Breaking Windows

What the heck prompted the movie industy to put these new security tabs on DVD cases? Is the sticker tape on the top, side, bottom, and the plastic wrap not enough? So annoying.

The one thing any good horror creature feature needs is a monster that has the ability to evoke terror from its audience. If it can't do that, then you simply don't have a creature feature worth watching. Now, with Man-Thing, we have a walking pile of swamp gas, leaves, moss, and branches. It doesn't matter how red this things eyes get or how many people it rips apart. The entire thing is laughable, and that's probably why the full reveal is held off until the final half hour.

Well, its been a week since my birthday. My stuff is still sitting in my living room waiting to be put away, most of it anyway. Maybe I will put it away tomorrow.

I got my retail box of Tiger Monday. The funny thing is that is is Build 8A428, the same as the GM that I downloaded from the ADC Connect site days ago. I have been beta testing Tiger thanks to Steve Gerhman's kindness; he gave me a ADC seed key.

I have too many variables to install Tiger on my work drive, but I have enough firewire drives laying around to choke a horse. I figure I will test installing all my software on this drive before I take the plunge on my main work drive.

Before I go any further, let me explain something about upgrading Mac OS X. Every time we have even a dot release I see all these people having problems. MacFixIt just loves to post them too. Disconnect all your stuff. Especially your firewire drives. I am going to have to make a seperate post for this because it is just so important. If it is a dot release, do not install it through Software Update.

And now we continue with our regularly scheduled post...

You can't please everybody, and George Lucas probably found that out shortly after the release of Episode I. Ripped apart by critics and disowned by over-hyped fans, it seems the only people who actually enjoyed the film were those looking for a good time. It's not on par with the originals, but to say it doesn't fit or it doesn't have a place in this series is ridiculous.

You could reload this one for hours and still get something new. Some will end up being the funniest things you've ever read:

Vin Diesel created both Mac and PC. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are just hand puppets he uses. The whole thing is just to entertain him as he wistfully wishes for a much simpler time of pirate dinosaurs and flying pyramids manned by busty Nympho Amazonians.

I hate politics. I really, really do. Here we are, trying to educate parents about the game rating system firmly in place. They aren't getting it for whatever reason. What's Illinois going to do? Slap their own rating on the box! Genius, pure genius! Instead of moving forward with the simple system already in place that at least some parents are familiar with, let's confuse these people even more with TWO on the box! Hooray for common sense and starting all over. Idiots.

I am using Office 2004, Mac OS X 10.3.9.  I get the following error when sending an email:

Temporary local problem - please try later

Mail cound not be sent.

Error -17099

I am able to send using my GMail account, but nothing else in Entourage.

This problem went away a couple days ago and has never come back. Really strange. The microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage newsgroup didn't seem to know either, as I have not yet gotten a reply there.

Annoying sound effects. Annoying sound effects that have a ton of base.

Exhibit #1
Be sure to mouse over the car logos, as well as the "collision center" button.

Exhibit #2
They have tamed this down since I bookmarked it. Mouse over "New Vehicle Inventory" or "Used Vehicle Inventory." It also helps to turn your speakers up. Not work safe!

Exhibit #3
Mouse over the "Dick Says Yes.com" button. Funny I just heard that in exhibit #1. Another annoying aspect of people who use Flash. They all go and grab the same FlashKit sound effect.

Why do people do this? In general, people do not want to hear sounds going off left and right, they surely do not need a stereo base beat for a button either. If you are in an office, or a school, or a library, or sitting at home browsing the web listening to your favorite music in iTunes (totally hypothetical here) wild button noises are the last thing you want to hear. Unless the sound effect has a purpose, it should die.

Sound effects can be used in Flash successfully if they are subtle. Most Flash designers do not know the meaning of the word subtle.

A new film for a new decade, Attack of the Clones tosses everything Star Wars into a blender, adding in doses of insane action and mundane dialogue to flesh out the story of Darth Vader. It's a movie that's better in parts than a whole, but as a middle film in this new trilogy, it does what it needs to do. Whether or not it's what you expected is an entirely different situation.

Godzilla struggled his way through the low-budget 70s, the occasionally generic 90s, and an awful 1998 American version. He even survived a nuclear blast to become king of the monsters. All of that to end up in Godzilla: Final Wars, Toho's supposed last gasp for the series before putting it on hiatus due to dwindling ticket sales and a celebration of the 50th anniversary. Not even the Big G himself can fight his way out of this disaster.

One thing handheld consoles always do well are puzzle games. They kill time like no other, require deep, concentrated thought, and can be put down when needed. That's essentially the portable experience. Archer Maclean's Mercury is an odd, addictive, almost indescribable title that fills each criteria required of it while providing a unique gaming experience on the go.

This past thursday (Cinco de Mayo) the Unigraphics and Production staff, plus me, had a Disc Golf scramble over at Carter Park. The first time I have played this summer. It was a little windy, but then its Bowling Green. It was warm, and that is a rarity here. I mean it was snowing at the end of April after all.

Even if I can probably count on one hand the number of people I know who still use a PDA, I’m not ashamed to say that I’m a Palm user. For the longest time, I used the company’s Palm Desktop software. But about a year ago, I switched to iCal and Address Book—while jumping to Mark/Space’s Missing Sync For Palm OS as a replacement for the Palm HotSync Manager—because Palm Desktop was old and messy, and I really enjoyed the speed and integration of Apple’s calendar and contact applications. And thanks to Apple’s free iSync Palm Conduit, I could synchronize iCal and Address Book info with my Palm.

I would have to agree. I really do like Missing Sync. It is so much better. I only came to this conclusion recently, but all the same. If there was going to be one problem with moving to Tiger, I would have put money on Palm syncing to break. This is the main reason I have not upgraded to Tiger on my main hard drive yet.

I also did not know there is a new iSync conduit in iSync 2. That was helpful to know.

Macworld will routinely update this page with information on Tiger-related software updates.

Here is something handy to bookmark.

PalmOne plans to announce later this month its first hard-drive-based product line, broadening its device portfolio and leading another trend in the handheld market.

The No. 1 handheld maker will introduce LifeDrive Mobile Manager on May 18, according to sources familiar with the company's plans. The $499 device will come with a 4GB Hitachi Microdrive and two flavors of wireless networking--Bluetooth and 802.11b Wi-Fi.

They call it an iPod killer. I can't wait to see it, but i think it is too little too late for PalmOne.

LONDON - The involvement of blogging in marketing has taken a step up with the news that Microsoft is recruiting a team of bloggers to help generate a buzz for the next generation of its Windows operating system.

I guess they are banking on the readership. What if it backfires? I am sure at least one person is going to have problems, or just simply tell it like it is and talk bad about it.

But since they will be signing a NDA, I don't really see the point.

That is what it says atop the Basecamp web site: Project Management Utopia. And they are not kidding.

I tried the free trial and bought a plan within the same day. Not only is this the cheapest web based project management app I have seen, it is also the easiest to use. The interface the 37signals created for Basecamp is down right elegant.

Why would Apple move the location of such important information as the fun OBJECT code needed because of WinIE 5.5 SP2 so WMP doesn't hijack QuickTime? Well they did. And it took some searching, but here is something like the old one.

It has been a while since I have dealt with QT, the last time I was still working at CTLT, and Apple had just posted the ActiveX/ anti-hijacking code. Well I am back to QT for this Photochemical Sciences Outreach site. Fun stuff.

I also found some QuickTime detection scripts, but I cannot find the same page with the ActiveX code that I had bookmarked years ago. So here it is:

<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab" height="256" width="320"><param name="src" value="posterframe.mov">

<embed src="posterframe.mov" width="320" height="256" PLUGINSPAGE="http://quicktime.apple.com" type="video/quicktime" CONTROLLER=false LOOP=false AUTOPLAY=false href="movie.mov" target=myself></embed></object>

Apple has added some great pages on their QuickTime Tutorials section, I just wish it was organized a little better. I can't imagine the page with this code is NOT on their site anymore, I just cannot find it.

People cannot memorize cryptic industrial acronyms.

Obviously, Konami believes that card based games can work alongside any genre, regardless of how much sense it makes. Metal Gear Ac!d almost seems like a cruel joke to fans of the series, at least from the start. It takes time to adjust, learn, and appreciate just what it is.

Happy Mother's Day to all mothers out there, especially to my mom and my step-mom Melodye.

stephan.com has some great examples of mischief with Safari and Tiger's Dashboard Widgets. *DO NOT* go to that page if you do not want it to auto-install a Widget. But do go there to learn more about Widgets in Tiger.

This weekend I watched Shaun of the Dead (IMDb, Amazon). I should have caught it in theaters. It would have been worth it. What a great comedy. I highly recommend this movie. It was defiantly nothing like I expected, and it was better for it.

If you love British comedy, this one has it in spades. It also has some nice editing. There is one long steady-cam shot that seems to go on forever. Cool editing and selection of shots all around.

So much for the surprise reveal on MTV. Hey Microsoft, here's an idea. How about designing a game system that *gasp* actually looks like a game system? Or, is that too much to ask? And is it just me, or does it look like that controller could slice fingers off?

Seems like he's screaming for attention, but still a funny story.

Resistant to change, the Hot Shots Golf series made a name for itself with easy to pick and play mechanics, quirky characters, and a surprisingly enjoyable game of arcade style golf. There's little reason for it to change, as the successful formula only requires more meat on the game outside of that basic gameplay engine. That's exactly what Open Tee on the PSP provides.

If I could go back to 10.3.8 I would. I did not make a Carbon Copy Cloner image of my 10.3.8 hard drive, drat!

My system is very unstable. The SystemUIServer comes up as being hung right after a reboot most times. I get hung applications for no reason at all. And once I get one, more follow soon after. I have nothing to do but a hard reboot. Running Repair Permissions doesn't seem to help either.

Under 10.3.8 I could run my computer for weeks before I needed to reboot. Now I am rebooting more then once a day because of hung applications.

Funny enough, my friend Chris told me they had to back off 10.3.9 at CTLT because of similar problems. So it doesn't look like this is a isolated case.

I will be doing an Archive & Install of 10.4 soon, but I just do not have time to do that right now.

Very annoyed.

Your marketing department needs to learn when enough is enough. Your advertising is way over the line. If a NBA fan watches one game of their favorite team, there's no possible way for them NOT to know about the Closer or Into the West. That's fine for the first round or maybe even one game. Now into the second round, for a die-hard NBA fan, it is well beyond the point of ridiculous.

Why do you feel the need to annoy your viewers with this? Do you honestly believe we missed the ad seven times in the first quarter? Isn't it obvious that once Charles Barkley begins sarcastically guessing which ad is coming up next that you've went to far?

STOP with these ads. WE KNOW. This is not good marketing. It's unneccesary and if anything, it makes it easier to turn the channels each break just to get away from it.

Yet she has her own Geocities website. Genius at work folks, pure genius.

It's bad enough gamers are subjected to a Spike TV video game award show every year. However, for all of the nonsense going on at those shows, they at least have a point. Microsoft's Xbox 360 unveiling did not.

Just read how small it's going to be! Backwards compatibility is somewhat of a waste, but it seems like they're going in head first this generation. E3 can't come soon enough.

I originally wrote about connecting your PSP to an AirPort at the end of March. Since them I have received a number of emails from fellow Mac users trying to get their PSP talking to an AirPort.

My parents found a garage sale this morning and called me at home. They had a Playstation, 26 games, and some accessories for $40. Once it was confirmed there were no sports games, I told them to go for it and I'd pay them back. They came home with one hell of a great find.

The Xbox 360 features 512MB GDDR3 RAM, eight times as much as its predecessor... Looking further into the guts of the box, the Xbox 360 features a 500MHz graphics chip developed by ATI, the same company that makes graphics hardware for leading PC manufacturers including Apple... Another startling similarity with Apple’s Macintosh systems: At the core of the Xbox 360 is a set of three symmetrical IBM PowerPC processor cores, each running at 3.2GHz.

I know, why is this coming from Macworld? Why are they working with the thin string that Microsoft is using an IBM PowerPC processor?

Well, that might not be a string after all. The Xbox 360 uses three such PowerPC chips. You can't call them G5 chips because this is not an Apple computer. But what the hell, lets just call it a G5. That would be a 3.2 Ghz G5. Now Apple just released a Dual 2.7 Ghz G5.

Interesting, very interesting.

Until I see games that look good on the system (as in not Perfect Dark Zero) I am not going to get excited about this system. The specs look great. The system looks great, although a blatant rip-off of the PS2. I am just not wowed by how the games look, either in video footage or screen shots.

I also expect Sony to trump these specs with the PS3.

Sega's Spikeout never pretends to be anything more than update to a seemingly lost genre. It doesn't have a gimmick like the disastrous Rise to Honor on the PS2, choosing to instead put the focus where it belongs. It's a true beat-em-up for the hardcore crowd, and it doesn't need to be anything else.

With a title like the Fallen Ones, you're probably expecting a documentary on World War II. Maybe you're imagining a movie about past and deceased baseball players. Would you guess it's a movie about a 42-foot tall mummy that eats people? Could you possibly guess it's the best 42-foot mummy that eats people movie ever? Well, it is, and even if it doesn't sound like it, that means something.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Microsoft Corp.'s share of the U.S. browser market has slipped below 90 percent as the Firefox browser continues to grow in popularity, according to independent tracking by WebSideStory.

I really love the sounds of this. It means more and more people are discovering for the first time that there is a web browser our there other then Internet Explorer.

E3 begins tomorrow, the largest trade show for the video game industry. This years event is particularly important as the next generation game consoles should be out in full force.

Microsoft jumped the gun Thursday with the unveiling of the Xbox 360 on MTV. Nintendo already leaked small details on their console, with features such as backwards compatibility and DVD playback. Sony is waiting until their press conference as nothing has come from their camp other than some suspicious bus ads.

It's not all about the new consoles and game though. Digital Press is hosting their second annual exhibit of classic games, The History of Video Games. Should be exciting and more information is available in their forums here.

The classic brawler that started Capcom's love affair with the genre is coming back on the Playstation 2. This 3-D update puts Cody in the hands of the villains and it's up to his brother to rescue him.

The beat-em-up genre has been on its last legs for years now, living on slightly when mixed into titles like God of War. The recent update of Sega's Spikeout, along with Sony's Rise to Honor are two previous titles that attempted to resurrect the classic gameplay. Sony's Playstation 2 launched with Square's dud The Bouncer. Whether or not this new Final Fight finally brings the beat-em-up back to life won't be known until it's released.

When the NBA Street series debuted, it was fresh, unique, and simply a blast to play. The trick system gave the game life. Now on the third game of the series, it doesn't have that same magic. On the PSP, it fares even worse.

As expected, Sony has released the expected information on the upcoming Playstation 3, now the official name. Ken Kutaragi, designer of the console, spoke on its multimedia capabilities, including photo viewing and internet access. It will be backwards compatible with both the original and second generation Playstation.

It will run Sony's own Blu-Ray discs, their own Hi-Definition DVD standard. Wireless controllers will be the standard, though USB ports may allow for third-party controllers to connect via a cord. The slot for Memory Stick Duo cards could lead to some form of compatibility with the PSP.

Now that everything has calmed down, it's time to look at what the industry leader plans on doing for the next generation. They're not bringing in anything completely unexpected (except the new controller), but looking at these one by one may allow this to sink in.

Nintendo revealed their hand, oddly, in USA Today, which came out before their pre-E3 press conference. The company is still sticking to their philosophy of games first, whereas Microsoft is touting its next generation Xbox as a media center. The new console looks much like a standard PC DVD or CD-ROM drive and will again be the smallest of the three home consoles vying for dominance. It can be aligned either horizontally or vertically.

The biggest announcement is the ability to download Nintendo classics and previous generation games to play on the Revolution. That gives the console a range of titles from the original Mario Bros. all the way up to Super Mario Sunshine. How these games will be stored is not yet known. Gamers will still be able to play any of their Gamecube games with the original discs. The controllers, the source of speculation, have not yet been revealed.

Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, begins the show. He brags that he beat Reggie Fils-Aime in Smash Bros. in broken English. This is followed by a video montage covering DS and GameCube consoles. Aimes takes over when they come back, announcing Nintendo has sold two billion games since they entered the industry. Similar in tone to Microsoft, Aimes speaks on how they plan on targeting different demographics, other than the 18-34 year old male. He then proceeds to throw out some deceptive numbers, including the claim that the PSP had a worldwide launch before Christmas. He takes a cheap stab at Sony while spouting off these numbers.