Pixel Pushing Monkey

Last post here

2007-04-07T01:41:00.000-07:00

The blog has been moved:

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Phallic logo contest

2007-03-27T13:42:00.000-07:00

Oh, this is just too, too good.

B3TA : FEATURES : Phallic Logo Awards

The game designers across the nation are playing is; can they design a logo and get it approved without the client realising it's a big spurting penis?

We asked our readers to send in the best cock logos from around the world for our team of experts to evaluate. Now we present to you the very cream of the cocks.

ROFLMAO!

Bushisms~~~

2007-03-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

I <3 George W. Bush

And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it.

"This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all.

You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war President. No President wants to be a war President, but I am one.

You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror

The Complete Bushism - By Jacob Weisberg

Value of data over people

2007-03-17T15:35:00.000-07:00

I've always believed that a great product is made a few brilliant people with the vision to create something innovative & intuitive. Perhaps it's due to my designer background and philosophy, where the success and the failure of a design firm really rests on the vision of a few people, rather than say, a focus group, research institute or a database collected over a number of years.

Apparently, that isn't the corporate culture we have in America today. The corporate culture we have today is a series of handed-me-down responsibilities. The board of directors demands that the CEO to be responsible for the direction of the company. The CEO demands that his VP's of various operational group within the company be responsible for the direction of the products. So you would think that somewhere down the line of responsibilities, someone has to make choices & decisions.

Problem is, responsibilities is also directly linked with faults and blame. It wasn't the CEO that made the decision to focus on project A instead of B, it was the VP of some other department. It wasn't the VP that made the decision either, it was the people working in the department that gave the VP the valid information, whatever that may be, that led to the decision for the VP to make the recommendation to focus on project A instead of B. Thus causing company to lose market share and money instead of potentially make millions and watch the stock prices go up (which is only a hypothesis, since project B never got off the groundf anyway).

So to preserve one's "lack of blame", one must create at least another level in the chain of responsibilities. Thus, at least this is what I theorized, focus groups & market research were born.

I'm not completely against market research or focus groups, but I *am* against using those as the only benchmark of a company's ability to make the right decisions. Companies hire people with dozens of years of experience in a given field, trusting that their expertise will provide the company with the right process, visions and plans. Yet at the end of the day, the same said company will question their employees to come up with data & research that supports their every decision.

So what if Jack in Sales Operations has 15 years of experience, and knows that the marketing angle we're taking simply won't work? He's only been in the field for 15 years, what does he know? Let's go out and do a round of focus group, market research, surveys, then we'll see if the evidence is substantial enough to prove Jack right or wrong. God forbid if there was inconclusive evidence, in which case we'll just do another round of research and focus groups until we get enough evidence to be conclusive.

At the end of the day, if we don't give at least some credence to the 15 years of experience that Jack had, why did we hire Jack anyway? Why didn't we just hire some fresh-out-of-college data research geek? Google it, wiki it, then focus group, survey; all decisions in consumer product should be made that way, shouldn't it?

I am Jack's rambling rage.

Create a need, then fill it

2007-03-14T14:31:00.000-07:00

...That's often the mantra of many consumer product companies. It's not just about finding an unfulfilled need in the marketplace, but creating a new need in the market. As devious as it sounds, the reality is that if you break down "need" to its most simplistic form, our lives would only be able survival on the bare minimum of food and water. For example, television was a "created need", and for the most part, is it now an ingrained part of our daily lives.

However, for every created need, there are a dozen of "WTF were you thinking?" I think this qualifies as one of them:

iCarta: Stereo Dock for iPod® with Bath Tissue Holder

I realize the product is a bit on the old side. I ran across a picture while browsing TUAW, and couldn't resist posting it here. Since the product has been released for almost a year now, I'd like to see how many of these they've actually sold.

Been a busy couple of weeks

2007-03-12T09:29:00.001-07:00

There are plenty of things going on that I *can* post about, but didn't have a chance to. So at some point.. they will be posted, right? Right?....

Brute force keygen now available for Vista

2007-03-02T13:31:00.000-08:00

You know it's only a matter of time... just another proof any sort of piracy protection ultimately, will fail.

Brute force keygen cracks open Vista

It's certainly not an easy hack, but at the end of the day is that it *will* work. Microsoft will probably also attempt to figure which keys are hacked and which ones aren't, and disable those which are. The problem is, if hacked keys become widespread and varied enough, it will become harder and harder to track & keep everything "clean". If two people calls up the Windows Activation hotline, who do you trust?

Showusthecode!

2007-02-26T11:44:00.000-08:00

This post goes beyond even my usual amount of geekiness.

"Show Us The Code" is pushing for Steve Ballmer to show the open source world exactly what part of Microsoft's source code is being used in Linux:

Your repeated claims that Linux violates Microsoft's intellectual property has come to the attention of the Linux community. Not only that, but it's been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can't provide.

Publicly pledge your support for Microsoft showing the public the code within Linux that violates their intellectual property by May 1st, 2007.

So far, the support seems to be gathering steam. Let's hope this one doesn't fizzle out like previous movements.

How to: Utterly destroy a game franchise

2007-02-23T15:59:00.000-08:00

For those old enough to remember it, Wing Commander was one of the most revered PC gaming franchise ever. It was a "space combat simulation" (which is an oxymoron on itself, since there are no combat in space yet to be simulated) game which rich and deep storylines. In its last few years, the game was taken to CD-ROM and started filling up with full motion video up to the brim. To the point where gameplay and even some of the story telling eventually suffered.

Electronic Arts acquired Origin, the original maker of the series, somewhere in between. The creator of the game left the company a couple of years after. Since then the franchise has been shelved in vague memories of PC gamers everywhere.

Well, EA resurrected the franchise with this utter piece of crap. So the new generation gamers will know nothing of the greatness that was Wing Commander, but remember this game that shouldn't even garner $20 at Walmart. Thanks Electronic Arts!

(GASP!) What has EA done to Wing Commander! (via Joystiq)

Apple vs PC!

2007-02-21T10:52:00.000-08:00

This is a really old ad from MacAddict way back when (btw, the magazine was recently renamed as well). Time is quite unkind... :)

The Original Apple Vs. PC Guy Ad

So.. this is what Viacom had up their sleeves

2007-02-20T14:56:00.000-08:00

This will raise an interesting "war" of sorts on very different competing platforms. Youtube is all about ease of use and wide-spread adoption, while Joost is pushing the technology envelope to deliver HD-quality content over P2P. If Viacom's experiment pays off, it could easily spurn more companies to pull their support for Youtube and migrate. We'll see... we'll see...

Viacom to Sign Deal with Joost (via Techcrunch)

DRM just doesn't work

2007-02-13T13:46:00.000-08:00

Not long after my last post.. literally seconds, I saw this cute little news item:

Hackers discover HD DVD and Blu-ray "processing key" -- all HD titles now exposed

Enjoy!

CES 2007 W00table Awards!

2007-02-12T10:43:00.000-08:00

OMG.. I have no idea how I missed this post. Mainstream publications should publish more of the bizarre & useless gadgets (or malfunctioning demos) that happens at these events. I'm tired of the same ol' oh-my-god-can-you-see-how-big-that-screen-is. Anyway, here's the very belated w00tables:

CES 2007: The Wootable Awards

Windows Vista content protection

2007-02-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection was published by a software researcher from New Zealand. The paper went into deep discussion on what was, up to that point, completely uncovered topic related to the underlying Windows Vista code to comply with protected content playbacks for next-gen formats (Blu-ray and HD-DVD). Subsequent conversations about this topic flared up across the web, on Security Now! podcast as well as other various TWIT network related podcasts.

Part of me didn't believe that even Microsoft would go as far as implementing a content protection system that would come at a such detriment to the consumer. So I waited for weeks to see if Microsoft had any sort of public statement and rebuttal against it. Microsoft did eventually comment on the content protection behind Vista, and really couldn't say much more other than admitting, and putting a good spin on what has been done.

Short blurb about AACS
To understand Windows Vista content protection, we have to first understand the difference between DVD, Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Our good ol' DVD format was made during the adolescence of the digital content era. At the time the movie studios were promised that this complex encryption algorithm would never be cracked. As it turns out, CSS (the method of encryption used on DVD) wasn't as impervious as we thought. If I recall correctly, the key to decrypting CSS was discovered in one of the software that plays back DVD on the PC. Since there's no way to revoke that key once discovered, CSS encryption was hence cracked forever.

Thus, with HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the studios sought out a much more effective method of protecting their content. What they arrived at is what's known as AACS (Advanced Access Content System). The key differences between AACS and CSS are:

AACS seems to have a more modern public/private key encryption system, where there are many more keys assigned than there are in CSS encryption. The granularity of key distribution is unknown. Keys can be handed out on a per-player or per-model number basis, or perhaps even a per-company basis. This is unknown.

What is for sure, is that there is a very complex & established backend that manages the distribution & licensing of all these keys.

AACS uses a revocable broadcast system, where the content providers can revoke keys that has been hacked & distributed illegally. So if they realize a certain key has been compromised, they could distribute future content where they no longer will play and decrypt by using that pirated key.

Manufacturers of players, either software or hardware based, has to pay licensing fee to AACS in order to use the keys. If a certain manufacturer say, goes out of business and then fails to pay the licensing fee, there are no guarantee that your player from that said manufacturer will continue to function. They could revoke the key and you would essentially be stuck with a brick (or useless bytes on your hard drive, if it's a software player).

AACS is also "policy-based". Meaning that each Blu-ray and HD-DVD has a list of configurable policy to act with the hardware/software system that it is playing on. The content provider can choose to enable & disable certain features. For example, a lot of first-generation players shipped with component output which does not support HDCP (the end-to-end encryption from your player to your TV set), and a lot of current content does not have the policy to disable or degrade playback at the lack of HDCP. However content providers can choose to enable this feature in the future and once again, render your current hardware/software potentially useless.

How doe this affect Windows Vista?
Microsoft has an obvious strategy on making Windows Vista the next "media center" for every home, which probably also led to the decision for them to comply with just about everything that content providers wanted, even above and beyond the normal amount of compliance that is expected from a hardware manufacturer of traditional players.

AACS on its own is much more resource intensive; which explains why very early first generation Blu-ray and HD-DVD players can take as long as a minute to just "load" the disc. Of course that has improved with better & cheaper processors in the players, and won't be much of an issue on your PC. Other than this resource being taken up by decryption, there are still other issues.

Like the aforementioned flexible policy with AACS, Windows Vista is also designed to "degrade" video & sound playback quality if the policy of the content calls for it. Of course all players has to deal with this, but PC users has the worst of it, because there's a severe lack of completely compliant hardware available. To have complete compliance with AACS, you need to have HDCP, the end-to-end data encryption protection from the disc all the way to your monitor/speakers. There are very few hardware available that has HDCP compliance. There are very few HDCP compliant video cards, I'm not aware of any HDCP compliant sound card at all (which means you can't get a digital output, only analog), and there are next to none HDCP compliant computer monitor on the market.

Furthermore, complete HDCP compliance requires part of the video/sound driver to become a "black box". Obviously if the driver source code is available completely, HDCP would be easily hacked or bypassed by some method. So those users who chooses to run alternative operating systems, such as Linux, may be completely out of luck when it comes to HD content on their computer. There would be no open-source driver development to support HDCP components.

However, like I said earlier, most content available now do not have the entire set of compliance rules enabled, simply because there are still plenty of HD components on the market that doesn't have compliance, and will *never* be compliant. It's hard to say whether the content provider will eventually enable these features, and essentially shut out all first generation HD adopters (players & TV without HDCP support are all going to be obsolete if they choose to do so). It remains a fact that they are the ones in control, the consumers are not.

Other than HDCP compliance checks, Microsoft also implemented a "tilt-bit". This is where they go much further to ensure content provider's happiness than even the stand-alone players. A "tilt-bit" is a term derived from pinball machines, where there's a detection that if you tilt the machine too much, the machine would consider that you were cheating & stop your ability to continue play. There is a constant system check that runs in the background every 30ms (milliseconds) when you are playing HD content. It checks against all the drivers in the system, all the processes, to make sure that nothing "weird" is going on. Nothing out of "expectation" is going on.

The reality is that computers are rather fickle machines. When you have millions of microscopic circuits on a tiny little chip smaller than your nails, there are a lot of errors that happens on a very small scale at all times. Computer chip do deteriorate over time as well, resulting very small breakdowns in circuits. Most people don't realize that their computer is very much like their car, where "wear & tear" over time eventually degrades performance and kills a computer (which answers a lot of the questions like, "Why did my computer break down? I've only had it for 5 years and only ran one software on it!"). A "tilt-bit" check essentially catches errors similar to what your computer will naturally produce, and then decides what is deemed "appropriate" and what might be "hostile" and then restarts your graphic subsystem if it detects any potentially "harmful" behavior.

This is done to ensure that there isn't any memory resident hack that's capturing the decrypted output somehow. It's also a very wide-area check for any potential hack of any sort that the system just can't even predict or even know about. It's like catching brim shrimps with a fishnet.

Lastly, there is a 128-bit encryption for all data sent through the PCI bus to your video card during playback, to ensure that no one can use any sort of a hardware snoop to capture unencrypted data going from the disc to your video card. HD content already takes up much higher bandwidth than DVD, now imagine having to encrypt/decrypt that content over PCI bus in real time. That's an incredible amount of resource being eaten up for no reason other to service the content providers.

Will other OS's follow suit?
This kind of insanely taxing implementations of content protection, is what I believe to be the reason that we have yet to see any sort of next-gen content announcement from Apple.

As much as people criticize Apple's FairPlay DRM for being a closed & proprietary system, people also forget how much Apple fought to reach the compromise that became FairPlay. FairPlay came at a time where record companies weren't happy about distributing digital content, and even those who did, did not want to license more than one device at a time. They wanted to charge people money for every device that their music played on. Apple fought back, got the contract so people can play their music on up to 5 devices, and are able to disable licensing on devices that they no longer use.

Even before the iTunes Music Store (I'm also surprised at how many people forgot that iTunes existed without the music store at first, and the first iPods did not have downloadable content; it was just a MP3 player), iPod implemented a really screwy one-direction music download to the device, where the song names would be completely scrambled & referenced by a XML file to provide a "soft-protection". This was part of the design that convinced the music industry that Apple were at least somewhat reasonable to work with. Apple didn't do these things for no reason at all, they did it so they can negotiate some sort of a compromise that could appease both content provider and the consumers.

Microsoft had made absolutely no attempt at negotiating for a compromise of any sort. Even with their Zune player, they agreed to "pay" music labels for each Zune they sold, even if none of that label's music would ever make it onto a Zune. Microsoft has certainly made a terrible example of how to deliver content protection to their consumer, and I hope other companies will not follow in their footsteps.

Pirated software key to IT growth in Romania

2007-02-02T11:50:00.000-08:00

This is just too funny to ignore:
Piracy worked for us, Romania president tells Gates

Although this response could be universally applied to all software, it is hilariously funny that the president of Romania would say this right in front of Bill Gates... and basically thank him for the one issue he hates the most.

Method to make your tenant's day miserable

2007-01-26T07:23:00.000-08:00

1. Tenant ask about possibility of having a cat.
2. Landlord says yes, you can have a cat.
3. Tenant lets landlord know when they can expect a call from SPCA.
4. Landlord says it's all good.
5. Tenant goes to SPCA, fills out paperwork. SPCA worker calls landlord for confirmation.
6. Landlord says yes to SPCA worker, hangs up.
7. Landlord immediately calls the tenant, informing the tenant that she will need the house back in about 5 months or so. Don't worry, you have plenty of time to find a place to live.

I = tenant

Would've been nice to know just a few minutes before I get the cat, wouldn't it?

CNET gives Vista a yawn

2007-01-24T23:54:00.000-08:00

With any consumer products, there are two signs that you're really in trouble:

1. You're only being compared to the same product of last generation.
This type of comparative review where you're evaluated mostly against the last generation, perhaps even last generation of your own product, can only happen under two situations. One, if you're the market leader and there are nothing else to compare to. Or two, you are only impressive when compared against last generation or your previous self. If you're not in situation one, you're in trouble.

2. Even major publications that are generally very mutual and stays away from making strong statements and opinions are not giving you a positive, perhaps even just mutual review.
This would be CNET...

It's very clear in CNET's review of Windows Vista Ultimate, they are not impressed by how much Windows Vista had to offer after years of development, and the only comparison that would shine light on Vista's major facelift, would be against its former brethen.

Snippets like this cannot be what Microsoft has planned for five+ years:

Windows Vista is not the Apple Mac OS X 10.4 killer one hoped for (or feared).

Perhaps we're spoiled, but after more than five years of development, there's a definite "Is that all?" feeling about Windows Vista. Like cramming an info-dump into a book report the night before it's due, there certainly are a lot of individual features within the operating system, but the real value lies in their execution--how the user experiences (or doesn't experience) these--and like the info-dump, we came away shaking our heads, disappointed. Compared with Mac OS X 10.4, Windows Vista feels clunky and not very intuitive, almost as though it's still based on DOS (or at least the internal logic that made up DOS).

But is Windows Vista a bad operating system? No. It's just a disappointment for PC users who hoped that Microsoft would deliver something truly exciting to finally leapfrog ahead of Apple. They failed.

Of course, CNET is still putting a positive spin on this being just Vista 1.0, and Microsoft will publish service packs in the future to improve the user experience. Although there are absolutely no historical example of that Microsoft, who up until this point used Service Packs primarily to fix bugs and address security issues.

Even then, they did not recommend current XP users to jump on the Vista bandwagon.

Windows Vista is essentially warmed-over Windows XP. If you're currently happy with Windows XP SP2, we see no compelling reason to upgrade. On the other hand, if you need a new computer right now, Windows Vista is stable enough for everyday use.

The saddest truth about all this though, is that eventually all users will be running Vista, because it'll be on their computer when they buy it. Chances are it'll be the cheap crappy version of Vista anyway, but it'll be Vista nevertheless. Microsoft will still make plenty of money just by the inertia of the computing masses, with a mediocre OS that did nothing to take us forward. At least Windows users can finally say they have a 3D accelerated UI as well, albeit an ugly looking one (insert your "PC case with plexi window + neon light" versus Mac Pro design analogy here).

Driven to Mac by Vista

2007-01-19T15:15:00.000-08:00

It's nice to see that I'm not the only one that's been driven to Mac by the disappointment of Windows Vista.

From The Unofficial Apple Weblog:
MIT writer says Vista drove her to Mac

And the original article here:
Uninspiring Vista

Yay! I'm not alone! We should start a whole new subculture of "users driven to Mac by Vista" under the broader big-brother branch of the Mac culture.

Gear Diary reviews Presto - part 2

2007-01-16T11:16:00.000-08:00

Gear Diary had done a very impressive and thorough out-of-the-box experience & review for Presto before. They also apparently followed it up with a Part 2 of the review that shows the experience from the receiver's side (the previous review was more focused on the sender).

Worth a read:
The Presto Service and HP Printing Mailbox Review - Part Two

More signs that apocalypse is coming... VirginMega France without DRM?

2007-01-16T10:57:00.000-08:00

The industry trend to start selling DRM-less music seems to be growing. Independent artists & small labels were where I expected to see those changes taking place. However, it seems that even some major labels has throw themselves into the fray as well. VirginMega France will start selling MP3 files without DRM, and even encode them at higher than traditional bitrates.

Take a look at Engadget's article for more information:
VirginMega France to sell DRM-free MP3s in March

Alas, not all is perfect with the Mac

2007-01-15T23:01:00.000-08:00

From a person who complains about the nuisances... well, just about anything, would you expect anything less? Every product, may it be a car, my choice of toothpaste and shaving cream, and as incredulous as it may sound, even my computers (that includes both my of choices in Mac & PC) are far from the utopian world where flawless products prosper.

So here are a few annoyance that I've found with my Mac:

The Finder -
The Finder is an adequate file management system. Part of my unhappiness with it is due to my experience with Windows Explorer for the past several years. Although Windows Explorer has its share of flaws, both file management system can take a few tips from the other. Although the more time I've spent with Finder, the more familiar and comfortable I became. It is also quite apparent that since moving to the Mac, I tend to interact with files a lot less with Finders than individual applications. For example, organizing my photos is done through iPhoto, music through iTunes. However, this also brings me to the next caveat...
Can't cut & paste files -
This is one feature that saved me a lot of headache in Windows. Instead of having to move files by manually drag & dropping, I often just "cut" the files from one directory, then navigate and "paste" the files where I need them to be. You can still "copy & paste" files in the Finder, but you can't "cut" them completely. Which makes moving files much harder within a single Finder window. I understand this design in a way, forcing users to open multiple Finder windows prevents users from "getting lost". Not allowing cutting & pasting "files" also prevents the users from cutting a file, then go into a program and copy/cut a text/image, and possibly induce the complete loss of the file by overwriting that data in the Clipboard. Windows separate these two actions, when you cut or copy a piece of data in any software, the cut performed on a file is just completely cancelled. Even though I understand Apple's rationale, I would rather if they had left this as an user-enabled option.
Lack of a good, free remote desktop application -
Windows Remote Desktop really works remarkably well. It is free with higher versions of Windows XP, allows you to access your computer with relative ease (although also a very apparent lack of general security). The remote desktop software hooks into the windows UI, so it allows for a much faster redraw rate, which gives you remote desktop interaction that's almost comparable with local operation. I have not tried Apple Remote Desktop (which is reported to be much faster than VNC) at all, since it costs a huge amount of money for my single user purposes. VNC is somewhat acceptible, but still too slow compared to Windows Remote Desktop. I even tried Desktop Transporter from Devon Technologies, and although it had really good graphic quality, still wasn't any faster than VNC. The only thing left to try is Timbuktu, which is still expensive, although not as much as Apple Remote Desktop.

Despite those complaints, the nuisances that I'm experiencing with OS X are far less troublesome than I had with Windows. I had installed Windows XP on this machine in Bootcamp, anticipating needing to run some Windows app at some point. I also pondered getting Parallels. The truth is, I haven't found any software in Windows that I can't find a replacement for in OS X. Often times the replacement software is much more intuitive than its Windows counterpart (that's entirely another blog entry, eh?). The only thing I wish I can do is run Windows games, and I haven't found a single game that really makes me want to dual-boot back to Windows at all.

I heard rumors that Parallels is working on getting game API calls routed through their virtual machine. There has always been such software for Linux to get Windows games to play within Linux. So... I guess that day will come.. eventually.

Although it isn't perfect in the world of Mac, it's close enough to convince me to get a Macbook Pro to go with my quiet behemoth at home.

Best quote about the iPhone so far

2007-01-09T15:52:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Time Magazine online:

The iPhone breaks two basic axioms of consumer technology. One, when you take an application and put it on a phone, that application must be reduced to a crippled and annoying version of itself. Two, when you take two devices—such as an iPod and a phone—and squish them into one, both devices must necessarily become lamer versions of themselves. The iPhone is a phone, an iPod, and a mini-Internet computer all at once, and contrary to Newton—who knew a thing or two about apples—they all occupy the same space at the same time, but without taking a hit in performance. In a way iPhone is the wrong name for it. It's a handheld computing platform that just happens to contain a phone.

Read the whole article here.

Mac was very quiet at Macworld

2007-01-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

This year's Macworld keynote was all about the iPhone, and a bit about appletv. Despite that the next release of OS X, Leopard, is pretty much around the corner (anywhere between now and summer?), there had been very little talk about Mac at all.

Part of that may just be Apple is very satisfied with where Mac hardware & software is right now, and any model changes & upgrades wouldn't require such a big announcement at Macworld. I think part of the reason may also be article like this one in Information Week:

"Microsoft had two serious issues. First, they had to make this update of Windows revolutionary enough that it came close to justifying the delay. Second, they had to come up with something that would stand up well with its main competitor in the desktop OS market, Mac OS X. Have they succeeded at both? I'd argue that the former's almost a non-issue: Vista will sell well, because the world won't have a choice. As far as the latter, well, probably, but you'd be hard-pressed to say Vista's better than Mac OS X."

"Windows is...well, Windows is very eager to tell you what's going on. Constantly. Plug something in, and you get a message. Unplug something and you get a message. If you're on a network that's having problems staying up, you'll get tons of messages telling you this. It's rather like dealing with an overexcited Boy Scout...who has a lifetime supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans."

"This kind of "change for change's sake" is all over Vista. The window controls in Vista are smaller and flatter than in XP, and unlike XP, don't reach all the way to the top of the window anymore."

"For example, in Windows XP you have a control panel called "Add or Remove Programs." While not elegant, it is clear. You know what that control panel's functionality is, no guessing. It adds and removes programs. The Vista version? "Programs and Features." Huh? What does that do?"

This article goes into a good amount of detail, including some comparative screenshots, and echos my sentiment about Windows Vista. It's just not good enough to be "competitive", but it's still better than Windows XP.

Read more at Information Week:
Review: Mac OS X Shines In Comparison With Windows Vista

Apple just killed CES

2007-01-09T12:55:00.000-08:00

It's not typical for CES and Macworld to happen on the same week. Usually CES occurs a week before Macworld, and it was due to the weird calendar dates following New Years this year, that both events were held at the same time.

Well, I hope CES learned their lesson and never do this again. Apple just blew everyone away with the iPhone, coverages are all over the web, so I won't repeat any of them here. I'll just provide a few useful links to read up on all the jazz:

News.com
Engadget
Gizmodo

Of course, not the least:

Apple

Despite month of speculations, including many accurate ones, Apple *still* managed to just BLOW EVERYONE AWAY. Even with all the expectations and hype, they outdone all of them. No one cares about anything that's going on at CES now, we're all just counting our bills and waiting 'til June 2007.

Is it finally time for DRM to be over?

2007-01-08T13:20:00.000-08:00

A few, rather small & quiet, news items caught my attention shortly over the holiday season. During the season of CES & Macworld, or the blissful orgasmic gathering of tech geeks as I like to call it, it's easy for other important news items to be drowned out. Small, minor movements in the industry seems insigificant next to the big boys announcing the next awesome hardware-soon-to-be-vaporware. The first is the announcement of a label completely going digital. The second is Jason Mraz releasing his latest EP.

To be honest, I think the Jason Mraz EP has been out for quite a while, I just haven't checked his website recently. I'm also not up to date with the ongoings of the music industry, part of which I contribute to my age. As my parents used to hang on tightly to the music that they heard in their youth, I used to struggle with the notion that I may one day be out of touch with the current state of pop culture. Inevitably I've lost connection with what is hot and cool (all at the same time), and thus transitioning from MTV to VH1, and now really nothing at all.

What is exciting to me, is that Jason Mraz released his EP not in iTunes, not in WMA format with DRM, and most certainly not on the Zune marketplace (that wouldn't have done him any good at all, would it?); but in pure, unadulterated MP3 file format. The audiophile in me still despises MP3 for what it is, a lossy compression format where some of the most important and delicate detail in the music gets freeze dried, but it is by far more preferable than any other DRM-laden formats.

Similarly, Ropeadope has announced that they're going to all digital distribution of their records starting this year; and early indication is that they will be distributing via MP3's, sans all the DRM-goodness that major record label deem as their sacred family jewel.

It is also worthy to mention that some big artists that has less need for major label backing, such as Phish, has been publishing their own music on the web for years now. Phish goes one step further in distributing not only MP3's, but uncompressed versions of their live tours.

More and more, record labels are exposed as promotional vehicles of bland and uninspired music rather than scouts of original & exotic talent. Several years ago Apple had the chance to revolutionize the music industry by allowing artists to directly publish music via iTunes Music Store. Instead they went the safe route and established a storefront for a pre-existing, but archaic economy. It certainly doesn't help that Microsoft essentially sanctioned treating people like thieves by giving record labels royalty on every Zune player sold (which isn't all that many, I wonder if they have to provide royalty on the players they give away?).

People love the artists, everyone hates the record label. The record industry has a chance here to gain a huge amount of traction with the public by allowing people the freedom to do what they want with their music. Remove DRM, and suddenly the record industry improves its image by a huge amount, and maybe that plunging music sale would surge back up again. Keep going down the DRM route, eventually all good artists will start publishing their own music, on their own terms.

The never-resting holiday season

2007-01-08T13:10:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, I wish I can be working at a company where I really do get "holidays" through the Christmas/New Years season. Last few years I've worked in consumer products; meanwhile it is a much more rewarding experience overall than working at a purely tech/web company, it also obliterates any chance of a real vacation over the break.

Christmas is accompanied by an insane & non-stop rush to get last minute promotions in place, and this year, New Years is compromised by the rush to get materials together for CES. Throw in a seemingly endless amount of family events in between, the holidays turned out to be huge fiascos over the past few years.

I often thought about creating my own little holiday season, perhaps akin to the "Summer of George". As attractive of an offer as that is, I've never been able to pull together a "Summer of Steve". My last job left me with over hundreds of unused vacations hours when it was all said and done. I doubt this one will be much different.

So, welcome to 2007, and even though my resolution for this year may include the need for a more regulated sleep pattern, somehow I doubt that'll be possible between ,World of Warcraft, work, and life in general.

Christmas Irony

2006-12-27T23:30:00.000-08:00

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.

Wired's top vaporware of 2006!

2006-12-27T09:16:00.000-08:00

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

Windows Vista.. first round of security flaws

2006-12-26T13:27:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-26T10:22:00.000-08:00

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.

Two years with World of Warcraft

2006-12-22T14:05:00.000-08:00

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!

2006-12-22T10:57:00.000-08:00

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)

2006-12-22T10:50:00.000-08:00

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...

Driving in the slow lane

2006-12-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

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).

Windows Update broke my Windows

2006-12-20T11:11:00.000-08:00

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.

Windows Vista: Just catching up to OS X

2006-12-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

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.

IE7... customized by Google!

2006-12-18T17:44:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-18T15:19:00.000-08:00

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...

2006-12-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

... 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.

Tab & selection fields on MacOS X

2006-12-13T16:45:00.000-08:00

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!

Trick to get Word out of Word 2007

2006-12-08T14:56:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-08T13:45:00.000-08:00

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?

2006-12-08T10:40:00.000-08:00

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).

Mac software for switchers

2006-12-07T16:33:00.000-08:00

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.

Wowhead beta key contest

2006-12-06T00:57:00.000-08:00

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.

Office 2007 and Mac incompatibility

2006-12-05T17:15:00.000-08:00

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?

2006-12-05T10:58:00.000-08:00

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"

2006-12-05T00:32:00.000-08:00

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:

The switch to Intel
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.
PC, despite conventional wisdom, aren't cheaper
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 can't just "upgrade" my PC anymore
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).
When I buy a Mac, I'm buying a PC too
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.
MacOS X has matured
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...
Windows Vista
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.

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.

Meanwhile, I haven't been this happy with a computer in years.

It's been a long time

2006-12-04T12:12:00.000-08:00

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? :)