I originally got into computer programming because of video games. The moment I had my Vic 20 (OK, my SpectraVideo, I swapped my Vic 20 after a week because it sucked) I was programming, wanting to know how all these cool games did their thing. I dabbled away here and there making different sorts of games for myself and in the early to mid 90’s I got to actually work on a couple of commercial projects. One, known as “The Game That Shall Not Be Named” was a complete pile of rubbish that I, along with my friend Chuck, were employed at the 11th hour to try and help salvage. We failed (Believe me, the game actually got released in a better state than what it was in before we started). But my proudest game development moment came with a PC port of an Amiga game called Seek and Destroy. I worked for 18 months on the game, driving the project because the artist had worked on the Amiga version and could hardly be bothered working on this one. It got released on Epic Megagame’s budget label ‘Safari Software’ at a time just before Epic really started to make it big and sold, if my memory serves, a whopping 13,000 copies! Needless to say, I am NOT retired.

Anyway I just happened to Google it today to see if there was anything around on the game, and was very surprised to see that someone had actually made a video of the game being played. Unfortunately the person playing does not seem to have worked out that the helicopter can strafe, but nonetheless it brought back the warm and fuzzies. At the time it was a pretty revolutionary game in the way it drew the screen to fake up full screen rotation.

Enjoy!

Seek and Destroy Factoids

- The game almost got banned in Germany. We were pushing  the limits with the game’s final screen showing a UN soldier (In blue helmet) with a gun to the head of a captured enemy. We had to move the arm so it was facing up, change the blood from red to green and remove the colouring of the helmet.

- I had to finish the game while I was on my OE. After selling Seek, I got some money and took my wife on a trip to Europe. While we were enjoying ourselves, we found out Germany needed changes so I went and stayed with one of Epic’s employees in Potton in the UK. They got me an Amiga and the source code and I spent about 3 weeks trying to fix all the things the Germans hated. I imagine we probably sold 2 copies there.

- There are secret codes that unlock a large anti-war rant when you finish the game. The whole game was just over the top and meant to be extremely tongue in cheek. A lot of people didn’t quite see it that way.

- The company I worked for (Vision Software) made a massive amount of money off “The Game That Shall Not Be Named” then promptly urinated it up against a wall (Literally, by buying a pub) and went bankrupt. The first I knew was when I received a letter from the bank saying that my wages had bounced.

- The game was originally just a helicopter game. But, in what I still to this day, feel was not one of Epic’s greatest moves, they wanted me to shoehorn a tank mechanic in the game. Please, if you play it, do not blame me for the tank…..

- While the game was waiting to be published, I, along with another developer was working on a SUPER fast full screen rotation algorithm in x86 assembler. We got it working real well but could not squeeze another cycle out to get it to a consistent 60fps on our 486 DX40, only on a DX 2 66 could handle the job. We decided that that was way too high spec for minimum requirements, so abandoned the tech for Seek. Nowadays the chip in my credit card could do it.

Uncategorized Computers, Programming, Video Games

OK, the next little review I’m going to do in my rundown of my new machine is the machine itself seeing as the opener was just about Apple’s new Magic Mouse (which you can read here). I’ll finish off with a little article later about the keyboard, which while not a new design, is the first time I’ve used one of Apple’s flat type keyboards so I have a bit to say about it.

Hmm, where to start? I had an aging iMac (2006 Model) that sported a Core 2 Duo running at I think about 2.06GHz. The machine served me well but when Apple announced their Quad Core’s the temptation was a little too much especially because I do quite a bit more photography and video encoding than I used to. As mentioned in another post I had initially ordered from JBHiFi only to be told over a week later that they wouldn’t be arriving until mid Jan. I cancelled the order and bought from the Apple store; the machine arrived DEcember 29th. Buying from the Apple store was fortuitous for me, but not my bank balance because while ordering online I made the decision to get the i7 Quad core as opposed to the i5. Some benchmarks showed up to around 30% increase in performance compared to the i5 model, and for a measly couple of hundred bucks it seemed like a silly thing not to do it.

So, some basic specs:

• Quad Core i7 Intel Processor with 8MB L3 cache, Hyperthreading and Turbo mode (realtime overclocking).
• 4GB DDR3 RAM @ 1066MHz with 2 slots spare.
• 1TB Hard drive.
• 27″ LED backlit screen.
• Various USB, Firewire 800 and other ports.

As with my other review, I’ll break it down into a few parts (along with a rating): Setup, Screen, Performance, Peripherals and Connectors.

Setup (D)

Setup on this thing was abysmal. This is the first Apple machine that I have had problems with during the initial setup, and this time they were twofold; one much more serious than the other. First the not-quite-as-serious-but-damned-annoying.

The machine has NO, that’s NONE, NOT ONE, Firewire 400 port. When migrating from one Mac to another, using a Firewire cable between your new machine and old one is a pretty standard way of connecting them together. You just plug them in, boot one of them in Target disk mode and away you go without a care in the world. Unfortunately because the new Quad Core has no FW 400 port and I was upgrading from a machine that only had FW400, I didn’t have a cable or adapter do link up my machines. I would have needed to have purchased the correct cable beforehand. You could argue I should have looked at the specs more closely but I would say it’s pretty reasonably to expect FW400 to still in machines these days. Maybe I’m just too much of an old fogey.

The second issue was much more serious. After not being able to use Firewire to migrate, I made a Time Machine backup of my disk. I then plugged it into my new machine, selected it as the source for the migration and went away. I came back sometime later, saw it had finished successfully and rebooted my machine. As a little paranoia check I then looked in my documents folder to find that only a few of my files had been migrated. Confused I re-ran the migration assistant and watched it. What I saw was a surprise.

At some point in the migration the drive with my Time Machine backup on just disappeared from the system. The light on my external drive dimmed down to indicate it wasn’t in use and the migration assistant just sat there. After a while it popped up a dialog saying it had finished successfully! I then ran Disk Utility and the external drive wasn’t even appearing. It wasn’t as though it had just been dismounted, it was gone completely. I had to turn the power off and on on the enclosure to get it to be recognised again. I repeated the test to make sure and it did it 2 more times at seemingly random places. I will also say at this point that the enclosure had worked flawlessly for me on my old mac.

At this time it was very late at night (Early morning in fact) and I wanted to get this working so it could migrate while I slept, so I turned off all powersaving options that looked dodgy, moved the drive to another USB port on the machine and tried again with a partial migration. This worked so I migrated the rest of my content and the machine was finally up and running. I have yet to go back and diagnose the problem accurately, but a quick search on the Apple forums revealed that this problem is happening to a few others. Most of which run Snow Leopard but some that don’t, and some with machines a couple of years old.

Apart from these two issues, all the hardware detection worked well and everything was up and running in the end.

Screen (A)

The screen on an iMac is no laughing matter seeing as it’s integrated into the computer. I was pretty happy with my old one, but this one blows it away. It’s large, very bright and of course sexy. I have not noticed any dead or hot pixels either which is nice. With a screen that big I almost expected some.

The screen is true 16:9 which is nice compared to older iMacs which have 16:10 screens. It’s LED backlight and probably the only thing I can fault it on is that it’s not perfectly evenly lit. The corners are brighter than the rest of the display but it’s not something you tend to notice, and I bet you’d find your LCD TV has the same issue (Mine does).

Oh yes, it does have another problem. It gets dirty quick. Thankfully Apple supplied a screen cleaning cloth in the box- nice.

Performance (A+?, A++?,AAAAA?)

Performance is a hard one for me to quantify with comparative numbers simply because I dont’ have a raft of other machines to run benchmarks against. This has thankfully been done by a number of other people and I’d suggest you go looking at those sites for raw figures. I can however give an indication about how it feels to use the machine and some general speed comparisons.

In short, the i7 Quad Core iMac is blisteringly fast. Due in a small part to the 4GB DDR3 RAM vs my old 2.5GB DDR2 RAM and due in a BIG part to the 4 cores at higher clock speeds, this thing blows my old Core 2 Duo out of the water. Firing up applications is very fast although the decrease in load times is not as much as the raw processing speed increase; after all, hard drives are still the slow, lumbering behemoths they were a couple of years ago. When the applications are running though, things are sublime. In fact this is the first Mac I’ve owned where I feel it’s “Fast enough”. By that I mean when I tell it to do something, it does it before my patience wears out.

Of course the physical theorem that patience is inversely proportional to length of ownership of a fast computer, means that I’ll think this thing is as slow as a ZX81 within a week.

The main pieces of software I tend to run at the moment are Handbrake (For encoding my entire DVD collection), Lightroom for my photography and general use software like Mail, Chromium and iTunes. I also run The Gimp from time to time as well.

Handbrake encoding is now so fast on this machine that I can encode a full feature film faster than I can rip it from disc. Ripping takes about 30-40 minutes to rip a disk and now my movies are encoding in around the same time. My old machine used to take upwards of 2 hours to encode a movie. Basically, my new machine is 4x faster than my old one at encoding movies in H264 at the settings I use (level=40:ref=2:mixed-refs=1:bframes=3:weightb=1:subq=9:direct=auto:b-pyramid=1:me=umh:analyse=all:no-fast-pskip=1:merange=32:no-dct-decimate=1). This now affords me the option of using very high quality settings for my encodings which take my new machine 2 hours, but used to take 8 or so on my old one.

Lightroom not only starts a lot faster, but browsing my photo library in grid mode is now a pleasure; the wide screen allowing me to see 50-60 photos at once. Loading previews are a snap now too of course and general usage has improved a lot. It’s probably not quite as marked as encoding, but then Lightroom is rather disk intensive.

General usage is also where I see a massive improvement. Application start times, responsiveness of the UI and the ability to run more apps at once are all big plusses. I have also finally started using Spaces. I now put one application on it’s own space which keeps my desktop uncluttered and switching between is so fast and smooth that it’s practical to do so. I think the machine has finally caught up to the sluggish UI framework that Apple uses so it’s no longer as much of a burden. All they need to do now is rewrite that abysmal piece of rubbish – Finder – and the machine would be perfect.

All this performance does come a bit of a cost though. Heat. After using my iMac for a while I reached around the back to feel what it was like and was rather shocked at how hot the back of the machine gets. This of course is a good thing because it means the heat is not inside your computer burning it alive, but it was still surprising. There are also fans at the back which, when they aren’t on mean you machine is almost inaudible. When they do kick in (When I’m encoding video) it’s a moderate background noise that’s a little quieter than than my external Vantec RAID enclosure.

Connectors (B-)

The connectors that come on the iMac have been pretty common fare on macs for a while now. You get 4 USB 2.0 ports, 1 Firewire 800 port (I smell the death of Firewire looming unfortunately), Audio in and out and a mini Display Port. The one additional connector that intrigued  me was the addition of an SD card slot. This is a very consumer-oriented port and when I first heard about it being added I thought it seemed a little cheap to add it to such a nice machine. Nowadays though, almost every device you use for capturing still and moving images uses SD cards at the consumer level so I am sure lots of people will be happy the SD card slot is there.

The slot sits just below the Superdrive slot on the right side of the machine and there’s been a few complaints around the internet suggesting it’s too close. Some people have accidentally slid their SD card into the SuperDrive slot and I can see how that can happen if you don’t look or check very carefully.

Now I shoot with professional still cameras so I use CF card for those, which would have been nice to have in the machine, but my video camera is a simple SD card recording Panasonic HDC-SD9. I do have a card reader but I found the iMac SD card slot to be much faster and will definitely use it for my video capturing from now on.

Now I realise that the iMac is considered Apple’s “consumer” desktop but in reality the speed of this machine is far from consumer. It’s a machine that I think any professional photographer or videographer could happily use and this is why I wish they had have added a few other ports. First a legacy Firewire 400 port would have been nice, or at least include an adapter. Secondly I would have liked to have seen the inclusion of a CF card slot. CF cards are what the professional stills camera photographers use and the addition of one would have be a lovely cherry on top.

Uncategorized 27", Apple, Computers, i7, Mac, Quad Core

OK, now that I’ve had a little time to play with my new Quad Core iMac (i7, everything else standard) I thought I’d do a series of posts on how I’m finding it. This first one won’t be about the machine, it will be about the Magic Mouse that comes standard with the machine. I’m starting with this because it’s the most annoying thing about my new setup.

The Magic Mouse is Apple’s latest bluetooth mouse for their Macs. It’s sleek and stylish like most things Apple but the revolutionary thing about this mouse is that it has a multi-touch sensitive top and therefore no mouse ball/wheel. It’s totally smooth and I must say totally gorgeous.

There are 5 factors regarding the mouse that I want to talk about. Build, Ergonomics, Tracking, Button surface and Battery and I’ll tackle them in that order.

Build (A)

There’s very little I can fault about the build quality of this mouse. Seriously it has to be not only the sexiest mouse I’ve seen but also the most solid feeling. Given the fact that there is no ball or wheel, means that there’s pretty much two pieces to the unit; the bottom and the top. The top is a lovely white surface (Clear cover with white underneath) and is decorated with a light grey Apple logo at the bottom. The underneath looks like anodised metal (It is in fact plastic) and contains the battery cover (This mouse is wireless), power switch, laser and foot pads.

Ergonomics (C-)

“C-!!” I hear you scream? Yup, I have to give this mouse a low score on ergonomics. The main culprit is the low profile nature of the mouse. It is so low I cannot rest my hand on it easily and have my finger tips still on the mouse for swiping. If I raise my hand so that my fingers fit, then I put more strain on my wrist as it heads more towards a 90 degree angle. I then have to move my wrist in an arc in order to move the cursor. And given the fact that the screen is 27″ in size on my iMac, that’s a big arc, especially if you use the default mouse tracking settings as I will talk about next. Even Apples images on their site show someone holding their mouse like it’s a dainty little thing that you tinkle with.

What I need to qualify this score with though, is that you need to take your hand size into account. While I don’t think I have overly large hands I have longish fingers but if you were blessed with hands the size of fieldmice, you should be OK.

After a week of use I am already finding the mouse rather tiresome on my hands, wrists and arms and if I cannot find a way to alleviate the discomfort I will probably go back to my $20 no-name mouse with scroll wheel.

Tracking (B-)

In my opinion, tracking has always been a weak point of Apple mice and this mouse is no exception. The maximum speed that you can move the mouse is borderline unusable on something like my iMac with it’s 27 inch screen. I would find myself having to move the mouse miles across my desk to get from one side to the other and if you use a mouse pad, forget it, you’ll fall off the edge before you get there. You will need to get a utility called MouseZoom which allows you to increase the speed of your mouse tracking. I have mine set to 10, which is the maximum MouseZoom allows, whereas Apple’s maximum is 1.7 on that same scale (i.e. my tracking speed is nearly 6 times faster). Now that I have MouseZoom installed the mouse works pretty well.

Button surface (A+)

The surface of the mouse is a single piece of Apple’s mojo infilled acrylic like substance. In order to scroll just swipe your finger along the surface as you would with a scroll ball. It is also multi-touch aware so you can scroll two fingers horizontally to navigate forward and backwards in Finder, your web browser (It works fine with Chromium) or other application. These features can be altered within the System Preferences to turn them on or off, switch buttons and set sensitivities.

Magic Mouse System Preferences

There is nothing bad I can say about the touch sensitivity of the mouse so far. It works flawlessly, scrolling when I ask it and not scrolling when I don’t. Additionally, because the scrolling allows for momentum you get a more natural feel to your movements when using it.

The scrolling seems like Apple over-compensated for the abysmal product that was the Mighty Mouse. A single surface mouse with a tiny ball that worked beautifully for about a month then never worked again. That mouse ball had to be cleaned so regularly that you spent more time doing that than using your computer and then eventually it just stopped working. I don’t think there are many people I know who still have a working Mighty Mouse, and I know several that have been smashed in frustration once they stopped working.

Battery (B+)

Wireless mice are both a boon and a bane. Less cables is oh-so-much better but having to put batteries in the thing all the time is annoying as all hell. So far though I must say I’m happy. As you can see in the screenshot of the System Preferences panel above, my mouse is sitting at 87% battery life. These are the standard batteries that ship with the mouse and I have had the machine a total of 6 days. I only use my machine out of work hours at home for about 20 hours a week, so if you work it all out that’s about 130 hours on a set of 2 AA batteries. I’m fine with that, especially seeing as I will move to rechargables.

As expected, the bluetooth worked flawlessly and when I turned on my iMac for the first time it was detected and started working without a hitch…once I turned the power on on the mouse of course.

Summary

To finish off, the mouse is a solid and sexy performer with poor ergonomics. The touch screen tech is great, however I don’t have to have a fancy touch surface on my mouse when I just want to scroll. Any other mouse on the planet does that well enough with the old scroll wheel. It’s just Apple that can’t make mice with wheels/balls.

Uncategorized Apple, Computers, Mac, Magic Mouse, Review

Well I finally did it. I went and upgraded my old 2006 iMac. Doing photography and encoding a lot of my DVD’s recently I’d been a little annoyed at the speed (Or lack of) of my old iMac. While it boasted a Core 2 Duo running at a little over 2Ghz, it had started to show it’s age with raw throughput when using Adobe Lightroom and Handbrake. Apple had recently revved their lineup so I decided to look into an upgrade and see what it’d cost me. Of course, a small upgrade to the low end iMac would have still left me with tech envy, so I opted for the new Quad Core iMac.

I had ordered through JBHiFi but after some mucking around by them and being told in the end I wouldn’t get it until mid January I cancelled my order and bought instead from the Apple store. This was a good move for Apple because while I was there I noticed that for just a teeny bit more I could get the i7 Quad Core running at 2.8GHz as opposed to the i5 Quad Core @ 2.66GHz which is Apple’s stock top of the line model; the i7 is a custom build which benchmarks showed to be about 20% faster in some cases than the i5. So I hit the button and hunkered down for the guesstimated 6th Jan ship date. However, I must have been a good boy throughout the year because on the 29th of December Santa delivered my new toy!

I eagerly unpacked it and admired the predictably sexy Apple packaging then fired it up, grabbed my Firewire cable to join to my old iMac for migration and – uh oh – “Where do I stick this Firewire plug” – oh “I don’t, it only has a Firewire 800 port now”. This was my first hurdle and while very inconvenient, the Migration Assistant allows network migration. I hit Airport and started the process – “Oh, 13 hours to migrate? No way am I waiting for that!” so I cancelled it. In the end I had to resort to making a Time Machine backup of my old machine first and using that as my migration source.

Then issue two hit me and this was was a bit more worrisome. I let the migration progress, came back when it finished, looked at my files and noticed lots were missing. I then tried migrating again, and watched it. Part way through at some random time (I tried a few more times) my drive would just disappear from the system and so the migration wouldn’t finish. On top of that the Migration Assistant reported success so I thought it’d worked. In the end I turned off every setting to do with Sleeping, Screen Fading and what have you as well as trying a different USB port and managed to get migrated without the drive being lost. I really hope the issue doesn’t come back but I’ll spend some time later looking into it.

Anyway once up and running I have to say the machine is sexy. It looks good, with a 27″ anodised aluminium body and runs like the clappers. I did some test encodings of DVD’s of mine and the machine could encode at about 4x the speed of my old iMac. Very, Very nice. Everything opens fast, Lightroom flies and life is good. Apart from this keyboard which is already hurting my hands.

The mouse on the other hand feels quite nice, albeit small (Most mice are for my hands) and the touch sensitive surface for scrolling and swiping works well. It does suffer from Apple’s usual mouse issue of not tracking fast enough, but I found a little Preference Pane called Mouse Zoom that makes my mouse a lot faster, even if not quite fast enough for me.

Anyway, I can’t wait to get into some real work with this baby.

Uncategorized Apple, Computers, Mac

Happy New year everyone! I hope you all had some great celebrations with people you care about and are looking forward to an awesome 2009. I spent Christmas eve and Christmas day with family and it was all good!

Now that the new year is here resolutions are the order of the day and while I have a rather large list I’ll mention just a few of mine.

First is to run another 1/2 marathon and beat my current time of 1hour 53 minutes. Until yesterday I hadn’t been running for 4 weeks but as they say “Start out as you mean to continue” so I got up and did a small run along Tamaki Drive in the middle of the day – damn it was hot. I don’t want to do that resolution any more…

Second. I am going to spend a lot less time on my computer. Yup, surprise surprise I spend vast quantities of time on it. Some productive, creative and interesting, but most of it not. I’m going a bit cold turkey to start off in that apart from work and a quick email check, several days a week I am not going to go near it at all. We’ll see how that pans out but I started it yesterday and while it was tough it was very rewarding. I actually got some writing (Not on a computer) done.

Third, I am going to attempt a photo a day. Every day, rain or shine I will take a photo. I will then post it up at the end of the day or if time is tight I will save them up and post en masse at the end of the week (So you might see up to 7 in one go). The key thing about this challenge is that it keeps me photographing and thinking about photography. A side benefit I see from this also is that if I just start taking random snaps to fill my quota I’ll be unhappy with the results so I’ll actually try harder to shoot more interestingly and of higher quality.

I have also joined the Flickr group 365 in 2009 where I will also be posting the photo a day. I encourage anyone else to join this group too and if you do, let me know.

So now that’s out of the way, here is my first two photos covering January 1st and 2nd.

The first while not a cop out, wasn’t difficult to produce and is not very flash. I was trying to think what to shoot and then stopped to think about how my day was going. I was relaxing, enjoying thinking about photography and about to have some whiskey so I combined them into a photo.

Relaxing on New Years Day

You may have noticed the insignificant role that the whiskey plays in this photo. I would like to make it clear that this is no metaphor for reduction of my whiskey consumption this year – no no no…it’s just that if I had of kept it in the shot, there would have been this ugly umbrella pole sticking out the top of it thereby making the photo even worse.  Totally my fault for setting up an awful shot.

Now, day 2 is a much better attempt I feel and I personally like the result much better. I got up at 4am because I couldn’t sleep and thought “while I’m up why not get out there and get a sunrise” so I went to Shoal Bay under the Auckland Harbour Bridge and waited.

And waited, but nothing was happening. Everything looked dreary and boring so I decided to jump down under the bridge and take some shots of the supports. When I did – WHAM – The sun burst over the horizon and I got about 5-10 minutes where I shot the crap out of the sunrise. I learnt a lot – primarily how damned hard it is to manage exposure with super bright sunlight smashing you in the face.

Sunrise at Shoal Bay, Auckland

So there we have it. Two days down and 363 more to come. I should end this by saying that one last resolution I have is to become good enough at photography this year to actually get a job in the field. Anything – assisting, small business of my own, or toilet cleaner at the Photo Warehouse. Given my noob-ness in the world of photography it’s a tall order but I’ve set it as a goal for the year because only under pain of forclosure do I want to go back to fulltime software engineering and I need a lofty goal to get me moving – fast!

Have a great one!

Uncategorized 365in2009, Computers, Photography, Running

Hi everyone. Just a short post today about a link I came across that lists the browsers that are available for OSX. The link arrived at an opportune time because I’m currently looking to replace that memory-hungry-system-slowing-beach-ball-generating browser known as Safari. I’ve noticed my machine performing a lot of disk activity lately, even after the regular maintenance tasks and it wasn’t until I killed Safari and started testing out Camino that it seemed that the activity stopped and my machine has now come back to normal (More tests to follow to make sure).

I would use Firefox but it’s not very Mac like and doesn’t integrate with the Keychain which is something I use a lot. Camino on the other hand does but I have read about it’s low quality Acid3 test results so I may well end up moving on and trying another soon.

What the Acid3 result should look like

What it *IS* like under Camino

Anyway, knock yourselves out.

Link to OSX browsers

Uncategorized Computers