I think part of this tale could be considered ironic. Although in the strictest sense, the word "irony" is often misused to characterize what could purely be coincidental and unfortunate. Even more confusing is the association of irony, "dramatic irony" in particular, as a common device of literary tragedy.
A high school English teacher I once had, made it a point to have a 40-minute class dedicated to the differentiation of the common usage of irony as we know, versus the literary device & meaning of the word. Perhaps it was only fitting, that this particularly bright & dedicated teacher was fired at the end of the semester, due to many student issued complaints about her moodiness; ironic indeed.
Either way, I'm not sure if these particular events in my life qualifies as irony, or maybe coincidence, and for those of us who has more faith in the unseen, perhaps we could call it fate.
As I've mentioned before, a surgery scheduled around Christmas was what started me off on World of Warcraft two years ago. That surgery, was a combination of chance, timing, and my own choice. I could've had the surgery earlier, or later, but the only time slot that seemed to make sense, was to throw it into the middle of the Christmas season.
However, it also is not the first time I've had surgery during the festive seasons. My first surgery (and only other surgery in my life) was also performed around the same time. It was a case of appendicitis that started rearing its head around the 27th or 28th, and eventually grown into body-spasm inducing pain as it ruptured.
Not to delve into the complicated living arrangements that was my youth, but I was staying with my aunt at the time. None of us realized how dire my illness was at the time. Needless to say, I didn't have much to say about the timing of this procedure. Even less had I to say about the series of mis-steps that eventually led to the surgery room. Besides the extremely delayed diagnosis, we had also made the mistake of not calling an ambulance, opting instead to drive into the emergency room on our own. As a result, I was treated alongside patients with slight fevers and cold, instead of proper treatment for a life-threatening infection that is now spreading through my body. Of course, that mistake was not ours alone, also as much as the hospital workers who simply stashed me into the back of the line.
It was a nurse that was about to go off-duty that noticed me. She had examined me earlier and determined that I probably had appendicitis, and urged the others to get me into a room as soon as possible. Of course, the ball was dropped, and I was sitting in the waiting room for a solid three hours or so before I was finally admitted by her personally. Had she not seen me on her way out of the door, I probably wouldn't have survived at all.
That is the closest I came to facing death, a fact confirmed by my surgeon days after the surgery. "You were only about another hour or so away from an irreversible infection, you know? Once the infection penetrates the diaphram and reaches your lung, that would've been it," he would later on relay to me with a proud smile on his face. Another life saved, but it never had to be that close if it wasn't for the incompetency of the hospital to begin with.
However, those hours spent in the waiting room wasn't wasted. I was very well aware of my own mortality, as the pain grew and festered. It was a pain that wouldn't give way even to the multitude of pain medication and morphine I had later on. Although the drugs did create a psychological disassociation with the pain, I would be laughing and joking as they're taking my x-ray, while I can barely move around and stand up due to the pain & muscle spasm. The combination of pain, realization of my fragility, perhaps to a point of how little control I had over the current situation, forced me to re-evaluate my life at that young age.
That event alone, would indeed reshape my life down a direction that I never before considered. In hindsight, it was perhaps childish of me, in both the world I had created for myself up to that point, as well as the epiphany I had from that point on. None of that realization seems significant now that I'm in my later 20's, or perhaps they're so ingrained into who I've became, that it no longer seem to carry any significance.
It's been two years since my last Christmas procedure, just as it's been two years since I first picked up World of Warcraft. As I celebrate this Christmas, a dear friend that I've met through World of Warcraft, and then in real life as well (we have almost weekly gatherings at her place), is having a surgery of her own.
The short and happy story, is that she's safe and sound, with a good amount of weight removed (quite literally). For me though, this special sort of coincidence carries more meaning than just a friend getting over a surgery, but the timing of it, the connection that's established through both the events in my own life and how I came to meet this person, all makes it seem as if a larger force is at work.
The life threatening operation I had when I was 14, the procedure I had two years ago (almost to the exact date to which my friend entered the hospital), picking up World of Warcraft to pass time while I recovered from surgery... All eventually led to me being a supporting character of some sort in her life, as she is getting her own special Christmas surgery.
I don't know if this can be categorized as irony, but I had long ago, forgotten the exclusive definition insisted upon by that endearing, if not moody, English teacher.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Christmas Irony
Wired's top vaporware of 2006!
This has always been one of my favorite annual tradition, when Wired recounts exactly what great promises were made to us, the consumers, and just didn't quite deliver. Have fun, read it here:
Vaporware '06: Return of the King
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Windows Vista.. first round of security flaws
Already, a couple of serious security flaws has been discovered in Vista, a month before its official consumer release (enterprise users can get their hands on Vista right now). Read more about it at Wired:
Vista Security Flaws Uncovered
That, in combination with how hackers already found a way to fool Vista into a permanent 30-day trial. Does not bode well for Microsoft's PR. Of course, all operating system has its share of security flaws, MacOS X has plenty as well. Just that Microsoft is always under more scrutiny than anyone else. It's the price you pay for being a dominant, yet also hated company at the same time.
Aftermath of WoW 2.0
With the expansion around the corner, Blizzard saw this as an opportunity to implement a lot of changes which are long overdue. The scripting language engine behind the user interface has been updated to the newest version of LUA, and a lot of UI functionality has been modified. Some of the changes are more or less just for maintenance, some of the changes impacts gameplay greatly.
For example, a very popular addon, Decursive, no longer works. Which doesn't bother me a bit, not because I don't often play a class that needs to cleanse/decurse; but there was a long standing tradition for hardcore raiders to not rely too heavily on addons that make choices for you. Decursive was one of those addon that clearly would deteriorate a player's ability to play the "right way" if used too often. I never used it even when I played my Priest, running through Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. In fact, I much appreciate the fact that Blizzard finally made a strong stance on how people should have to learn certain skills to advance in the game, rather than relying on addons that will perform the duty for them.
What really grinds my gear, in a Peter Griffin-like fashion, is that the patch has been out for almost a month now, and there still isn't a single reliable and flexible actionbar addon.
The previous "king of actionbar" addon has to be Discord ActionBars. Which is all but defunct given the release of WoW 2.0. The author of Discord decided to create a completely different addon architecture that can modify the entire UI in-game. I've tried the beta version of this for a bit on The Burning Crusade test realms, but the interface is so complex and obtuse, that I couldn't find my way around it. Discord ActionBar was no simple matter to configure & customize, requiring dedicating at least 20 minutes of my life to it every time. Discord UI Builder was even worse, and not even close to being complete.
There are other very simple bar mods that just aren't flexible enough for me. They can clean up the actionbar a bit, compact some of the elements, but they don't allow you to build everything from the ground up. Then there are mods like Bongos and Trinity Bars, which gives you extremely high amount of flexibility in contructing your actionbars from the ground up, but both has some very annoying, and potentially game breaking bugs. Here are the problems with each as of the writing of this post:
Trinity Bars
Much prettier than Bongos, has multiple bar arrangements in different shapes (circles, semi-circles, columns, vertical & horizontal), and allows a few different types of button textures. A little harder to configure than Bongos, but looks much, much better.
On other hand, buggy as hell. Keybindings not saving between game sessions, stances not swapping correctly. All sorts of other problems.
Bongos
Ugly, ugly ugly, but functional. Configuration is easier than Trinity Bars, but doesn't allow for bars over 12 buttons. Only one glaring bug in sight, it seems to lose stances after a while... for no apparent reason.
That, ladies & gentlemen, are really the only two available choices we have with the "new WoW". There are a few other odds & ends out there, but none of them are as flexible as either of the two mentioned here. It's a sad state of things, and maybe they'll eventually get all the bugs & kinks fixed... or maybe Bongos will get prettier.
I have no qualms about getting rid of addons that plays the game for us, instead of helping us play. However, missing critical mods that provides better "basic" functionality to the game, such as just being able to arrange buttons how I want them, and have them look pretty, is extremely frustrating. Makes me not want to pick up the game for a while. Just hope that everything gets fixed before the expansion hits the shelves.
Friday, December 22, 2006
Two years with World of Warcraft
I first started playing World of Warcraft two years ago, when I had a surgery scheduled right before Christmas. Given my work schedule at the time, the only sensible way to get a surgery done was to mix it into the Christmas/New Years season and lump it into my vacation to give myself adequate time for recovery.
Knowing that I wouldn't have very much physical activity for a while, I decided to give World of Warcraft a try. WoW had already been released for several months, and garnered many good reviews. I haven't been a steady gamer for quite a while, although I dabbled in various MMORPG for a bit (anything from the pre-alpha, beta of Ultimate Online, to a few months in EverQuest amongst other various MMO's that came and went), I've never found any of them to be a satisfying experience. I liked Blizzard's games from before, and WoW was getting enough good press to garner my interest.
To my surprise, WoW was not only a great MMORPG, but it was a great "game" by any standard. Up to that point, MMO's has always played second fiddle to your regular PC games. Yes, they have a huge community that may suck you in, but generally the grahpics and gameplay was sub-standard compared to what you would get from a single player experience. WoW was really the first MMO to bring it altogether, great interesting play on a single-player level alongside of the massive world and community. Before you know it, I was sucked into the game, deeply entranched in its social atmosphere, spending hours a night leveling and running new instances and challenges.
I think the biggest misconception about a game like this to the outsiders, is that a game is just a "game". There are many often heard, cliched complaints about people who are dedicated to WoW. For example, people who wanted you to do something else instead of playing the game may say something like, "Why don't you just save the game?" To these people, it isn't obvious that WoW is more than just a game. As with all MMO's, a huge part of the attraction is the social atmosphere that is established over this virtual environment. Having a game-based objective helps bringing people together via providing them with a common interest. However it is the social interactions and obligations that makes the game as important to people who are playing it, as much as their other, non-game space related social obligations.
In the two years I've been in WoW, I've gone through the transitions of being a casual player, to a hardcore raider, then toned back down to a semi-hardcore casual player. Through the journey I've met a lot of people from all different facets of life. There are your high school and college students who are so addicted to the game to the edge of dropping out of school (which I highly recommend against). There are the working class folks like me. Then there are the independently wealthy folks that doesn't have to worry about other things in life except to play WoW (I wish I was one of these folks). What's even more surprising, especially for a person from my perspective of a single, working professional, is that for many people WoW is a family activity rather than an individualistic endeavor. I've ran across more than a couple of gamers whose spouse, children, some even grandparents that all played WoW as a part of their daily social interaction.
What is also interesting, is that the older, more mature the gamer is behind the character, the more likely that WoW carries more meaning than just being a game. It is easy for some of the younger kids to dismiss WoW as "just a game" and the social community they work within, whether a pick-up group or a guild, are just means to the next great loot. The older the gamer is, the more cognizant they are of social ramifications of the community they are involved with.
To those uninitiated, it may seem ludicrous to treat the friends that I've made in a "game" to those whom I've made in real life. The reality is that our social behavior is changing rapidly by an entire generation at a time. Just as kids who make friends via MySpace, communicate to each other by IM and text messages, WoW is no less a social atsmophere within the context of a game as MySpace is a social atmosphere within the context of Web 2.0. I think this behavior is also proven through Second Life, which is a virtual environment without a hint of the game-induced, goal-driven context; unless the goal is of the individual who wishes to participate in such a virtual environment on their own accord.
It also makes me wonder, what if World of Warcraft fails us one day, either by not living up to our expectation (The Burning Crusader expansion is just around the corner, and we'll see how the critical mass respond to it), or just shutting down operation in transition to another game (perhaps, World of Starcraft one day?). What will be the next destination for our mass social gathering?
Presto in the press!
Some people know, but most probably don't... My current place of employment is Presto Services Inc., which in conjuncture with HP, makes a device that allows people who don't have a computer to have access to email that "prints". It differs from previous offering of similar type in the industry, in that it doesn't attempt to make another device that's just similar to a miniature computer. I don't want to go into too much here, but it's been getting enough reviews in the press, so you can go read about it in the expanded post.
USA Today's article on Presto
Walt Mossberg's review on Wall Street Journal
(sorry, subscription required for this one)
Presto on CBS's Early Show
Presto on CBS's local San Diego station
San Jose Mercury News
A very detailed out of the box experience via Gear Diary
We're finally getting Marty McFly's shoes! (sorta)
I swear I've been dreaming about getting these shoes since I was like.. 8 years old or something. No power lace yet, but at least we're... hrm... half-way there?
Via my favorite gadget blog.. Engadget:
Smart sole, adjustment shoe.. etc...
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Driving in the slow lane
On my morning commute, I tend to drive through a lot of areas with relatively wealthy residents, right into the heart of the Silicon Valley. Once in a while, it amazes me that how trivial it was to see a Porsche, Corvette, NSX, Lamborgini, Ferarri on the freeway. As a child growing up in the Midwest (for what little time period it was), those were cars of dreams, magazines, for the most part fictitious entities that few lucky people in the world would ever own.
Yet here, they are the common vehicles of the wealthy young or old alike. What's most ironic though, is finding a middle-aged man with silver mane, proudly and triumphantly driving down the freeway in his exotic sports car traveling at 55mph. Perhaps they are just past their athletic prime and no longer possess the reaction time required for pushing their vehicles to the limit. Or maybe they're just very aware of how much it would cost if a dent was ever placed on their precious gem.
Either way, there's nothing funnier than following a Porsche at 55mph in the slow lane (I was heading for the exit, mind you), then watching the driver slam on the brake lights as if going any faster would tear their $100k vehicle apart (he, on the other hand, was not exiting).
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Windows Update broke my Windows
Alright.. this is just ridiculous....
I just spent half a day of work fixing Windows on my work computer, which Windows Update broke. Apparently, somewhere along the line, the automatic update got some corrupted install files. Every time I started up my computer, it attempts to run itself, then crashes svchost.exe with some memory error.
If you looked into your task manager, you'll probably see several entries by svchost.exe. This is a process that Windows uses to execute DLL's, thus an integral process of the system that just can't be allowed to fail by any extent. After my svchost.exe took a dump (and not all of them, just one of the many processes), my XP-styled UI disappeared, reverting back to "classic style". I couldn't run certain applications, Internet Explorer hung & crashed, and I could not access any networked drives.
The solution was, to turn off automatic Windows Update completely. Reboot the computer so it no longer tries to run the Windows Update process. Then manually go to the Windows Update site to get my updates. After wasting a few hours figuring out what's going on, and fixing it... now my computer is up and running again. Still, isn't this the type of thing that should *never* happen with an automatic update process? Now I'm leaving my automatic update off permanently to prevent any future occurrences of this issue.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Windows Vista: Just catching up to OS X
Now that Windows Vista is shipping to enterprises along with a planned consumer release in January of 2007, you would think that all the major magazines are conjuring up their mega-features and 80 page reports on a much-delayed and somewhat trimmed-down Windows release. So on the lookout for the mega-issues of PCWorld, PCMag, and whatever else tickles your tech-geek fancy coming just around the corner. Meanwhile, the SuperSite for Windows has a very through and detailed review of Windows Vista which will quench your thirst for the meanwhile (and likely much more complete than what you'll get out of those 80/50/30/15-page features).
As much as I adore Paul Thurrot (and that's no sarcasm, I really do admire how much time & effort he put into giving us accurate & detailed information), I can't help but note the enthusiasm and appreciation he has towards one of the "most important Windows release in years." I mean, if you only release one major OS revision ever fives years, are there anything less important? However the review eschews every possible comparison to other existing operating system and turns a blind eye towards the alternatives. There's much to be said about judging an OS release on its own merit, but the whole mega-multi-part review just reminds me of how much Windows Vista is just playing catch-up.
The most apparent example of this, is the 3d-accelerated UI of Vista. The Aero/Glass (I'm still not sure exactly how it's branded, Aero Glass, Glass Aero? Aero, then Glass? *shrug*) interface in itself is close to being unusable. For those of you who has not seen it yet, there are basically translucent UI element all throughout the operating system. The windows in background are blurred through the translucent elements, thus giving you the frosted "glass" effect for which the UI is named after. Problem is, having multiple windows stacked this way causes visual confusion and provides no improvement to productivity. Transparency in Windows has been done before via third party addons, although not accelerated by hardware, and from an usability stand point has never worked well.
So if the interface is so bad, why did Microsoft put it in? It's the same reason why people mod their computer cases, cut out windows on the side and put in a bunch of neon lights. Anyone who thinks a bunch of tied down cables and liquid cooling tubes lit by a dozen LED and neon light is "cool" clearly has no appreciation for aesthetics and design. At some point Microsoft thought that's the user base that they had to impress.
Flip3D is equally atrocious as a task-switcher. It's Microsoft's attempt to make something that resembles Expose, without just copying it completely. Expose on the Mac instantly zooms out all of the windows you have open, allowing you to look through the windows and find the application that you are working with. Flip3D, places the windows at a diagonal view that detracts from readability. Furthermore, it stacks the windows up, so a single view of all your open windows isn't really possible. At the end of the day, it is no more effective the good ol' alt+tab. What I found most offensive, is that for all the 3d accelerated power, the windows aren't even anti-aliased, giving you an ugly jagged edge as it is repositioned into an isometric/diagonal viewing angle.
Interface aside, the underlying security improvements of Windows is nothing more than just catching up to Unix, the underpinning of MacOS X. The one thing that would've taken Vista past OS X, instead of just playing catch up, was the ambitious database-driven file system. So ambitious in fact, that WinFS was axed years before the final development cycle. Who knows when we'll get WinFS? Another five years? Would WinFS still be relevant?
What about the bundled software? Vista finally has a built-in Calendar without people having to shell out money for their own PIM or Outlook. It also now has separate applications that handles photos and other media, instead of dealing with those media organization strictly from Explorer (not IE, but Windows Explorer) as it was in Windows XP. Basically, Microsoft just copied iCal, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. Way to go Microsoft.
The last item that I've found extremely disappointing, is that Windows Vista is supposed to be the version of Windows that finally allows us to take advantage of the 64-bit processor now found in most PC's. It seems silly that all of our AMD Athlon and Intel Core chips has had 64-bit extension for more than a year now, and still yet to be able to take full advantage of it. However, Vista 32-bit and 64-bit are actually different installs. So if you install 32-bit Vista, you'll have to reinstall completely if you want to use 64-bit. If you install 64-bit today, you'll probably find software or device driver conflicts as they weren't written for the 64-bit Vista.
MacOS X, btw, is 64-bit (even though I think few apps are written to take advantage of that yet), and has been for almost an entire year now. No separate installs, no separate drivers. It just works.
Vista will do just fine, because people with PC will eventually upgrade, new PC's will ship with it, corporations will adopt. However, it is nevertheless a disappointing and underwhelming release. Anyone who sees through that will heavily consider switching to a Mac, just as I have.
Monday, December 18, 2006
IE7... customized by Google!
I'm pretty sure this wasn't what Microsoft had in mind when they incorporated the ability to customize IE7 distributions. There's Dell putting their little flashing logo's in the toolbar instead of Microsoft's... then there's complete circumvention of Microsoft's search engine & default homepage. Look here:
IE 7 optimized for Google
I'm conflicted, cheer or jeer?
Using XBox 360 controller on your Mac
The XBox 360 controller is really one of the best gamepad ever made for any console out there. The best part is it works on computers as well, where past efforts by various companies to produce a good gamepad has always fell short. You can't fully realize the XBox 360 controller's potential just yet on the PC though, as full support won't arrive until Windows Vista. The current PC drivers can't take advantage of all the buttons, and has trouble dealing with several of the input axis (getting analog stick & the paddle trigger to work, for example, is an exercise of frustration).
Of course, Microsoft isn't offering a driver for the Mac. However, just as SteerMouse provides an excellent third party solution for enhancing your mouse on the Mac, there are third party driver for getting the XBox 360 controller to work on your Mac as well. Spotty game support is more of an issue, but I'd imagine most of us will just be playing emulator games with that controller anyway.
Take a look at the Mac driver for the XBox 360 controller here.
Between work, holiday, and everything else...
... I became an American citizen at last. As much as I should have been excited, my mood was rather nonchalant, preceded by weeks worth of anxiety, and followed only by a sense of relief. My journey to citizenship was not particularly painful, but it was anything but pleasant. The old immigration services department was extremely inefficient, insisted on pushing paperwork around the country rather than getting data computerized. The result of which was a long and tedious application, and re-application process which was repeated more than a few times in the past few years.
The most frustrating aspect was how much time it took just to confirm that my paperwork had yet again disappeared in the abyss of bureaucracy. At some point I suspected that a team of entrepreneurial gnomes snuck into the the INS office and stole paperwork on a nightly basis, a la South Park's underpants gnomes. They would then transport those paperwork into their secret underground headquarter, where on one side of the cave, there would be a huge poster of their business development flowchart. One huge block with "Immigration application", eventually leading into a bubble that says "Profit"; but the step in between would be filled with just a giant-sized question mark.
In a way, it would make more sense to shred a certain number of application per year by "accident" in order to extract more application fee out of the same people over and over again. After all, there are no repeat customers in the naturalization market. You can only get naturalized once in a lifetime; well, unless you decide that Vancouver is more to your liking than United States (a conclusion with surprising number of growing supporters).
The irony of the whole thing, is that it wasn't for 9/11, I may still be amidst the process. It was the establishment of Homeland Security that forced changes in the immigration services that moved all the paper-based processes into one that is electronic. Imagine the most important document in your life handed over to some random person without a face, being packaged & shuffled across the country multiple times. That was the situation that I, along with what has to be hundreds of thousands of immigrants per year has to deal with.
It seems very odd to me, that this, my last application went through with rapid speed. It took no more than six months before I was in an auditorium, with 1255 other newly minted Americans, to take our final oath and turn in our green card. Yet this turn of events was at least in part, made possible by the tragic event that has shaped America for the past several years. The impact of 9/11 isn't just those people who died, but the families of those who had to carry on, and those soldiers we're sending overseas to fight in a fictitious war.
Yet for at least one person, 9/11 was a fortunate event.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Tab & selection fields on MacOS X
There was one very, very annoying issue that I've found with MacOS X. When you tab through fields, it will by default, always skip over drop-down selection menus. Since so many websites uses this as say, the credit card expiration date field, it is extremely annoying as we get close to the Christmas season.
Just doing a bit of digging though, I came across the solution. Turns out this is a behavior that wasn't just browser specific, but applied across the entire OS. All you have to do is change the option of how your keyboard behaves. Tony Spencer has a blog post on how it's done:
"Un-skip" those dropdown boxes now!
Friday, December 8, 2006
Trick to get Word out of Word 2007
As a follow up to my post about Word 2007 file format incompatibilities, there are some very clever people that found out how you can extract the text out of these new file formats. Go to MacOSXHints to read more:
Extract text out of Word 2007
Terabyte on a DVD? Laughing in the face of blue-ray
ZD's emerging technology blog has a piece on some new research that combines the usage of lasers at different wavelength, allowing recording on multi-layer DVD technology and storing up to 1 terabyte of information per disc. Even more impressive is that the technology doesn't require the use of those expensive & rare blue-ray diodes."The process involves shooting two different wavelengths of light onto the recording surface. The use of two lasers creates a very specific image that is sharper than what current techniques can render. Depending on the color (wavelength) of the light, information is written onto a disk. The information is highly compacted, so the disk isn’t much thicker. It’s like a typical DVD."
But.. all is not good news.. how long before we'll actually see this technology?"But when will we able to use DVDs with a terabyte capacity? Not before several years. In fact, the researchers just received a $270,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to continue its work."
Yeah.. it'll be a while.
Firefly MMO may be coming our way?!! Now that's shiny, dong ma?
According to Wired, Multiverse has signed a deal with Fox, securing the right to make a MMO based on Firefly. I'm holding cautious enthusiasm right now, since Multiverse has not to this date, produced any games on their own. Instead, Multiverse's business plan so far has been providing the platform (some may say "game engine", but there platform is a more appropriate phrase, because the background infrastructure is much more massive compared to say, a FPS game) for developers to make their own MMO's. I'm a bit unclear if Multiverse is planning to make this themselves, or maybe they're going to license it to one of the game developers currently using their platform.
Read more about the deal here (Wired).
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Mac software for switchers
As I've mentioned in the "Yes, I'm a 'switcher'" post, I'm a very recent convert to the Mac. Although I can't quite identify myself as a pure convert, since I've had plenty of experience with Mac since childhood, throughout college & professionally. I just haven't owned a Mac at home for the past decade and a half.
There are a lot of fear in switching to a new platform. Although going from Windows to Mac really isn't that hard, a bit of a learning curve is involved in acclimation to the slight differences in their UI. Honestly, Windows has always emulated Mac, and then Mac emulated some parts of Window, it's really not that hard to get accustomed. What is a bigger problem though, is getting replacement software for what you're used to in Windows.
Here's the good news, there is a plethora of budget to free Mac software that can probably cover everything you do in Windows, and in many cases, do it even better.
Mail, Address & Calendar
Most people has seen plenty of iTunes, heard about iMovie and iDVD in the barrage of Apple TV ads. I'm surprised at how many people who don't know about the other very useful, and powerful software that Mac comes with.
Mail (sometimes called Mail.app to not confuse it with... well, mail) is the default email program shipped with Mac. It does look extremely simple and straight forward at first, but it does have a good amount of hidden power under its UI. The rules are extremely robust and easy to configure. It comes with a very decent built-in junkmail filter. What impressed me the most, is one silly little feature (as with everything in life, it's the little details that makes a huge difference): Mail automatically sorts your email into separate inboxes by account, along with a top level inbox. So you can view each individual account or all your email at once. I used to spend minutes in Outlook creating rules to sort my email into different boxes by account, now that's all done automatically as soon as I create an account. Like I said, little thing that counts.
Mail doesn't have its own contact list, instead it is integrated with Address Book (sometimes I really wish they would come up with some awesome superhero-sounding names for these applications). This idea of having many smaller application that does one particular task well, and also allows other application to integrate & access that data seamlessly, is one you'll find across many Mac applications (even third party apps does a great job at doing this). For example, adding a birthday to my friend in Address Book, automatically creates an appointment entry in iCal. Similarly, any email request for appointment that comes through Mail, is also added to iCal automatically.
Between Mail, Address Book, and iCal, I've found absolutely no reason to use any other PIM software. If you're really into Microsoft Outlook, and just can't abandone its all-in-one behemoth-like philosophy, then you can still get Microsoft Entourage. Of course, you'd have to pay Microsoft for that one.
Web Browsers
MacOS comes with Safari, but I'm really not too hot on Safari. It's a decent browser, but the lack of support & worries over the adaptation of standards (at least, the interpreted web standards) just doesn't float my boat. Instead, I always fall back on Firefox, just as I did with my PC. The number of available extensions, open source community development still makes Firefox the best browser on both Mac & Windows.
There is another viable option. OmniWeb is also based on WebKit, like Safari, but it offers some additional functionality that is at least somewhat intriguing. You may find it to your likings, but you do have to pay for OmniWeb.
Other Internet Utilities
For FTP I use CyberDuck, which is another one of those great, free and open-source application. I use Speed Download to manage my downloads, it's faster than Firefox's built-in downloader by a huge margin, and at $25, it's not an expensive purchase. Shrook is one of the best RSS reader out there, and again, available for free. The only downside to Shrook is the UI heavily depends on having a wide-screen. Given most default Mac configuration these days, that's not much of a problem.
Productivity
I don't use Microsoft Office anymore. I can't help but shake the feeling that the Mac development team at Microsoft is all huddled up in this little corner of one building, with the rest of the employees walking by them pretending they don't exist. They do turn out excellent software at times, but it's always short on a few features here and there, not enough resource for development... etc.. etc... Just look at the crippled MSN Messenger for Mac.
So, Microsoft Office is not universal binary and have no plans to be in its current iteration. There are no clear plans of what's going to happen after Office 2007 comes out for PC. As mentioned in my previous post, there are going to file incompatibility problem between Mac version of Office and Office 2007.
Instead, I've switched over to NeoOffice, the open-source alternative based on OpenOffice. The performance of NeoOffice isn't the best, but it gets most of what I need out of an office suite for no cost at all.
Another great productivity software is OmniGraffle, by the same people that makes OmniWeb. This is one robust application that allows you to create flowcharts that are highly functional, and much better looking than Visio.
Multimedia
As great as iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie can be, at times they still can't do everything you want them to do. For example, iTunes is a great music player and manager, but it doesn't want to do anything outside of its library-based UI, and it doesn't offer a convient way of converting files. I store all my music in Apple Lossless, but some of my friends don't want files in that format (they're gigantic). Converting file format in iTunes can be done, but it's pretty awkward to create a second copy of the same songs in a different format, especially since it's only for my friends, not me. This is where I've found Switch Plus to be a great application. It can basically convert anything that QuickTime can play (thus, all the formats, other than protected formats, from iTunes) into a different music file format.
I also download a lot of manga, which is a pain to import into iPhoto & view, because they're not really the same as family vacation photos. Instead, I use another freeware application called FFView, which has built-in capability to view into Zip, Rar, and a few other compressed file archives without having to expand the files. It's the best way to keep my manga organized and kept away from my vacation photos.
Lastly, if you do in fact, have vacation photos that you want to edit, but iPhoto just doesn't quite do it for you... try out Gimp. It's a long-standing open-source image editing software that aimed to compete against Photoshop (but never quite gets there). It's been around Unix/Linux for ages, and the MacOS is just as good.
For movies, you have to get Flip4Mac and VLC. The combination of these two software will allow you to view most of the DivX, ogm, mkv, wmv, and various other movie files you'll find on the net.
System Utilities
These software utilities are hard to categorize, but they are all what I would consider must-haves.
SteerMouse - an almost-universal mouse software that can configure almost any of the popular mouse on the market. Often giving you much more flexibility than the commercial driver of the mouse. It adds more feature to Apple's own Might Mouse, and even beats the Logitech driver for my MX1000 hands down.
Zooom - this gives you the ability to resize and move windows without having to grab onto the title bar and the corner. Hold down a customized function key anywhere within your current window, and you can resize & move the window at ease. It may sound trivial at first, but once you get used to it, you'll never want to move your mouse to the corner of the window just to resize it.
Email Backup Pro & ChronoSync - These two applications makes backing up your email & other files a breeze. I have Email Backup Pro scheduled to backup all my mailbox on a nightly basis, and ChronoSync setup to synchronize my documents folder. I don't know if TimeMachine , when OS X 10.5 comes out, will make either of these software obsolete. I can still use ChronoSync to synchronize my files between work & home computer.
As you can see, there are plenty of softwares out there for the Mac, and chances are if you just took a bit of time, did a little bit of research, you'll find software that allows you to do everything that you could've done with your Windows machine. Most of the time, even better.
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Wowhead beta key contest
Wowhead is holding a contest & giving away 100 beta keys. Several people I know already have beta keys, but if you're one of those who are still yearning for one, this might be a worthy contest. See more details at -- Contest: The Biggest Helper.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Office 2007 and Mac incompatibility
News.com has the scoop here:
New Office file format could cause headaches
This makes me wonder, if OpenOffice (or its Mac cousin, NeoOffice) would have an easier time at opening the new file formats & types than the Mac or Windows's previous version of Office. I've been using NeoOffice exclusively since switching over to the Mac. I've never personally required any of the advanced capabilities of Microsoft Office anyway.
As much as Microsoft champion the idea of backward compatibility (after all, that's why it took so long to get us from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP, right?), it's surprising to me that they would devise a format that causes so much backward compatibility issues.
Social network for WoW?
Apparently, the guy who brought us Napster is also going to be bringing us a whole new social network for World of Warcraft. The software will be called "Rupture", and unlike wowhead, thottbot and the likes, it will be able to pull data directly from WoW servers instead of being an externally managed database. Sounds interesting. Read the whole story at WoWInsider.
Read the whole story here.
Yes, I'm a "switcher"
The very first time I fell in love with a computer, was my brother's Macintosh. This was way before Microsoft even had Windows 1.0 up and running. It opened my eyes to what the computing experience should be like versus what it was. The concept of a GUI, the usage of this odd little device called "mouse", the chime as the Mac booted up was all so intuitive to me; so much so, that my brother was concerned with me breaking the computer for the first time. It wasn't so much that I would spill drinks on it, but I knew how to use the Mac enough to really cause some damage to it, where I would never be able to even navigate my own way through DOS without his guidance.
Even then, I still faded away from Mac in the 90's. The mid-90's was a dark period for Apple. Steve Jobs was gone, and Apple stopped innovating on new technology, instead focused heavily on marketing and diluting their own product line by introducing a seemingly endless number of models that catered to no particular segments (well, they were supposed to, just never did a very good job at it). The only memorable about Apple during those periods were the endless informercials I would see on Sundays about their line of Performa, Quadra, Classic... so on & so forth.
After many happy years with Windows (and I do stress, that I was in fact, happy with Windows), I finally made the switch back to Mac. So what prompted me to finally make the switch?...
I never had much "brand loyalty" of any type to begin with. As a personal mantra I have with all of my purchasing decisions in life, I go with what works. Throughout the 90's, Windows kept on getting better. Despite what Mac zealots may be led to believe by the great Apple marketing machine, Windows 95 was at least on par, if not better than Mac at the time. The subsequent Windows 98 and Windows 2000 releases (we can just try to forget about ME and most versions of NT up to that point.. those were.. *cough*... software I'd rather not traverse) were all heading towards the right direction. Windows XP is really the pinnacle of it all, where Microsoft finally consolidated their codebase, giving backward compatibility & forward progress at the same time. Meanwhile Mac struggled along with System 7, 7.5, 8, and finally the horrible mess that was System 9.
It really wasn't until Steve Jobs came back, made the decision to completely scrap backward compatibility and ditch MacOS 9, that Apple started to get back on the right track. At least from the software standpoint. PowerPC was a pretty good platform for a while, but the lack of developmental support from Motorola & IBM really allowed PowerPC to fall behind by a fair margin. Forget the talk about how great G3, G4, and G5 was. The fact is, those CPU's didn't live up to their performance unless given a very specific situation & specific benchmark that made it look good for the marketing team. Intel and AMD was faster, dollar for dollar. The awesome advancements such as Alvitec was nothing more than glorified MMX and SSE. Good thing those did for our x86 chips, right? (To a point, those features have somewhat became an integrated part of the chip design.. but I'm not an engineer... so I won't go into it. Ars-technica is great for that type of info)
This year though, I've finally hit a "tipping point", as the scale fell back into Apple's favor, prompting my switch back to the Mac after nearly 15 years of using Windows exclusively:
Now, I'll admit that I miss playing some games in Windows. It's still frustrating to see the extremely wide variety of games available on Windows as opposed to Mac. I'm just happy that some of the best game developers out there do care about Mac (for example, Blizzard with all of their games). There are several promising developments that will perhaps continue to bring more games to the Mac platform.
This is a huge reason for me to switch over to the Mac. Finally I don't feel like I'm paying extra $$$ for an inferior CPU. The playing field in terms of hardware advancement, is finally even between PC and Mac.
Pricing a Mac Pro configuration on Dell's website, as many have suggested before, will actually give you a more expensive PC than the Mac. An equivalently configured Dell will atually cost more. I think part of the reason that Mac seems more expensive, has to do with their configuration & pricing scheme. You have iMac, which would be cheaper if the monitor isn't integrated. Mac Mini which is a great entry-level machine, but gamers can't play games on it. Mac Pro which has great, awesome power, but usually is more than what your typical user would need. If you can sell a system configured like a high-end iMac without the built-in LCD screen, that would be the price "sweet spot" for the typical PC buyer right now.
I used to just upgrade bits and pieces of my PC to keep myself up to date. As computer development sped up rapidly due to competition between AMD and Intel, that just isn't possible anymore. My last major computer upgrade consisted of an entire motherboard, CPU, memory, hard drive, video card and power supply swap. I've literally gutted my entire computer to keep myself "up to date". The price of keeping up went from just a few pieces of hardware, to basically half of a system. Next time I want to upgrade my CPU, I can guarantee that my motherboard wouldn't be compatible, and who knows what other parts needs to be retired (my hard drives has already fallen behind the current SATA standard).
Mac can run Windows, either using a virtual machine via Parallels or dual-boot using Bootcamp. Parallels can be a tiny bit slower (you probably won't notice unless you're running benchmarks) and it can't play games (just yet, they are planning to do that in the future), but since you no longer need to emulate CPU, it runs extremely well and extremely fast. In fact, some users reports Photoshop CS2 being faster in Parallels than MacOS (CS2 is not Universal Binary, so it runs via Rosetta emulation mode on Intel Macs. This may not be true anymore, since MacOS X 10.4.8 brought a lot of speed improvements in Rosetta. Still a remarkable fact though). Bootcamp is literally booting your machine like a PC, no compromise in speed whatsoever.
OS X had several years to refine itself. I remember seeing the very first OS X, it was a resource hog and had a lot of inconsistency throughout its UI and file structures. All these problems were slowly ironed out over the past few years. The GUI is extremely stable and flexible. The file system really screams in comparison to NTFS. While Windows Vista is just catching up to where OS X is today, OS X is already moving forward. Which brings me to the last point...
Ironically, this was probably the nail in the coffin for me. Windows Vista, despite all its praises compared to Windows XP, simply wasn't impressive to me. It attempts to do everything that OS X already does, poorly. "Aero Glass" is a disgusting attempt at making an eye-catching GUI while giving us no more functional improvements. Sure, it may look cool the first few times, but does transparency really help me work better, or just make everything more cluttered? Flip3D is a complete joke compared to Expose. There just aren't enough improvements in Vista to prompt me to invest in "Vista Ultimate", which invariably will be the version I would want to run if I was still a Windows user. Vista isn't bad, but it's just not good enough.
Meanwhile, I haven't been this happy with a computer in years.
Monday, December 4, 2006
It's been a long time
It's been a long time since I last published a blog. My last post probably dates back closer to the last quarter of 2002.
A staggering amount of changes has happened in the world since then. Our country is now in the middle (or perhaps, some would think optimistically towards the end) of a baffling & almost meaningless war. The web had somehow grown up into "2.0" without my realization, even more ironic given that I have been doing nothing but the web since college. The mass public has moved into LCD panels despite the obvious performance issues that still plague them (and will never be solved), and thus, so did I.
Yet it's also amazing how much of the world only seemed to move forward. Every time I see a journalist talk about the usability & greatness of RSS, I think about PointCast. Much of what RSS is now, came from what "push technology" promised. Now the only remain traces of "push" resides in Windows Update, whose insistency is not entirely appreciated by all.
Five years ago, I would also assume that by now, the music industry would've wised up and somehow embraced digital music distribution. Sure, iTunes Music Store has been an astounding success in its own right, but it is nowhere near taking over the traditional music sale business. What boggles my mind even more is that the music industry has still yet to accept digital format fully, and is still consistently fighting & negotiating over the distribution model. Take Microsoft's Zune for example, which actually pays a royalty fee to Universal for every unit sold. Or that fact that Canada still charges a tax for recordable CD's. I would expect by now, not only the music industry would embrace digital format (I mean, think about it, cutting out the middle man means more profit, right?), but they would offer high quality, lossless codecs. Phish has offered lossless recordings of their concerts for years!
Then again, to put everything into perspective... I've gone through two more jobs in these past five years, but I still live at the same place. So who am I to judge? :)
