tbradshaw.net

So for the last month or so I’ve been running Windows Vista RC1, trying things out. My primary reason for installing Vista was the installation process. I’m so freaking sick of the crappy Windows XP installer that it’s difficult for me to blog about it without dropping my rating from a PG-13 to NC-17.

Suffice it to say that I’m offended at an installer that doesn’t support years old technology (SATA) without requiring ancient technology (a floppy drive). Vista’s installer has resolved that problem in both ways, first providing full SATA support and second by allowing drivers to be loaded from floppy drives, CD-ROM, and USB storage devices. They’ve also done a few other nice things, like ask almost all of the questions at the beginning so that you can go have a donut while the installation finishes. Review of the installer? Two thumbs way the hell up.

Things start to fall apart a little after installation though, the crux of the entire situation being memory usage. Freshly booted, nothing running, idle, Windows Vista uses about 650 megs of RAM. We’re talking a fresh installation as well, so there’s nothing else running. It’s offensive. My relatively nice computer with a gig of CAS 2 latency RAM was upgraded to a sporty new video card… and game perforance went down after upgrading to Vista! Down!

Simply put, Vista uses too much RAM. Even after disabling every single internal service I could disable without crashing the box: the Defender, the nice new UI, absolutely everything; it still used 430 megs of RAM. Is Vista worth the sticker price? Maybe… I guess… depending on how much you pay. Since I’m a student in the Computer Science department, it’s free, so yeah I guess. However, is Vista worth buying a new computer (or at least a butt-ton of RAM) for? Definitely not!

In fact, I was previously offended enough by the installer that I refused, on all counts to install a floppy drive just to install XP. However, I’ve been having a huge amount of fun raiding in WoW lately, and that is enough. I’m currently downloading SCSI drivers for my SATA controller to copy using a freshly installed floppy disk drive to disk.

Before I had experienced Vista, there was nothing that was going to make me go through the additional work to install crappy ol’ XP. After experiencing Vista… turns out it’s worth the extra work just to stick with XP and not use Vista. How’s that for an ironic turn around? I just got owned.

I noticed today on Slashdot that IGN has released a complete track list for Guitar Hero 2!

To say that I’m excited would be an understatement. I’ve already been downloading music to fill out my Guitar Hero 2 playlist on iTunes, just so that I can be familiar with the songs before the November 7th release. Now (as soon as I get my PowerBook back) I can finish up the track listing completely, in order!

A quick note before I dive right into the track list: 40 licensed songs things time instead of 30, and it look to have gotten a lot harder!

• 1. Opening Licks
  • Motley Crue - Shout at the Devil
  • Danzig - Mother
  • Cheap Trick - Surrender
  • Wolfmother - Woman
  • Spinal Tap - Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight
• 2. Amp-Warmers
  • Kiss - Strutter
  • Nirvana - Heart-Shaped Box
  • Police - Message in a Bottle
  • Van Halen - You Really Got Me
  • Kansas - Carry on Wayward Son
• 3. String-Snappers
  • Foo Fighters - Monkey Wrench
  • Alice in Chains - Them Bones
  • Iggy Pop and the Stooges - Search and Destroy
  • Pretenders - Tattooed Love Boys
  • Black Sabbath - War Pigs
• 4. Thrash and Burn
  • Warrant - Cherry Pie
  • Butthole Surfers - Who Was in My Room Last Night
  • Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend
  • Rolling Stones - Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’
  • Guns N’ Roses - Sweet Child O’ Mine
• 5. Return of the Shred
  • Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name Of
  • Primus - John the Fisherman
  • Sword - Freya
  • Thin Lizzy - Bad Reputation
  • Aerosmith - Last Child
• 6. Relentless Riffs
  • Heart - Crazy on You
  • Stone Temple Pilots - Tripping on a Hole in a Paper Heart
  • Stray Cats - Rock This Town
  • Allman Brothers - Jessica
  • Jane’s Addiction - Stop
• 7. Furious Fretwork
  • Anthrax - Madhouse
  • Living End - Carry Me Home
  • Lamb of God - Laid to Rest
  • Reverend Horton Heat - Psychobilly Freakout
  • Rush - YYZ
• 8. Face-Melters
  • Avenged Sevenfold - Beast and the Harlot
  • Suicidal Tendencies - Institutionalized
  • Dick Dale - Misirlou
  • Megadeth - Hangar 18
  • Lynyrd Skynyrd - Free Bird

Yeah. Amazing. Can’t-Freaking-Wait Amazing.

I left a pretty open ended blog post about wanting to switch to one of the hot new Intel x86 Mac Pros, whenever they came out.  Well they’ve came out, and are just about as glorious as I thought they could be.  (Although they did go a little stingy in the video card department, which I think kind of stinks.)

However, despite my lust for a new Mac Pro, I have decided not to switch.  Instead, I spent about $300 upgrading my computer to bring it up to the latest generation of games and I’m just going to call it good.  I ended up grabbing a new motherboard, a new PCIe GeForce 7600GT, and a new hard drive to bring my PC back into the swing of things.

Now WoW should play great, and I should be able to handle Quake Wars whenever it hits the shelves.  Of course you’ll notice “should” play great, rather that “plays great”.  I’ve had the hardware for a while, but ran into an unexpected problem.  I have a gig of CAS2 RAM of which I’m very happy with.  Unfortunately Vista isn’t particularly happy with it, and even with a gig of RAM it runs out pretty frequently and starts thrashing, killing my sweet frame rate.

I haven’t yet decided what my solution will be.  Sadly, I only have two memory slots and they are both full with 512meg sticks.  So if I am to increase my total amount of RAM, I’ll have to replace everything I have.  Bummer.

But, anyway, the point of this post is to say:  I’m not switching.  At least not for a couple years.  After I graduate, we’ll see.

I’ve been considering the possibility of “switching” (ala, moving to a primarily Apple environment) for quite some time now, but recently I’ve convinced myself that it’s exactly what I want to do.  While I do think that there is a general feature parity between my Ubuntu (or Gentoo) desktops and the OS X desktop, there are a couple killer features that are just worth the switch.

First, multimedia.  I’ve strugged with media player after media player, even took a very brief stint trying to help out Banshee, but time and time again all I want is to run iTunes.  The excellent, crash free(!), library management is exactly what my 16k songs and I need.  On top of that, lately I’ve been having a great time with the iTunes music store.  While I still can’t justify purchases that support the RIAA in any way the free Download of the Month has been very enjoyable… in fact, I would be completely sold if not on the principle of hating the RIAA.  The only reason that Apple hasn’t gotten a nice little chunk of my disposible income (that is, when I have any) is solely that the RIAA are scum.  I’m also digging podcasts.

Second, surprisingly enough, the Address Book.  The seemly insignificant application on OS X is exactly what I want for my contact management needs.  Not only is it slick and easy, it full integrates with my cellphone and chat clients.  Between Address Book, my Symbian60 running phone, iSync, and Adium, contact management “just works”.  And not only does it “just work”, it also works exactly the way that I want it to… seemless and intuitively.

Only two things are holding me back at this point.  The obvious one is cash, though significant money is always just a matter of time.  The second is that I want to wait for an Intel based desktop system like a PowerMac.  I have the peripherals that I want, I just want the desktop computer.  But I also am pretty demanding with my computer, so a Mac Mini won’t cut it for me.  While there certainly appears to be a bit of a price premium of about $600 to join the “professonal” teir of Apple desktop computers, after my experiences with my iBook and now PowerBook… I think it’s just plain worth it.

As a third concern, I don’t really “need” a new computer yet.  It would be nice, but I’m still getting along fine with my current computer.  Maybe by the time September or so rolls around it will be more of a need rather than just a desire.  We’ll see.

A while back I was helping Lindsay figure out how much some more RAM was going to cost for her computer (that I ended up rebuilding, yet again) and I stumbled onto the price for some new RAM on my laptop.  I’ve been putting off buying any RAM for my PowerBook just out of fear of the price.

Turns out, it was only like sixty bucks to add 512 megs! So as soon as I could I put in an order at Crucial for a little DIMM.  The results have been amazing.  My laptop feels like a completely new computer.  Besides unimportant things that this has done for my laptop experience (like I can now run WoW on my laptop), it has revitalized my use of the laptop almost one hundred fold.  It surprises me how much that nagging slowness was bothering me.

As such, I’ve been integrating my laptop back into my daily routine with fantastic results.  An auxillary audio cable turns my laptop into the jukebox at work.  The additional RAM avoids chunky audio over the network at parties.  Synergy has brought keyboard and mouse sharing to my workspace environments with a level of simplicity I didn’t know was possible.

The RAM brought so much life back into my laptop, I’m in love all over again.  It’s like a brand new laptop.

Continuing in a long surge of excitement over the potential of Guitar Hero 2, the tides of gaming news brought a partial set list from Red Octane.  Here’s what they have so far:

• “War Pigs” - Black Sabbath
• “Who was in my room last night?” - Butthole Surfers
• “Strutter” - KISS
• “YYZ” - Rush
• “Psychobilly Freakout” - Reverend Horton Heat
• “You Really Got Me” - Van Halen

Can I get a “holy crap”?  With only 6 songs announced of an expected 50+ songs, I already love where they are going with this.  The absence of Van Halen and Black Sabbath from the first game is a very common “complaint” lodged against the game, an unfortunate necessity without the success and budget to get rights for songs with that level of stature.  The Butthole Surfers track is a dive directly into the 90’s alternative rock scene, a challenging era to crack for a guitar game (most 90’s rock was about front men more-so than guitarists).  Rush fills a similar void to the Boston track in the first game, and KISS has to be in a game like this… they are on absolutely everything else that can hold a name on it.

I guess what I’m saying is that this tiny preview of the set list confirms what I already confident in, this Guitar Hero development team really have their heads wrapped around the potential of this game.  The setlist in the first game was well crafted within the limitations that a relatively unknown unknown property can do.  Now that Guitar Hero is a monumental success, the team is rising up to a new level of content, but without losing a single bit of the polished consideration that made the first game so freaking awesome.

I’m pumped.  Can you tell I’m pumped?

For the longest time I’ve been pining for iTunes on Linux.  The reason?  I’ve been fighting linux media players time and time again to just be stable with my large music collection, while iTunes takes it without so much as a studder.

The music players that I’ve messed with the most are Rhythmbox, Banshee, and Muine, soI figured I would give a small review of them while I’m whining, and to be fair, I’m not reviewing them on two fronts.  First as a user, and now as a young developer looking to get involved.

The first was Muine.  After moving from XMMS and XMMS-like programs I hit the ground running with Muine due to it’s simple smooth interface.  I loved the “add album to playlist” feature and was lulled into a happy place by the auto-downloading of album art making that particular window as exciting as a shelf full of “real” CD’s (without the RIAA guilt).  Unfortunately that feature which had lulled me into happiness stopped working when some business with the Amazon developer key thingie got in the way of downloading album covers.  What at first looking like a really busy project that was going to be making my dreams come true in short order, turned out to go a bit stale almost right away.  I was saddened.

After a while I started to long for the library functionality that I enjoyed on my PowerBook.  This was entirely thanks to a recent set of downloads that brought me the collection of Billboard Top 100 songs from 1950 something until 2004.  Suddenly my signal to noise ratio when looking for something to listen to shot through the roof and I needed help finding my songs.  So I decided to give Rhythmbox a shot.  This is the “default” gnome go at an iTunes clone, and it has a lot of things going for it.  The Artist-Album browser at the top fo the window is devine and the over all experience seemed to be snappy.  That is… when it doesn’t crash.  What turned out to be a long standing theme with any media player I use in linux, is frequent crashes when trying to import my library.  For whatever reason there isn’t an open source music player/organizer on the planet that can load 15,000+ songs without crashing.

For a while I could build the library in short bursts with the Rhythmbox in the “stable” branch and then when completed go back to the “~x86″ branch for the increased functionality.  But there were a number of “small” behavioral things that were driving me nuts.  Two examples:

1. I’m feeling a little “80’s” today, so I flip to the “Billboard Top 100 of 1984″ in the browse album and see what there is to see.  Oh yeah!  Right there at number 44 is Huey Lewis & The News singing “The Heart of Rock & Roll”.  That was a good year for Huey if I remember, so I click on Huey Lewis & The News in the browse artist selection box to “drill down” and get the Huey Lewis hits from 1984.  But I can’t… because for some reason selecting something in the browse artist selection box “resets” the browse album selection box to “all” instead of keeping the setting.  Weird.
2. Most importantly, when adding new songs to the library, no progress meter is shown.  When a media player has a strong propensity to crash when loading songs… it really stinks to have no idea when/where/why it crashed.
3. This application is coded in GObject C… and I’m just not sure that I want to learn GObject C.  From a guy that adores Python, C feels like digging the chunnel with a spoon instead of a tunnel boring machine.

So I kept looking and came across Banshee.  First points for Banshee, it looks good.  Really good, sharp and clean with a more modern feel.  It wows me out of the gates with a slick progress meter for importing songs and the ability to asynchronously add songs to the queue to be imported at will.  Super work.   It still has it’s warts, however… it’s written in C# on Mono, which is something that I want to learn anyway… hmmm.  Anyway, the big bugs:

1. When importing new music, CPU usage shoots up to like 100% and lags anything that tries to say otherwise.  Totally impolite, like totally.
2. Still crashes frequently when importing music.
3. Filling my window with songs takes long time.  Say I’m on a playlist and then move back to the unfiltered main window… I can expect several seconds of hardcore “omg run!” from Banshee as it fills the window.
4. Typing “1984″ in the search box will get me the Billboard Top 100 of 1984, but typing “1984 huey” won’t give me anything.

The verdict?  I really need to stop being the needy quiet guy and start being a needy contributer.  I’ve joined the Banshee mailing list and I’m going to lurk for a little while and start to soak up the atmosphere.  Hopefully I can also get in contact with a Banshee developer with some experience for a touch of mentoring to get me started.  We shall see, I don’t know if anything will come of this.  But I do know that the best way to make sure the features that I care about most get attention is to be willing to put some of the work in myself, and I think I’m willing to do that.

It’s been a long time that I’ve been wrestling with my currently monitors.  My left monitor has been fritzing out to purple for quite some time and my right monitor has this tendency to just start violently shaking all the time.

I’ve been avoiding the problem partially through practice.  If I bend the end of the monitor cable just right I can get the color to stay, and the violent shaking (and sometimes screaming) are infrequent.  But today was the last straw.

My left monitor shot to purple at the slightest accidental tap of my desk, and when I tried to twist the monitor cable just so… the red channel snapped leaving me with a very sickly green monitor.  Coupled with my tax return and several elements of back pay, it was time to make things happen.

So I caved in and purchased a couple new monitors.  I don’t know if this really should be at the top of my purchasing priority list, but I know that it’s going to be a severe increase in my quality of life when I get rid of these frequent monitor induced headaches and extra frustration.

Hopefully in a week or two I’ll be the proud owner of two of these bad boys:

This monitor is about as close as I could find to the monitors that I have at work that were still pretty heavily discounted for university students.  The deal was sweet, less than $600 dollars for the pair of them.  When I first started looking at buying monitors, I thought that I was going to end up paying over $600 each for a decent set of Dell flat panels.

I’ll certainly be giving a quick review (or at least a brief celebration) when they come in.

For quite some time I’ve been avoiding the Gmail craze. Not because I didn’t want to participate, no that’s not it at all. In fact, I’ve been relatively certain that Gmail was the best possible way to handle mail currently available to mortal man. So why the hesitation? Well way back when I decided to entire the modern internet community–start blogging and reading blogs, sharing photographs, etc–I had given a lot of thought to the different options out there.

At the time I was primarly considering Drupal versus Wordpress versus Blogger, but the points of contention were exactly the same as my current wrestling with mail providers. While the hosting and feature set of Blogger was(is?) superior to the host-it-yourself solutions of Drupal and Wordpress, I really liked the idea of owning my own data. It would be in a database that I would own, I would back up, I could translate or transfer (which came in handy when I switched from Drupal to Wordpress), that I would control. So I ruled out Blogger because I would lose that control, and I continued to choose between the host-it-yourself options.

With email I came to the same conclusion. I was never interested in a Gmail account because I already have my own web propery with tbradshaw.net and the mail hosting at Dreamhost is absolutely fantastic. I’ve been wrestling with the idea of trying Gmail for quite a while now (there’s actually a “Draft” blog post in WordPress right now called “Gmail Invite” where I never followed through) and last night I decided to take the plunge. I did it for a number of reasons:

• K-State’s email sucks. - After we moved our CIS department email to CNS we realized something very critical that we weren’t expecting. CNS’s email reliability hinged on the fact that hosting just ksu.edu was “easy”. The added complication of our email and especially (perhaps to the point of making CIS insignificant) oznet has mostly destroyed the quality of service from K-State.edu email. Even when it is working, it’s remarkably slow.
• Gmail’s Up-times Approach Infinity - Well, DreamHost’s uptimes are pretty fantastic too, but I have no idea “how many nines” Google pulls. I bet it’s a lot.
• Google has all the sweet toys. - One thing I really miss is not being able to check out all the sweet new toys from Google, a lot of which are starting to be tied together with the Gmail account.
• Gmail establishes Identity - Just as having tbradshaw.net does a lot to establish identity, so goes one’s Gmail address. I have already slumbered long enough to lose the possibility of getting tbradshaw, t.bradshaw, travis.bradshaw, travisbradshaw, or anything similar. ctb is invalid. c.travis.bradshaw is actually a pretty good identifier for me, even if it different than what I’ve been using previously. Starting now landed me c.travis.bradshaw for my Gmail identity.
• I can keep another copy. - With most/all forwarding mechanisms, I can also keep a copy on the IMAP server just like I have all this time. So while the privacy concerns with Google might be a small issue, in the general case I have nothing to lose.

And so that’s it. I’m now a Gmail participant and currently in the process of getting all of my previous k-state email onto gmail so I can really give that search functionality a ride.

Ever since I first tried to keep up with the math551 (Applied Matrix Theory) taking notes on my laptop in LaTeX have I lusted after a well done Apple tablet. Just the idea of taking math notes seemed like the killer application at the time.

Well Apple has filed for some more tablet related patents, and things are looking all the more likely. I sure hope something like this pans out.

Generally speaking, the line of thought with Mozilla Firefox extensions is simple. The “core” browsing experience is provided as the base Firefox installation. It’s lean, it’s mean, it doesn’t take all day for someone on dial up to download. It might be missing some features that would be desirable, but that doesn’t matter because that’s where extensions come in. With extensions, the user can “extend” their Firefox experience with enhanced functionality both general and very specific until they have built their almost custom perfect browsing experience.

For the longest time I’ve completely bought into that line of thought. In fact, I still do… but now to a lesser extent. There is something that is lost with this kind of tinker-toy style construction of an individual’s perfect browser, and that something is consistency. Of course there’s the obvious consistency lost when moving between individuals “perfectly” tweaked Firefox installations, but that’s not really what I’m talking about here. I’m specifically talking about two things.

First, what happens when the “core” Firefox moves on to a new version number, and the extensions fall behind. It’s a disconcerting feeling when an individual (that’s me) has Frankenstein’ed the perfect browser, only to have the promise of new and great things from the core platform turn into love lost with one’s favorite extensions.

Second, I compute in multiple locations. At a bare minimum I have my personal workstation at home, my personal laptop, and my workstation at the office. Keeping everything in synch is a constant struggle. Of course, sometimes things don’t need to be in synch. I don’t do much web development on my laptop, so things like Color Picker become less important… but then again, sometimes I will find myself designing on-the-go and the lack of the Color Picker will feel like a crippling blow. Not even beginning to consider bookmark synchronization.

I still like the way that Firefox is doing things… but I’m less “sold” than I was before.

Before the LAN party even started, I had already started my gaming fix. Roland and I split a copy of Quake 4 and by virtue of an upcoming test for Roland I got it for the night before the LAN.

Man, oh, man is Quake 4 awesome. I haven’t played a game all the way through that was that much fun in ages. It dwarfs DOOM 3 in just about every way. Well, other than pure scariness, which was what DOOM was all about. But since I’m not particularly big on scary games/movies/anything, Quake 4 had everything I wanted in a game.

In one weird aspect, it kind of reminds me of Half-Life 2. Half-Life 2’s engine appears as pretty much the apex of the previous generation’s technology. Quake 4 plays like pretty much the apex of last generation’s gameplay. The engine is clearly the best use of the latest technology we’ve seen so far. Without the frequent dips into complete darkness, the features of the DOOM 3 engine are really allowed to shine.

This is where I take a moment to consider the reviews of Quake 4 that I’ve read. All of them were “okay”, but focused almost entirely on “what is new here”, and when finding nothing outlandishly new about the gameplay, they just kind of blew it off. I really think that is a poor criterion to review from. Indeed when gaming was a new entertainment medium, every single game was a foray into something completely new. But now that gaming has matured a little (still new, I realize, but maybe toddler rather than newborn), the expectation that every single “great” game has to be brand spanking new is pretty unrealistic.

When I think of game reviewers I picture the group of judges in Iron Chef. They sit around the table and taste the amazing dishes provided by the challenger and they go, “I’ve already tasted this taste before… I guess it’s okay.” Then the equally amazing dishes come from the Iron Chef and all the judges go, “I’ve tasted this before. I mean, it’s a new mixture of tastes, but I’ve already tasted each of these tastes before. Since you’re the Iron Chef, I expected something completely new.”

What a crappy and unfair criterion that would be. After all, great recipes are creations derived from the good tastes of other things. I feel the same thing about great games. We’ve experimented enough that there are some well-known “good gameplay flavors”. Why rate down a game like Quake 4 because they took an old favorite gameplay base, then smothered it in a beautiful glaze of content and a revolutionary presentation. It is a great game. It’s something familiar with something delightful.

In fact, I think that describes all of my favorite recipes, gaming or food.

So I’ve been debating for quite some time about installing Windows so that I could give some games a shot. (Specifically World of Warcraft, Black and White 2, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas)

I’ve left space on my hard drive, but one thing has always held me back. After purchasing this computer and entering the “modern era” of hardware, I’ve been enjoying my configuration and never looking back. There were a few growing pains when I first got my new setup, but Linux has always been right on top of all the latest hardware changes.

And this is the part that kills me. I’ve got a couple nice SATA hard drives. One fast one that I use for my boot drive, and a large slower one that I use for storage. However, Windows XP has no support for SATA drives during installation. They do have an option to load drivers during the installation, but of course with a catch. They have to be on a floppy. I haven’t had a floppy drive in years and I have no intention of putting one in.

So it’s an interesting situation, Windows XP, the supposed pinnacle of typical computing, the “works with all hardware” operating system, can’t even install on hardware from the last several years while I can burn any Linux distribution’s LiveCD and be running in 5 minutes or less.

I thought that I might have work around, though, when I noticed the release of the Beta 2 version of “Longhorn”, now called Windows Vista. I figured, “Hell, this operating system isn’t even going to be released until next year. It has to have SATA support in the installation.”

I figured wrong. I was stunned to find out that not even an attempt was made at supporting SATA during the installation of Windows Vista. However, one serious improvement was made: now instead of requiring a floppy drive (a technology that is overdue to be taken behind the shed and shot) they allow the drivers to be located on a CD-ROM or USB Flash Drive.

“Hey, that’s not too shabby,” I thought.

Then things start to get screwed up as only Microsoft can do it. After copying the drivers over to JD’s thumb drive and clicking the “Load Drivers…” button, I was confused by the lack of interaction. Turns out I’m not privileged enough to actually browse for the driver, it has to just search on it’s own. (The auto-search for drivers has always sucked, and I’ve never used it… why make it mandatory?)

A little reading on some online forums reveals that no searching is done past the root folder of all attached drives. Hmph. Fine. So I copy the specific drive files to the root of the thumb drive. Still nothing. So I crawl under my desk to see what’s going on… and I don’t even see any activity lights on the USB flash drive except for the initial insertion. Fine… so the thumb drive driver thing doesn’t actually work.

So next I burn a CD with the same files on it (driver in the root!) and sure enough this time Windows Vista reads the .inf file and gives me some options for loading a driver. And I do. But it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, Vista still doesn’t see my hard drives.

It was at this point that I gave up. I don’t want to play games bad enough to deal with Microsoft’s stupidity in the installation process. I’ll go back to my Gentoo installation and GNOME environment where things just work. Or at least if they don’t work, there’s a decent reason why.

It’s a good thing that Microsoft has swindled Windows into the “default install” position on almost every OEM computer on the planet, because if end consumers bought a new computer and had to install Vista on it, they would most certainly fail. And I would be happy to hand them an Ubuntu installation CD.

I’ve blogged several times about my keyboard dying, and I’ve finally had enough. I’m going to have to buy a new keyboard. However, the keyboard market as it is (sucky and completely lacking diversity) it’s been difficult to find out exactly what I want to get.

First, it has to be mentioned that this is no small purchase or decision for me. I use a keyboard (usually my own) more than any other object on any given day. It’s touch, feel, responsiveness, comfort, and asthetic appeal probably has more effect on my quality of life than any other single inanimate object that I come in contact with, coming in just behind my bed and just in front of my mobile phone.

Thankfully, I’ve been getting a lot of help from friends doing research for this purchase. Last night I took my first swing when I found out that none other than Wal-Mart had the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Comfort Edition in stock. This is the latest revision of the “ergonomic” keyboard line from Microsoft. This time instead of being a “split” keyboard… it’s a “bent” keyboard.

I wasn’t sure if it was going to cut it, but if it’s at Wal-Mart then it is pretty much the lowest risk purchase one could imagine. Previously I wouldn’t even consider a wireless keyboard, but chatting with my good friend EvilJohn convinced me that it was at least worth a shot. He had no problems whatsoever with lag and stuff from the wireless keyboard.

Good thing it was from Wal-Mart… because it’s just not going to cut it. I’ll probably be taking it back today. Not that it doesn’t have it’s good points too.

• The Good
  • Looks snazzy. - Even just sitting on my keyboard tray it looked cool.
  • Lots of buttons. - Lots of extra buttons that look like they could be cool. I really like the five “favorite” buttons that are completely configurable instead of a bunch of “multimedia keys” that they just try and guess what you want to do with them.
  • Soft leather-like pad - The little wrist pad thing was very nice feeling.
• The Bad
  • Not “ergo” enough. - Eh, they tried with the “bent” thing, it just doesn’t work for me. It’s almost shaped like a “smile”, where the ‘A’ key for instance starts to curve a bit in relation to the ‘F’ key.
  • Didn’t feel natural. - Keyboards that just “feel” right… when you slap your hands down on the keyboard, 90% of the time you land right on the home row ready to type away. I was missing the home row at least half the time.
  • The caps, num, and function lock lights are on the “base” transmitter… not the keyboard. It looks like this might be normal for all wireless keyboards. Lame.
  • Poor linux support. - Most of those cool buttons do nothing in linux becuase the keycodes are above 255. (Kind of a weird thing with 2.6 kernels, I believe.) I was also getting an error starting up the USB device pretty often, but I had PS2 plugged in as well so it didn’t matter.
  • Tiny meta keys. - The alt, control, and start keys are all quite small in favor of a longer shift key. That kind of sucks for me, because I don’t even use the shift key with my left hand… it’s solely the meta-mod-key hand for Alt’s, Control’s, and stuff. It was almost uncomfortable to hit the alt-key.

So, as you can see… the cons outweight the pros. I’m going to try and find the Wireless Optical Desktop Pro to try next. The Microsoft website shows that they are sold at Radio Shack, and I think they are sold at Staples as well. We shall see.

One of my most nagging questions when it comes to development is: To IDE or not to IDE?

On one hand, I greatly enjoy the hands on total control of developing with nothing but a text editor (no less than the amazing VIM) and a bunch of shell windows. Everything definitely does What I Want And Nothing Else.

However, sometimes development can become tedious and the tools available in a fine IDE can make a huge difference in the productivity that a sole developer can achieve. For instance, when I was developing on QCVS 2 I used PHPEclipse for a good while in hopes that the WYSIWYG html editing would save me some time. However, regardless of how good the features on an IDE can be, I always pine for the amazing text editing power of VIM.

So I was more than just a little bit stunned when I ran across PIDA (Python Integrated Development Application). It’s an IDE that is written in Python and rather than providing new implementations of existing tools, simply embeds those tools together to form the IDE. I haven’t worked with it much, but so far I’m hugely impressed with the VIM integration.

If this truely works out to be an IDE that provides all of the ease-of-use-timesavers that I crave from full IDEs with the same glory of text editing power of VIM, I could be in love.

For quite some time now I have been annoyed with the keyboard market, but it’s about to get drastic. My keyboard is starting to fail.

For a while now I’ve having periodic problems with a few keys–like ‘i’ and ‘n’, but nothing severe enough that it couldn’t have just been written off to poor typing or something like that. However, it has finally gotten to the point that the problems are undeniable. There are times when I’ll have to deliberately hit the ‘i’ key five and six times before any input is finally send to the computer. For a guy that spends a good portion (if not a majority) if his time everyday in front of a computer, this really sucks.

The only thing that sucks more than my problems with my failing keyboard is the inability to find a decent replacement. I currently have a Microsoft Natural Internet keyboard, circa like six or seven years ago. I love this baby and it has been very good to me, the feature set includes:

• “Split”-style ergonomic layout.
• PS2 or USB
• Embedded 2-Port USB Hub
• Multimedia Keys
• “Normal” arrow keys

It’s glorious work of art, something that I’ve been happy with for years and would love to just buy a drop in replacement to do the exact same thing. Only I can’t… it’s not possible… no one makes a keyboard as nice as this one. The only USB split keyboard that is available from Microsoft (or any other vendor, as far as I can tell) has messed up the keyboard layout. The Microsoft Natural “Elite” has these amazingly stupid arrow keys arranged in a diamond. Now I’ve been using a three button arrow keys layout for over a decade, why would I want to relearn the arrow keys? Most of the other brands have done some amazingly bizarre keyboard changes, no doubt because most split keyboard key layouts are patented… so they have to have some kind of “substantial” change.

The USB hub in this keyboard is underutilized and not really a big deal, but having a USB keyboard is a big deal. It seems that the nicest split keyboard I can not find is PS2 only. I mean… that might have to be tolerable, I guess. But having a keyboard that’s hot swappable is just awesome when working on the expected computer.

What really is the icing on the cake for me, however, is that I can find a number of keyboards that are exactly like mine on sale on eBay. “My” keyboard is going for more money USED on eBay than most keyboards sell for when brand-spanking new!

The closest keyboard that I can find to what I want is this Wireless Optical Desktop Pro. Only I don’t really want a wireless keyboard and mouse. I mean, I don’t have any problems with the wires that I have, at least not enough that I think it would be worth dealing with inherent latency and dead batteries.

All in all, I’m kind of stunned that the entire market for traditional keyboard input devices has narrowed down to just a few devices, none of which meet even the moderate standards that we had seven years ago.

I’m bummed. And I hit the ‘i’ in “I’m” at the beginning of this sentence 4 times.

I have once again began the process of reinstalling my home workstation. I actually started last night, and have been building software ever since.

This was original motivated by my recent research into World of Warcraft, which has started a nagging desire to get Windows onto my primary workstation. I haven’t so much as dual-booted my home computer in years so this is a bit of a signficant change for me.

However, I knew that I was going to want to make some significant changes in my partitioning scheme. I was very confident in the fact that I wasn’t going to want to have Windows tainting my lovely home computer any time in the future, so I created four primary paritions instead of creating an extended partition and any necessary logical partions therein. After playing around with some resizing of partions it became obviously apparent that I had picked a pretty inflexible partitioning scheme and I wanted to do it over again to be more flexible.

Another thing that I hadn’t counted on at all was the sudden urge to play a lot of other games as well. I mean, there have been a lot of interesting games that have came out since I last ran Windows. Maybe I should try out Half-Life 2’s single player… or that cool Dawn of War, Warhammer 40k real time strategy game that the guys were playing. It would be kind of neat to give some of the great single player games a run through…

I haven’t had a gamer bone in me for a long time, but lately I’ve found myself getting the itch to play some games, prompting a sooner-rather-than-later approach to my reinstallation.

As a side effect, I have always loved the “feel” of a freshly installed from scratch system. None of the cruft, all of the latest advancements (especially with such a moving target as Gentoo), and a fresh start to reoptimize my computing habits.

I’ve also revived the old “mandark” computer name. The age old naming scheme was that all computers were named after cartoon characters, with Linux and OS X getting the names of heros and stars and Windows computers getting the names of villians. Since my workstation is again going to be tainted, it has became again mandark.

Just tonight I completed my first time through Super Mario RPG, a roleplaying game starring Mario released in 1996.

I started playing this game as a time filler while I was in Philadelphia waiting to judge student congress rounds. It was surprisingly fun, simple, and didn’t require a lot of physical dexterity (which can be tough when playing a console game with a keyboard). During my time in Philadelphia I managed to get most of the way through the game.

Since then, I’ve been playing it when I’m having trouble sleeping or I’m watching things compile.

Overall, it was a quite fun game. I had forgotten how genuinely fun the classic style RPG was (classic style as in not a series of cutscenes on one hand or a 15,000 playable character 18 billion item universe on the other). If you haven’t had a chance to play through this classic, I would highly recommend giving it a shot with your favorite SNES emulator.

Soon after posting my quick experiences with Planet, I received a suggestion from Brent O’Connor to check out Bloglines. Bloglines is a free (and apparently quite popular) service for aggregating blogs similar to Planet plus a bunch of other functionality as well. Sounded good to me, so I decided to try it out. Soon after experimenting with Bloglines, I received a pm on EnterTheGame asking for a comparison of the two. Another great idea.

So, as a way of collecting my own notes and sharing a bit with anyone that’s curious, here is my comparison/contrast of Planet vs. Bloglines.

Methodology

First, there’s an immediate difference in the methodology between Planet and Bloglines.

Planet is a quick and simple Python script that takes a set of feed URI’s, a touch of metadata, and generates a single HTML page with all of the posts in chronological order. That’s it, the whole enchilada. As such, Planet is very simple to use, but certainly requires a certain amount of base knowledge to use. Things like editing text files on a web server and setting up a cron job are expected prerequisites. No problem for me or most people that Planet serves. It has a very “do it yourself” kind of feel, it’s one web tool in the toolbox of self-sufficient web usage.

Bloglines, on the other hand, is a fully featured, fully loaded, full service, feed aggregation and blog publishing service provider. It’s apparent in the feel that this is a group of people providing services to web users of all skill levels. I would imagine that little background knowledge is necessary to make full use of Bloglines’ functionality. It also makes an attempt to be not just one web tool in the toolbox, but a complete toolbox for feed handling. A noble goal, for sure.

Planet vs. Bloglines winner in this category? Tie. There is nothing wrong with either methodology. It just depends on what the user is looking for.

Feed Support

It’s kind of sad, but landscape the blogosphere is a nasty conglomerate of feed types in varying stages of compliance with a range of standards. As such, the ability of any truely useful application is often measured by the range of well-formed (and perhaps mal-formed) feeds that it can handle.

Planet appears to have problems with the RSS feeds available from Xanga. I have this hunch that these feeds fall into the “mal-formed” category of RSS feeds, but it would still be nice if they were handled in such a fashion that the nastiness of the Xanga feed generation were invisible to the user. One can read my previous post for how mangled it is. Also, generally speaking, Planet uses a tool written out-of-house for handling it’s feed parsing. So these problems might not be in Planet code proper, but I’m still going to refer to them as “planet problems”.

Bloglines, on the other hand, seems to be able to handle Xanga feeds superbly. I have a feeling this has very little to do with standards compliance, and instead a lot to do with some custom handling of Xanga’s nastiness. In fact, when adding feeds to Bloglines there are four methodologies available. First, you can just enter the URI of a blog or a feed. If you enter the URI of a blog, it will attempt to find a feed and if you enter the URI of a feed… well that’s just kind of obvious. The other three methods for adding feeds are to enter the username of a blog writer from the providers Blogger, LiveJournal, or Xanga, respectively. Bloglines then takes care of the rest for finding the feed and adding a subscription. It kind of makes me cringe as a standards-loving geek that this is necessary, but I think this is definitely the best way to handle it for the vast majority of users.

Bloglines vs. Planet? Bloglines, definitely. Planet is definitely written to the “general case” and in the case of Xanga, it shows. Bloglines definitely felt like it was “right”, even if the implementation under the hood might be nasty. But then again, a user doesn’t have to worry about the source of a provided service, heh heh.

Extra Features

Planet doesn’t really have any extra features. It does generate a few feeds for the entire aggregated stream, which is nice. But besides that, Planet does only what it set out to do, generate a static HTML page after aggregating the given feeds. Very UNIX like, “do one thing and do it well”.

Bloglines has a load of extra features. You can arrange feeds into “folders” like categories, read them based on those categories or all at once. It has a dynamic presentation, rather than a static presentation, and as such you can do things like “view the posts from the last 24 hours” and stuff like that. In fact, by default Bloglines only displays the posts that are new since your last visit. Pretty cool idea, kind of turns blog reading towards the email reading paradigm rather than the web reading paradigm. One can even enable an email notification for when a feed has updated. I’ve probably only scratched the surface, but Bloglines seems to provide a lot. (I didn’t even mention the fact that they also do blog hosting and publication.

Display

Planet provides a robust templating system that allows the user to pretty much generate anything that they can think up. Provided that they know how to edit a template file, anyway. This is readily apparent when cruising around other sites that use Planet and see just how much variance that there is.

Bloglines has a pretty basic and rigid display, no doubt a concerted effort between their datamodel decisions for all of those features and their desire for consistant branding for the service they provide.

Planet vs. Bloglines? I think Planet has to take the cake on this one. While some may love Bloglines interface, I don’t know how being able to output anything can be beat.

Conclusion

This is where this relatively objective review turns into a wholly opinionated blog entry. If you’re really wondering which you should use between Planet and Bloglines, focus on the top part of this “review”.

Display is really the most important part of a blog aggregator for me, and this is where Planet plays it’s trump. While Bloglines does a great job of moving the paradigm of reading blog entries to more of a piece-meal email reading type of activity, that’s really just not what I want. I read blogs as part of my morning, daily, and nightly reading routine, one that is quite comfortably set in the reading webpages/reading a newspaper paradigm. And while Bloglines can also be set to show all the posts in a given range, those posts are always grouped by the feed. I adore how the default Planet output is to have all blog entries sorted into one chronology. I just find this more entertaining and vibrant to read, especially with the right theme. I can’t get Bloglines to reproduce this configuration.

Feed support is also important, but I think I might be able to get around the problems myself. I could either patch the library Planet uses to handle Xanga feeds as a special case, or more likely I’ll try some free service like FeedBurner to do all of the heavy lifting.

Methodology is completely a personal preference, and so I consider this the least important aspect of the service. I lean towards “do-it-yourself” kinds of tools, so I guess Planet wins for me personally in this regard.

In closing, Bloglines is pretty damn cool… but I think I’m going to keep working on my Planet based aggregator to see if I can get it to the state that I want it to be.

It’s been ages since I initially recognized that the widget that I want to use for Boof is gtksourceview. However, the long standing problem has been a lack of an easily accessible package for the python bindings to gtksourceview in the portage tree.

Quite some time ago, gtksourceview went from being a fairly accepted gtk widget to a pretty prime-time widget used in not only widely used applications like gedit, the GNOME text editor, but now in the up-and-coming MonoDevelop. Gtksourceview was clearly moved into the standard set of gnome packages, and I thought that surely the python bindings for gtksourceview would enter into the standard gnome-python bindings in short order.

Well, it kind of did. But the portage tree for Gentoo didn’t keep up. However, there is a tried at true method for getting the “cutting edge” GNOME stuff for Gentoo in the form of Break My Gentoo. Though, I should say that there used to be a tried and true method for getting the latest and greatest stuff from GNOME on Gentoo. Apparently that project has all but died. So I’ve been patiently watching the portage tree for that day when my next emerge sync would bring me a build for a newer that 2.6 version of gnome-python.

To make things just a little more complicated, the gnome-python package was split upstream into gnome-python, with the core developer API bindings, and gnome-python-extras, with the not-so-essential dohickies like my beloved gtksourceview and other nicities like nautilus cd burning. So I was waiting not only for a new gnome-python, but also a gnome-python-extras package to be added to the portage tree.

Well last night one of those became a reality when gnome-python 2.10 hit the portage tree. Stunned by the potential progress, I decided to hop around and look for a gnome-python-extras ebuild that would be handy. Low and behold, I found one! A developer on Gentoo by the name of spyderous has an overlay that contains just what the doctor ordered.

I now have gnome-python version 2.10 and gnome-python-extras version 2.11 installed on my home pc, and I haven’t been this excited for a new piece of software in a long long time. Hopefully I’ll have some time to play with it soon!