psyche

Adam Zethraeus provided useful linkage which helped me upgrade my WordPress thingy. I wholly recommend the WPAU; it’s totally awesome.

Storrs Kegel (case of fractured virtual identity, hence Googlage) put me onto Coda which is possibly the greatest app I have ever used. It’s also the first thing I’ve used my debit card on. Yeah, I’m a real man (…I also think wtf at this).

I spoke to Elliott Katz about computer science at Cambridge (he’s been offered a place there to do that) and he seemed very modest and repeatedly claimed that he had simply “got lucky” (regrettably, I’m getting Americanised, I think: I kept trying to type “gotten” for “got” back there). In any case, awesome. I need to know more stuff.

Everybody loves subnet masks. The internet is serious business.

I’ve attempted another rather weak redesign of the main site but it’s ultra-clean, so, you know…

In CompSoc today, I realised just how retarded some of the things in Mac OS X really are. The ability to remotely control the GUI (not just background processes and stuff) via the shell and stuff… urgh… it’s like… whatever. And then being able to (re)set the root password by having the install disc: this makes me nervous.

However, it was entertaining to use the following sequence I devised to annoy family, which caught on pretty quickly at school too:


user$ ssh loggedinuser@x.x.x.x
Password: ******
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ osascript -e "set Volume 10"
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ say -v Zarvox
I AM WATCHING YOU
YOU ARE UGLY
^Z
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ ps -x
[A bunch of processes and their numbers are displayed; too lazy to type them out properly]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ kill [pid of something like web browser]
[actual loggedinuser now tries to open System Preferences to disable remote login]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ ps -x
[pid of System Prefs displayed]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ kill [pid of System Prefs]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ sudo shutdown -h now
Password: ******
SYSTEM GOING DOWN NOW or something to that effect


And then I win!

Pax

I’m getting more interested in the informatics side of computer science - which I guess is what I want “computer science” or “computing” to mean. Although software design is awesome. This reminds me of the distinction between web design and web dev.

I’m not actually very good with computers aside from an almost-reasonable knowledge of JavaScript, HTML and CSS, but I’m confident I can actually make the leap to being good. A-level computing is helping, yes… =]

Leopard’s Quick Look is extremely useful. While people complain that Leopard has fixed things that weren’t broken (cf. menu bar, special folder icons [Home, Applications etc.]) and of course I don’t think that a few features justify a massive paid-for upgrade I am still finding new ways to optimise with it. Quick Look and Spaces are probably my most-used new features atm. Wikipedia in Dictionary is pretty great but it doesn’t support User: or other types of page (i.e. it’s not fully featured) which is a shame, because I could easily see myself dedicating a whole app to definition retrieval

If this Snap stuff could be implemented like Quick Look (and the filesystem-checking blockquote tag’s cite attribute could do something), the web would be a happier place.

I noticed that when I viewed my blog in Lynxlet, the quotation from Michael Henley (Leopard is a service pack) showed up in colour… so, WordPress keeps the q tag but doesn’t parse my text in quotation marks?! Lame!

I’ve always been interested in psychology and, you know, who do I have most information about? Me! What better person to psychoanalyse?

Leopard failed a bit - it stopped auto-switching Spaces when I switched apps for some reason, but a quick
killall Dock fixed it.

Just to finish, imagine this:
Finally, a quotation that sums up today's generation quite well…
[blockquote cite="http://canyouhearme.wordpress.com"]I am an angsty teen with too much time.[/blockquote]


I would want some kind of functionality to be given to that citation. Maybe some cursor hovering could bring up a thing asking if you wanted to visit the source or something… ugh. So what does the citation actually do? I guess it gets indexed by search engines and stuff… hmm…

Pax

Internet Explorer won’t display the nonstandard character’s on Psyche’s front page and has a messed up Japanese font, Leopard is a service pack and my MacBook Pro can cook things. On the other hand, m35 of jpsx and the people in #lain are working on ripping the videos from the Lain game with sound. What an active community we are… (note the absence of my Unicode ellipsis - I miss OS X already).

I am planning a much, much better incarnation of Psyche. 2.7 will be a landmark version!

I’m running Leopard now and I like it. I plan to dual boot with Debian to familiarise myself with the console before I take the plunge into building a robot to replace me (…that was just a joke + look! Unicode ellipsis!). Getting into the spirit of these saved searches (which I never really embraced in Tiger), I’m tagging my browsers as “browser” etc. I want to be able to type “browser” into Spotlight and be able to quickly choose whichever one. There’s probably a better solution (using a stack? Actually using the Desktop for aliases?) but I like metadata…

Pax

I went to a talk with my mother about dementia - it was to help us care for my demented grandmother. Most people there wanted to complain about the NHS’s stupidity in terms of distributing an acetylcholine-conserving drug (I won’t go into it; it’s pretty dumb) but I found the guy’s stuff quite chilling. Some was straight out of Memento (being unable to “make new memories”, reverting to old memories “for comfort”), some Lain (”if your patient doesn’t remember it, you’re best off pretending that it never really happened”) and the atmosphere - support group, like - was straight out of Fight Club…

I wish I’d known about XFN before! I have to add it to Psyche… and my blogroll.

This is cool and this may come in handy.

The whole OiNK/Pirate Bay thing reminds me of the Great Hacker War somehow.

I’ve seriously had to start sending emails to myself to remember stuff. I think I will use notes in Mail in Leopard after all…

There’s a new David Gray song!

From Everything2:

Serial Experiments Lain begins to scratch at the surface of what is on everyones mind, but is not yet full developed, quite similar to the show. The fears of a nation barreling towards self-oblivion, with ultra high suicide rates, low-paying-high-stress jobs, and family structures that are crumbling because of a lack of communication of emotions, and moral values.

Pax

Having finished migrating to my new MacBook Pro, I have been able to actually play my music from my internal hard drive. Incredible. This means I have letting Last.fm scrobble again.

Awesome.

Pax

It’s not a uselessly semantic distinction, as YouTube commenters would have you believe. Even Apple, in their dumbed-down advertising campaigns borne of their selling-out (they’ve been doing it for a long time), refer to things like “surfing the internet” and making the “internet look good on your phone”. I understand that when this ridiculous error is so prevalent, even intelligent people can inherit it, so here is the truth:

• The Internet is hardware - it is the network (analogous to, say, a LAN)
• The Web is software* - it is one of the many applications** of the Internet (analogous to your company’s intranet site)

* It’s a big bunch of HTML documents. On its own, you wouldn’t be able to access web pages from anywhere unless you were directly connected to the computer or server they were stored on. However, you can connect via the Internet so you don’t require a direct connection. See?** Yeah, ever heard of e-mail? File transfers? Internet-enabled games? You don’t connect to “the web” when you plug your modem into a phone port, do you?

For clarity, Wiki strikes again.

The internet is a marvel of engineering and hardware design coupled with software transfer protocols so awesome that I believe that it is the pinnacle of not only communications design but of all electronics.The web is a dynamic and thus shifting, self-maintaining in some areas, self-destroying in others mass of files designed to be opened by web browsers over networks connections and ultimately the internet. It is a remarkable experiment in content creation and sharing and is obviously one of the most important and frequently-used applications of the internet (along with e-mail, IM and file transfer). A massive sociological wonderland, it is novice programming on steroids and in another dimension.The internet combined with the web (no, this is not called the interweb) and other apps is, I believe, humanity’s greatest achievement. While retaining our individuality, we are becoming able to function as a true collective, silenced by no-one. It is great but it is not good or evil; it is neutral, as things with extreme power often are - and thus corruptible.

However, it remains the basis for my faith in computer science. We have become more than the sum of our parts. We are both man and machine. We have transformed into something altogether more interesting than I thought possible.

Pax

I am working on a music video for Requiem in C# Minor and it’s well underway. I need a proper tripod, though - hopefully I can pick one up tomorrow. This kind of shows how much of an Apple fanboy I am; I recorded the song in GarageBand and am doing the video in iMovie. Speaking of iLife, we went to Brent Cross and I attempted to pick up the iLife ‘08. When I told the helpful selling guy that it would be run on a G4, he said “G4… hmm… I don’t know…”, looked at his mate (who pulled a face: “G4? Yeuch!”) and they somehow talked me out of buying it. Good salespeople indeed. At least I may have a real reason to upgrade soon. I actually hate most of the annoying, superficial losers that frequent the Apple store. They aren’t newbies, they’re n00bs. The difference is that n00bs never become productive, seasoned veterans - they keep their abrasive attitude forever.This is from a long time ago - it was recorded on my Nokia 6820 over at Elliot’s house. Warning: involves awesomeness.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_RVfECfFOI] I saw The Simpsons Movie and liked it, actually. It was good.I am going to screw up my exams when I get into gaming properly. The last time I could be even loosely classified as a gamer was back in Durston. A long, long time ago.Pax

Terminal.app, how I’ve missed you. UNIX commands, how I’ve missed you too.

Pax

Thanks to Howard Oakley, survivologist™ (is that a word?) - who, incidentally, helped me set up the awesome AirPort network that has irradiated and served our household for years now, and Firewire Target Disk mode, I succeeded. I am considerably lazy and it’d take ages to post exactly what I did but basically I connected the PowerBook (corrupt HD), in target disk mode, and the external HD (with .fullBackup as well as expanded backup) to the iBook, whence I copied over Apps/System etc.. The Home Folder, missing from the expanded backup as previously stated, I extracted from the mounted .sparseImage, and put in its rightful place on the PB HD. I tried to boot the PowerBook from disk; this failed so I booted from CD, reinstalled, it booted, I ran Software Update etc. and now everything works. The only minor annoyance is that G7 prompts me to register despite the fact it’s registered (obviously some corrupt file somewhere, although Alias SketchBook Pro, Uplink etc. stayed registered) - however if I say “register later”, it proceeds normally, saying I’m registered as before! Annoying but one of the better outcomes.

Linux, meh. For another time.

AS choices. Right. Mrs Holmes, art teacher and careers advisor, told me not to overfocus on sciency stuff. However, I plan to, and to counterbalance this with diverse work experience and other stuff that will go on my UCAS form.

At the moment I plan to do 4.5* AS levels:

Physics
Maths
Further Maths (=0.5)*
Chemistry
Computing

Broadening… it’s broad enough. Physics is my primary interest and is totally backed up by all the others. Maths opens up phat avenues of statistics, economics, computing (this is not an error); all sorts of crap. Chemistry, as Mrs Holmes put it, is the “Rolls-Royce of sciences”. I’m assuming this means that it’s both of great import and generates many opportunities. And computing? Mr Barker explained that Computing isn’t actually required to do a university course in Computing (lol) - in fact they probably won’t care - it’s more about maths, which makes sense. However, in all this “judge stuff the same way the university will”, it’s easy to forget that by doing Computing I will learn about computers which is something I actually want to do. Mrs Holmes asked me to read up on courses and universities over the weekend, which is what I shall do.

Pax

* (11/7/2008): I don’t really know where I got that from, but when Lance asked me how many I was doing at some point and I said 4.5, Elliot quite angrily corrected me (Futher Maths is a whole one). Perhaps I was thinking of doing Further Maths AS or something. I have no idea.

So, the obligatory post-25th post. I hesitate to call it Christmas, as that was dubious from the start, what with its fusion into Pagan festivals and all. Anyway, I came out relatively unscathed, with a Logitech MX Revolution mouse, a 250GB HP external Hard Drive, a new Nokia 6131 and Command & Conquer: The First Decade - and yes, I preordered Tiberium Wars.

I updated Psyche - for the first time in a while - with some Tiberian Sun stuff and made some aesthetic changes to Science and some more significant (but still aesthetic) changes to About, so that’s all good. I’d like to pick up an Intel iMac and boot Vista in order to run Tiberium Wars, but I’ll see what rolls over at Macworld and check out Leopard before I finalise my choices. I need to get good at Yuri’s Revenge so I can challenge Elliot, damn it!

Anyway, you know the deal. Tiberian Sun is a beautiful game.

Logitech MX RevolutionFor the record, I’m on an old-ish 17″ PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.8. The installation was … well, non-existent - in a good way. I put the mouse into its power cradle and left it charging for a couple of hours after unpacking it. I downloaded the Logitech Control Center (there was no Mac software in the box) and wandered off somewhere… and then sauntered back and checked it out. I plugged the RF dongle into my USB port, slid the slider on the underside of the mouse to the “on” position, and voilà, the mouse was working! I hastened to System Preferences, wherein I increased the sensitivity, configured some options etc. although I might add that my global settings are almost the same as the default ones as they were well thought out. Basically, the mouse is perfect apart from the absence of a left-handed version, which means nothing to me but everything to, say, my brother and my dad. Anyway, the only oddity I encountered was in Jedi Academy (don’t laugh) when I found that switching weapons with the primary scroll wheel always caused me to suddenly look upward. So far I have no explanation - it’s probably something to do with the way I’ve configured the controls in JKA - but until I can eliminate this I’ll use the left/right tilt function of the wheel. Phew. Once you configure the speed you’d like the SmartShift wheel function (the scroll wheel basically goes into a frictionless spin when you spin it at a certain speed) it pretty much becomes a better and more convenient (and fun) version of page up/page down. The mouse is great - works well, was easy to set up, is easy to configure. Unfortunately there’s no left-handed version… hmm… that’s economics for you.
Nokia 6131
Once again, no Mac software or USB cable out of the box - shame on you, Nokia! However the phone is good. It’s not Series 60 and therefore all my crap from my old 6260 is, well, non-transferable. It also takes a microSD card (which I haven’t got yet) - and I thought miniSD cards (which the 6260 took) were small! The font for the clock thing on the outside is really bad. Anyway, this is progress towards a really good Nokia clamshell, but until then, looks like Motorola have that market under control. How’s that KRZR thing doing?

Pax