Computers

Which Country Am I In?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

It was raining in the Bay Area when I left. When I got to Heathrow the weather was like California only about 10 degrees colder. I am confused.

I had a really smooth trip. The flight went fine. Passport control and baggage claim were very smooth – the move to Terminal 1 seems to have been good for United from that point of view. And then I just walked on and off trains in sequence managing the whole journey back to Darkest Somerset in a little over 3 hours from touchdown.

Settling back in has not been so smooth. My wireless modem may have given up the ghost. Fortunately I have a (non-wireless) backup so I could still get online. I’m mostly caught up, but I can’t go through my blog feeds because Google’s UK site appears to be offline. I always log into google.com as a matter of course, but when I’m in the UK that automatically redirects to google.co.uk, and that site is down. Or at least I can’t get to it. Very odd.

Warhammer Goes Online

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The BBC Reports that Games Workshop is launching an online version of their Warhammer role-playing game that will compete with World of Warcraft. As a retired game designer, I took an interest in some of the things they were pushing as advantages of their system:

Ditched in WAR has been item damage which sees weapons and armour degrade in quality as they are used until they break. Also gone is the need to ghost run from a graveyard back to a corpse when a character is killed. From the start everyone also gets a bag big enough to hold all the loot they gather.

Well, it is a “fantasy” after all, so who cares if equipment never breaks and one small backpack can hold thousands of gold coins and several suits of magic armor without getting heavy, right?

Still, I did like what they said about providing an open gaming environment rather than creating an objective for playing that everyone has to aim for.

Meanwhile another BBC report reveals that computer gamers are actually fairly fit compared to the general population, but they are more prone to depression.

Learning Chrome

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I have downloaded the new Google browser, Chrome, and have been testing it on the various web sites that I manage. So far all seems well, but some of the font rendering in Chrome seems distinctly inferior to that in Firefox. Compare this site with the two browsers to see what I mean. John Scalzi also rates Chrome as “meh”.

On the other hand, the advantages of Chrome are supposed to be under the hood, not technoflash. Tim Anderson has been peeking at memory usage and is favorably impressed.

I’m hoping that Chrome will prove more of a threat to IE than to Firefox. Because it comes from well known brand rather than an open source community (though it is actually open source itself) it may get past the Great Gods In White Coats who staff corporate IT departments, and get used in business as well as by home users. Also the morons who insist on coding web sites specifically for IE will find it harder to explain to even the dimmest pointy-haired boss why they should cut themselves off from Google users.

Breakthrough in Hair Animation

~ Cheryl

One of the easiest ways to tell if you are in a virtual environment or not (and we do wonder about that, don’t we) is that computer animation is useless at doing hair, until now. Researchers at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering have developed new techniques that look very promising. There’s a write-up here, but for the full effect watch the video. It is quite a big download, but well worth it. Of course the current demo uses short-haired men. When they do long hair in the wind with the character in motion I’ll be seriously impressed, but for how this is very good. (And yes, it does mean an end to bald spots on male actors.)

How I Almost Traveled the Universe

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Today’s online reading turned up what sounded like one of the coolest pieces of software in a very long time. Microsoft has come up with something called WorldWide Telescope, which basically hooks you in to a vast collection of astronomical databases and allows you to browse the night sky in much the same way as Google Earth allows you to browse our planet. The introductory videos on the site talk a lot about creating stories, and it is clear that, at least as far as the astronomy community is concerned, one of the major purposes of this is to get kids doing astronomy from their PCs and making their own multi-media presentations based on their explorations. That’s seriously cool.
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Asus Update

~ Cheryl

I’ve come across an annoying little problem with the Asus. Google Reader doesn’t work properly (at least under Firefox). The web site is OK, but there is a scrollable section in the bottom left of the screen where you pick which folder you want to view, and it is just far enough down the page to not display the scroll bar. Changing the text size didn’t work, but I finally got it displayed by turning off all of the toolbars. Irritating,

The Cat Has Landed

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

So, here I am back in Darkest Somerset. The weather is typical for April – brief periods of bright sunshine followed by short spells of torrential rain, on a permanent repeat loop. The summer country is mostly above water, although there are a lot of swans in the fields so it must be still quite damp. Also we have been invaded. There is a veritable army of rabbits camped in the fields between Taunton and Bridgwater.

The Asus did OK on the trip, and was a huge hit with both the TSA guys at SFO and the chap in the seat next to me. I think I need to be on commission. It does seem to leak power when on standby, which is irritating, but I need to do more tests to be sure.

I got back just in time to catch the tail end of today’s cricket on cricinfo.com, and what a match it was. Two wickets by Shaun Pollock in his first over disposed of the dangerous McCullum and Ganguly, and a masterful 3-14 by Jayasuriya held the rest of the Knight Riders batting to a lowly 137. Dwayne Bravo and Robin Uthappa knocked the runs off with ease. So the Indians have a win at last, and the Knight Riders are in a slump. Guess who they have to play next. Yep, they are off to Jaipur. Here’s hoping they are still bruised and depressed on Thursday.

Help Save XP

~ Cheryl

I never thought I’d be in the position of wanting to save a Microsoft operating system from extinction, but I do have to use Windows for work, and I really don’t want to have to have to buy a Vista machine until they get the damn thing to work properly. Apparently Steve Ballmer has said that Microsoft would be prepared to grant a stay of execution for XP if enough customers want them to. Sign the petition, now, please.

Unstained but Mobile

~ Cheryl

I am reminded that today is not only Dragon Killing Day but also International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. I don’t have anything substantive to post, but then I haven’t been charging you for any of this lot, have I?

More importantly, I spent most of today in San Francisco. That involved having lunch in Starbucks, and I’m pleased to note that I was able to sit there and work on the Tiptree article on the Asus. I’d copied it off a Windows box via a USB stick, and it loaded into Open Office just fine. And I’ve just transfered it back. Again no trouble. I am very pleased.

Miniaturized

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

This post is being written on my brand new Asus Eee PC. It is seriously cute, and it was also up and running and useful in minutes, which is more than you can say for a Windows box. The keyboard is a little small, but the low weight more than makes up for that. I can see me taking this little machine everywhere.

Playing with Computers

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

This is going to sound like one of those old Jerry Pournelle Chaos Manor columns from the late, lamented Byte. But the weekend didn’t start like that. It actually took a long time to get around to doing the computer work. First of all two writing jobs came in, which you will see the results of next week. Also we had errands to do, and wanted to get plenty of exercise, seeing as how it was a fairly quiet weekend. But by late Sunday afternoon we managed to get going.

I’d been spending the weekend off and on making backups of modeling data on my main workhorse desktop. I finally managed to free up 60 Gb of space on that machine. I then extracted the hard drive from the dead laptop, hooked it up to the desktop, and transferred all of the vital data from it.

Meanwhile we got to work on the Linux install. The machine we planned to put it on was a bust. Although Kevin has bought the machine from work, no one knew that it came armed with an RFID-based security system and would not boot outside the office. We may be able to do something about that, but in the meantime we went to Plan B which involved an old desktop stuck running Windows 98. It was useless like that, but it had enough memory and disk space to run Ubuntu so we gave it a go.

It ran like a dream. I was particularly impressed that Ubuntu was able to access the Internet when booted off the install disk, so you could check support documentation before installing. And we now have a functional web browser, and there’s a whole bunch of other useful programs on it too. The next step will be downloading and installing a LAMP set-up so that I can have an actual Linux-based web environment to test on.

One thing that isn’t working yet is the network. The Ubuntu machine can see that there is a Windows network out there, but it can’t see any of the machines on it, let alone access their public spaces. That may require a little work. But so far so good.

Of course I now want to know where I can get a copy of Kylix…

Mapping Through Time

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Every so often you are in the middle of a book and you see a news story that just seems to belong with it. So here am I reading Felix Gilman’s Thunderer, and here are the Long Now folks talking about a project at UCLA that produces computerized maps that not only show how a city is now, but how it has changed through time. Professor Holbach would be fascinated, I suspect.