I made an epic shot in Halo 3 the other day on Multiplayer. It was a team match, and I randomly found a Spartan Laser. Since the map was Sandtrap, I decided I should get to high ground before I get run over by the people driving around, because for some reason, Sandtrap always turns into a Rally Race. So I get to the top of a hill, and see a Warthog drive over it – little did I know that another Warthog was right behind it, as well as a Mongoose. Literally, just as the laser fired, they all were in line and I killed their entire team. 6 players. 3 vehicles.

Screenshot courtesy of Rage Hawley (BobDolesViagra)

Here’s the crap part though: Bungie.net was having problems that weekend, so I didn’t get credit for it. It doesn’t matter though, cause I got it on video.

At work, I always seen this guy who is working late, with goofy blue terminal windows; this time I manage to glance at the door to see who it is. Yeah, it’s fucking David Cutler, the man who singlehandedly designed 2 major operating systems, one of which is used by the majority of the planet. Jeff Atwood has more info.

This presentation done by Wil Shipley given to the WWDC Student developers is fucking awesome. Read it, be inspired. Even if you don’t care about Apple at all, his advise applies to anyone who’s a developer (or really, even anyone who wants to start a business)

Even if you don’t make the zillion dollars, you’ll be rich in awesome.

This video is hella cheesy, but the concept kicks ass

Just another example of how creative Nintendo is with taking a video game system and thinking outside the box to come up with something that’s truly useful – I know that I’ll definitely be using it to stay in shape, it looks so much more engaging than anything else

Here it is – this is a freebie for all the record companies, this is the way to make piracy go away, and in turn, be the future of music distribution for the entire modern world and completely change the business of music. I’m calling this in 2007, we’ll see if it comes true.

As pervasive fast wireless Internet becomes a standard throughout the nation, the concept of an iPod will be replaced with a device that will stream and cache digital music that is supplied online via music download services. Any time you want, you will be able to pull down any album and listen to it for a flat monthly fee, just like you can with Napster/Zune/et al. Furthermore, you can do the same thing (albeit slower) with television shows and movies.

This solves the MP3 piracy problem not through lockdown DRM, but by making the concept of pirating MP3s inferior – why bother downloading files to your computer if you can just pull them off the net when you want them?

What’s left of my computer – note the PCI card that now has the nice spline bend in it

Well, I finally got the last of my stuff after moving to the University District in Seattle – almost all of it came through just fine with the exception of my computer, pictured above. That and my bedframe was destroyed which sucks too but that isn’t nearly as expensive as the computer. Here’s the lesson – always take the hard drive out and take it with you. I did it even though it seemed totally paranoid at the time, and it saved 500 GB of my data from becoming completely lost. I think that’s the most annoying part of not having my desktop right now is that I can’t get at any of my movies or music – it’s all on the 4 HDs sitting on my desk.

My plans to live without a car have been working out, despite getting lost 4 of the 5 times I used the bus. It’s alright, I always find something interesting despite the likelihood of me having to walk 30+ blocks. I really do think it’s possible to live here without a car (being across the street from a grocery store helps too, of course), especially with the Flexcar service that’s popular here. Basically, it’s a corporate version of “Hey let me borrow your car for $10″ – it means that you can have the use of a pickup truck when you need it without the price of using one.

Work is not particularly exciting so far since it’s only the first week – mostly a lot of waiting around; waiting for presentations, waiting for my password, waiting for permissions, etc. Next week I’ll finally be able to start actually doing shit. I feel somewhat detached from the group but hopefully this will change, and I like my mentor Ivan, he’s a cool guy.

I’d be really happy if I wasn’t by myself all the time – I need more people! Right now, I see my coworkers and my landlord, and occasionally some other random people but not nearly enough – being in the U-District hasn’t quite helped yet, though my landlord / quasi-roommate Dan took me around the neighborhood so that was cool. So all-in-all, it’s good time island in Seattle, Washington and I’m starting to get used to this town.

Well, it looks like I’ll be out of commission even longer than I originally thought I would be – I came home today to find my desktop turned off. I thought this was strange, so I turned it back on, or at least tried to because the machine was completely, 100% dead. Switching out the power supply yielded a machine that will turn on but won’t post.

So in summary, I now have no viable dev machine, and possibly only one copy of my data (my documents and Emails are safe however so that’s good). I probably won’t even have a chance of being up-and-running again till June 26th. ::sigh:: At least it looks like the hard drives are still intact, although I can’t be sure.

I’ve seen tons of people complaining about how slow Vista is and honestly, I was really confused; to me, Vista is about the same speed as XP (not as fast as a tweaked Win2k3 though). Then I found out why, because I always change some settings to make it faster, whereas the Vista you get on most preinstalled PCs is bogged down. Here’s (in my somewhat-supported opinion) the biggest source of Vista why-does-this-take-so-fing-long’ness, in order:

1. Antivirus Software
2. Windows Defender
3. Windows Search (ie the Indexer)

Antivirus is really, really slow

According to Coding Horror via Oli at The PC Spy, if you run Norton Internet Security 2006, your disk access speed increases by 2369%. That means, a program that takes 10 seconds to load now takes minutes. And if you have Antivirus on Vista as it recommends, you also have Windows Defender, which means that every time that you load a program, two system-level services scan the program against two separate databases.

…and you don’t need it!

Here’s a secret that Symantec and McAfee don’t want you to know: if you always run Windows Update when the little globe tells you to, you’ll avoid 95%+ of computer viruses, especially if you use Mozilla Firefox as your browser which will help you avoid the Spyware problem. Almost all the famous outbreaks that bring down thousands of PCs were already fixed by Microsoft before they broke out! Don’t bother with Antivirus, instead keep backups of your data on a separate machine; there are lots of programs that let you make backups to other machines or to a USB drive – use them and make it automatic, so you don’t have to think about it. Turn off Windows Defender by going into Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services, and mark the Windows Defender service as “Disabled”. There’s also a way to disable it via the Windows Defender program but I’m too lazy to find it. So in summary:

• Always run the updates. Seriously.
• Don’t use Antivirus / Antispyware / whatever, make automatic backups instead
• Turn off Windows Defender

The other culprit – Windows Search

Now, if you fixed the two things listed above, your computer should already be running much better. However, there’s one feature of Windows Vista that can put a hurt on performance, particularly if you have a laptop – Windows Search. This feature is actually pretty useful though, so if your computer is “fast enough”, you should probably leave it on. It runs a program in the background called the Windows Indexing Service that watches for new and changed files: when it finds one, it scans through it looking for the text and puts it in a database. Later, when you run Search using the Start menu or through another program like Outlook 2007, you can quickly find things.

The downside of Windows Search

The Windows Indexer tries to be smart and not run while you’re working; however, it’s really hard for these kinds of programs to not slow you down, because to work perfectly they have to read your mind. For example, you’re looking for pictures of landscapes, and you download a zip file online with 500 stock pictures and unzip it. You then find out that all of these pictures are of cute kittens, so you’re like “Well this is useless, deleted!”.

The indexer on the other hand does this: First, it sees that there are 500 new pictures to index – it freaks out and starts reading all the information like resolution, tags, camera type, etc from all of these pictures, causing your hard disk to be very busy. Then, when the user deletes the files, the indexer goes crazy again and has to remove all the entries it just created from its database. Now admittedly, for most people this isn’t going to happen often, but if you’re a developer with tons of files that change all the time, you’re gonna feel it. You can disable the indexer the same way, by going to the Services window and setting “Windows Indexing Service” to disabled. If you can (I’m not sure), set the Indexer to only run on specific directories that you know would be useful to index, like the Documents directory. This way you get the benefits of WDS without the slow’osity.

Since America’s banking system is stuck in the 50s and transfers between accounts for some reason have $20 fees associated with them, I’ve been struggling with a way to transfer moderate sums of money to do things like pay rent (since I don’t have a checkbook). Furthermore, if you have an account that is credit-card only, you’re even more screwed. Turns out though, that I’ve stumbled across something that I think will work. Banks will write a check for you you against your account, but they’ll charge you $5 or so.

Here’s the trick: the USPS takes Visa, and according to this site, you can get a $1000 money order for $1.25. This means that you can do a transfer for almost free – although at considerable expense to your time.

GNOME 2.20 will hopefully be able to format stuff

For the last three months or so I’ve been working on a replacement for GFloppy called “gnome-format”, and despite it being stalled for two weeks or so, I’ve finally started making progress on it again. Here’s the latest screenshot, including what I like to call the “OMG THIS WILL HAX UR USB!!!11″ messagebox

Ignore the “Filesystem type” dropdown, it’s busted

Getting stuff done – some thoughts

Recently I came to a pretty useful epiphany today. I’ve always been (and this blog will attest to it) pretty lazy when it comes to finishing projects. I’d come up with this awesome idea, hack on it for awhile, then it’d be a chore and I’d give up. However, here’s the thing that brought me out of at, so far:

1. Make a detailed list of everything left in the project
2. Line them up in order
3. Make a to-do list with due dates, preferably in the same list that you put everything else in (I’m a fan of rememberthemilk)

For some reason, people with ADD (or at least “people with ADD who are also Me”) need a due date, something to put them under the gun. Unfortunately, you also need to be given a task that’s not impossible, so hence the splitting into small pieces. So if you find you have lots of cool projects you’ve started but not finished, take one of them and try this; maybe it will help.