Concern

I liked this movie. It gives a convincing argument on why the current Iraq occupation is a nearly complete failure, and one that will cost the United States dearly in the world economies of capitol and credibility.

I mean, it really seems like every decision made by someone important in the occupation was designed to be the worst possible thing that could be done. People are starting to loot — let’s not enforce any law, and give the impression that lawlessness will go unchallenged. People are starting to loot and destroy core infrastructure and important sites of national history — let’s still not intervene, and let the entire country deal without basic administrative infrastructure and without any sense of history, art, or pride. We’ll need to start up civil services again — let’s fire everyone who knew these jobs before, let them know that because of their political party before the invasion that they can never hold a position of importance in this country again, and then let’s hire US trust-fund babies fresh out of ivy-league colleges to handle the infrastructure to support millions of Iraqis. We really need a strong military presence to keep the peace — lets disband the entire national military, and leave jobless thousands of angry, combat-trained people who know the locations of all the currently under-guarded weapons caches in the country.

And we’re surprised the situation fell apart as thoroughly as it has?

I desperately want to love this computer. Apple’s quality just seems to be extremely inconsistent.

The screen is gorgeous. I bought the 24″ model, added another gigabyte of RAM, and have been thoroughly impressed with the system performance and the display. Watching videos — especially HD content — makes this beast well worth the price; it would probably rival some decent televisions, and it works perfectly for my small apartment. The new keyboard design is nice, but it’s nevertheless just a beautifully-designed ergonomic nightmare, and I’m letting my co-worker borrow it instead (since I have a better keyboard anyway). The Mighty Mouse is also neat, but I use a trackball, and could never use that mouse properly since its cable is so ridiculously short. Regardless, it is teh sexy for watching video podcasts and DVDs, and doesn’t hang when doing more than one thing like my Mac Mini did.

But, I’m running into some serious issues. Here’s the list thus far:

1. It kernel panicked the first day, while I was setting it up. Now I was putting some stress on the system — hooking up 1TB of storage through three external drives — but come on. Let me at least install some crazy kernel extensions before it starts panicking on me.
2. There’s a dead pixel, out of the box. It’s near the upper right hand corner of the screen, and thus out of the way, but still.
3. The screen doesn’t feel like glass. Tapping it with my fingernail, it sounds just like a regular old plastic screen, it just looks a lot shinier. I hope I’m just being picky, and didn’t get screwed somehow.
4. This is the kicker: WindowServer will intermittently hang. On Mac OS X, this means that the entire desktop freezes, and while you can still SSH into the system, to use the main display you need to reboot the machine.

   This has happened three times so far, and each time I was looking at the iTunes store in iTunes; I’m starting to suspect that it has something to do with the graphics card, because I can SSH into the system, and using sample can see that iTunes is hung off in the weeds in some graphics routine. Both iTunes and the WindowServer are stuck in uninterruptible sleep, presumably waiting for the graphics hardware to stop freaking out. There’s no obvious crash information, but in the logs I did see this:

   Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: ** ASIC Hang Log Start **
Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0x01019583 00009062 00009583 00000000
Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0x00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0x0011a010 00000000 00000000 0083106b
Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0x00f8fc00 00000000 00000001 00008a12

   which continues with a lot of hex values. Fun.

   From reading the discussion boards on Apple’s website, it looks like a few other people have seen this, usually while playing games, which typically means exercising the video.

Update: Rumor has it that the iMac Software Update 1.1 fixes the “ASIC hang” problem. It seems to be working for me.

Update (October 6): Apple seems to be working on the issue. Software update 1.1 does not completely solve the iMac hang problem.

Update (November 3): iMac Software Update 1.2 (Tiger) and 1.3 (Leopard).

I was pretty excited when I saw that Kinesis, who made my cherished, but now discontinued, Evolution split-design keyboard, were planning to release a new split design keyboard, the Freestyle. My existing pair of Evolution keyboards (one at work, the other at home) were showing their age, and the design of that keyboard is admittedly on the bulky side.

Of course, I wouldn’t have considered buying the Freestyle if it was only offered with a 6-inch separation. Not only do I like having a wide separation of the two modules, I also like putting my trackball in between the two, so it’s very easy to reach, and I couldn’t do either if it only spread 6 inches or so. Kinesis thankfully saw the light and made a version that has a 20 inch cable separating the two modules. A longer cable than that might have been nice, for things like chair mounting, but I don’t think I want it mounted to my chair, anyway.

So, I bought two Freestyle keyboards, and two “VIP” accessory packs (which include wrist pads for each module, and a tilting mechanism so you can “tent” the keyboard modules at one of two different angles). I like it a whole lot, so far.

The Evolution had extremely noisy keys — it would probably rival an IBM keyboard for typing noise. Loud keys are both good and bad; as the typer, it’s satisfying to have a keyboard with feedback. To the people around me, I’m sure it’s a drawback to have to listen to my wild, speedy clacking when I’m on a roll with something. The Freestyle is much quieter; the keys feel rather a lot like the kind you’ll see in, say, a modern Dell keyboard. The keys are nice and large, and take little force to depress. I think overall I like this kind of key more than the clicky mechanical one on the Evolution, and more than the keys on my laptop (the laptop keyboard loses already, since it’s rectangular, but just by key I think I prefer those on the Freestyle).

It’s taking me a little time to get used to the new keyboard, but it is, of course, infinitely adjustable, so I’m sure I’ll be moving and changing things for some time to come. The biggest issue is just finding where the keys are. The design is very compact and simple — the weird curves and space cadet key overload of the Evolution is gone, and we now have a sparse, economical design. I find that I’m having a little trouble finding the home row by touch, and the abrupt edge on the inside of each module means I sometimes dip off into empty space, instead of bumping against the plastic center the Evolution has. After only a day of use I’m already starting to get used to it, however.

The “driverless hot keys” are pretty much useless to me on my Mac, though, since they’re hard-coded to Windows key shortcuts (I’m hoping there’s a way to reassign them somehow). Some of the keys might be useful in Emacs though (control-x and control-c both have dedicated keys). From the factory, the two modules are attached to one another by a “pivot tether,” which anchors the two modules together at their upper inner corners. You’re supposed to be able to separate them with the two release buttons on the top of each module, but I couldn’t get that to work, so I removed the screws that held them there instead.

Otherwise, it’s a standard USB keyboard. A simple set-up step in Mac OS X when I plugged it in was all I needed. It has some nicely bright blue LEDs for caps lock and friends. It feels very solid and well-built.

The VIP tilt and wrist pads are nice, but overpriced. I’m not sure yet if I like the modules inclined, but the wrist pads are nice, with a not-too-soft gel-like material, wrapped in soft synthetic cloth. I hear the pads themselves are replaceable, which is good, given the way the pads on my Evolution have been deteriorating.

Overall, I’m impressed. It’s a nicely streamlined update to one of the best keyboards ever.

I just started watching this show, and went through the first season in a week and a half (or so) time span. I did this, I admit, largely because a number of people had recommended it recently, and I’m bored with life as it were.

I like it. The fact that a lot of the show is an excuse to go into the deep, and sometimes surprising, back-stories of the characters is fine with me — the world these people inhabit certainly feels rich and unpredictable enough to be real. Now, the rest of the show seems to be nothing more than a long series of MacGuffins, lots of things that don’t make much sense, but are compelling enough to make you want to know just WTF is going on.

It’s rather a lot like Twin Peaks, except instead of Laura Palmer’s murderer it’s a bunch of maybe-supernatural, maybe-technological, creepy and dangerous things going on. I guess the writers of this show will eventually start bringing answers to questions, which killed TP, but I have hopes that the characters will remain interesting.

Anyway, I dig deep back-stories and character development, and slight-of-hand what-did-I-just-see (and mistakes with nitroglycerin) is fun too.

Most of the time I buy music on CD, partly because I find DRM and intellectual “property” rights an asinine topic, and partly because I can’t stand AAC files encoded at 128kbps (I’ll rip each CD at 256kbps). I bought a few songs on iTunes, and a few albums (I used to buy whole albums sometimes; now I just go a la carte if there’s one specific song I want, not necessarily caring about the freedom or quality), and always disliked the quality, and even bumped into DRM issues when just trying to use stuff I bought.

So, Apple’s new “iTunes Plus,” where songs are DRM-free AAC encoded at 256kbps, sounds like the perfect solution. It only took $30 to update the parts of my library that I could, and though it still hasn’t finished downloading all the songs (it is stuck on some Brian Eno songs, one of which is 56MB (!) — it looks like the ITS is under some heavy load at the moment), I have to say that I like it so far.

The higher bit-rate makes a difference. A big difference. It’s hard to elucidate how they differ, but the higher bit-rate sounds a lot better. I haven’t done any A/B comparisons yet, but I can’t see myself ever buying music at a low bit-rate again. Double the size be damned; disk space is plentiful and cheap.

I don’t have any practical use for DRM-free tracks (I still just use iTunes or my iPod), but it’s a nice feeling to know that none of that lunacy is present in those files, and that Apple trusts me as adult enough that I’m not going to go right out and send these files to thousands of people on the Internet.