Yeah, I haven’t posted in a while. Not for lack of things to write about either: I saw Up in 3D (loved it), I played around with a Palm Pre (enjoyed it), there’s a new iPhone, etc etc. I’ve just been incredibly busy lately. That being said, school is ending next wednesday, so I’ll have much more time to post about fun things. In the mean time, check out Little Wheel, one of the best Flash games I’ve played since Samorost.
A Series of Tubes
An archive of old posts.
Category Archives: Life in general
Watchmen
I’ve been anticipating the movie adaption of Watchmen for months now, since the first time I ever saw the trailer. Watchmen (the movie) is based on Watchmen, the wildly popular graphic novel, and tells the story of a group of retired masked vigilantes, The Watchmen. The action takes place in 1985, although the earlier arrival of a superhuman figure named Dr. Manhattan has altered the course of world events: Vietnam surrendered to America, technology has advanced at an extremely accelerated rate, and human masked vigilantes have been outlawed by President Nixon, in his third term of the presidency. The narrative is told by Rorschach, a paranoid, sociopathic detective-type vigilante, the only Watchman still operational. The movie opens with the death of The Comedian, one of the disguised heroes, and the main plot is Rorschach trying to figure out who is responsible.
I won’t go too much more into the plot, but needless to say – it is very interesting to watch and read. The thing that really amazed me about the movie was how similar it was to the comic. While watching the movie, the exact same emotions and thoughts rolled through my head as when I was reading the book. The style and feel of the movie is the same as the book, the characters look and sound exactly as I imagined (with the exception of one character, Adrian Veidt), and it was overall just really well-made.
There are three problems I have with the movie, however.
The first problem is Veidt. While all of the other characters in the movie (particularly Rorschach, who was absolutely perfect in every way) were extremely well-cast, Veidt looked nothing like he did in the comic book. Veidt is the alter-ego of ex-vigilante Ozymandias, the smartest man in the world. In both versions of the story, Veidt is extremely wealthy, intelligent, and obsessed with Alexander the Great and all sorts of ancient civilizations. However, in the comic Veidt resembled a Roman emperor in appearance. He had a classically beautiful look to him, and wore purple and gold. His office was highly gilded, and he seemed warm, but regal. In the movie, however, Veidt appears almost scrawny. His armor helps him appear stronger, but it is entirely black and silver, not Ozy’s purple and gold. The same goes for his workspace, being entirely gray marble and black rock. Also, his feline companion, Bubastis, is blue instead of red for some reason.
Another issue I had with the movie was the lack of detail in certain scenes, and the addition of detail in others. The movie is already 2 hours and 40 minutes long, so obviously some scenes had to be cut down a bit, but unfortunately it’s the origin stories that lose out. Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan both had very interesting stories in the comic, explaining how they really became the heroes they are at the time of the action, but these are cut down to the bare minimum in the movie. Rorschach in the comic is forced to talk to a psychoanalyst, and over time he slowly breaks him down from a jolly fat man to a gibbering, depressed, shell of his former self. In the movie, Rorschach has one session with said therapist, and that’s it. We are still shown some of his origin, but it is condensed into a single scene. The same thing happens with Dr. Manhattan, who comprehends time differently from humans. For him, all time is simultaneous, he sees all of his past and all of his future at the same time. This makes for a very interesting origin story, as it doesn’t necessarily progress in chronological order. This was shown in the movie, but it wasn’t nearly as interesting as in the comic, and a number of crucial scenes from his past were removed.
At the same time, some details were left in that were unnecessary, and some were even added in. The biggest problem, I thought, was the sex scene. It lasted quite a bit longer than it had to, and while I do think the scene itself was important to have in the film, it shouldn’t have been long enough to require the removal of actual content. I do, however, applaud the parties responsible for the movie for leaving many of the R-rated aspects of the movie unchanged.
The final problem I had was the soundtrack. While the music chosen was awesone (Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Hendrix, etc.), it seemed to not really fit the action. Particularly the scene of Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam, with Ride of the Valkyries in the background. The song is awesome, and fits, but it is such a cliché that it didn’t work. I would have liked more original music, with one or two oldies every now and then.
Apart from these three, however, I loved the movie, and would recommend it to anybody who likes (super)hero movies with less action than normal (which isn’t to say less blood), and more mystery and plot.
Watchmen
I’ve been anticipating the movie adaption of Watchmen for months now, since the first time I ever saw the trailer. Watchmen (the movie) is based on Watchmen, the wildly popular graphic novel, and tells the story of a group of retired masked vigilantes, The Watchmen. The action takes place in 1985, although the earlier arrival of a superhuman figure named Dr. Manhattan has altered the course of world events: Vietnam surrendered to America, technology has advanced at an extremely accelerated rate, and human masked vigilantes have been outlawed by President Nixon, in his third term of the presidency. The narrative is told by Rorschach, a paranoid, sociopathic detective-type vigilante, the only Watchman still operational. The movie opens with the death of The Comedian, one of the disguised heroes, and the main plot is Rorschach trying to figure out who is responsible.
I won’t go too much more into the plot, but needless to say – it is very interesting to watch and read. The thing that really amazed me about the movie was how similar it was to the comic. While watching the movie, the exact same emotions and thoughts rolled through my head as when I was reading the book. The style and feel of the movie is the same as the book, the characters look and sound exactly as I imagined (with the exception of one character, Adrian Veidt), and it was overall just really well-made.
There are three problems I have with the movie, however.
The first problem is Veidt. While all of the other characters in the movie (particularly Rorschach, who was absolutely perfect in every way) were extremely well-cast, Veidt looked nothing like he did in the comic book. Veidt is the alter-ego of ex-vigilante Ozymandias, the smartest man in the world. In both versions of the story, Veidt is extremely wealthy, intelligent, and obsessed with Alexander the Great and all sorts of ancient civilizations. However, in the comic Veidt resembled a Roman emperor in appearance. He had a classically beautiful look to him, and wore purple and gold. His office was highly gilded, and he seemed warm, but regal. In the movie, however, Veidt appears almost scrawny. His armor helps him appear stronger, but it is entirely black and silver, not Ozy’s purple and gold. The same goes for his workspace, being entirely gray marble and black rock. Also, his feline companion, Bubastis, is blue instead of red for some reason.
Another issue I had with the movie was the lack of detail in certain scenes, and the addition of detail in others. The movie is already 2 hours and 40 minutes long, so obviously some scenes had to be cut down a bit, but unfortunately it’s the origin stories that lose out. Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan both had very interesting stories in the comic, explaining how they really became the heroes they are at the time of the action, but these are cut down to the bare minimum in the movie. Rorschach in the comic is forced to talk to a psychoanalyst, and over time he slowly breaks him down from a jolly fat man to a gibbering, depressed, shell of his former self. In the movie, Rorschach has one session with said therapist, and that’s it. We are still shown some of his origin, but it is condensed into a single scene. The same thing happens with Dr. Manhattan, who comprehends time differently from humans. For him, all time is simultaneous, he sees all of his past and all of his future at the same time. This makes for a very interesting origin story, as it doesn’t necessarily progress in chronological order. This was shown in the movie, but it wasn’t nearly as interesting as in the comic, and a number of crucial scenes from his past were removed.
At the same time, some details were left in that were unnecessary, and some were even added in. The biggest problem, I thought, was the sex scene. It lasted quite a bit longer than it had to, and while I do think the scene itself was important to have in the film, it shouldn’t have been long enough to require the removal of actual content. I do, however, applaud the parties responsible for the movie for leaving many of the R-rated aspects of the movie unchanged.
The final problem I had was the soundtrack. While the music chosen was awesone (Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Hendrix, etc.), it seemed to not really fit the action. Particularly the scene of Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam, with Ride of the Valkyries in the background. The song is awesome, and fits, but it is such a cliché that it didn’t work. I would have liked more original music, with one or two oldies every now and then.
Apart from these three, however, I loved the movie, and would recommend it to anybody who likes (super)hero movies with less action than normal (which isn’t to say less blood), and more mystery and plot.
Fan failure and other tales of woe
Lately, Eve (my 15″ MacBook Pro) has been showing her age a bit more than I’m comfortable with.
A few weeks ago, she suddenly became unresponsive, as in no applications would launch, and finder froze. She complained that spotlight had quit unexpectedly, and at other times (the problem persisted after a reboot) she added more serious things too, like the loginwindow (which is supposed to always be running in the background), and even more seriously, the systemuiserver (which manages the entire visible interface of the computer). After some personal messing around (ensuring that I had all of my files backed up-thank god for Time Machine), I brought her into the Apple Store.
The Geniuses tried re-installing the OS from an external hard drive (as my superdrive had been broken for more than a year), and it repeatedly failed. This led them to the conclusion that Eve’s hard drive was corrupted. Seeing as how she is almost 3 years old, and that’s about the average life of a hard drive, it seemed likely….However, they said that it was highly unlikely that they’d be able to repair it themselves due to the computer’s cosmetic damage (dents and such, particularly one directly under the hard drive, not to mention a huge crack across the base of the frame of the display). Instead, they sent me to a little place in Allston called The Computer Loft, who agreed to replace/upgrade the hard drive and the superdrive for around $600.
Well, they did an amazing job – Eve’s hard drive is now a 7200rpm, 320gb drive, which is absolutely amazing, and I finally have a working superdrive again, which is nice. However, two days ago Eve’s right-hand started acting up.
I noticed that she was making a pretty loud buzzing noise, with a relatively light load, so I checked the fan speeds – as I thought, the left fan was going at about 5000rpm, and the right fan was spinning at around 2400rpm. This itself was abnormal, since I have the fans set to always spin in synchronization, but even more abnormal was the buzzing noise – a fan spinning at 2400rpm should be relatively quiet. I put her to sleep, and woke her up again – the buzzing was entirely gone. I was happy, but that didn’t last long, because I realized that the buzzing had only stopped because the fan had, as well. That was two days ago, and my right fan hasn’t risen above 0rpm since.
As a result, Eve is running a bit hotter than normal, but the left fan is working in overtime to keep the temperature regulated. Meanwhile, I’m trying to avoid heavy loads (opeations which would normally push both fans to their maximum) for fear of overheating her. I suppose I’m going to have to bring her back into The Computer Loft. I’m not really ready to buy a new computer yet, but Eve is starting to fall apart…
Fan failure and other tales of woe
Lately, Eve (my 15″ MacBook Pro) has been showing her age a bit more than I’m comfortable with.
A few weeks ago, she suddenly became unresponsive, as in no applications would launch, and finder froze. She complained that spotlight had quit unexpectedly, and at other times (the problem persisted after a reboot) she added more serious things too, like the loginwindow (which is supposed to always be running in the background), and even more seriously, the systemuiserver (which manages the entire visible interface of the computer). After some personal messing around (ensuring that I had all of my files backed up-thank god for Time Machine), I brought her into the Apple Store.
The Geniuses tried re-installing the OS from an external hard drive (as my superdrive had been broken for more than a year), and it repeatedly failed. This led them to the conclusion that Eve’s hard drive was corrupted. Seeing as how she is almost 3 years old, and that’s about the average life of a hard drive, it seemed likely….However, they said that it was highly unlikely that they’d be able to repair it themselves due to the computer’s cosmetic damage (dents and such, particularly one directly under the hard drive, not to mention a huge crack across the base of the frame of the display). Instead, they sent me to a little place in Allston called The Computer Loft, who agreed to replace/upgrade the hard drive and the superdrive for around $600.
Well, they did an amazing job – Eve’s hard drive is now a 7200rpm, 320gb drive, which is absolutely amazing, and I finally have a working superdrive again, which is nice. However, two days ago Eve’s right-hand started acting up.
I noticed that she was making a pretty loud buzzing noise, with a relatively light load, so I checked the fan speeds – as I thought, the left fan was going at about 5000rpm, and the right fan was spinning at around 2400rpm. This itself was abnormal, since I have the fans set to always spin in synchronization, but even more abnormal was the buzzing noise – a fan spinning at 2400rpm should be relatively quiet. I put her to sleep, and woke her up again – the buzzing was entirely gone. I was happy, but that didn’t last long, because I realized that the buzzing had only stopped because the fan had, as well. That was two days ago, and my right fan hasn’t risen above 0rpm since.
As a result, Eve is running a bit hotter than normal, but the left fan is working in overtime to keep the temperature regulated. Meanwhile, I’m trying to avoid heavy loads (opeations which would normally push both fans to their maximum) for fear of overheating her. I suppose I’m going to have to bring her back into The Computer Loft. I’m not really ready to buy a new computer yet, but Eve is starting to fall apart…
Windows 7 SKUs – How Microsoft fails as they improve
Microsoft confirmed the 6 SKUs of Windows 7 today – Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. At first glance, this seems pretty bad, even worse than Vista’s nightmare melange of SKUS (as this seems to have 2 more SKUs than the previous OS). However, if one takes a closer peek, it becomes clear that this is actually much better than Vista (while simultaneously still being pretty bad).
Let me explain a bit. Windows XP basically had two SKUs, Home and Professional. There were other versions too (Media Center, x64, etc), but it basically boiled down to Home and Professional. This is pretty self-explanatory, and in my opinion this is really as complicated as it has to get. Average users can use Home just fine, while people who need more features for work or ‘enthusiast’ use can get Professional. This is simple enough, not quite as simple as OS X’s single one-size-fits-all edition, but it works (and in some ways, is better than the single blanket edition, until you need to use a feature from Pro edition that simply isn’t available in Home no matter what you do…)
Windows Vista complicated things pretty horribly. The Vista SKUs (as most people know them) were Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate. In addition to these, Vista Starter and Vista Enterprise also exist, but are not purchasable by most consumers. Home Basic ws an extremely crippled version of Vista, lacking almost all of the new features of the OS, and not really worth anybody’s time or money. Home Premium added most of Vista’s features, and was suitable for most people’s use (the XP Home of Vista). Business added business-centric features, but removed many of the home-use features (such as Windows Media Center), and Ultimate simply includes everything. If this is confusing to you, don’t worry, it is confusing to most people. Vista didn’t sell that well, and it’s not much of a surprise.
Now, Windows 7 has the same SKUs as Vista, at least in name. As with Vista, most people don’t need to worry about Starter or Enterprise, as these are only available in developing countries and to big businesses, respectively. For Windows 7, Home Premium is still suitable for most people’s use, as it includes basically all of Windows 7’s main features. Business adds to these features, but it includes all the features of Home Premium. Ultimate adds a few more features, being the most complete edition, however it seems like Ultimate is a bit unnecessary, as Business edition includes practically all of the features as well. Accordingly, Microsoft is going to be reducing the shelf presence of Ultimate edition by a lot for Windows 7, pushing customers towards Home Premium or Business.
Now, what about Home Basic? Home Basic wasn’t useful for anybody in Windows Vista, and Home Premium is being set up to become the default Windows 7 SKU, so what is the point of Home Basic? This is one of the reasons I’m still very disappointed in Microsoft. In Windows 7, Home Basic and Ultimate editions are not going to be seen by most people, and don’t even really have a purpose anymore, so they are just complicating things unnecessarily. The two of them should be dropped entirely, and Home Premium should become simply ‘Home’. Personally, if I go into a store and I see ‘Home Premium’, I’m going to be confused if there isn’t a ‘Home Basic’ somewhere around, it just makes no sense to have only a Premium edition.
Riven Map
I’m working on a Riven-related project, which I’m not really at liberty to give details about just yet, suffice to say that it requires a good, accurate map of the 5 islands and the 233rd age. I googled and manually searched for such a map for a few days, to no avail. I asked several people who I expected to know (the good folks at the Guild of Cartographers), but nowhere could I find a decent map.
Then I found the amazing collection of MystRiven (an UruObsession member), including a poster-sized map of Riven:
I asked MystRiven where he got the map, and he told me that it was from a Riven strategy guide by Prima. I searched Amazon, and found it. Even better, I found it used, for $4.00 including shipping. I sent a message to all of the sellers inquiring about the status of the map/poster, and one helpful store informed me that the poster was included. Long story short – I got that map.
Remembering how infuriating it was to not be able to find a good map, I promptly scanned my map and pieced it together in Photoshop, so that anyone else who needs a good Riven map won’t have to go through what I did.
You can download 4 versions:
- The low resolution version (949×855, 1.6MB)
- The normal version (1460×1316, 3.7MB)
- The high resolution version (5840×5265, 70.7MB)
- The .psd version, so you can edit it yourself(5840×5265, 218.1MB)
Riven Map
I’m working on a Riven-related project, which I’m not really at liberty to give details about just yet, suffice to say that it requires a good, accurate map of the 5 islands and the 233rd age. I googled and manually searched for such a map for a few days, to no avail. I asked several people who I expected to know (the good folks at the Guild of Cartographers), but nowhere could I find a decent map.
Then I found the amazing collection of MystRiven (an UruObsession member), including a poster-sized map of Riven:
I asked MystRiven where he got the map, and he told me that it was from a Riven strategy guide by Prima. I searched Amazon, and found it. Even better, I found it used, for $4.00 including shipping. I sent a message to all of the sellers inquiring about the status of the map/poster, and one helpful store informed me that the poster was included. Long story short – I got that map.
Remembering how infuriating it was to not be able to find a good map, I promptly scanned my map and pieced it together in Photoshop, so that anyone else who needs a good Riven map won’t have to go through what I did.
You can download 4 versions:
- The low resolution version (949×855, 1.6MB)
- The normal version (1460×1316, 3.7MB)
- The high resolution version (5840×5265, 70.7MB)
- The .psd version, so you can edit it yourself(5840×5265, 218.1MB)
Picasa For Mac
Picasa, Google’s photo manager program, has finally been released for Mac OS X. This is absolutely great news for people like me, who despise iPhoto. iPhoto is ridiculously slow and inefficient in my experience, and (like a lot of other things on OS X) doesn’t really offer a lot of options on how behind-the-scenes organization will take place, so photos get hidden in big file trees, ending with the ‘Roll’, which is completely nondescript and unhelpful when looking for files. More recent versions of iPhoto are even worse, packing all of the photos into a single pseudofile: like a .app, it is actually a folder that has been given a file extention. This means that its still relatively easy to access your photos, but it makes actions like backing up photos or accessing them from other programs very difficult. In short, I don’t like iPhoto.
However, up until now, there haven’t really been any other options. Microsoft doesn’t really offer a built-in method of photo organization (or at least, they didn’t before Windows 7, which uses special ‘Library’ folders that can be used for photo organization, I think), so there are lots of programs out there for Windows photo organization (like Picasa). Since iPhoto is pre-installed on every Mac, nobody has really bothered to write up an alternative photo manager.
Picasa was my photo manager of choice on Windows, has traditionally been only for Windows and (infuriatingly) Linux. This has never made sense to me. Obviously, this is a very cross-platform application if it can be run on Windows and Linux, so how hard could it be to get it running on a Mac? Apparently very hard, as Picasa 3 for Mac is only in Beta at this point, and it has taken Google this long to get that far.
Anyway, the application itself is very nice. I like it a lot more than iPhoto for many reasons, but I miss some things from iPhoto. For one thing, Picasa is not really a photo manager as much as a picture manager. When you launch it, it scans your whole home folder looking for images, and displays them all, categorized by folder. It tries to sort the folders by date, but it seems to have a very tough time doing this (most of the years assigned to my folders are a year or two off, while some are dated 1990 and as far back as 1969…). I want a way to exclude folders entirely from its scan, but I have not found a way to do this yet. To make up for this lacking feature, Picasa categorizes its sources and allows you to minimize the ones you don’t want to see (for example, I have Albums, iPhoto Library, and one other specific folder opened, but the main folder hierarchies are minimized, because they add a lot of noise).
Picasa doesn’t really organize at all behind the scenes, it seems to just want to display the pictures as it finds them on your machine, and leave the organization to the user. I like this more than iPhoto, because it gives me complete control over organization and makes things a lot easier to find (inside the Pictures/Picasa folder that I made, I make a specific folder for each photo shoot, and then inside that, one folder for each camera or lens used). Picasa neatly recognizes my organizational system and displays the shoot folder as a category in the sidebar, with the folders under it.
One thing I don’t like so far is that Picasa doesn’t seem that much more efficient than iPhoto. It certainly loads faster, opening almost as soon as I launch it, while iPhoto can take up to 30 seconds to get to a usable state, and even longer to quit. However, both applications use a lot of resources on my machine, if either is running in the background my fans start going nuts before long. Picasa is, however, still only a beta, so it’s very likely that it will become better soon.
Overall, I really like Picasa, a lot more than iPhoto, and I’d recommend it to anybody who’s as fed up with iPhoto as I am.
Windows 7
So as some people may have heard, the first beta of Windows 7 (aka build 7000) has been leaked onto the internet. For those of you who haven’t heard, and have no idea what I’m talking about, Windows 7 is Microsoft’s next operating system (the replacement for Vista, just as Vista was the replacement for XP before it). Despite my dislike for Windows Vista, which is a bloated and unusable operating system on most machines, I decided that I ought to try out Windows 7 for myself, since Microsoft claims that it is much faster than Vista.
Well, after a bit of trouble burning it to a disk (fourth time’s the charm!), I finally got the OS up and running on my machine. Let me start of by saying that for the most part, Microsoft is completely right: 7 is amazingly fast. For the most part. Compared to Vista. The impressive thing is that the machine I’m running 7 on is somewhat old, a 2.93ghz Celeron cpu with 512mb of ram, and yet it manages to pull off full Aero effects at full speed (by which I mean it runs at the same speed as Windows XP on the same machine, give or take a bit). Admittedly, I do have a pretty good graphics card to go with the crappy processor and memory, but Vista didn’t even give me the option of enabling Aero, so this is definitely a step up. Overall my machine gets a 2.9 in the experience index (which, by the way, now goes up to 7.9 instead of 5.9) – limited by my memory.
Windows 7 is currently installed at the back of my computer, on the second partition of my secondary hard drive, which it seems to be dealing with just fine. It is completely comfortable being installed alongside Windows XP, and by default gives me the option to boot an older version of Windows or 7, which is really nice. Annoyingly, it doesn’t automatically mount the other hard drive (which is C:\\ for Windows XP), but I got it to mount as a C:\\Windows XP folder with no problems.
Even though this is only a beta, it is surprisingly stable. I don’t really think much of the stability of Windows in the first place, so the amount of instability present in 7 is practically acceptable. The most annoying thing is the Windows Explorer crash every time I log in, which is easily fixed by relaunching it. Apart from that, there have been a few minor crashes every now and then, and a few places where it’s obvious that a little polish is still needed (notably the help files).
Compatability-wise, 7 is surprisingly friendly with almost all of my hardware by default. During the system installation it managed to connect to my WiFi, and has been connected flawlessly ever since then. Seriously, two thumbs way up for Microsoft on getting the WiFi thing down. It never asks me which network to connect to, and never bugs me when it can’t connect (because it always manages to connect). Also, I love the fact that Windows 7 doesn’t bug me about empty ethernet ports like every other version of Windows does. All I have in my taskbar is the WiFi connection level and some system warnings (get a virus scanner, turn on updates, blah blah blah), both of which I could hide if I so chose. The one piece of hardware 7 seems to be having trouble with is my sound processor, which isn’t surprising as no version of Windows seems to be able to install this chip by default (the VIA Vinyl AC’97 or something).
On the software side, things in general seem to work (including Uru, which is actually faster, if anything), with the exception of the programs that rely on audio (all of which just complain about the lack of an audio device before quitting themselves – Myst, Riven, etc). I cannot get the installer for my audio chip drivers to work, which is very annoying. However, overall this seems like a very good OS in terms of compatibility.
I like the superbar a lot. It really has to be seen to fully appreciate it, but basically the superbar is the new taskbar. Applications appear now as tiles on the bar, and the quicklaunch is gone – replaced with ‘pinned’ applications, which are always present on the bar. Icons have menus that pop up when right-clicked, and if more than one window is open for an application, a small extra bar is added to the right side of the tile, one bar for each extra window. It’s a subtle way to show how many windows you have open, and much nicer than the grouping that old taskbars did.
Overall, I’m really enjoying Windows 7. Apart from the small assortment of glitches listed above, the environment is very stable and speedy, and a lot nicer looking than XP and Vista. Thanks to a patch I found online, I have Windows 7 until July, at which point there should be a newer build out anyway. I very much want to upgrade my XP installation rather than dual-boot, but the problems listed above force me not to (plus I don’t think the leaked beta even allows upgrading yet). As of this moment, I do plan on buying a copy (or at least trying to get a copy from a friend at Microsoft) of Windows 7 when it comes out. If I could, I would even install it on Eve, it’s just that good.