Technology

Things that catch my geeky interests that don’t fall into a more specific tag.

42 minutes

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Not having a digital video camera to play with video bits, and hot having any multi-megabyte Photoshop files to play with, I have to admit that I haven’t exactly been taxing my G5 since I got it. I’m loving the speed, to be sure — but I also know I haven’t even begun to push the limits of what this machine can do.

I stumbled across a post by someone who does do video rendering work, though, and they posted a comparison of video render times for whatever project they’re working on. The clip that they were working on took 6 hours and 46 minutes to render on a dual 500Mhz processor G4 — but only 42 minutes to render on the dual 2Ghz processor G5.

That’s fast. Time for me to upgrade my projects! ;)

No kidding

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The result of attempting to open a .mix file with Microsoft Digital Image Pro 9:

Sorry

Thank you so much for that insightful and helpful piece of information. No indication of why the file is having problems, or what problems might have been encountered, or anything else. Just the computer equivalent of “Screw you, leave me alone.” Joy.

Search the web?

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Search the web button

A question for Windows UI gurus — why in the world is there a “Search the web” button right next to the “Up one level” button in open/save dialog boxes in Windows XP?

I never realized that it was there before — or if I’d noticed it, I’d never given it much thought — but a few minutes ago, I was switching directories to open a file, when suddenly Excel switched into the background, my web browser came up, and I was dumped into an MSN search page. Now, I’m no newbie with computers, I’ve been using Macs since System 6, Windows since v3.1, and have experience with CP/M, MS-DOS, UNIX, etc. Even with many years of computer use behind me, for a few moments I was completely baffled — I didn’t have the faintest clue why I wasn’t in the open/save dialog box anymore, and was instead staring at a search box on the web.

Firstly, I’ve yet to come up with a good reason why an open/save dialog even needs a “Search the web” button. Secondly, though, and more importantly, why is that button placed a mere seven pixels away from the navigational “Up one level” button, and smack dab in the middle of a collection of navigational buttons? Any other choice in that menu bar relates to actions you can take on the computer — navigational movement, creating new folders, or switching your list view choice — but then there’s this one button, right in the midst of the rest, that ends up moving you from navigating your file system into a web search.

I can’t come up with a scenario or thought process in which that might be useful, or make any kind of sense — and while I’m no UI expert, if someone with my level of computer experience can be confused that quickly as to what just happened, it’s almost mind boggling how a new computer user must feel when faced with situations like this.

Meme 1: The Dock

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My dock

There’s a meme propagating around the OS X corner of the ‘net right now, started by this O’Reilly article, propagated by Jason Kottke, and since picked up by many others, looking at how different people keep their dock arranged. Bottom, left, or right? Hidden or visible? Magnifying or not? And so on.

So, not being one to let a silly pointless meme pass by, I give you my current dock! I’m sure you’re all thrilled. It’s actually fairly boring at the moment, but that’s partly because I don’t use the dock as a launcher at all, instead preferring to use it only to show currently running applications. As I’ve had this machine for all of five days now, and there were a few restarts as I got things installed and configured, my list of running applications hasn’t grown terribly much yet.

I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping my dock on the right hand side of the screen. I’m right handed, so it’s a very natural movement for me to swing over that way to switch from app to app when I’m mousing around (which is actually a little odd, as on my Windows box at work, I keep the taskbar anchored to the left hand side of the screen — one of them is backwards). Keeping it on the bottom never really worked for me, as it takes up screen real estate that I’d rather have useable for windows — I’m far more likely to want as much vertical space as possible for reading pages than horizontal space.

Here’s what I’ve got running right now, top to bottom: The Mac OS X finder, Pathfinder (a finder replacement), Mail (email), iPulse (system monitoring), iTunes (music), iChat AV (.mac/AIM IMing), System Preferences (not usually open, but I’m still tweaking things), GraphicConverter (excellent graphic manipulation program), Safari (web browsing), NetNewsWire (news aggregator), QuickTime Player (had to watch the Return of the King trailer a couple times last night), and iCal (calendar/secheduling).

Exciting, huh? ;)

Trying to get caught up

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So far, I’ve found two (and only two) downsides to the new computer.

Firstly, I need to get used to having a single monitor again. I’ve been using a dual-monitor setup for the past few years with my old Mac, using two 17\” CRT monitors. Once was an old Apple monitor that used the old proprietary Apple monitor connector, and the other was a standard VGA monitor attacheched to a VGA port on a second video card.

I can’t do this on the new machine, though. While its video card has two ports, and will drive two monitors quite comfortably, one port is the new ADC port for Apple’s LCD screens, and the other is a DVI port for non-Apple LCD screens. The machine came with a DVI to VGA adaptor, so I can run one of my 17\” monitors, but that’s it. I’ll get used to it, it’s just feeling a bit cramped right now, and I keep losing windows.

Guess what just rocketed to the top of my wish list? ;)

Secondly, after spending the weekend getting things set up and configured on the new machine — and doing a fair amount of playing and marvelling at the new goodies — I’m way behind in reading all of my usual websites. Uff-da.

So, things have been a little slow for the past few days, but I’m working on getting back up to speed. Small prices to pay, really.

Excluding OS X?

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So I’m in the midst of getting my new machine all configured the way I like it, installing software, drivers, etc. I use a Microsoft Office Keyboard (that’s discontinued), so I hit Microsoft’s keyboard pages to download the software. As I was working my way through the download process (verify system requirements, choose your product, choose your OS, choose your language, and download), I was presented with these choices when choosing my operating system:

Mac OS 10.1 - 10.2.x (excluding OS X)

Anybody want to take a stab at explaining to me just what operating system Microsoft thinks I’m running on my Mac that has a version number equal to or greater than 10.0, and yet excludes OS X?

My new toy!

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So today was the big day — new computers for both Prarie and me! Prairie got a new iMac (which came with all sorts of other goodies), and I got my G5. Once we got home and unloaded the car, we had to memorialize the occasion…

All of our new goodies...

I opened mine up first — I’d been waiting for this for a while, and there was only room on the bed for one of us to unpack at a time, so Prairie was kind enough to let me dive in first. After a minor incident with the knife I used to slit the tape on the box (it’s okay, I didn’t really need that part of my fingertip anyway), I got to see in person what I’d been drooling over online for the past few months.

Two! Count them! Two! Ah ha ha ha ha!

And, just a few minutes later, everything was plugged in and I was up and running. I haven’t installed any really processor intensive applications yet, but even with just poking around at the basic stuff that comes pre-installed, this is so much nicer than my old machine. I’m definitely looking forward to taxing it a bit more in the future — right now, the biggest speed test I’ve had has been with opening iPhoto. On my old G3, with an iPhoto library pushing 2000 photos, it was a good minute or two for the application to open and be ready to use. On the G5? Roughly three seconds.

Oh, and I was highly amused by this. Never having unpacked an iMac before, I wasn’t expecting to see this, but from what we could see when we opened up Prairie’s box — it’s a boy!

It's a boy!

Geek porn!

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Cute girl + Dual 2.0 Ghz PowerMac G5 = Geek Porn! ;)

If all goes well, I should be doing this very thing this weekend. ‘Cept I won’t be nearly as photogenic while doing it. And I don’t think I’d look as good in that dress. Other than that, though, it’ll be exactly the same. Really.

Credit where credit is due

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Wil’s request for a WMV-to-Qicktime converter reminded me of something that I’ve had rattling around in my head for a bit.

I’m fairly obvious about having a strong anti-Microsoft bias. However, I do have to admit (and really don’t mind doing so) that the Macintosh team at Microsoft does some truly kick-ass work. Nearly everything that MS has produced for the Mac in the past few years has been fairly impressive. Even with as much as I bash Internet Explorer in all its variations, when IE 5 for Mac OS X was released, it was the best browser on the market. The fact that it’s since been superceded by other browsers and subsequently abandoned by Microsoft isn’t the fault of the Mac team there, I’m sure.

What popped this into my head a couple weeks ago was, of all things, the driver software for the Microsoft Office keyboard, Intellitype Pro. Where the PC version of the software is its own standalone application, the Mac version of the software integrates right into the OS X control panel. More of a standout feature, though, is the fact that on the Mac, you can assign special functions to all the extra special keys on an application-by-application basis — something which I hardly thought about until I tried to do the same thing on my PC and discovered that it wasn’t possible. Score one more for the Mac team.

All that said, though, there is one glaring exception to the rule — and that’s the Mac version of Windows Media Player. Horrid little application, that one. I’m more surprised when I find a .wmv file that it can open, and even then, performace (at least on my 350Mhz G3) is abysmal. At least that’s the only stumbling block I’ve seen from them. I can’t say that I’m too distraught over having limited-to-nonexistant Windows Media functionality on my Mac, anyway.

So, that’s it, really. Kudos to the Microsoft at Mac team. Now, why don’t you all go tell the rest of the company how to write decent software? ;)

(Oh, and incidentally, I was also looking for a WMV-to-Quicktime converter a couple weeks ago, and found diddley.)