Happy New Year!

Goodbye 2009 (which was a good year in my opinion) and high hopes for 2010!

Busy Busy Busy!!

I just stopped by my blog to check up on things. It appears I was a few versions behind so I thought I should probably update it while I was here and avoiding doing my school work. After updating, I felt kinda guilty for not updating the blog more often.
It’s fall, so why not? School is back and super super busy, and I haven’t had ANY time to write a single line of code since I left work in the summer. How bad is that? That’s quite unlike me. This term’s course load is tremendous. I’m taking…

• Embedded Systems
• Electrical Engineering
• Algorithms
• Ethics in the workplace
• Numerical Methods

All of those classes besides the ethics class are extremely demanding and have me working many hours a day just to keep up. All this week has been 12+ hour days, except today when the lack of sleep started to catch up to me.
Just thought I’d give you guys a quick update on what’s going on, and hope to hear from you soon!

Two things: one, awesomeness for Biohazard. Two, I seem to now have editing permissions for my own posts after all

The Awesomeness for Biohazard
Yes, it IS safe for work, would I post THAT type of content here? You gotta give me some credit.

Anyway, you now have VGL -and- this! Woot! (Be sure to show Miyth!)

…Where are my manners? Long time no see, everyone! I’ve been more than a bit busy these days, and am gearing up currently to make yet another excursion to VGL with the ‘Hazard. Frankly, I do worry that he might evaporate in the light of the sun, but that is a risk I am willing to take, given the concert missed if not. I hope to return with many tales of “NO FREAKIN’ WAY!”, “SO AWESOME!”, “ROFLMAO!” and “PWNT!” (The last being me destroying Biohazard in ad-hoc wireless fun on the trip over. If not, at least there was Pwnage on one of us lol). And Bio, bring thy DS! We may have left ours in the car last time, but there is no way we can afford to miss out in this E3 closing ceremony concert.

Well, I am tired. I think sleep sounds like a good plan. Night, everyone!

iPhoto 09 first thought!

Faces is really cool.

Places is neato too.

But you can’t make smart albums with Faces or Places? Why not? Why can’t I have “All Photos with myself AND dad” ?

Oh well. Otherwise it’s wickedsweet.

Windows 7 thoughts

I’ve been playing around with the first beta for Windows 7 for a few weeks now, and I’ve got some thoughts on it.

A little background: I’m primarily a Mac user, and I haven’t used Vista much at all. I’ve been running W7 in a VMWare image (because that’s where Windows belongs and lately Windows has been stupid about running on my hardware). That’s that.

Running in a VM with 2GB of memory I have to say it runs brilliantly fast. IE8 is nice enough, though I find the menus incredibly difficult to navigate. Paint has been revamped with the new Ribbon interface (world asks “why?”), which although questionable, it still works pretty well. Paint has become a lot more feature rich lately — finally Microsoft seems to have realized it’s actually a pretty widely-used tool!

Haven’t tried any games on it.

Taskbar: Here’s where things get interesting. I’ll start with the Notification area, which has been revamped greatly. Instead of being clustered with a billion icons, it arranges itself perfectly and lets you configure what shows up and what doesn’t. And it works. It works well. It works like it always should have.

As for the rest of the bar, for starters you can finally re-arrange items in the taskbar (why this took so long is beyond me) but it works great. You items are now arranged by app, represented by a single app icon. This is also where your quick-launch items go. So allegedly it’s a lot like the Dock on Mac OS X. I’d say that’s a fair assumption. It works a bit differently, but they offer mostly the same functionality. The new taskbar will also show you window previews for each app, as you mouse over its icon. A nice touch.

So while I would say it’s borrowed things from the Dock, it’s not in a bad way. It’s all been implemented in a good Windows fashion and it doesn’t feel out of place. Very natural. I think it’s a great step forward in terms of usability. One thing they have to fix is the way running/nonrunning apps are shown. They all appear in the taskbar, with only a tiny, subtle indicator denoting a running app (a little outline, very faint). If they fix this, it will be mostly perfect.

So it’s generally a solid beta. No UAC bullcrap everywhere. It feels pretty refined. Good on them.

I have to say this looks mighty slick

Even though I’m generally not a fan of Windows laptops (especially from Dell), I must admit this is a very pretty one.

It looks like the screen might be pretty glossy, but generally that isn’t a problem for me. Not that I’m really in the market to get a new laptop (and certainly not a PC), but I just thought I’d point it out. Looks nice.

I think they are launching either H1 or H2 of this year (it’s a PC, there had to be something stupid about it).

OMG Bio left his room?

Well, I’m at MacWorld in San Fransisco. Have been for a few days now. I’m just playing around on the interweb so I thought I’d post here.

Right now I’m in an InDesign class about Keyboard Shortcuts. Cool.

Dear every app on every platform ever

STOP TAKING MY GODDAMN FOCUS.

EDIT:

Jumpstarted the conversation for you guys on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7hvip/dear_every_app_on_every_platform_please_stop/

This is the best bicycle ever made.

This is such a cool bike. Found around U of Ottawa.

iPod touch as a gaming machine

I read this article earlier today, and I’ve heard the same thing said before, so I thought I’d comment on it, and see what your thoughts are as well.

Apple really seems to be throwing down at both Nintendo and Sony with regards to the iPod touch as a gaming platform. Why? And why not iPhone?

I believe they aren’t so much marketing iPhone as a gaming platform because of battery life. If you’re intended (as per the marketing) to play a bunch of games on your iPhone, you probably won’t have much juice left for calls. So right now it’s only iPod touch marketed for games.

Is this a possibility? I’m not very confident the iPod will ever entirely dethrone the DS — there are about 85 million DS consoles around the world right now. That’s a huge hurdle, and while the iPod touch will likely be incredibly successful, it’s hard to judge who buys it with games in mind and who doesn’t.

The other hurdle for iPod touch are the controls. There are no physical buttons which can be used for game controls on the device. Instead you have the touchscreen and the accelerometer. Using the device’s [arguably] flagship game as an example, Super Monkey Ball, it uses touch for menus, and the accelerometer for controlling your character. And it’s really, really difficult. Most other games which use the “tilt-to-move” paradigm are also pretty difficult to control. I think these issues will eventually be resolved as time goes by. Developers will learn the system better and develop more controllable games. But currently controls are a little difficult.

The absence of buttons is seen as a deficiency for a gaming device (as in “it sucks because you don’t have buttons and you can’t do X without buttons”), but I think it’s more of a paradigm thing, again. Given time, developers will come up with novel ways of controlling the games. This is a strength of iPod touch in the gaming sense. No, it’s not going to be the same as A, B, and a D-pad, but that’s getting pretty stale anyway. The device also has WiFi, a microphone, and is location aware. Those are three more new inputs to play around with. So I think it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing more novel games appear which will start to threaten Sony and Nintendo.

But here’s where Apple really has the advantage: the App Store. I honestly can’t believe neither Nintendo nor (especially) Sony hasn’t done something like this already. The App Store is where you get your iPod touch apps (or Games in this case). Apps typically cost between $0-$10 as opposed to $30 on the other consoles. But more importantly, there are no cartridges or discs to worry about. If you lose your game, you just download it again. One game can go on all of your iPods. They are backed up in iTunes. You can download them wherever you have internet access. Are you getting this Sony? Nintendo? This is where Apple has the potential to dominate.

It will be interesting to see where this goes in the coming years. As an aside, I fully believe Apple will eventually move all of their iPods to the iPhone OS (with touchscreen, accelerometer, etc). When they do this (nano touch, anyone?), they will really shine.