Ape::Tracks

Two Fantasy Worlds

I'm still steadfastly refusing to join Facebook but I've given in and joined LinkedIn, the dull but apparently useful social networking site for adults and those who can sometimes pass as adults, such as myself.

I'm also definitely weakening on my plan to avoid MMORPGs. I'm much too much of an old-timer RPG-snob to dabble in chatrooms disguised as cartoony Warhammer-knockoffs (I've never liked any of Warcraft's incarnations) and I'm still not fully recovered from my MUD days (those nightmares involving rapidly scrolling green text, struggling to trigger the macros in time...) but the EVE Online demo is definitely fun. Hard SF space opera, piracy and capitalism. Strong Vernor Vinge influences. Drone swarms. Sensible navigation (tell the ship where to go, and it handles things for you. No joysticks, no already extinct WW2 dogfight physics). Spaceships, banks, insurance, trading, huge battles, missions. It's a 1980s 'Elite' player's fantasy made real.

Best of all, it looks fun without investing too much valuable time. There's a chance I might subscribe.

Quadrastate

I bought this album when it first appeared, on vinyl. I've not played it for years since I sold my hifi while scraping together enough cash to move house but recently noticed it on CD at Amazon, and realised that buying the CD was easier than buying a new amp.

The CD includes a few extra track, including Let Yourself Go which I bought after hearing it on John Peel's show back in my sixth form days, and absolutely loved. Hearing it all again almost two decades later I'm struck by just how bloody good it all is.

Dragon's Blood

I was surprised to learn that the world's hottest peppers are grown in the south of England, and that hot sauce is now a local delicacy on the south coast. While I was in Lyndhurst I bought a couple of locally produced sauces.

'Raging Ape' (I couldn't resist) is a spicer version of 'Cheeky Monkey' (also tempting) but is not particularly hot - it's a spicy banana chutney rather than a chili sauce. Nice on a cheese sandwich.

'Dragon's Blood', on the other hand, has been a rather moving experience (tears were involved) and very enjoyable. I suspect it's also mostly banana, but the Naga pepper in it makes things very interesting without it becoming a joke sauce - it's remarkably hot but also has a nice flavour, and the heat isn't harsh or unpleasant. Definitely recommended, but be cautious. Naga peppers are apparently used as anti-elephant tear gas.

La Princesse

La Princesse (1)
Originally uploaded by BinaryApe

We went to Liverpool on Sunday to see La Princesse. La Machine brought La Princesse to Liverpool as one of the 'Capital of Culture 2008' events.

We arrived to find a huge crowd watching a spider that was still asleep - the afternoon event had been cancelled. The crowd stayed, watching the spider.

I've not really been to Liverpool city centre before, so we went for a wander for a few hours and had a rather good meal at a nice Chinese restaraunt called Yeut Ben, then went back to Lime Street to watch La Princesse as she woke up.

The evening was absolutely wonderful, not just the spider itself but the music and the crowd. La Princesse was a truly fantastic work of engineering but had personality too, from the excellent performance of her operators.

I'm also really pleased that I managed to get some photos from the back of the crowd, in the dark. The video clip above was taken as La Princesse approached the end of her visit.

Mod_rails saves the day?

Hosting has always been the weakest aspect of Ruby on Rails. You can't simply upload a set of files and expect them to run, as you can with PHP thanks to mod_php. FastCGI is flaky (I'm still trying to escape it at work). A proxied pack of Mongrels is great when given a dedicated server and enough care and attention, but awkward and demanding on shared hosting.

Phusion's Passenger, an Apache module also referred to as mod_rails, looks as if it's exactly what many people have wanted: upload a Rails application to web host using Passenger and it just works. Passenger looks after managing your application for you, restarting it and spawning new backend processes as needed. It's even easy to install - just type gem install passenger and then tweak your Apache config.

I'm not going to switch my production services at work to this for quite a while, in fact, as they're hosted on a dedicated box there may be little benefit (and Mongrel looks like a better fit) but if it performs as advertised it should be enormously useful for web hosts, ISPs and universities. The issue of RAM usage remains, but that isn't a problem only for Rails apps.

Well worth watching.

Link: Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails)

Evil crumbles at her touch

Camera-shy Anne Diamond carefully reviews the excellent adult game 'Resident Evil 4'

This game shouldn't be allowed to be sold, even to adults

and gets so angry that games begin to dematerialise in her hands.

An excellent example of terrible image editing and lazy proofing, via Photoshop Disasters. Also, notice the Daily Mail's clever trick of scanning and uploading bits of their own newspaper.

Link: Anne Diamond gives her chilling verdict (Daily Mail)

Free Beer Wins Here

Vienna (open source) is great software, but NetNewsWire (now a free download) works much better on my little old PPC Mac, so I've switched over.

Link: NetNewsWire vs. Vienna - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Notes on Leopard

I normally wait and let other people suffer from Point Zero problems, but I got Leopard on release day and immediately upgraded. (This was written weeks ago)

Leopard would not install at first - the installer would boot, but my disk wasn't shown. It was visible to Disk Utility, and it was even mounted (I like having a shell available in the installer!), but it would not appear. I tried three or four times. My boot partition was called "system". On a hunch I changed its name and tried again, and it appeared immediately. I've not been able to repeat the experiment, so I'm not 100% sure the name was causing the problem.

The extras in the installer (Disk Utility, Terminal) are nice. A tetris game or web browser would have been even nicer, as the install took rather a long time*.

Network browsing (Samba, AFP) seems much better. Until now Mac OS hasn't been very good at interacting with LAN file shares, but I think Leopard has got it right at last. Overall speed seemed good too. Windows tends to get slower with each new version, but Mac OS X gets faster.

LDAP and Kerberos integration is looking very strong indeed - all sorts of software can take advantage of directory information and Kerberos authentication. Apple are using Sun's NFS automounter and it's far better than static mounts: just browse on the commandline by cd-ing to servers by name, with Kerberos there to make NFS useful again. There are various LDAP tools that I expect to spend days playing with, like catnip for sysadmins.

Spotlight seems to be much more effective and faster. Previously I've not been impressed, but things like Smart Folders now look practical rather than just good in principle.

Coverflow views seem slow and gimmicky. Maybe on a faster Mac they'd be more fluid and responsive.

At first I dismissed the Finder's new Quick Look preview feature as just a copy of similar elements of Windows and KDE desktops, but it's turned out to be much more useful and convenient than I expected.

The Dock graphics seem to be a bit tattier. I like the reflective surface but the icons don't look quite right. My Mac is a PPC Mac Mini without accelerated graphics, and I wonder if Apple are assuming more powerful Macs when optimising the display.

Leopard's desktop style (especially the blue colour and icons) reminds me of an old Gnome theme. This is good.

Time Machine will not work with network drives, or DMG disk images on network drives. This is very disappointing.

Spaces provides a good implementation of multiple desktops, but there's no facility to name the spaces. Clicking on the Spaces menu displays a list of numbered desktops with blank areas where names would fit, but there's no way to set them. Odd.

The new voice is rather good. There's just one, and I've heard better, but a huge improvement over the ancient ones.

SMB/CIFS mounts are faster and friendlier. There's still no reliable way to get them to mount automatically on login other than via an Automator script, but that works well enough. I'm not sure if it would be better to use Samba for CIFS, or Netatalk for AFP.

The default desktop and login screen image is rather gloomy, and a strange choice. Replacing /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg fixes that easily enough.

'Get Info' on the Finder's contextual menus has moved, and 'Move to Trash' is dangerously close to where 'Get Info' used to be.

Bundled developer software is much better, with less need to head to MacPorts straight away. Subversion is there, Ruby, Ruby Gems, Mongrel and Ruby On Rails too, all with DTrace patches applied. Apple's bundling of Ruby on Rails with all Macs is rather significant, I think.

I'm disappointed by the delayed arrival of ZFS and iSCSI in Mac OS. Hopefully they'll turn up soon.

TextEdit can open and save OpenDocument (.odt) word processor files! This is good news.

X11.app seems to be broken somehow. It doesn't X start from the Dock properly, and X forwarding over SSH during session setup following SSH logins fails - I can't simply ssh to a Linux server and run graphical apps. It used to work fine under Tiger.

I've had very few problems with incompatible software. The only major trouble so far is that Missing Sync 5 won't sync calendars properly (partly due to the authors not updating it, and partly due to bugs in iCal and iSync) and NeoOffice is refusing to open some files over CIFS. Overall I'm very pleased with Leopard but looking forward to improvements.

* Backing up before upgrading took even longer. Fortunately Metroid Prime 3 arrived the same morning, so I was distracted, confused and entertained by that instead.

Lyra, Airships and Bears, Oh My!

'His Dark Materials: Northern Lights' trailer! Woo! (Well, it's 'The Golden Compass' now, following the book's American title, and not quite the same as the book, but definitely Woo all the same.)

It looks good, but I'm still concerned: I've been wondering how they'll convincingly show a talking polar bear (lets face it, they don't have the jaw, teeth lips, etc for it it look "normal") and I'm still not convinced from the trailer. Where are all the demon animals? I thought the Texan balloonist was younger... But I'm still eagerly looking forward to this. At the very least it should encourage more people to enjoy the books. Pullman himself has said "All the important scenes are there and will have their full value." Fingers crossed.

(Via His Dark Materials from Ben Hammersley) [I too will be very surprised if they get away with showing one particular small scene in the third book. Although I'm hoping it might make it to a DVD extended edition :-)]

Going to the dogs

Oh dear. I actually want to get this. Of my own free will.

Link: THE DOG ISLAND

Do not judge me harshly.

Update: Link to screenshots and YouTube (Flash) video especially for Anglo-Hawaiians who complain about WMV videos.