n()_cHIEFs Drivel

…and when you think you have enough get more. I’m not exactly sure why, I’m guessing it has something to do with the way that OS X uses and manages virtual memory vs. Windows, but it’s very obvious to me that OS X performs much better when running multiple programs (usually 5 or more) when you have 1GB of RAM or more. Add in even another 512MB and you can run almost twice the number of programs at once without much slowdown. I bought my MacBook Pro with 1GB of RAM initially, and if you read past posts you’ll know that at first I had completely thought to myself “why did I just spend this money on a new computer, it’s running like a snail”, I thought well let’s just try a little RAM upgrade and then we’ll see. And the 1.5GB did make a lot of difference in performance, and as the number of programs that run natively or as Universal applications increased, so did the performance of my computer, to a point.

Recently, I had noticed that with Parallels Desktop, the Mac VM for running Windows, the performance of my computer began to slip. I had also noticed that when running 10+ applications at once, there was a huge performance decrease. I decided, what the heck, all I need is another 1GB chip and I’ll have 2GB and that’s only a small investment and it had worked in the past. So, as any computer nerd would, I decided to add two matched chips to the machine (rather than one Samsung chip and one Micron). Anyway, what did this do for the performance? It’s back to it’s incredibly speedy self. I almost always am running Terminal.app, BBEdit, Photoshop, iPhoto, Mail.app, Safari, iCal, iTunes, ecto and Parallels (yes all of these) at the same time. Since the upgrade even when running Parallels the system is running like a bat outta hell. I had almost given up on having any “good” performance out of Parallels even when running only Safari and Mail.app (which I have to have running, period). It didn’t matter how I set the cache settings (for OS X performance or VM performance) Parallels would drag on startup and run at a tolerable level after boot-up. When switching back to an OS X application the system would be pulled to it’s knees, without being able to move back and forth between Parallels and OS X what is the use of Parallels anyway, here isn’t. So I was about to give up on the whole Parallels experience at this point, but after adding the extra 512MB, for a full, 2GB Parallels not only boots about twice as fast, now I can run multiple applications on top of Parallels.

Anyway, I don’t think this is a weakness of Mac OS (and if anyone out there can tell me why, I’d love to hear the ins-and-outs of why OS X likes to have more RAM than Windows to keep a number of programs running and the programs in the foreground running speedier, for all I know it’s some flaw in Windows that allows foreground apps more CPU/memory than background applications, I’d love to hear it. I don’t have time to do any research to find out for myself, I only have the anecdotal evidence of this post. If I do get time I will try to run some benchmarks to backup my claim. But when I compare to Windows I don’t know if I’ll be able to demonstrate the issue as I would like or not. We’ll See.

…I got an itch and just went out and bought The Prestige the other day (off Apple’s iTunes music store, see the next post). It was an interesting flick and IMHO it was one of the most refreshing plots that I have seen in a movie in a while, although some of the plot is cheesy (the rivalry is obvious from the beginning) but because of the fresh ideas of the movie it was easy to look past and the twists kept me guessing at what was really going on the whole movie.

The movie is about two young magicians who are working their way up in the world of illusionists in the early late 1800′s, a mistake during a show leads to the death of one’s wife and a bitter hatred and rivalry begins to develop. The rivalry as it develops it quickly turns violent and soon the two are planning the most gruesome tricks on each other in an attempt to ruin the other. They each share a deep desire to understand each others greatest illusion which in the end drives them both to ruin. The twist at the end is truly a grisly, and the bizarre way this ending question comes about is a weakness in the movie, well not so much a weakness but something that bugged me as I know about history. One of the magicians seeks help for his act in science, from an aging Tesla. The help he requests from Tesla bothered me greatly because of the absurd nature of the science in the move, but it’s also a real world example of how a rivalry between to scientific “magicians”, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, resulted in the ruin of one (Tesla). Anyway, it is a work of fiction so I can live with the artistic license.

The acting is fairly good, I have always been a fan of Christian Bale and he lives up to my expectations in this film as well. I’m not fan of Hugh Jackman but he does perform fairly well in this movie. Scarlet Johansen is excellent in her part. All in all it’s a thumbs up. I wouldn’t spend $14.99 that I did again, but if it were $9.99 as most of the movies on iTunes are, it would be. It’s a Donnie Darko type movie that requires a couple viewings to really get the film.

…I just realized the obvious incongruity that some of you may see in posting videos of myself, family, and friends shooting automatic weapons with a post preaching peace and arguing against the extremist views of islam and it’s blind hatred and wanton jihad against the infidel’s of the west. Yes, it is in a way taking opposing views, but you have to understand that we (meaning the people I hunt and shoot with) use guns as a way to get away from the stress of life for a while and return to nature, or to just watch an amazing piece of machinery at work destroying a tin can, water bottles or the occasional rusted out car. We don’t condone violence or use of any of the guns we own against humans (well, I guess unless absolutely necessary Anyway, more fun and interesting gun videos on their way. Keep looking at this post because of the higher quality (640×480 30fps, which I’m sure will be highly degraded by YouTube) takes forever to upload. So they won’t all be on for a few days. Fortunately no one really visits the news portion of the site too much so by the time anyone reads this the video’s will be online

…well here goes, I’m sure I’ll be hacked for this (well now that I’m with Site5 at least I won’t have to worry about it) but I just had to post this. It’s a video that was sent to me by my Dad (Thanks Dad!), and it really does make some excellent points about Islam and many of the hypocrisies that are exhibited by not only terrorists but is echoed in the media without really saying what they should about the activities of the Islamic “Extremists”. Anyway, I don’t need to say much, the video speaks for itself, here you go:

…so, if you’re a reader from the NMSU community, please stop reading NOW! Just kidding, actually, I wanted to say that if you are from NMSU you’ve probably been aware that we are in the process of moving from just the standard ID Card to an Enhanced ID card which is actually a Wells Fargo Visa Check-Card as well as your NMSU ID. It’s an extremely good idea and will be beneficial to both students and staff, the University as a while and Wells Fargo. I’m really all for it, and I can’t wait until we go-live with the project hopefully sometime in early August.

That said, I’m about to practice the ancient Japanese art of Seppuku, more commonly known as hari kari. Yes, I’m half a bubble away from sliding a razor sharp blade through my gut and letting my intestines, blood, and all that fills the bowel drop on to the floor of my office. And no, this isn’t a cry for help, it’s a joke. So if you’re (still) reading this it’s my attempt to say, I’m about ready to kill myself over the project we’re working on. And really Seppuku isn’t the real thing I want to do, I really want to bash my own head with a hammer.

Why would one resort to such a vile and disgusting act as Seppuku in a cubicle? Because I have to send a file feed to said Bank and the documentation is… well… let’s just say, less than thorough. I seem to be having issues with file encodings. Which would be partially my fault because I am using a Mac, so we start off with Mac Roman encoding and the good ole, Mac newlines (which consist of only a carriage return character, or is it line feed? Anyway, if you do it in terminal it’s UNIX which I think is linefeed and if you do it in Textedit it’s CR) Anyway, not only does the file need to be encoded in good ‘ole ASCII (back from DOS) it also needs the PC/DOS newlines (CR LF) so I get that squared away, or at least I think I do. On top of this, there is an image portion of the record that is inserted into a TEXT file as BINARY data. What, what you say? You must be using UUENCODE? MIME? NO, they just have an ASCII text file with a BINARY JPG file just inserted into the file. Gravy dude. Gravy.

So I’ve been spending the past month or so trying to get this file right (not the entire month, I have other duties, but a good 25-40 hours total), back and forth with tech support. Nothing. So today, I open up 0xED the hex editor from heXll! And I create the file (IN ASCII) basically by hand. Just got done doing that and if it doesn’t work now, I have basically jumped through every hoop that tells me it’s their freakin’ problem. Seppuku avoided… for now!

…work continues. I’m happy, actually very happy, with the theme I have. I think it’s the best theme that I have ever had on a site, and required very little work to make it my own. I like the CSS, I like the Web 2.0 look with the 5 color swatches, I like the Web 2.0′ish logo and the way it flows. Galley looks very good inside it with it’s default theme (matrix). I did find another them for gallery that had a little less fluff and worked better with the site, but the theme tried to implement some fancy forward, back via click position on all the images which didn’t work so well, and the bread-crumb trail of links on the top of the gallery pages didn’t work anymore so I nixed that theme until they get a working version out.

I’ve uploaded almost all of my iPhoto library that I want shown on the net to the site, and I just had Site5 install ffmpeg on thailia so we can add movies to the Gallery as well. I know there are a few I’d like out there. I am not sure exactly what cause it but there was an issue with the photos so the max res on most of my gallery is 800×600 or 600×800 depending on the camera rotation. That’s fine I guess, you don’t need much more than that to get an idea of what the picture is about, but if you’re printing photos it’s not very good. I am going to have to think long and hard about the focus of my gallery, is it to allow picture viewing or is it to allow people access to my full photo library? I would love to give out access to the full high resolution images but that will eat up more of my bandwidth and I know that iPhoto2Gallery doesn’t like it when the images are the massive 2,816×2,112 pixel images. I was hoping for something a little more in between like 1600×1200 or about but some option somewhere is shrinking them even more. Investigation is needed. So check out the Gallery, and more photos to come. Oh and I have some really great hunting shots that I’m going to password protect, no sense in letting anyone look at the gory 300+ yard rabbit kills I’ve documented, but if you’re interested let me know and I’ll share the password. </evil grin>

…ok, so I’ve found some time to mess with the site. Basically I found out after our Hawaii trip that the newest version of Gallery2 that I had running on my site is incompatible with my iPhoto plugin, what that means in English? I can’t post any pictures to the gallery (well I can, I just can’t do it very easily). So what do I do to rectify this situation? I install upgrades across the boards of course! So we have a new version of Drupal, we’re in the 5.1 range now how exciting (and I hear they’re releasing 6.0 soon).

What does this mean? Well not much currently, there’s a new theme that you may have noticed that’s very Web 2.0, I think I’ll stick with it for a while. I had to rebuild the entire Front_Page modules page because I forgot to back it up, so it’s a little different and in making that mistake, I have made a good backup with instructions on how to get it back up and running. So after several hours of upgrading and blah… still no photos . Well all that’s about to change because I’ve just decided to go with Gallery2′s nifty little Java app which of course is completely and utterly ugly but works.

Hopefully the iPhoto plugin will get some further development to make it compatible with whatever it’s currently incompatible with. I have been in contact with the developer and he’s working to help, but I’m not keeping my fingers crossed. iPhoto2Gallery is still at version .66 and has been for the past year or so (at least since iPhoto 6 came out).

Anyway, hope all is well out in web land. I’ll post more when I have the time (yes again, I’m going to say “jee I need to post more don’t I?” and I’ll post well for a few weeks or maybe even a few months but eventually I’ll loose interest again in the posting and the gallery will be the only updated feature). I wish I had the time I did when it was strictly school. I liked making those political posts and rambling about this and that, but I just don’t keep up with politics and such anymore. Too much good things in my life I guess, not enough depressive need to watch CNN tell us about how the planet is dying or Bush is a failure of a human (asshats!). Enough blathering…