Category: Geek Stuff

Civilization IV for Mac

I saw that Civilization IV for Mac was finally released, and a demo version is now available for download. I checked out the specs needed to run the game and was sadly disappointed — it requires a G5 processor or an Intel Mac!

Simulation games are about the only thing I like as far as gaming’s concerned: The SimCity series, Civilization series, Age of Empires series and those Rainbow Six/Rouge Spear military/special forces games. Argh!… But then again it has been 4 years since I got my PowerBook… Damn old Macs…

Dream Toy

The much anticipated and rumored replacement of Fujifilm’s S3 Pro DSLR was finally unveiled today. But instead of the usual increment to “S4”, Fujifilm decided to call this upgrade the “S5″…. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Japanese don’t really like the number “4”?

Anyway… the features were a little disappointing for a high end toy. I was looking forward to this upgrade since the S3 was considered my dream toy when it was first released. At my wedding, two out of the three professional photographers there had the S2 (the other guy had a Nikon)! I guess that says something about Fujifilm’s professional cameras.

Even though the price isn’t available yet, I have a feeling it’s going to be at around $2500 to $3000. That was how much the S3 cost when it first came out. But then the price has been dropped to around $1500 after about 2 years being in the market.

Fujifilm S5 Pro DSLR

Digital SLR Camera

Nikon finally came out with the successor to replace the successful D70… the Nikon D80. I think this is my camera for the price range… Now I just gotta wait for the price drop before placing my order… I am just glad I can finally reuse all the photo equipment I’d accumulated when I was a photo student (yes, there was a time when I was more artistic than techno-geek).

Nikon D80

I didn’t have much to complain about my Canon S230 until Bryan got way too active for the aging digital dinosaur. Almost every shot misses the “Kodak Moment” which really get me frustrated sometimes.

Refuge

Most people don’t realize just how impossible it is to work at home in peace, especially when everyone else is also at home. But even when nobody is at home to bug you, there’s still plenty of distractions:

“Have I paid the electric bill yet? I better do that now.”
“What’s that sound in the living room? Did one of the cats knock something off? I better go check it out.”
“Did the postman just drop off the mail? I better go get that…”
“Why doesn’t the neighbor pick up her phone? It rings so damn loud…”

It’s especially tough this month because my mom’s visiting, and I basically gave our spare bedroom, a.k.a. “my office”, to her and work on our dinning table in the kitchen where it’s almost impossible to work because Grace and mom watch Korean drama, marathon style. Besides, mom is always doing stuff in the kitchen when she’s not watching Korean drama with Grace… Then there’s Bryan playing with his toys just 3 feet away in the living room right next to me.

With my latest project being 2 months overdue, and I am under tremendous pressure to “show” something in 3 days, I have had to “escape” from the house and find refuge elsewhere to concentrate and just crank out codes. At first I tried the library, but then it’s almost eerily quiet after having been in a house where there’s always something going on.

The most unlikely refuge, I found out, is the Mall, of all places, the most crowded and noisy space. The interesting thing about the mall though, specifically Vally Fair Mall in Santa Clara, is that the music is always blasting in full volume (which I never noticed before). The crowd and the noise actually help me concentrate even more. It’s like I find peace in my little 15.4″ laptop screen in a massive crowd where I intended to find refuge away from a small crowd at home. What an oxymoron.

Just a couple of months ago I debated really hard whether or not to rent a small corner office for a few hundred bucks a month just so that I have a place to go and just focus on my programming, homework and everything else. But I just couldn’t justify having to spend that kind of money when we are trying to save every penny we can being in the situation that we are in.

The mall then becomes an interesting choice because it has no distractions (as long as I don’t lift my head up from the screen), no trivial household tasks to take care of, even going to the bathroom is inconvenient. And it’s got free wifi connection right next to the Sony Store where there are lots of seats, tables and even power outlets. So there, about the only thing I can do is bury my head in my thoughts and programming logics and just work.

The joke between me and Grace now is: if you ever need me, I’ll be in my “office” at the mall…. Hah!

Safari Unable to Load Nested xhmHttpRequest Objects!

I started a project where I used pure CSS and Ajax on the interface, like how Google implemented the Gmail interface. But soon it was clear that Safari’s handling of Ajax and dynamic DOM element updates is very limited.

I created a “div” tag on the base page to load various sections of the website into it using xmlHttpRequest object. Where Safari (and Shiira as well as Opera) failed was when I started loading a separate page into another “div” tag that was dynamically created by the “div” tag created by the base page. At first the problem persisted only within my application. But then I was able to recreate the problem by making a bare application just to load one “div” tag into another.

So basically, Safari is unable to recognize nested HTML elements created by xmlHttpRequest…. Or so my theory goes.

Yuck…

UPDATE 08.02.2006: I tested using a plain javascript to load DOM elements into each other without Safari complaining. So one can assume the issue is only with loading DOM elements via xmlHttpRequest or that the particular method I am using makes Safari very unhappy.

Trekkies

Not that I am a Trekky at all…. but an episode on NPR about fan-made Trek series seemed like an interesting idea. And supposedly, even the studios are taking note of a growing movements in fan-made films/TV series (as long as, god forbid, they don’t don’t profit off of them, of course).

I thought Murdza might appreciate something like that… They are supposed to be pretty good quality productions similar to ones on Sci-fi channel. Some scripts are so good that even some of the original Star Trek actors/actresses have guest appeared in some of them!

Perl and More Perl

Finally finished another intensive 4-day course in more advanced Perl this week. I have to say that Perl gets a little disappointing in the more advanced level. Making an object/class is kind of painful compared to more modern scripting language like PHP. And the CGI portion gets more ugly when it comes to having to edit multiple files in different directories…. or one can venture into using the dreadful CGI package. But luckily there’s Mason which runs on the server side and makes everything very PHP-like. Unfortunately it requires separate installation. And I am doubtful of its support on most web hosting services.

In any case, I am still glad I got to know as much Perl as I did. It’s another tool in my arsenal of scripting/programming languages for future gigs. Next on my list, C, C++, Java, Ruby on Rails, and hopefully someday, Objective-C/Cocoa!

Internet Explorer Woes

I probably wrote about this before… But I am going to rant about it again…

Microsoft Internet Explorer SUCKS ASS! And the engineers who came up with versions 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0 should go to hell and stay there.

It’s probably not entirely their fault that IE has sucked ever since its inception. For what its’ worth, Netscape 4.x sucked so bad that it skipped 5.0 and went straight to 6.0, which help contributed the collapse of the once great Netscape empire.

That said, how much IE has sucked in the past 6 or 7 years since the fall of Netscape just goes to show that monopoly in any given technological field DOES harm innovation. Had Netscape stayed (or Firefox came out earlier), IE wouldn’t have stayed sucky for 3 versions straight with little to no improvements in each version.

On top of that, they are so broken that developing web interfaces for them is virtually impossible. I have had perfectly coded sites working with all other major browsers BUT IE! So that meant I have had to come up with hacks and work arounds just to make things work for IE, which is so damn non-compliant with standards in a very ugly way… And like I said, people who keep using IE to surf the web aren’t helping with the cause either… (why anyone would use IE to surf the web is beyond me… it’s so tied in with the operating system that any hacker going through IE, which is nortoriously known for its suckiness in security, can practically get the entire computer fried… figuratively speaking).

I had this beautifully written pure css sytle sheet design that worked perfectly in Firefox and Safari, but as soon as IE sees it, all hell broke lose. So now I gotta use stupid tables just so that I don’t have to waste time tweaking the css just for damn IE.

A lot of comments in codes I have read often include phrases like ”

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/*fix for stupid IE*/

“, or ”

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/*hack for stupid IE*/

“… With the intorduction of IE7 beta, which I have tried, things aren’t getting better. I hopte Firefox will just run IE over and Steve Ballmer can just run Microsoft to ground (at which he’s already doing a pretty good job) so that we will never have to deal with another inferior, buggy Microsoft product again, EVER!

God damn! Microsoft… Seriously… Go to hell with IE! Damn it…
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There, I vented. I can’t stress just how pissed I can get working with Microsoft technology at times… Sometimes I wish I can just choke Steve Ballmer into fixing these damn problems in IE. I guess I should probably document some of the issues I have dealt with and solutions I found/discovered/made (thanks, solely, to Google… no thanks to MSN).

An interesting side note… while working with Murdza on a mass mail campaign, the project redered out perfectly in EVERYTHING but Hotmail… So I had to find fixes just for stupid Hotmail… It’s no accident that Hotmail is another inferior product of Microsoft’s that way too many ignorant people are still using as if it’s oxygen for their lungs… Fricking convert to Gmail or Yahoo Mail already… damn it…

Stupid Microsoft…

Fast Talker

Murdza and I had a chat this morning. I’d forgotten how fast people from the Northeastern part of the U.S. talk. I misheard him say “I got an external RAID” when, in fact, he said “I got a Xserve RAID“. It’s all geek talk, I know… But the difference in the two statements are so profound (to us geeks) that I almost fell off of my chair when I finally figured out it was the Apple Xserve RAID he got!

But then, Jason and Alicia lived in NY for a while, they don’t talk quite nearly as fast… Maybe it’s just Murdza with his self-diagnosed ADHD where he ahs to get the thoughts out of his head really fast or else something else will pop up in his head and he’d forget what he was going to say just a second ago…

But it’s all good. I have been in California for too long, watching Chinese new channels* and eating Chinese food… It’s almost like I never left Taiwan! Hah! You gotta love it — America, a little piece of every country.

*The Chinese news channel actually lasts an entire hour which covers news from all over the world — unlike local news channels (or even national ones like CNN!) in 99.999% of the United States where their 4PM, 5PM, 6PM and 11PM news stories are almost all identical and cover only local and U.S.-related national news. If you want to know what happens somewhere else in the world, good luck. Unless the U.S. is in a war with them or is threatening to have one, they’d be luck to get even 1 full minute of coverage (case in point, when the President of Taiwan got shot during presidential election, our local news station in San Jose only gave it an ONE-sentence coverage and then moved on to some other petty and trivial local news).

Rude People

Rude people suck. That’s a fact.

But some people are rude in suttle ways. Take for example, the Asian chick sitting next to me in m PERL class. She has so many fricking stupid problems with her PERL codes that she almost never stops raising her hands for help during lab time. If the instructor didn’t know any better, she’d have monopolized the instructor. But worse, she fricking picks up her cell phone during class AND whispers into her phone as if nobody’d be distracted if she did that! And she does it like multiple times a day. What an idiot.

But I do have to say that she knows her way around vi pretty well.

I think the instructor is partly to blame for not telling her to stop doing it. Some instructors get pissed at even the ring tones…

Other than that, PERL really is cool. But the instructor kept on saying how PERL on Windows is different… etc. I wish Windows could just go away so that everything can work more harmoniously together — coding, browsing, working, playing… Ok, maybe not playing… There ARE a lot of games for Windows.