Why can't I buy Tiger now...

I'm pretty pissed that I wasn't able to purchase Tiger until after 6pm local time. I'm now not so certain that I will be purchasing it all and will seek out an 'alternative' source.

Here's a copy of what I left on the Apple site as feedback for this bullshit

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I go down to the local Apple store, cash in hand, to buy a family pack of the latest version of OS X for the three macs I have purchased over the past year, as well as some Shuffle acessories, only to be told that I can't purchase the software until after 6pm local time.

This was very disappointing and annoying; I had just driven across town to leave the store empty handed.

Several friends have 'copies' of the software they were willing to share with me, but I wanted to do the right thing, support Apple and purchase the software. I'm so irked right now that I just might take those friends up on their offer. I can guarantee you I won't be purchasing any acessories from the Apple store.

I don't who was the marketing choad that thought this was good idea (a better idea would have been to have a midnight release party early this morning), but it has generated a good bit of ill will with me.

Thanks for nothing.

Heheh...

well, a coupla days has turned into a few weeks. World of Warcraft is just an amazing game and I am really enjoying playing it on the iMac G5. It is consuming most of my free time and throw in all the holiday crap I haven't been posting as I should.

We got a new big screen television for xmas, the Mitsubishi WD-52525; yet another time sink. It supports upto a 1280x720 resolution, so I am looking forward to kicking back on the couch with the wireless mouse and keyboard and enjoying WoW on the big screen.

Other than WoW I haven't done much with the PodBox other than the typical web surfing and emailing. Things are running well in general, although I have sufered a couple of kernal panics while playing World of Warcraft. I think it is related to heat but don't have anything to really back that up.

Will post again when able. Check yer action til then

Don't Expect Much Posting Over the Next Coupla Days...

I will be playing World of Warcraft pretty heavy for the next couple
of days and then there is the Thanksgiving Holiday. So prolly not too
many postings for the next few days.

Take care and have a Happy Turkey Day.

This Past Weekend...

This Past Weekend...

I spent some of the day Saturday playing around with an Applescript I have been working on. I'm just getting started with Applescript and I am quite the noob. I have been reading Matt Neuberg's 'Applescript - Definitive Guide' from O'Reilly and just about done with it. So I've got the basics in my head, which of course I completely forget when it gets down to actually writing some code, and I spend alot of time looking things up and re-reading the code examples, and of course, going thru the Finder dictionary. Basically I want the script to watch a folder and when a new file is added to that folder and is an mp3 it will be copied into iTunes and added to a playlist. Still a bit of work to be done.

I have a bit of Python code that I lifted from Ray Slakinski's (who is now working on iPodderX) orignal pyPodder that contained an Applescript to move files to iTunes and add it to a playlist. I was going to use this as a model for a portion of my Applescript. I realized however that I had not yet installed Python for the Mac yet. Actually that is not entirely true, as I do not really need to add Python because Apple is nice enough to include the core of Python as part of OS X. Instead what I needed to do was get to the MacPython site and download and install the IDE, the Package Manager and the waste module that the other two packages depend on, the rest is already there. The MacPython addition installed easily and without trouble. I then went to find me a good programmer's type text editor as I prefer to use a text editor instead of the Python IDE. On the Powerbook 12" I had been using Mi. I liked it at first and it has all the features one would need, but after a bit the rather wonky syntax highlighting began to bug me and it was no longer being actively maintained, and just before I had purchased the iMac G5 I had put Sub etha Edit on the Powerbook. So for the PodBox I decided to start off with it. Not only is Sub etha Edit a good general purpose editor with all the necessary functions and a plethora of syntax highlighting, it also has the ability to allow for the document to be edited by numerous folks at the same time via Rendevous, each with their own color for text they have added or edited. I haven't played with this feature yet, but plan on soon when I will need to do some collaborative web editing. Sub etha Edit appears to be free for non-commercial use (although it displays a somewhat distracting watermark stating its non-commercial license), and it is also quite reasonable in price when the full meal deal is purchased. I'm gonna run it thru its paces a bit and will then probally opt for the paid version. Check it out.

After playing around with Applescript for a bit more I set it aside to go run some errands with the family. While out and about I picked up a couple of items I was wanting for the PodBox. One was a USB 2.0 hub.

I found one I kinda liked made by Kensington, the DomeHub USB 2.0, which also came with a free USB 'FlyLight'. Its a silver hemisphere about the size of half of a small grapefruit. It has six USB 2.0 ports arranged along the back of the hub and one port at the top of the hemisphere (the packaging illustration shows them plugging the FlyLight into the top port). Along the front are seven small green rectangular LEDs which light up when the associated port has something plugged into it. The hub, besides going along with the rest of my desk and its accessories, and the fact that it has seven ports, has a nice weight to it (it prolly weighs a half pound or more), which is very helpful in keeping the hub and cables in place. So when I plug my camera into it and then in turn pick up the camera to turn it on or just move it around in general, the USB hub stays right where I left it and tends not to get drug around the desk or get turned to one side like a typical lightweight hub will do.

But so begins an hour long comedy of errors and frustration. The PodBox's three USB 2.0 ports were occupied with the Seagate external drive, the color laserjet and the blue glowy USB 1.1 hub. I unplugged the glowy hub from the iMac G5, plugged in the new USB 2.0 hub, and in turn plugged the iMic and glowy hub into the new one and unplugged the Powermate from the glowy hub and added it the new one as well. The glowy hub began glowing again and the Powermate began to faintly glow, so I presumed things had been rediscovered. I attempted to wake up the PodBox from screensaver mode, it didn't want to come back to life, tapped on the keyboard a few times, jiggled the mouse around, waited a bit and tried again, the screen saver just kept Ken Burnsing its images of outer space. So I was forced to power down the iMac G5 and turn it back on (having just typed this I'm thinking maybe I should have attempted a forced reboot with some key combo, but didn't think about it at the time and not sure if they work without the system being fully awake anyways). The PodBox booted right up, but once back in OS X I noticed something was different about my desktop, "ah crap!" the Seagate external USB drive had disappeared (and it wasn't showing in the finder either). So I unplugged the the drive from the PodBox and plugged it back in, nothing, powered the drive off and on, nothing. I also attempted to turn up the system sound volume via the Powermate, it no worky either. Did another quick reboot.

Remembering the first time I attempted to connect the external drive and the issues I had with it not liking certain USB ports I decided I would try that trick again. Sure enough, plugging the external drive into a different port had it discovered and mounted in seconds. Now however, I had unplugged the new USB hub to plug in the external drive where it was and when I plugged it back in it wasn't recognized. So, I unplug it and the printer and swap their positions, and if you haven't guessed it, now the printer was recognized. I wasn't about to mess with that external drive again and I was outta ports to swap, so I rebooted the PodBox, still no printer. Tired of dicking around I removed the printer via the 'Printer Setup Utility' from the Applications:Utilities folder and re-added it. Ta, da! Back was the printer.

Now I thought all this USB stuff was supposed to be hot pluggable? I understand about the external hard drive and that I would need to unmount it or 'eject' it prior to unplugging it, but I never touched it and yet it still disappeared when I unplugged a different USB device. It seems like the USB ports on the back of the iMac G5 are all kinda daisy-chained together and removing a device from one effects the others; and once those ports get all funky they don't want to accept the device that was previously plugged into it. Will have to do some checking around and see it this is intended behavior or not.

Got a few more things I did over the weekend, but I'm tired of typing. Stay tuned...

Blue Glowy (mmmmm...)

Below is the rig in full blue glowy mode. The blue is provided by the Powermate turned fully up, the little funky USB 1.1 hub and the blue illuminated USB 2.0 cable that is used to connect the color laserjet to the PodBox.



I picked up some nifty velcro cable ties made by Belkin to tidy up the cabling, but haven't got around to doing it yet. In the image above, the device to the left of the iMac G5 is the Seagate external hard drive, at its base, the bright light is the USB 1.1 hub (off to the left of it, that point of white light, is the Powerbook 12"'s heartbeat), and off to the right of the PodBox is the Netgear 802.11 Super G wireless router. The color laserjet is below the desk on the left and its end of the illuminated USB cable that is lighting things up under the desk.

Orcs and Dorfs and Undead, Oh My...

World of Warcraft Open Beta was winding down, so I've spent the last couple of evenings playing it, trying out various races and classes. This game is gonna be a real blast and looking forward to it coming out soon; supposedly November 23. Doh! That reminds me I need to pre-order a copy. If you are going to play WoW you have got to pick up the free Cosmos UI enhancement. This adds a lot of really nice features and some automation to the WoW user interface. From simple things like the ability to set the mouselook to a toggle, to a an ingame clock (with alarms, I suppose to remind you that it is time to head off to bed) that you hover the mouse over and gives you detailed stats on how much experience gained this session, overall experience, estimated time to next level at current experience rate, distance traveled by your character, &c. and all that is just part of clock and just scratches the surface of all that you can do with Cosmos. This is very deep enhancement and a great piece of work, be sure to check it out.

In an earlier post I mentioned that the iMac G5 was running the game very well graphically and with fairly high level of detail selected, well, this has changed a bit. After I moved out the starter town and went to one of the main cities, with lots of other player characters around and NPCs, and things started chunking a bit, making it more difficult to move around smoothly. So I had to crank down the detail a bit. I'm still gonna have to play with the video settings extensively once the game is released and really get things dialed in. There was one point when I was playing when a goodly portion of the peeps in the zone I was exploring went off to participate in a large scale raid. All of sudden my framerate really jumped up and things were ultra smooth. This made me realise I need to do some tweaking. I think the first to do will be to crank down the resolution a bit, I was running in that huge 1680x1050 resolution. The way WoW does things it scales the UI elements as your resolution changes (although this can be changed in either the options or via Cosmos. In DAoC when you began to run larger rezs the UI elemets shrank and in turn you saw a lot more of the screen empty of menus, chat boxes, &c. So in WoW I'm thinking I can go to a smaller resolution and not really lose any screen real estate and surely the FX5200 in the PodBox can push the pixels around a bit better. Now don't get me wrong, never did the game, even in the most crowded of situations, become unplayable (unlike times on DAoC when the PC just ground to a halt with what had to be about .5 fps), its just once I saw how nice and smooth it could be I want that, or close to it, all the time. Its kinda like the two mice I have, each has a scroll wheel on it, but one has a kinda notchy wheel that you feel clicking as you scroll it, while the other is smooth like butter. I never knew how much I liked the smooth scroll wheel until I actually used it. Its kinda the same with the graphics in WoW that I am seeing. The game basically played the same, when I swung the camera around it basically was at the same speed it was just that at higher framerates the swinging was very smooth, like butter, while the lower framerate was, click, click, click, click... as it swung around; you almost didn't notice it until you had seen what a higher framerate looked and felt like.

So far this has been the closest thing to a disappointment in my purchase of the new iMac G5, and I went into it fully knowing that this might be the end result. I really wish Apple at least offered the option of upgrading to a better video card. I'm sure using the card they chose saves some on cost, and I also know that alot of these newer cards run really hot, and that might have been more of the issue, but still, couldn't they have given us the option of more video memory? Of course this is only an issue when playing a graphically intensive game like World of Warcraft (you know, maybe I need to fire up the original Halo and see how it does). In all other applications that I have placed the PodBox the video has never been an issue; playing DVDs, mpegs and avi's at full screen things have never hitched once.

With the WoW beta done I'm gonna continue my setup of the PodBox, things on the plate are trying to share my iCal so the rest of the house can see it, some more playing around with the podcasting software, and many other things all that I intend to document here.

Stay tuned...

WoW Me...

Got home from work today to find the PodBox silently Ken Burnsing its screensaver of outer space. What a welcome sight. Things seem back to their error free ways.

Decided to take it easy tonight and spent the evening playing World of Warcraft with a buddy.

Installing the latest Airport update that just came thru on 'Software Update'.

Check y'alls action later.