A Series of Tubes

Well, now that I have Windows Vista it’s time for a review. So far I like Vista a lot, it’s very shiny and good-looking. Many things are still the same as with XP, and some stuff is left over that doesn’t even do anything (ClearType options are still there, but they do nothing). So far I’ve only used a few programs that are incompatible with Vista. They were the Boot Camp drivers (made for XP, some don’t work that hot in Vista…) and (sadly) Trillian. The first time I ran it, Vista complained that Trilly couldn’t use Aero, so it disabled Aero for the whole system while Trilly is open. Even though I have now set Trilly to run without Aero, Vista still turns the glass effects (which are über cool, by the way) off when I launch it. Oh well, I’ll figure it out eventually.

The biggest problem I’ve had so far is (I think) due to the airport card drivers. It doesn’t seem to recognize my wifi at all, since my wifi doesn’t always broadcast its name. In OS X, you just tell it to connect to the name and it does, but in Vista you can only add the network to your list of automatic networks and wait for it to find it. Since it never finds the network, it won’t connect, and since there’s no way to manually connect to a network without a broadcasting name, I’m basically screwed.

Also, I’d like to be able to use my Boot Camp partition through Parallels, so I can try out Coherence and use Trillian in OS X, but I can’t figure out how to use a Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine. Does anyone know how to do this?

Today I made my first Cocoa-based App for OS X. It’s called PieText.app, and is a very very simple text editor. It’s features are rich text, printing, a ‘clear all text’ button, and a special limited edition button, the Pie button. It prints a special message in the document.

It’s extremely basic, yes, but I figured out how to use XCode and make this app using this tutorial and this one. They are very well written and illustrated, and best of all, there are no prerequisites to doing them, no coding skillz or anything, they will teach you what you need to know.

There’s only two so far, but there’s a (not so) subtle hint that he’ll write more if people donate money to him.

Today the 13 Intertube root nameservers (the things that turn ip addresses into urls and vice-versa) were attacked by a few South Korean hackers, in an attempt to clog up the Tubes so badly we wouldn’t be able to use them. 3 of the servers were overwhelmed over a period of around 12 hours, but the other 10 were just fine, so nobody really saw any of the effects of this attack. Still, it’s apparently the worst attack against the Tubes since 2002. Huh.