Geez… I bought a Nyko Perfect Shot a few weeks ago and didn’t get to play with it until now. That’s how busy my life has been.
So how is it?
Computers
Snow Leopard (almost) free
In my day job as a Mac software developer I’m certainly excited by the prospects offered in the upcoming Mac OS X 10.6 release codenamed “Snow Leopard“.
But that’s just the thing. I’m excited because I’m a developer and Snow Leopard offers a boatload of awesome things for developers and other under-the-hood improvements. As an end-user, I’m not really sure what benefits I see from Snow Leopard, especially in terms of enticing me to plunk down a big chunk of money to buy that OS version.
Adam Engst at TidBITS wrote an article that articulates the matter better than I ever could. I think there’s a good argument for making Snow Leopard as low-cost as possible, especially because yes a lot of people are still hanging on to Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). Anything to help get people to move along is useful.
Nyko Perfect Shot for Wii
My mother bought the kids a Wii for Christmas. I have to admit, it’s a lot of fun. Growing up as a child of the video game age, we’ve come a long way from the Atari console’s “stick and one button” interface. Sure some Wii games aren’t very inventive in taking advantage of the platform, but most are and it’s neat to interact with games in a way that isn’t just button mashing.
I hear the kids downstairs playing on it right now, so on a whim I started to Google around to see what’s hot in Wii games right now. After a few clicks, I stumbled upon the Nyko Perfect Shot.
Want. Here’s an IGN review.
Nintendo makes their official Wii Zapper, but it pales. I mean look at the Perfect Shot: 1911-like styling; certainly more realistic in styling and ergonomics to a real pistol; the review reads like the trigger is pretty good; and look! Sights! That rules!
Oo… massive amounts of want.
But then, what game to get to go with it? Ghost Squad? Call of Duty: World at War? Medal of Honor Heros 2? Hrm…. 🙂
Updated: I caved. Went to the local GameStop and they had one in stock. Also a copy of Ghost Squad, which the guy working there (who has worked there a long time, has a trustworthy opinion regarding game stuff) said was a lot of fun. The game was even on sale this weekend, so bonus there. Didn’t cost me much for the two things. I haven’t played with it yet (got other things to do first), but I did take it out of the package and fondle it. The grip is very thick, probably to accomodate/balance the Wiimote’s size. I do like how they did the “pass-through” for the nunchuck. The trigger feels as good as you can expect for a little plastic contraption like this, but what tickled me was while it looks like a little pivot trigger, it actually slides back and forth just like a 1911 trigger would. Nifty. As soon as I get a chance to try it out, I’ll report back.
The server is down
So… the company email server goes down. No problem. These things happen.
The server comes back up. All the backlogged email comes gushing through.
What’s one of the first emails that we receive?
An email telling us that the email server is down.
*sigh*
Reminds me of The Website Is Down, sales guy vs. web dude. NFSW, but damn hilarious.
Delicate infrastructure
I work for a company in California.
Right now we’re supposed to be having a lot of meetings using a mix of telephone and Internet for voice and video, screen sharing, all other sorts of technical goodies.
But it’s been odd. I haven’t seen anyone from the office online yet. No IM’s, no emails. Meeting is supposed to start but no one is around, nor is anyone calling me into the meeting. I pick up the telephone and start calling. Every line is busy. That’s odd. I call mobile phones, they all kick immediately into voice mail. That’s really odd. I tried a few people’s home phones (reach the spouse, ensure I have the right mobile number) and they were busy. Now things are just getting weird. Of course any attempts to connect via the Internet to the office (e.g. VPN) aren’t happening.
I called the company’s main office down in southern California. They confirm the other office seems to have no phone or Internet. This sometimes happens, so I think no big deal, but coupled with all the other inabilities to get through (e.g. mobile phones), I hit Google.
That’s basically the area where the office is located. So best I can say is this is the problem. So who knows how long we’ll be high and dry.
Think about the implications of this:
- An AT&T fiber line was cut. As a result, 50,000 land lines were down, mobile phones are down, Internet is down. This leaves a massive number of people without any means of communication to anything further than shouting distance.
- Report says that people may not be able to contact police. They are saying if you have an emergency to go to the nearest police station. Think about that. If you ever counted on the police coming to help you, how can they know to come help you if you can’t tell them to come help you…. again, unless they’re within shouting distance.
- If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you can probably figure out what I’m implying here.
- Of course, emergencies aren’t just police. What about medical emergencies? What if your house catches fire?
- How are hospitals coping?
- If everything can be brought to a screeching halt by severing one line, what does that say about infrastructure? Lack of redundancy?
- How much commerce is affected? Not just our company’s inability to do business, but think about simple credit card transactions. I doubt those can go through. No grocery shopping, no buying gasoline, no nothing. Heck, I’m sure ATM’s aren’t working. Got cash?
And there are many many other things that you can imply by the fact that one line was cut and all this goes down.
Technology is great, but how much do we depend upon it? And how fragile is it all?
Updated: Word I hear is that this is now being view as vandalism. That someone maliciously cut 5 fiber optic cables. It’s created all sorts of chaos, it demonstrates how reliant we are upon such technology, and it shows how fragile things can be.
Updated 2: Looks like the plot sickens. Interesting quote:
“We would never condone any kind of destruction like this,” [Communications Workers of America union] spokeswoman Libby Sayre said. “We didn’t do it this time. We would never do it.”
Emphasis mine. This time. Mmm.
Streaming scanners
A buddy of mine just pointed me to this site: ScanAmerica. Streaming feeds of police scanners from around the US.
Open Documents in Texas Government
I just read via Slashdot about Texas HB 481. It’s a bill that would require pretty much any State agency to preserve their electronic documents in an open document standard format.
I think that’s a good thing.
The main thing is longevity. If these are to be vital documents to last beyond our lifetimes, we need to ensure they can. As a software engineer myself I know how software can come and go, formats can be lost to history, and files can be rendered unreadable.
Now some are saying that this is bad because it’s anti-competitive. I fail to see how that’s true. When you use a proprietary format like an MS Word document, what happens if Microsoft goes away? Yes folks it could happen. What would happen if applications could no longer read MS Word document files? What then? Now, this isn’t to say I’m against proprietary formats, but I understand if I want something to last you need to make it as open and accessible as possible. Microsoft doesn’t make their money from selling document formats, they make it from selling software that reads and writes those formats. So, they are more than welcome to add native support for these open file formats to their products, like anyone else… and that is what competition is all about.
I doubt this bill will see much traction, but it’s a nice effort.
The rules
This is what you get when you’re on a mailing list populated by people that are both computer geeks and gun nuts:
<so-and-so> wrote:
> sudo
Outstanding. I respect a man who wields awesome power responsibly.
1. All root shells are always loaded.
2. Never run as root on a system that you are not authorized to destroy.
3. Be aware of your PATH.
I’m not the original author of this, but for their privacy I’m not posting their name.
autodiskmount
As documented earlier, I was having problems with my home file/print/whatever server. I’ve gotten her mostly back and working, but I was having problems getting the FireWire drives to mount over AFP to my other boxen on my home network. Really, all you should have to do under Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is flip on File Sharing and off you go… log in via AFP to the machine with your user/pass for that machine and you should be able to see all the volumes. But alas, not working. Sometimes I would, sometimes I wouldn’t. Sometimes some volumes would show, sometimes some would not.
Eventually I cleaned up some permissions stuff, some ACL’s, and some other things, and I got it to a point where I could get all of the FireWire drives to be visible and mount over AFP but not after a reboot. Then I remembered there’s an old trick to get this to happen. But my Google-Fu was weak… much chaff, little wheat. But then I found a posting that jogged my memory. I looked on another computer in the house with a similar setup and found it, and so I must document it here so it’s easy for folks to find… or at least me to find if I need it in the future. 🙂
No fun
I discover last night that my home server box (and old Mac) has something wrong with it. I have no idea how it happened, but I went to print something (the server has the printer hooked up to it and shares the printer across my home network), there was a printing problem, needed to log into the box to fix it… turn on the machine’s monitor and there’s all this bizarre stuff on screen.. no GUI, just tons of scrolled text, like a console (I do have verbose booting turned on).
Looked at the system.log and there’s all manner of problems listed in there. Very weird things. Daemon proceeses not running, already running and terminated. Tons of weird errors. Trying to log into the box from other machines on the network would hang. It was just a mess.
Tried an archive install this morning. Didn’t seem to resolve things. So now I’m doing a full nuke and pave and rebuilding of the machine.
*sigh*
Y’know, this is the first serious problem I’ve ever had with a Mac, that I can remember. And I’m at a loss to explain why this even happened and why it requires such drastic measures to resolve. I went searching online on the things I saw in the system log and I’m not the only one that’s experienced it, but unfortunately no resolve could be found other than others taking the same route of nuke and pave… not that that’s the solution, just that they too couldn’t find an answer so they figured to try a complete reinstall and it of course made the problem go away.
Ugh.
But hey, 1 major problem like this with one machine in all the years and with all the Macs I’ve owned. Not a bad track record. Still better than using Windows. 😉
Update: I did a complete nuke and pave of the boot volume back to Mac OS X 10.5.0, then just completed doing all the netborne updates to get her up to 10.5.6 and all the other updates. And while the machine appears to be working better now, I still see a raft of the following errors:
kernel ALF ALERT: sockwall_cntl_updaterules ctl_enqueuedata rts err 55
Googling only turns up other people that are similiarly mystified. This error was in the system.log before I reinstalled, and is in there now, even after doing an erase install.
But again, the machine appears to be functioning correctly now. Many of the earlier problems were missing dylibs, other weird failures to load. And so it makes sense the reinstall corrected stuff. I’d still like to know about these errors tho.
Update 2: A buddy of mine pointed me to this page. I hadn’t seen that particular page, but I had seen some other things that were suggesting printer sharing might be the culprit. So since it was certainly the culprit for that guy I thought I’d try it on mine. Turned off printer sharing, reboot, no errors. Try again, still no errors. Turn printer sharing on, reboot, errors. Reboot again, errors. And tried that a few times to confirm and sure enough, printer sharing seems to be involved in the generation of this error.
I’m not sure if it’s truly an error or an issue to contend with, but I thought it’d be worthwhile to report to Apple. I have filed it as RADAR 6576309 with Apple.
Meantime, the machine appears to be working now, after the nuke & pave install. Things seem to be back to normal and functioning fine. In fact I have noticed that connecting to the machine via AFP from other machines is a bit faster now. I wouldn’t be surprised if because some of the old NetInfo-based SharePoints stuff was blown away (and seems to be not needed now) if that helped things a bit.
Update 3: (4/28/09). Apple DTS just replied to my RADAR report with a brief reply:
ALF ALERT: sockwall_cntl_updaterules ctl_enqueuedata rts err 55 is harmless, you should ignore it.
Well, there we go.
Stuff From Hsoi 