Played some Rosetta Warcraft 3 on the MBP today. Seems like the issues were primarily due to the custom map we were trying to play (not sure if it’s a problem specifically with the map or with the Rosetta/Mac/IntelMac and the map together). We played a short regular game and a game of DoTA and it seems to play okay. The mouse acceleration is still a bit weird to me… I hear there’s a Microsoft utility I can use to make it Windows-like… I was using a Logitech mouse though so not sure if that’ll work… I might try it out sometime.

In other news, with casual use (web surfing, iTunes) the MBP doesn’t get scorching hot like when it’s importing 11000+ photos. Parts of it, especially towards the rear can still get pretty warm though.

=)

Went to volunteer for the Freescale Marathon earlier today with other Freescalers… man, it was COLD! My hands still feel kinda weird, heh.

We were unprepared for the swarm when it came and like locusts in a field, they sucked up our water reserves like no other. I spent the next hour or so fervently filling up cups as fast as I could. My hands lost feeling so fast, it was crazy. I went into Home Depot and ran my hands under cool water and it felt like boiling water… =)

Anyways, even though it was uber cold, it was still a good experience with the coworkers.

So I finally looked at my server logs and it seems like I’ve got a decent number of people hotlinking my images. Apparently I show up quite high on some Google image searches. I’ve decided to put an end to that and modified my htaccess file to block requests for images other than those from oliverweb.com. shrug

Here’s a graph of how many requests I got for an image of Pikachu:

I thought about instead of forbidding access to the picture to replace it with… hmmm… wait, that’s actually a good idea… I’ll get back to you on that. =)

Edit: OMG, this is hilarious!! Go here and scroll down a bit… you’ll know when you see it. =) (You may need to refresh/reload the page once)… some more. Oh… if your firewall is configured to block the HTTP_REFERRER in your browser, it prob won’t work and you’ll just see sad Pikachu… gotta figure out a way around that…

While I’m waiting for some stuff to finish buildling here, I figured I’d blog a bit.

In the past few weeks/months, I started to visit digg on a regular basis. It generally picks up things faster than /. and has a ton more articles per day, but that’s not always a good thing. Along with all the cool stuff, there’s a lot of stupid articles that seem to populate up to the frontpage due to fanboys hopping excitingly at the mere mention of their idol and hitting the “digg it” button without any thought whatsoever.

Most often, this kind of thing happens to Apple-related articles where it seems like anyone who blogs virtually anything about Apple will get “dugg.” When the Intel Macs came out, there were about five or ten articles switching back and forth between “yes XP will boot” and “no, XP won’t boot!” and most of the articles were just guesses and/or repeats of previous ones. More recently, the annoying articles have been the “I know how to boot XP!” where it’s pretty much just some random guy who can’t figure out the name of the company is Apple, not Mac, and his idea of how he thinks he can boot XP. Many of the steps might as well like this:

1. Make world peace
2. Cure the common cold
3. Wallah!! XP on iMac!

… because they’re just as plausible as many of the proposed steps. It’s pretty much like if I said something like this: I know how to cure AIDS!

1. Inspect AIDS virus.
2. Find a chemical that destroys the virus.
3. Create a pill with that chemical.
4. Feed to AIDS infected person.
5. If all goes well, cured!!!

I don’t understand how articles with no backing/substance whatsoever get so popular. I guess it just goes to show how stupid masses of people can get… hehe…

I have determined that my decision to purchase an Intel PowerBook comes down to the following Pro/Con chart:



Cons:

• A bit pricey (but I can shave $300 off with student developer…).

• Apple Rev.A’s have an uncanny ability to get screwed compared to the Rev.B’s, where Apple fixes most issues with the Rev.A.

• Merom comes out in half a year (but will the 15” be updated then?).

• Other Apple Intel offerings are coming (but how soon, and how comparable to the 15” in size/power?).

• No reviews yet (does it get hot? what’s its battery life? any unusual common defects?).

• Ability to install Windows XP uncertain.
  

Pros:

• puuuurrrrrddddyyyy
  

Edit: Hehe, ok, really, another major pro is: OS X on Core Duo. Really, my main beef with the last PowerBook I had was that it got insanely hot and was not very impressive performance wise. OS X is no lean machine and it requires a pretty hefty system to achieve that “snappy response”… the PowerBook I had just didn’t cut it, despite the many other things I liked about it.

I do like Apple software, generally, I like the way I can switch between “noob GUI mode” and “l337 h4x0r pwn3d y0! CLI mode” rather seamlessly. That plus is also in recent Linux distros, however, OS X is a bit better when it comes to plug-and-play hardware issues (though, Linux def has its merits and it better in many other situations… which is why its on my mac mini right now). Apple also has the support of software companies such as Microsoft and Adobe, where Linux has to fall back on WINE (man, I’d like to see a Linux-native build of Photoshop… that’d be HOT).



Anyways, I think the Core Duo will likely solve most of these issues… of course, I should probably wait for reviews regardless. Heh…

At around 5 or 6AM or so, I stole Van’s monster of a tripod and took some pics. Now, I think I need some sleep… don’t expect to hear from me for a while, haha…

So apparently I had my comment spam filter a bit too strict and it was “junking” everything. I was unaware of this fact for a few days/weeks, so sorry about that. =)

[geek]
Apple “news” sites are going crazy predicting all kinds of crazy things (or not) for January given the smallest tiny bit of info from their “sources.” Anyways, here’s what I see as the possibilities:

iBook (maybe Mac Mini too) released in January with Yonah chips. Either Apple is going to be okay with the iBooks performing better than the PowerBooks (which will be a strange situation and especially not ideal from a marketing stance) or they are going to cripple the iBook’s Yonah chip (disable one core and/or clock it down a few hundred Hz). If the iBooks are crippled, the rest of the PC industry is leaving them in the dust again performance wise because they won’t cripple their batch of Yonahs in their laptops.

iBook and PowerBook lines released in January with Yonah chips. Somewhat trivial distribution of the different versions of the chips to the iBook/PowerBooks (slower two or three to the iBook, faster two or three to the PowerBook). This seems somewhat rushed, but I don’t think it’d be impossible. It wouldn’t be too hard to take essentially Intel’s reference design and slap Apple casing around it. Doesn’t coincide with many of the rumors going around as well…

No Intel parts this January. Apple is left in the dust as far as Yonah laptops go. I think there was a press release or something from either Apple or Intel indicating that Apple wanted to be one of the first to use Yonah, but I’m not entirely confident on the validity of it. If Apple wants to use Yonah, I don’t doubt that Intel promised them a good quantity of the initial batch in order to “win them over.” Though, I might take that back because I’m not entirely sure how much Intel really cares about Apple business (they’re insanely small compared to the rest of the PC industry that buys from Intel). Perhaps they care more about not letting Apple go with AMD than with the actual money Apple would bring them… shrug

Just PowerBook? This would be nice I suppose, but again… there’s not much indicating this is going to happen… most of the buzz has been around the iBook switching to Intel first.

If Apple were to wait for Merom, they’d be able to go entirely 64-bit x86, which would be nice and I think coincide with their mid-year switch to Intel. I’m sure Apple would put a nice spin to that as well as the rest of the PC industry would still be hunkered down with 32-bit x64. Since Apple is making the transition from PPC to x86, a directly transition to 64-bit x86 would be one of those “might as well” type of things. If Yonah laptops were released, it is somewhat silly to have to support 32-bit x86 just because of the first gen of either the iBook or PowerBook (and if Yonah laptops are released, perhaps this is a good reason to NOT buy first gen). If Apple waits for Merom, that means that first half of next year, expect not much from the Apple portables as they will become very very stale…

I forsee the desktop Macs (except for maybe the Mini, especially with Intel’s Viiv stuff) making the Intel transition the last. And, I expect the new Mac Mini (NEW new, not a little revision) to be aimed at the entertainment hub crowd. Maybe the Mini will make the transition first?…

That’s it for now. =) [/geek]

So Chronicles of Narnia was pretty good, pretty happy with that. =)

Andrew is back! And apparently is no longer single. O_o Haha… congrats, buddy. I, in the mean time, will continue waiting around I suppose… lol.

Went to do community service at the Salvation Army “today” (Friday), and we helped sort a whole ton of toys. There was one HUGE remote control Hummer that I’m sure is going to make some little kid very happy. I hope he doesn’t have a baby sibling or it might get run over.

Watching the Superman Returns treaser trailer has become a daily ritual. Still makes me smile each time I watch it…

I hear it’s finals time around UT. Hehe, gluck to all you kiddos taking tests. =)

A day or so ago before I went upstairs, I paused for a few minutes and just stared at the dark room lined with our computers. Ahhh… fun times we’ve had here, will be sad to move out next semester (but necessary, I think =).

More later… maybe, haha.