "activated" on that machine - but it works just fine. Seems almost spooky to transplant my desktop around like that, but if it works . . . . However, after a glorious two hours waiting for the Genius Bar I dropped Kool-Aid off this morning and got the call this evening. In theory by tomorrow even I should be back in business. And then I can install Virtual PC and iWork. And THEN, if people aren't careful I might actually do some writing. Shocker!

Wild and Funky!

April 13, 2005 Timothy Sanders

So this seems really weird to me. I'm writing this on my Powerbook, but I'm booted from an external drive. I went to Best Buy and grabbed a 300 Gig Firewire drive (big enough for us to back up multiple Powerbooks on). Partitioned it, and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my laptop drive onto a partition. The entire honking drive - just cloned it right over. It took a while (I wasn't timing it, but I had time to clean the kitchen, load the dishwasher, make Karin's lunch for tomorrow and do some magazine reading.) So that finished. Turn off the Mac, turn it back on while holding down the Option Key and blam - up pops a little menu listing the bootable drives. I booted off the firewire drive and now everything is running just spiffy - just no longer on a drive of debatable provenance. I actually just changed the wallpaper so I could be sure to keep track of which disk I was using. Desktop, mail, web bookmarks everything came over just fine. So now in theory I can let Apple replace the internal HD, get it back and just resume business as usual. I don't know - somehow cloning the entire OS install like that just felt weird. And the fact that this drive can simultaneously support multiple laptops - bizarre. I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect I could take this drive and boot Karin's laptop - into my OS, my crazy preferences and my email file. (I'll try that tomorrow if Apple keeps Kool-Aid overnight.) If I actually have my desktop, all my data, and all my applications on an external hard drive I can connect to any Firewire Mac and boot up well that just means I'm talking to you from the FUTURE baby!