• Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
So my copy of MacOS X 10.5 aka Leopard arrived Monday after much delay. As usual with these new releases there’s a few issues making the news although as usual the online news sites are focusing on the minor gripes when there’s bigger fish to fry. A lot has been said of issues with Unsanity’s Application Enhancer (APE), used for user interface tweaks. This apparently causes all sorts of installation problems, blue screens, etc. I don’t know why this is a surprise. Especially to those running it. This product is a system daemon that tinkers with the memory space of running applications, and has been known to cause weird issues and application crashes for years. I’ve seen it crash Finder itself (think “Explorer” if you’re a Windows user). If Finder crashes (as appears to be happening with fresh Leopard installs) then you’re up the creek without a paddle. The solution is not hard. Just don’t use it. I say this in the same way one might say “Don’t fly a kite in a lightning storm” or “Don’t shoot at cops”. Seemingly obvious perhaps with no degree in rocket science needed for understanding, but there are always “some”.
No, far far worse is Leopard’s network firewall. I should point out that a firewall is not a big concern to me since there are always about two hardware firewalls between my computer and the malarkey of constant hacking attempts that is the internet at large. It also helps that I have an idea of how to set up said hardware firewalls knowing what I can get away with and what I can’t. I feel sorry for most end users of Leopard though having to put up with the new firewall. Turned off by default, not only has it transformed into one of those slipshod application level firewalls that all the PC rags ironically think is a good idea but it also could fairly be likened to a kitchen sieve. Responding to time server requests even when the firewall is configured to “Block all incoming connections”? NetBIOS services exposed to the internet under the same conditions?!?! It’s somewhat hard to comprehend that Apple managed to have meetings about this without someone sane being in the vicinity holding a clue-stick. I mean if I paid a visit to Lockwood homes and in a meeting with the big brass advocated walls made out of perspex would it reach production or would I end up sore from the door hitting my backside on the way out? Thankfully MacOS X does still include the BSD ipfw firewall under the hood although that won’t be much consolation for the users who don’t know how to set this up. I think I had better brush up on my ipfw skills…
On the plus side the Coverflow finder view is always great and don’t know how I lived without smart mailboxes. The new network setup is really nice too. The changes under the hood are most impressive of all to me though. It also feels damn fast on the Intel Macs. I think they did some serious tuning on that side of the fence.
Current Music: D.A.N.C.E. - Justice - Cross
• Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
I finally managed to watch the Transformers movie. Given the extreme range of views I really didn’t know what to expect going in. Some really hated it while others thought it was great. In hindsight I think both points of view have merit. There’s a decent movie in there somewhere, but even more than “The Host” mentioned in my previous post Transformers seriously needed some brutal editing to extract that good movie out of the crud that was actually released.
The special effects were great even if the transformer designs were somewhat non-canonical (not that I personally care about such things). The action scenes were well done and exciting. The basic plot was serviceable enough if somewhat contrived (That’s fine, much 80s children’s TV was no different). Where it really went off the rails was spending so much time developing random human characters that no one could give a damn about. I mean seriously. This is a franchise about robots that transform into other objects and fight each other. Yeah there’s some sci-fi serving as a back story but that’s not a big deal. You don’t need hours (literally) of teen angst as if it’s an episode of “The O.C.” or whatever other trashy show Warner Brothers are putting out these days. Unfortunately that’s what they did. It was bad enough that you really could be forgiven for thinking it was a movie about something other than transforming robots. I totally head-palmed at least ten times with them deviating into places they really didn’t need to go.
I can’t say I’m disappointed since I wasn’t expecting any kind of cinematic masterpiece but I can’t help but feel there was a lot of wasted potential here. Michael Bay’s desire to take a movie with the potential to be different and turn it into generic Hollywood tripe is truly astounding.
On unrelated topics, MacOS X Leopard (10.5) and a new hard drive are due at my place on Friday. I’ve already spent quite a bit of time with earlier builds of the new MacOS but it’ll be good to switch my laptop and desktop over to it. It’s a little hard to go back to 10.4 after using Leopard a while. No Blu-ray or HD-DVD playback yet which is a bit of a shame but we can’t have everything. Speaking of HD movies I see Whitcoulls is jumping on the Blu-ray bandwagon although only in a very limited way at this point. The recorders are still a tad too expensive for my tastes but are slowly dropping. All in due time.
I haven’t been watching any anime lately which is a little odd for me. It probably doesn’t help that Madman (i.e. the new Madman) hasn’t released anything lately. They did manage to destroy their forums (aka Madchan), or perhaps just neglected to notice they were broken?…who knows. Kind of lucky notMadchan was around as a backup. Sometime I should investigate the difficulty of turning my custom phpBB code changes into a proper mod (it’s easy enough) and retrofitting them to work on a phpBB3 install to see how it goes. No rush though, PHPBB3 hasn’t even passed release candidate at this point.
Current Music: Ice Cream - New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom
• Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
I always seem to be complaining about having trouble catching up with everything that has to be done but once again it seems to be the case. Overall things are fine though. I upgraded Wordpress on my hosting account to version 2.3. The idea of just updating everything via Subversion appeals, I’ll have to see how it works. It seems a lot of plugins broke but my own custom ones appear to be fine. The Themes all seem uglier or somewhat broken currently. I think I’m going to have to do some hacking around myself to sort that out.
It’s been a while since I’ve last posted anything here although that’s not due to a lack of starting posts. I seem to have a habit of writing something and then saving it with the thought of finishing it later. Of course I don’t and then said post becomes redundant and/or contradictory and ends up being scrapped. I really should just write smaller posts more often.
I saw the South Korean film “The Host” last night. I liked it to a degree but I came off a somewhat disappointed given the rave reviews it has received. There are many reasons for the disappointment but the biggest is probably that it comes across as being unsure of what it’s really trying to achieve. It’s sort of a drama/comedy/social commentary/political commentary movie with a monster tacked on the side. It’s not even close to being scary enough to be a horror and with jokes and slapstick that misfire too often to be a comedy it ends up attempting to cover too many bases and in turn failing to do justice to any of them. There’s a whole subplot that is devoted a significant amount of screen time which turns out to have little purpose other than to take a few potshots at the Americans. Last but not least it’s overlong and at the end of that time you are left with a depressing ending; something I approve of in many cases, but here it just makes your time spend watching all the unnecessary filler feel like a waste of time. It’s shame because with some judicious editing and a simpler/more focused story it could have been really great. What saves the movie from total disaster is the monster itself which is original and well rendered (by Weta workshop no less) and the occasional tension building scenes of one of the characters in the monster’s lair which are well acted and compelling.
Current Music: Nocturne in E flat major, Op. 9, No. 2 - Frédéric Chopin - Played by Ivor Kureschy
