Categories
Tech

VirtualBox Buh Bye for Now!

When Sun was bought out by Oracle, many wondered what was going to happen to things like Java, MySQL, and VirtualBox. Well given the way trying to upgrade to version 2.2.2 on Windows XP totally nuked my working installation of 2.1.4 which I can now neither remove or repair, I think I’ll be saying buh bye to VirtualBox and hello to VMWare.

The VBox 2.2.2 install runs and then rolls back. This has been described in the VirtualBox forums, but the solution there doesn’t work for me. Not only that, running the old 2.1.4 installer in Repair mode does the same thing.  So rather than waste anymore time, I’m simply noting it here. Yeah I could login and post to the forum but after wasting half a day on this problem, I’d rather just switch to VMWare which we use at work anyway. It’s a real shame when you can’t get the installer to work right. Color me annoyed…

WTF VirtualBox! WTF!

Update: Since I’m a glutton for punishment and loathe defeat, I searched the VBox web site and found in the wiki a link to Microsoft’s Installer Cleanup tool. After running the tool I ran the 2.2.2 installer again. Like the first time I ran it, it hung at the very end. But while the installer is botched, apparently it installed enough of VirtualBox for it to work. So at least it works now even though as far as Windows is concerned the installation was interrupted. Now only slightly annoyed.

Categories
Tech

Flourish! Day 2

Sadly, family commitments kept me away from Flourish! on Saturday. But I did get a lot of time to play around with Kubuntu in a VirtualBox VM. The main hiccups I had were VM issues more than anything else, like learning that I needed to install the guest tools and using ICH AC97 sound. I didn’t get host folder sharing to work before I gave up for the day.

Again, not issues with Kubuntu itself. My first impression is of a very polished desktop that a Windows user should be able to use right out of the box. My only complaint was not finding any way to move icons on the panel around. Somehow my K menu ended up on the right side of the screen rather than the left.

I’ll probably play around with Kubuntu some more, but first I want to jump into Processing. I downloaded the installation from Processing.org and had been hoping to attend the workshop at Flourish. Since that didn’t come to pass I’ll just have to poke about on my own, which is pretty much SOP for me anyway, and a lot of fun!

Categories
Game Development Tech

Flourish! Day 1

Software development is a world that is always changing, especially the world of open source software development. It takes a bit of effort just to keep up, so with that in mind I decided to go to Flourish! Open Source Conference at the University of Illinois at Chicago today.

I almost didn’t go because nothing on the schedule appeared to be directly related to my current projects. But after having been reminded of the conference by a coworker, I decided what the heck, it’ll probably be fun! And I was not disappointed.

I went to talks on Kubuntu, the Open Source Lab at Oregon State, the Processing development language and environment, and a couple on Android app and game development. I was particularly interested in the Kubuntu presentation because KDE apps have started showing up everywhere, including Windows. But the presentation that totally blew me away was Processing!

Processing allows artists to create incredible graphics and animation often with only a few lines of code. I’m really not doing it justice with this description, so please visit Processing.org. All I know is that I just discovered something that I may be able to use to better visualize the data in a big project I’m working on!

So my day at Flourish has paid off far more than I would have imagined. It really is a blessing to be able to do what you love for a living! I won’t be able to make the whole day tomorrow, but hopefully I can at least get there for the Processing workshop and afternoon panel.

Categories
General Tech

Living Ahead Can Be Lonely

As a kid, it was my dream to live in a future of computers, spaceships, and robots. That was long ago, and the future came, and well, in some ways is even better than I might have imagined. But sometimes it gets a little lonely when your friends don’t seem  to have kept up.

I’ve always been a tech enthusiast, happy to live on the bleeding edge of technology long before it becomes safe for the masses. I’ve slowed down just a tiny bit, preferring to have others beta test before I waste my dwindling remainder of years. But I’ve been careful not to fall into the trap of becoming frozen at whatever the prevailing tech was when you reached adulthood. I push myself to learn and use the latest while my age peers have mostly become frozen in the age of telephones and simple cable television.

As a result, I rarely find my childhood friends on social networking sites like Facebook. Nor will typing their names in Google yield useful results. I can almost hear a howling wind as I stand on this barren age plane of the internet.

It’s not all bad though. I’ve made a lot of new, usually much younger, friends over the years as a result of my continuously evolving  and interests. Sometimes I feel bad having to hide my age, but sadly, it would only be a stumbling block, so I usually won’t mention it, preferring to merely be “over 30”. LOL, in real life people are usually shocked to learn how old I really am! Anyhow, I’m still having fun despite the temporal disconnect, so to speak. Still, it would be cool to have more people my age interested in the same things without it seeming creepy. I think I’m going to start actively seeking them out!

Categories
Media and Entertainment Tech

Hulu vs Boxee Round 3

In what is shaping up as a defining battle of new business model versus old, Hulu has decided to block its RSS feed if the reader is Boxee. I say a defining battle because Hulu, acting as a proxy for some of the giants of the old, television centered, media business model, is trying to dictate the where, what, and how of how the customer consumes their product. But clearly, the customer wants to decide for him/herself the where, when, and how of media consumption.

I don’t really blame Hulu because they’re just trying to meet the demands of their content providers (and save cable subscriptions), even though those demands are ultimately at odds with what the customer wants. The recent popularity of Boxee seems to indicate that a lot of people want to be able to easily what internet video on their TVs as well as computers. Ultimately, that’s something that the market is going to have to get used to and learn to profit from. Will the profits be as big as in the past? Who knows? It’s too early to tell, but I think that fighting the change will only alienate viewers and push them to pirated media sources. The successful business knows that the customer is always right.

Categories
Tech

Facebook Appin Time

A few days ago I finally got what I thought was a good idea for a Facebook application. I’ve been working on it and learning a few things about what is allowed and what is not. Now comes the hard part, making something that is really useful and perhaps fun, but not in the usual pandering chain letterish sort of way that most Facebook apps I’ve encountered are guilty of.

I think a good Facebook application should foster meaningful communication centered around some shared interest. I’m not going to outline what I have in mind here, but that is my central premise. And, of course, it will be nice to make some money from this as well. For that I’m depending on sales commissions which, if I accomplish the first goal, will hopefully follow in the steps of a truly useful application.^_^

Categories
Tech

Xbox 360 Conquers My Living Room

There’s been talk of so-called convergence devices combining the functions of multiple entertainment products in the living room for at least the last 10 years. One box handling broadcast/cable TV, on demand movies, and video games has been the holy grail for a number of companies. I’ve never been a fan of the concept though, preferring to keep some things separate, like my computer gaming for example. And it never looked like it was going to happen in any meaningful fashion, until now.

Things started to change with the arrival of two devices, TiVo, and later the Xbox 360. The TiVo started its life making sure I didn’t miss the shows I liked. But later it started trying to get cozy with my PC, giving me ways to start shows on the much larger PC hard drive and making use of some of its greater CPU power for some functions. But on the whole, it did these things badly. The TiVo hardware is just too underpowered to do much more than its basic functions. And as a person accustomed to high performance personal computers, I was never going to be satisfied with anything less. So I was annoyed with TiVo on this point, but I appreciated what it was trying to do. And unwittingly, TiVo had paved the way for the eventual conquest of my living room by Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 arrived in my living room all ready to embrace my PC in ways the TiVo could only dream of. Playing video from my PC on the Xbox 360 was generally pretty easy and I didn’t have to wait for it the way my TiVo made me. The Xbox 360 couldn’t play everything I had, but updates came relatively fast and soon I no longer needed to burn DVDs to preview my video projects on the living room TV. Now I could render a version in an Xbox friendly codec and in minutes I was watching it from the comfort of my sofa. A beach head had been established. My TiVo still makes sure that I don’t miss shows I like, but that pretty much all I use it for now.

Xbox Live has a lot of videos and games available for download. But with only a 20GB hard drive, I really felt constrained against downloading video. Not only that, I already had a Netflix subscription, so I had little reason to pay for rentals from another provider. So when I heard that Netflix’s instant play internet movie streaming was coming to the Xbox, I knew the final assault on my living room was about to begin. I had used Netflix’s streaming service on my PC, but I hate watching movies on my PC and wanted no part of connecting my PC directly to my TV.

Netflix on Xbox Live came last month with the New Xbox Experience update and while there were some quality and network issues at the beginning, it’s been a real champ the last few weeks. My TiVo box isn’t going anywhere, but the entertainment center of my living room is clearly the Xbox 360 now.

Categories
Games and Sports Tech

Spore, DRM, and the Death of PC Games

The long anticipated Spore has been recently released for the PC. I’ve been moving away from PC games to consoles for the last few years now, but there’d been so much hype around Spore that I had been tempted to buy a copy anyway. But now I hear that the DRM in Spore is so onerous that people are starting to pirate it en masse. Apparently, you can only install Spore 3 times on your PC for any reason. So if your machine is infested with spyware and you have to reinstall everything, you’re out of luck with Spore if you’ve already used up your 3 strikes. Having had to reinstall Windows on numerous occasions, I can see this as a likely scenario for many. So I’ll be taking a pass on Spore, unless it comes to Xbox 360.

It makes me wonder if the powers that be are intentionally trying to kill off PC gaming for good. Most pirates weren’t likely going to buy a legit copy of the game anyway, but onerous DRM can only scare off customers willing to pay cash money for it. This doesn’t sound like a very sustainable business model to me. It reminds me of my local CVS drugstore, which in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Chicago, has started locking up things like body washes. Rather than hire security to catch shoplifters, they instead treat all of their customers like criminals and in the process offend and thus lose paying customers like me!

I have no time for screwy DRM, but I don’t want to pirate Spore either, so I guess I won’t be playing it on the PC at all.T_T

Categories
Tech

Google Chrome Needs Some Polish Dude

I’ve been playing around with the Google Chrome browser since the beta was released a few days ago. Normally, I won’t bother much with new browsers since, well they’re all pretty similar by this time. But I decided to look at Chrome because after reading Google’s Chrome webcomic, aimed at developers, I was quite intrigued and curious.

The first thing that impressed me was how much noticeably faster Chrome is compared to Firefox on my machine. But in fairness, Chrome doesn’t have the plugins I have loaded in Firefox, still it is impressive. But to cut to the chase, on my machine at least, Chrome and YouTube videos do not play nicely together. Videos would play properly at first, but later they start to play then no sound and no motion video at all. Right now, that’s a deal breaker for me.

Some other things I ran into were buttons in which the text was truncated, and page time out errors on some sites. It was like Chrome gives loading a page faster than Firefox if the web server at the other end is a little slow, which is common for heavily trafficked sites. The button issue may be due to my use of Stardock Windowblinds, nevertheless, Firefox has no problem with this.

I’ll still use Chrome on and off as it is updated, but it’ll need a lot more polish before I would seriously consider replacing Firefox with Chrome. My hope is that Firefox may adopt the V8 javascript engine and some other Chrome concepts in future versions. I suspect that Google hopes for that as well and Chrome is just a friendly nudge.

Categories
Tech

Hooray A Free Yahoo!

Yahoo! has been in the news a lot lately. The most recent news is of a possible alliance with rival Google in part to avoid a buyout by the likes of Microsoft. So billionaire investor Carl Icahn has been throwing a hissy fit because he was unable to make more money selling Yahoo to Microsoft, and the press says shareholders are confused. Well, what’s to be confused about? Are we so greedy now that it is impossible to understand that maybe not everyone wants to sell to the highest bidder? Is it hard to believe that maybe Yahoo! wanted to remain independent? And, gasp, that maybe a free and independent Yahoo! is a better deal for consumers overall. Yahoo! has also been a strong supporter of open source technologies and open standards, anathema to Microsoft for the most part. As a developer, my world is better with Yahoo! than without it. So go Yahoo!

Categories
Tech

Resurrected Pirate Keyboard!

RRRRRRrrrrrrrr! My Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 keyboard is back from the dead, for now at least. After reading on the net numerous reports of key issues, and hating hating hating the replacement spare I was using, I figured I had nothing to lose by trying to fix my malfunctioning keyboard. So I opened it up with relative ease to see what I could do.

The internal circuits are essentially painted conductor on thin plastic film. I noticed a number of dark areas probably due to oxidation. So I cleaned these areas with a cotton swab dipped in alcohol, drying the swabbed areas with the dry end of the swab. I paid special attention to the area of the bad R key. I then reassembled the keyboard and am happily typing this post with it, R’s and all!^___^

Categories
General Tech

My Dead Pirate Keyboard

Arrrrrrgh! The R key has died on my keyboard (Microsoft Comfort Curve)! *expletive deleted* Now I must make do with the uber crappy spare… Not a happy camper!>_>

Categories
Anime, Manga, Etc Games and Sports General Tech

My Sonic Adventure

Yesterday I discovered that my oldest son was farther along the digital media curve than I thought. I was passing by him as he worked on the kids PC and caught a glimpse of what was clearly his art work on a YouTube channel, before he could cover it up! We’re pretty liberal around here, but I guess he wasn’t sure if I would approve. Once the cat was out of the bag and he could see that it was okay with me, he started to tell me about it. Even with limited tools, he’s made some pretty cool stuff. Much of using Windows Movie Maker, Hypercam, Audacity, and MS Paint! I’ve been in the process of upgrading his tools as I upgrade my own. I just installed Magix Movie Edit Pro 12 (I just got Sony Vegas) and he has Paint.net and GIMP already. Usually I pass down software I no longer use in order to keep costs down and to give the kids some experience in the kind of creative solutions you have to come up with when you can’t afford to go out and buy Adobe CS3 right away! LOL, but the way the kids are progressing I’m probably going to have to jump to industry standard tools faster than I had initially planned so they can take maximum advantage of the wealth of knowledge that already exists surrounding these tools, *cough*CS3*cough*cough*… Anyway, here’s something cool from sonic3895, my son, the games otaku and future graphics designer. Who needs a refrigerator for art when there’s YouTube?

Categories
Tech

BSG And Curing A Noisy Fan

One of the downsides of a big family is having to share everything with a lot of people, of course that’s one of the upsides too! But in this case it meant not being able to watch the Battlestar Galactica premiere last night on the living room TV, in part because I don’t feel like paying for another digital box to watch in the bed room. No worries though, I’d just transfer the TiVo recording to my PC and watch later, or so I thought…

TiVo transfers are notoriously slow, so after waiting an hour, I was all set for some BSG action! I started the video and immediately my CPU fan kicked into high gear emitting the usual jet engine-like whine. I didn’t think much of this as I’d gotten used to it. But about 15 minutes into the show, the video slowed down, even the sound was in slow motion. I was sure that the broadcast had been frakked up and started searching the boards for answers. Finding no mention of broadcast problems, I began to suspect that something on the PC was the problem.

As part of my troubleshooting, I decided to see if I could do something about the fan noise. Upon taking the cover off, I could clearly see at least part of the problem. The heat sink cooling fins were totally clogged with dust. So the fan must have been doing double time to remove the heat since there was virtually no air flow between the fins. I blew out the PC with compressed air and since that time it has run much quieter.

As for the play back speed problem, I turned off Zone Alarm, a real CPU hog, and some other apps. At first this seemed to solve the problem. I started the video again and skipped ahead to where I had stopped. It played normally for about 15 minutes and then the slow down happened again. This time I just closed Windows Media Player and started again, skipping to where I stopped and was able to finish the show. I still need to find the source of this problem, but at the very least I cured the noisy fan and perhaps extended the life of my PC in the process.

Categories
Anime, Manga, Etc General Tech

YouTube Stats: My 31 Country AMV World Tour

YouTube has just made more detailed video stats available to all users of the service. Now any YouTube user can see where their viewers are and how popular their videos are in a particular geographic region. It was pretty cool to see that my most popular anime music video has been seen in 31 countries around the world. In particular, it was cool to see just how your YouTube network of friends and subscribers probably influences regional popularity. I’m sure that for some of my videos their popularity in France and Spain was probably due to some friends I have in those countries. Some things are obvious, like Japanese language AMVs having significant popularity in Japan. But a couple with popularity in China and Indonesia had me scratching my head a bit, probably an extended friends network effect, friends of friends… In any case, fun tool! I’m sure the YouTube servers will be working overtime as more of my narcissistic brethren have fun with this new toy!^^



Viewed In 31 Countries!