I wasn’t planning to only write about this kind of thing but by the time I was done with these topics the post was already larger than I’d like and I thought I should stop. Might do another post on other topics soon to compensate.

It looks to be a good time for gaming currently as usually happens in the run up to Christmas. I’ve mostly been playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney 2 followed by 3 on Nintendo DS during the last few weeks but I think this will end up on the back burner for a while. I’ve been anticipating The Witcher on PC for quite a while now and I just got word of my copy shipping today. On top of that Assassins Creed is due on PS3 next week. The PS3 version seems to have a slight graphical edge over the 360 version making it a bit of a no-brainer which to pick up. Mass Effect is due on Xbox360 next week too but I’m managing to hold back on this one for now (along with Call of Duty 4). No doubt I’ll pick Mass Effect up some time in the January/February games drought. I’m also looking forward to Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune which ships for the PS3 in early december. The only big Wii title on the way seems to be Super Mario Galaxy but I’m not into these games at all so it just means more dust collection for the Wii. Shame Nintendo let Super Smash Bros Brawl slip into next year, it’s not going to sell anywhere near as well as it would if it hit during a Christmas season. I still want to play more Persona 3 on PS2 but I really need to sit down to it for a period of time and things have just been too busy in recent weeks to find any time like that.

Speaking of PC games, I’m planning to do a graphics card upgrade sometime. Maybe next week. Maybe six months from now. As usual the card I actually want to buy doesn’t exist but I’m tempted to pick up ATI’s new HD 3870 anyway. It has cheap-ish prices, very low power consumption, a small board and it’s capable of driving games at native res on my monitor with maximum quality settings for everything but Crysis. I’m not buying any card with less than 1GB of RAM on it though and I really want HDMI support too so if they can satisfy both I might bite. Yes, I can’t really use HDMI to it’s full potential yet but the emphasis is on “yet”. Something I’m hoping to remedy sometime during the course of the next year. Maybe.

I’ve talked a few times (not here) about how I should stop procrastinating and finish my custom transformer box for driving my headphones. Despite this the procrastination continues. Theoretically it should sound a lot better so motivation shouldn’t be hard. I’ve already done the hard part and got the custom made very large transformers already. All that remains is to sign up to Digikey and order the handful of electronic components to make a 580V bias supply to finish it off. Some of these innocuous components are for some unfathomable reason not sold locally in New Zealand. It’s not going to cost much either since the transformers are the most costly part. Yeah, I should just do it.

I wasn’t planning to talk about MacOS 10.5 any more but I found a few other things worth mentioning. First and most annoying are the kernel panics I’ve been seeing when the wireless network subsystem is under heavy load. When I say “heavy load” I mean hundreds of open connections and this isn’t necessarily as unlikely a situation as it may sound. The panics themselves appear to be due to a bug in the driver when managing memory. I’ve been reporting each instance to Apple and have been supplying the full stack traces but it’s still not fixed in 10.5.1. Frustrating.

It also appears that Firmtek SATA cards have issues with sleep mode 10.5. Put a machine to sleep with one of these in there and chances are it won’t wake up again without a power down. This is of course more a problem with the cards than MacOS and supposedly new firmware is on the way to fix this. I do happen to have one of these in my G5 and have hit this issue too. Also frustrating.

I also noticed Finder behaving oddly in certain cases although it took me some time to figure out what was going on. At first it appeared that the concept of finder Windows holding state like size, view, position and colour had become a casualty of the constant war between the spatial and browser metaphors of user interface design. At first I thought it was a bug but after some time experimenting and reading around on the net I see it’s actually intended behaviour. For someone like me that relies on at least some spatial cues and dislikes a one-size-fits-all browser view this is potentially quite a blow. Thankfully it is possible to override this behaviour although it requires that you manually set a flag on each folder where you want to preserve the view. This is good in the sense that it will cause the state to be held but is a pain in that you have to do so manually on all the folders you care about.

I have to say, this has turned out to be the most flaky MacOS release I remember since 7.5.2 back in the day. I’ve actually been tempted to go back to 10.4 until Leopard has a few more patches under it’s belt but at this point it still seems like an overreaction. It’s a shame it’s not as good as it should be since some of the features are very welcome. There’s so many little things that just work better or make more sense. Good to see Apple admitting the new firewall is broken although as of yet they haven’t really fixed much. I’ve been brushing up on my Objective-C/Interface Builder and am tempted to just re-implement the old Firewall GUI on 10.5. The other firewall programs around seem to either over-complicate things unnecessarily for basic use or just look plain ugly/gaudy. If that makes me a UI snob then I guess I have to live with that nom de guerre.