Joped.com

I don’t watch the news these days, its generally pretty depressing and its a good thing I didn’t.  I found out this morning that the great George Carlin has died.  If you are a big fan of George Carlin you will know he died and didn’t pass away.

George Carlin is by far my favorite comedian and I am very happy to say that I have had the great honor of seeing one of his shows live.  George Carlin is not only my hero but idol.  He has a way with words that is (ironically) indescribable.

I realized it was time to do some mild playing around with client side development on the Mac. Cocoa is the framework that runs the show on Mac (Carbon is on the way out). It requires the use of Objective-C.

For the most part, the languages I know are C style syntax. This makes it very easy to pick up new languages. When I switch from Perl to PHP, I picked things up very fast. I enjoy the look of PHP, which makes it my primary language.

Objective-C on the other hand is dead ugly. Function calls with []’s and class definitions with a plus sign.

C++
obj.method(value);

Objective-C
[obj method param1:value];

I find it very strange to have the left [ outside of object name. Its really going to take some getting used to. A few people have told me that once you get used to it you will love it. Well, we will have to see.

I have almost completed my first functional application. When I get better, I am going to rewrite it with a few more features and create a tool out of it. I will post more details in the future.

Ran into this 5v5 team that was 4 shamans and 1 pally.  Obviously, this guy was boxing.  Great focus fire damage, but any group with a clue can take them out fairly easy.

I had a part in a silly video we made at work, and of course I have to spread it around every where

After the credits, there is a few minutes of music … Don’t worry, I don’t get it either.

BTW, I am in the lab coat …

Someone took the Garfield comic strip, removed Garfield out (with Photoshop) and posts it on a blog. Everyday I get the newest comic from the RSS feed, I really look forward to it.

It takes looking over a few to get it … without Garfield, John is completely nuts!

Go check it out at:
http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com

I purchased the zboard fang a few days ago for World of Warcraft. The reason I purchased it was simple, there aren’t enough buttons around “WASD”. I was hoping it would improve my game play allowing better access to more spells.

I figured there would be a learning curve to get good with using it since its very difference then a keyboard. I gave my self the weekend to get it down. Now keep in mind, I didn’t spend an hour each day with it. I spent close to 6 hours each day playing.

This device is rather cumbersome to deal with. First off, its very easy to “lose” your place on the device. Some of the buttons are so far away, that it requires you to move your hand completely off the device. That isn’t a big deal since they are things like record video, volume controls, etc. The problem is putting your hand back to where it needs to be without looking. I guess over time you would be able to do it easier, but I am not going to gimp my self for a month learning it.

The next big problem I found is the number keys. They are spaced differently then a keyboard so being used to hitting 2 from the w key will throw you off and you end up hitting 3. If I could have gotten used to the rest of the layout, this might have worked to my advantage. I bumped my entire spell bar over 1 place.

I am going to attempt to use it with Team Fortress 2 when I get back from vacation. I have heard of better success using it for FPS games then MMOs. If worse comes to worse, I am going to use it for X-Plane. I plane to use it for the flight computer, trims, and other less commonly accessed items. (Well, you know what I mean)

All in all, I don’t recommend this device for MMOs. When I get time to try it on an FPS, I will post an update. Until then, save your money.

A recent work around has been posted on a number messages boards. I am not sure where it originated because a few people are claiming they found the hack. Either way, the following was NOT found by me

On the Mac type the following at a terminal:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

On the NAS server, create a file named .com.apple.timemachine.supported in the root of the shared partition.

This has finally allowed me to see the mount point using SMB. However, I have still not been able to make this work using AFP. I would rather use AFP because it is a huge performance boost.

As I started getting closer to a solution, I started to run into quite a few problems with my home server. To start off, its a very old copy of Debian that is in a very strange state. I was experimenting with apt pinning a while back, which failed pretty bad.

Its a raid 5 system with some of my more important data on it, so I can’t just wipe it. To make matters worse, one of the drives is in a degraded state and needs to be replaced. Of course, it just popped out of warranty a few months ago. I need to wait a few weeks before I can afford to purchase a new drive for it. In the mean time, I have powered down the system.

Now, I am using a very old and slow AMD system. This was a backup workstation I used a few years ago for some basic web browsing. After running it over night, I was shocked when I found it was only at 25% of backing up 80GB.

On the system side of things, it does have a gigabit network card. However, the iowait time was pegged at 80%. After some digging around, I found out the system only has a USB 1.1 port! Needless to say, I am working on getting a slightly newer system that I have up and running with a new version of Debian. It is the system I was previously using as a MythTV system when I lived back in NJ. The bad news is that it is going to set me back a few hours doing the entire setup again.

I have heard reports of the images that are created over NAS getting corrupt after disconnects and such. Since my data is so critical, I will be backing up to 2 separate devices until Apple releases a fix. The great thing is, that Time Machine can work using multiple different drives. You just need to change your backup location when you switch devices and no you can’t use more then 1 at once.

I have been using Leopard for about 4 seeds now (Legally). Time Machine used to work over any AFP (including Airport Base Station), NFS and even SMB. When the end of October hit and Leopard was finally released, for unknown reasons Apple removed most of those features.

Now, in order for Time Machine to work your only options either direct drive connected or AFP to another Leopard client or server.

Although connection to another Leopard box via AFP isn’t bad, its doesn’t work for me. I own 2 Macbook Pros and a Linux server. I had originally planned on using the Linux box as my server for Time Machine. Since I already had AFP running, it would be easy to drop in a new volume for it.

The reasons for Apple doing this is quite unknown and really drives me nuts. Now, I am forced to do one of the following work arounds. None of them are very appealing, and none I have gotten to work yet.

1. Find work around for backing up over SMB or AFP. Although I would love this one to happen, I have yet to see any progress. AFP isn’t being actively developed, so there is an even less chance then SMB. The strange thing is, you can’t even mount a Tiger AFP mount which doesn’t make any sense. I wonder what they changed in the protocol.
2. Find a work around for Airport Extreme Base stations or a fix from Apple. There is a small work around for getting Timemachine to backup to it. However, the Time Machine interface doesn’t work with it and its unstable. I could put together some simple scripts to make sure my mount point is valid at all times I am connected to my LAN.
3. Install Leopard in VMWare. (I am not interested in talking about the EULA. I purchased a Family Pack and I disagree that Apple has the right to limit what machine you can install it on. Its like aftermarket parts) I have been working on trying to figure this one out. I can’t get the image to boot, been trying for a week now. I have posted on a few message boards, this is feeling like a dead end. To top things off, my Linux server is SSE2.
4. Similar to #3, I was thinking that I could purchasing an ultra cheap bare bones system to run it. It doesn’t have to be powerful, just needs to handle Time Machine and serve iTunes to my AppleTV.
5. The AppleTV is another cheap system I might be able to install it to. I don’t think it has SSE3, so it might be a serious problem. I have heard of getting Tiger to run on it.
6. Find very cheap G4 on craigslist, I haven’t been able to find much under $300. I am trying to do it for no more then $250. I haven’t had much luck with eBay either. Not to mention, I don’t know much about older Macs.

There is also the big issue of I can restore from Time Machine after these work arounds are put in place. Once I find a working idea, I am going to test it. My plan is to install Leopard to an external drive and backup to the network mount. From that point, I am going to delete my test partition. Will all my test data be there ?

I will try and post my progress.

iLife ‘08 for the Mac came with a new gallery feature. Its a much nicer interface then the iWeb version. Its perfect for people like me that don’t plan on using the “web site” feature of .Mac and only want to use the picture gallery.

I still have a lot to move over, especially the descriptions. With my busy schedule, it could take a while.

If you have come here looking for the memorial day pictures, you can find them here.

After you check those out, feel free to pop over to my Joke site for a good laugh.