A good while ago (Ok, a pathetic while ago) a reader passed on a link to Who Owns Culture. I downloaded it, but enough things came up that I just got around to watching it earlier tonight, along with the last Doctor Who. In the off-chance that you're as lame as I am and haven't seen it, go get it bittorrent or just stream it, because hot buttered jesus is it cool (Both were pretty good, but I'm speaking specifically of the talk).
posted on June 30, 2005 at 03:15 AMCovering whether or now is the wrong time to buy a Mac, the possibility of dual-booting Windows and OS X on a Pentium-based Mac, plus more weirdness involving the CELL and consoles.
Please send cookies. And firewire drives.
On a related note, because it comes up every birthday, a caucasian poured over:
- Cocoa Puffs
- Cocoa Crispies
- Cinnamon Toast Crunch
...The morning after really does help your body and mind ease the transition from the sins of the night before. Hair of the dog and all that. This year we'll also have black russians and golden grahams available, which I have yet to try but has come recommended.
I still have the rest of the X86 questions, and yes there'll be more than 2 parts, but tonight was spent sending off samples to Evan and yet again testing build after build. It's amusing to remove a bottleneck and test, only to find it exposes another bottleneck which has to be removed, which then exposes yet another bottleneck to be removed...
Evan and I kill too many nights with this stuff when we're both supposed to be doing other things.
The good news is the problem was found, and Evan fixed the problem, and AdiumX no longer takes 45 seconds to connect my 4 accounts while thrashing the disk... Well, this build anyways, which makes me happy enough to call it a day. I love my software fairies, I really do.
I was able to chew through a few more questions tonight. Endians (aka, one of the most boring subjects known to man), the coexistence of 32-bit and 64-bit, and cheap macs. It's approaching 4am now, so consider this post to come with zero warranty, but if something is off let me know and I'll check it out once I've slept and my functional IQ is back above 30.
I've been chewing my way through your x86 questions (there are a few pages of them), and as we learned in Under the Iron, ask me a question and you can kill an afternoon. Yes, it's that way in real life, too. So I'm going to break them up, in order of the ones that help kill off others.
For warning, I have a habit of lumping things together when it's just easier that way, so 'x86' will be used to denote the instruction sets that make up, well, x86 chips, and IA-32 and the 64-bit extensions added on will be broken out only when necessary.
Every once in awhile I get something weird in my inbox that just makes plugging away at these x86 questions worthwhile. Earlier a guy in the Canadian military (really, they do have one) filled me in on his quest to get pictures of The Cow with a fighter jet, and then I got this beauty:
For fun, last night I cobbled together a Perl script to take some UTI HTML, cleanse it, split it up into question-answer pairs, have them read by the OS X `say` command (questions and answers having different voices), have them MP3-ized by LAME, have them all concatenated by another perl script (`mp3cat`, part of `mp3cut`, yes c*u*t, in CPAN), and finally have the concatenated file MP3-ized.I ran your interview through it, optimized the MP3 and added metadata in iTunes, handcrafted a podcast RSS feed and uploaded it.
What a cool hack, and while the .mp3 is a little rough it's pretty damn amusing. I'm just grateful he didn't make me have a female voice. It's almost 2.5 hours in duration, and if you really want a laugh you can fast-forward to about 2:00:20. You can get this in two ways:
- Jesper was kind enough to create a podcast for those who have it setup, which you can get at his site.
- If you'd like to save Jesper some bandwidth, you can download the MP3 from DrunkenBlog [16.5 MB].
FYI, if you haven't seen them, Jesper's two graphs [ graph 1 | graph 2 ] poking fun at the length of the 'interview' (and I use the term loosely) we did are priceless.
If you're a subscriber to MacTech Magazine, you may be surprised when you open this issue and are greeted with The Cow and white russian. Awhile ago, Dean Shavit over at MacTech approached me about some stuff, and it eventually led to him asking if I'd sit with him and talk about open source.
Being able to see The Cow in an actual printed -- let alone respectable -- magazine was one hell of an enticement, so after some ground rules -- and liberal use of the word 'slumming' -- we were good to go. We ended up sitting down late last month, and I'm told the magazine is in the process of being printed right now. Since it took place 'live', the interview has a different feel from the other I did with Jesper, and it's all about the Mac and OSS.
If you head on over to 'Under the Iron', you'll find an interview with me that was done over the last 1.5 months via email. Be warned, if you're having this thing read aloud, you should probably have 'the children' go to the other room.
Many things are asked, including about Apple and x86 (I still have your specific questions for posting), and due to its length and content should serve as a suitable warning for others who would also attempt the feat.
Small problem regarding the last post: I'd thrown my cap over the wall regarding the WWDC keynote, which meant I had to climb over and get it, but in watching the keynote there isn't a whole lot to talk about outside of the PowerPC to Intel switch post I'm working on, but I did jot down some thoughts while I was watching.
I've been fairly glutted by notes from people attending (which all piled in late, as apparently the network at WWDC was offline constantly), so I almost didn't need to watch it. It also didn't help that I have an unwatched Doctor Who episode sitting around, but I'd thrown the cap over the wall.
Been a bit of a crazy day in the inbox, with half the Mac world dropping into various states of depression or confusion. If I didn't know better, Apple was dropping flash-bangs into the web. Now that the QuickTime stream is up, I'll put on a pot of coffee, give it a whirl, and post my usual running commentary on it in the wee hours of the evening. My hope is that the Sony guy is back, he was the highlight of MacWorld for me.
I'm also aware that Apple announced they'll be moving to x86, but I can't respond to all those emails separately right now. I'm not really interested in some of the wild speculation coming my way, but if you have questions feel free to email them and I'll work them into a separate post regarding my thoughts on the PowerPC situation (short: I'm surprised they did it, but think it's a good thing in the long run even though we may be entering a world of pain in the short run).
That'll come after the WWDC post, and after I make good on getting some questions out for some interviews. I'm so crazy behind on some things that I'm going to have to slip into info-triage mode again, with the white earbuds superglued in place.
Many of the geeks I know are at WWDC or gearing up for it, and half the rest of them are gearing up for whether or not Apple will or won't announce they're switching to x86 CPUs and whether this will or won't be a good thing. Of course I'll be sucking down what info is out there and pinging around to those who went, but my day was spent pretty far away from technology.
The word on the street is that illumineX is going to acquire Freshly Squeezed Software, makers of PulpFiction (an RSS reader for the Mac) and some other things. I'm kinda scratching my head at this one, but it seems like it's probably going to end up being legit, or why else would people be posting things like this.
Still, I feel like I'm missing something:
- Obviously, making 'falling marble games' for Mac OS X is much more lucrative than my napkin calculations would imply if they're snapping up other companies.
- Freshly Squeezed makes more than an RSS reader, but they're primarily little utilities that would seem to have zero connection with what illumineX does, unless I'm missing something in their product portfolio.
Like I said, I'm scratching my head on this buzz, but now that I've had it pointed out to me it would certainly explain part of a bizarre conversation I had with Eric this morning.
Those are almost always a little different, but my accidently tripping into "Uh, why shouldn't I be asking you, you haven't sold the company have you?" would go a long way towards explaining why this one turned so decidedly odd so quickly.
D'oh, I so need to catch up on my feeds.
