Category: Geek Stuff

Breaking Windows

Windows rant ahead. Brace yourself.

I have no idea why, but my virtualized Windows XP just started bitching about

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svchost

crashing and started acting all weird on me — and this was on an installation that’s only used (or turned on, even) when I needed to test my code on various versions of IE. At first I thought maybe VMWare got corrupted, so I did a fresh install of VMWare. Then I thought maybe I could revert Windows XP back to its previous known good state. None of these helped, of course. So I did what any sane Windows user would do — complete re-install of Windows XP from scratch! Hah hah! I feel sorry for the poor souls who have to deal with this kind of crap all the time.

Thank god VMWare makes Windows installation easy and fast (at least 1/2 the time it takes for a fresh install on a real PC!). The first thing I do is to get rid of all the fluff out of Windows — games, MSN Explorer, Accessibility programs, Windows tour, Outlook Express (officially dead program by Microsoft’s definition)… etc. Then I started installing various versions of IE (5.01, 5.5, 6.x & 7) and other perceived “goodies” including MSN Live Messenger. Then Windows XP complained again in its own cute little way — it’s looking for

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msoert2.dll

… WTF!?! It’s a fresh install! It couldn’t possibly have something missing that MSN Live Messenger needed!

Then Google said it was a library that was removed when I got rid of Outlook Express. So why is it that MSN Live Messenger 8.5.xxx, the latest and greatest from Redmond, needs to depend on a library from a program that’s supposedly extinct? Locating and putting back the

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msoert2.dll

file back to

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Windows/system32

directory made it happy again though. And that’s all I cared.

I am guessing it’s a hook for MSN contacts to appear in Outlook Express and Outlook so that people who spend way too much time in those programs can start up chat sessions without having to look for the MSN Live Messenger contact list.

All this crap brought back the good old days of Windows tech support and having to decipher cryptic Windows errors. “Good” times.

Evolution of Apple.com

Neely was talking to me about the “original” Apple Computer Stores from the 80’s. But I wasn’t able to find any images of them but instead found some old snapshots of the old Apple’s website thanks to Apple Gazette and EMU. All, but the first and the last, captions are direct copy/pastes from Apple Gazette.

apple1995
The original apple.com from circa 1997.

apple1997
From 1996 to 1998 this is what Apple.com looked like. By today’s standards this site is laughable (although still better designed than MySpace), but at the time this was cutting edge.

apple1998
In 1998, Apple updated their look with this much more streamlined design.

apple2000
In 2000, Apple redesigned the site again. This new design is essentially the “missing link” between the 1998 design, and the layout that is still used today. Notice the red apple at the top of the page.

apple2001
In 2001 the front page recieved another slight make-over. This time the “News Headline” bar was given an Aqua enhancement, and the Apple at the top of the page turned blue.

apple2002
In 2002 the Apple in the top corner became gray (which it still is today). The rest of the front page remained virtually the same – only the site features significantly changed.

apple2006
The current front page design of Apple.com is almost identical to it’s 2002 counterpart, except for the “News Headline” bar, which is now a simple grey, and the addition of the iPod+iTunes tab.

apple2007
This was snapped just now in 2007. The look and feel has been significantly updated to match the look and feel of Leopard. Also various interface face elements were also cleaned up throughout the site. I suspect this new revision will be around for another couple of years or so until the next cat is out of the cage from Cupertino.

Taking MAMP More Seriously

This is the last draw. I am going to start using MAMP’s local web server solution seriously this time around.

It all started when I decided to upgrade to Leopard. I backed up everything else except for the MySQL database files that don’t exist in the

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~/user_name/

directory. So in upgrading to Leopard, I also blew away all of those development databases I was using for clients — great, now I’ll have to go through the motion of having to repopulate those databases manually…

The only gripe I have with MAMP is that it literally forces all the development files to uncharacteristically reside in the

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/Applications/

folder. I suppose I could move them somewhere else. But I just don’t have the time to deal with customizing it otherwise.

So from now on, literally everything that matters will be within the two places that I back up

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/Applications/
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~/user_name/

I also forgot to save my Addessbook contacts. But thank heavens the address content reside in

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~/user_name/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/

so I was able to recover them. But even if that failed, I had all my contacts sync’d to my Plaxo account using its free sync utility for the Mac OSX.

Lessons learned:

1. Backing up files and upgrading to a new OS when one is really tired is not good.
2. If unsure, backup EVERYTHING.

Purring Leopard

Where do I begin?

Leopard upgrade couldn’t have been easier. I backed up my entire home directory and did a clean install (ditto, Murdza!). And then I manually moved preferences for the apps that I still wanted to keep around back to Leopard and tested each one to make sure nothing burns the house. That took longer than the Leopard install itself (about 45 minutes for the installation).

I have some gripes on a couple of my favorite apps not being supported on Leopard yet. But other wise I’d say the whole thing went pretty well except for a couple of stupid mistakes I made here and there.

Typically on Windows, whenever I upgraded to a new OS to a current hardware spec, the new Windows OS inevitably would slow down the hardware. But on the Macs, at least for the past couple of revisions, everything has felt snappier than the previous version (unless the hardware is really old and Apple just won’t support it outright).

Let the good times roll! (Thanks Jason!)

Upgrading to WordPress 2.3

I spent sometime upgrading this blog to the latest and greatest… Unfortunately I spent way too much time on this biatch than I’d like to. But at least now I am in full compliance to the latest WordPress specs in terms of how things should be done instead of me hacking around the code base. There are still some quirks to work out, but at least they aren’t invisible to visitors (well, unless you are extremely sharp-eyed).

One thing I was surprised is broken in 2.3 is some small parts of the WP Tiger Admin plugin — one of my absolute favorite. Fortunately it’s nothing serious that’d stop me from using the theme, merely some interface quirks that just look annoying. I am a little disappointed that the author hasn’t fixed them yet… But no big deal.

So that’s one less thing I have to think about from now on…

Rise of the Big Mac

I find it amusing to see the very few among the student body who are using unmarked laptops… and some of them are even using just plain pen and paper… 🙂 It must’ve been a long time since I went to college. The reversal in Mac:PC ratio in classrooms is astounding. I find it hard that anyone would best against Apple nowadays in both the stock market and the PC market.

What's a Dell?

Another Mac Die Hard Was Born

I was talking to Norris last night to catch up on stuff, and I asked how he liked his PowerBook that he’d bought cheap and used from another friend before he moved back to Canada. Keep in mind, Norris has been a die hard Windows guy. And when he first got his Mac, he had a few gripes and groaned about certain usability issues.

Fast forward to a few months later, now he proclaims he’d never EVER go back to Windows ever again — NEVER! Having been a Windows fan boy for so long, he explained why (almost) everything on a Mac is simply more superior and simple to use:

1. Everything just works;
2. Superior and more stable 3rd party apps; he said on Windows, you have to “figure out” how some apps work if it came from a 3rd party. But on a Mac, you just expect everything to work without you having to know how or even to 2nd guess why… Now, this was exactly what I was talking about. You miss out quite a bit of fun just by using Windows even if by some godly divine intervention your Windows box somehow never crashes or catches a virus/malware/Trojan.
3. Mac OSX is rock solid; can’t say that about Windows XP or even Vista; he had to use Vista for 2 days and was ready to throw it out of the Window at the end. He ended up IMing another friend about how to install Mac OSX on his IBM laptop — that’s how much he loves Mac OSX.
4. He proclaims that eventually people will see the light and start using Mac OSX;
5. He’s in so far as to ponder on getting certified as a Mac OSX support guy!

So I guess the lesson is, shut up and stop whining about Mac OSX if you’ve never even used it for more than a few minutes in an Apple Store. Once you’ve understood it like Norris has… well… once you go Mac, you can never go back!

On a related note, I took Bryan to the mall the other day and saw that, again, the Apple Store was pack house… while the stupid Dell “booth” got a few tumble weeds strolling by and was dead as ever. I wonder why Dell does that — setting up a booth to fail. It seems like they tried to put up some kind of physical presence to demonstrate how “great” Dell computers are… But even die hard Dell/Windows fan boys I know would be embarrassed to be seen interacting with the ugly booth.

MacBook Pro for Arts

Generally speaking I think having invested in a MacBook Pro was one of the best investments in hardware equipment I’ve made for computing. But in terms of arts and photography, it’s looking a bit weak on the color front. My Eye-One monitor calibrator finally arrived today. So I ran a few tests trying to calibrate my monitor based on a few conditions. But at the end of the test, I was surprised to find that MacBook Pro’s gamut is actually pretty damn small compared to even sRGB!

Luckily Rob Galbraith found a fix for the 2nd gen MacBook Pro I have. Interestingly, he also noted that the latest LED-based MacBook Pros are the best of all laptops he’s tested as far as color accuracy is concerned. I look forward to the day when I can justify getting a decent display to edit photos with. Clean my mac x will help to monitor the system and optimize the storage.

I guess Ken Rockwell ain’t lying when he said color management is a silly thing to do unless you have super high end equipment that can both display and print those beautiful wide gamuts that digital cameras capture. Maybe I should dump Adobe RGB and go sRGB all the way instead since it seems no consumer grade monitor can even display anywhere close to the Adobe RGB gamut range… And most consumer grade print shops only print in sRGB, I could save myself a lot of grief having to manage and convert Adobe RGB to sRGB all the time! Hmmm…

Taking Photography More Seriously

It’s pretty rare to have both “arts” and “geek stuff” categorized for an entry. But I guess this is the beginning of things to come for me — back to the roots.

After not having touched photography in any serious capacity for 11 years, I recently started investing in the craft again. Brian agreed that I should diversify and do what I enjoy the most and try to make money with it. Instead of going back to film, I retired my faithful Nikon N8008s and picked up the most “film-like” DSLR I knew (Fujifilm S5 Pro, which is based on Nikon D200 body) and some new gears to go along with it.

I was pretty fluent and advanced with film and darkroom techniques having experimented heavily with black and white film and silver prints in college*. But the age of digital media ushered me into a whole new game in terms of photographic techniques with digital darkroom (or so to speak). Not surprisingly Photoshop rules in this area… So now I am scrambling to catch up having to learn more advanced techniques in post production processing. It will be a glorious day when the earnings from my photography breaks even with all the investments in equipment and time I have made.

Fortunately some parents that Grace hangs out with really like my shots of their kids and are thinking about paying me to photograph them for special events. My jaw dropped when one of the moms told Grace that an event held by her parents cost them nine G for a photographer. Then I went back to dig out the website of one of my wedding photographers whom agreed to be a backup photographer for almost nothing because she’d just started out doing wedding shoots — she now charges between $2,200 to $4,500 depending on the package; things must have been good for Connie.

I am excited but at the same time feeling a bit late to the digital photography game and doing it seriously. That scares me a little. It’s like asking me to go back to doing CG, special effects and all that crazy 3D stuff again — I know the basics and used to know quite a bit, but the industry has left me behind to rot while everything else has been advancing in leaps and bounds.

Nonetheless, let the good times roll. Hopefully my deteriorating back pain can take the abuse of toddler/children photography**. 😉

* I have Tom Fischer to thank for his Zone System class. There’s no better person to learn Zone System from as far as I am concerned since Tom was one of the top disciples of Ansel Adams having been Adams’ assistant/student for a number of years. And I also have Craig Stevens to thank for all the expensive flim/paper/chemical combo experiments — that was possibly the single most expensive class I’ve ever had in college other than color photography.

** Try squatting a hundred times within a few hours trying to take pictures at the same eye level as those toddlers while trying to chase them and capture the best shots…. Hanging out with kids is fun (the gentle ones are), but taking good shots of them is hard. I think my S5 Pro already feels a bit slow for them.

Web Photo Woes

I never paid much attention to how photos appear on the web until recently I’ve decided that I need to diversify my income sources by branching out into photography, which has been an old love affair of mine. Over the span of a week or so, I’ve soaked up so much information on just the idea of presentation of colors that it really sickens me how Apple’s Safari (and browsers based on its rendering engine, such as OmniWeb, Shiira among others) is the only browser that gets color renditions correctly according to the artists’ intent. Nine years after the initial dot-com boom and six years after its bust, I can’t believe only ONE technology company gets web-based photography presentation right!

Without getting into too much details, basically the chief complaint is, web browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer are only capable of displaying a very narrow set of colors that are capable of being displayed by modern monitors. This was done in the old days to insure compatibility of color display between various makes of monitors and applications via which images were rendered. But the “old days” have long gone, and browsers are still stuck in the 1990’s.

Now I understood why my images appeared muddy on Flickr. But since there are way too many of them to fix and re-upload, I’ve gone to hell and back trying everything to make sure the richness of colors captured by my camera is properly displayed on the web. But I think I am only half way there in finding an acceptable work flow that works for me.

So anyway, this is just a rant on one of those tech things….

Why I May Have Taken Macs for Granted

Sometimes I wonder if life with modern computers (as in after 2005) running Windows XP and Vista has gotten better over the years. I’ve known about PC vendors including trial wares on their boxes to earn a few bucks (which to me was incredibly annoying because as a systems administrator, I had to go through each box and uninstall each one of them every single time, which is really a waste of my time). But maybe, I told myself, it’s gotten better.

Another huge problem I had when supporting Windows running on PCs was drivers — often when I reinstalled Windows on any machine, the first thing I had to do was to go to the PC vendor’s site to download drivers. That was painful sometimes because they weren’t always clear on which drivers you had to use (yeah, part numbers and version numbers are really helpful… NOT).

Today I read a funny post on the experience of dealing with a Sony Vaio. Sony’s one of the computer vendors I absolutely hate to support for the reasons explained on Steve’s blog… but that was during 2000 and 2004. I can’t believe people are still stupid enough to keep buying computing crap from Sony as if they were really superior products. “Idiots!” I say.

I’ve told quite a few people that running Windows on my Mac has been a much pleasant experience than it is on an actual PC box designed with Windows in mind. Steve’s experience pretty much reflects that of my own (as do a few dozen comments left on that entry). Too bad BioShock is probably never coming to the Mac… But it’s good to know that at least Windows boxes are good for at least something other than doorstops.