Category: Uncategorized

Allow me to geek for a moment: There are new Mac Pro models. Nothing surprising, really – eight cores, faster front-side bus, and all that. The baseline price has gone up a hair to £1749, however, which coupled with the announcement a week before MacWorld has led some to start going all doo-lally about the possibility of an ‘xMac.’ The argument is that the Mac Pro is a workstation-class machine, and there should be a monitor-less ‘mainstream’ desktop between it and the iMac.

I think this is rot, for several reasons. Firstly, I think that ‘mainstream’ desktop is an iMac with a second monitor, if we’re being picky. But more specifically, the headline price increase in the Mac Pro masks a practical price drop.

See, you can spec a Pro with just four processor cores for £320 less than the baseline price. The resulting £1429 slots in neatly below the 2.8GHz 24″ iMac at £1459, for a machine bursting with drive bays and RAM slots, packing twice as many processors, but having no monitor. Which… is what people wanted to see from an xMac, frankly. OK, so they wanted it for £1000, but tough, this is Apple, you don’t get that lucky.

The thing that really narks me in all this is that I’m betting the people clamouring for an xMac are the same individuals who clamoured for a ‘Pro’ Mac with lots of expansion slots. Which, of course, almost nobody ever actually uses. Durr.

One final observation: the Refurb Store is offering the previous-generation 4-core Mac Pro. This is a machine with slower CPUs (though possibly more per-core bandwidth, which might factor), less RAM, a cruddy graphics card, etc etc. The discounted price? £1419. Wow. A whole tenner less than the new equivalent.

See, I told you the price had come down really.

You know it’s been a busy day when you reach 5:30pm and wonder why your Mac is taking a while to switch between applications. So you check the virtual memory and notice that it’s paging six gigs. Then you spot that the icons in your dock (along the bottom of a 20″ widescreen) are too small to recognise, and nearly all of them have little blue lights underneath.

How did I come to be running 27 applications in two different operating systems again?

Neeeeed … moooooore … raaaaaam …

I’m fairly bland in my choice of desktop picture, preferring something abstract and smooth that doesn’t get in the way nor prove too distracting. My dad, on the other hand, is a big fan of Astronomy Picture of the Day, to the extent that he has his desktop set to refresh from it.

So while I’m not using these myself, you, dear reader, might find some happy desktop joy in this collection from photographer Steve Paxton.

Christmas: done. New year: done. Meeting lots of family: done. Apologising to Flossie’s parents that dinner with them was the one family connection we didn’t manage to fit in: pending. Science teachers’ conference: done.

I’m back. Hope you all had a good one.

Every now and then I re-read my own blog, trying to work out what it’s for. It’s never going to be one of those sharply-focussed blogs that acquires a large, well-defined, and advertiser-friendly audience, but that’s never been the point of it anyway. I blog because I enjoy writing, and the restrictions of the format are interesting. The ideal blog post is an awkward length, and it’s a challenge to be correctly pithy.

So, my apologies to those of you for whom a third of this stuff is obscurely technical gibberish. My hope is that such an apology applies to basically everyone reading, but that the group of posts constituting the ‘third’ changes from individual to individual.

Musings aside: Chairman Gruber links to this delightful New York Times article on the joys of writing sans Microsoft Word. I only use Word for format conversions these days; I write mostly in TextMate, using Markdown.

In the unlikely event that I get around to writing the novel about my solution to the world’s energy problems, I might well do the legwork with Scrivener. We’ll see.

It seems churlish not to blog something about the ongoing saga of Flossie’s shopping for a specific type of under-frock bra, given that the adventure has thus far caused an exploration of West Yorkshire car parks, multiple discussions about the nature of scaffolding, and the purchase of at least one internet domain name. However, I fear the process may be too stressful for all concerned to be treated so flippantly.

I hope you’re all having a lovely Christmas, anyway. I’m standing outside the changing rooms at M&S, in what the ad-hoc group here is calling ‘texters corner.’

I might have finally sorted the export of Markdown text in the feeds for this site, let’s see:

There was a link up there; here’s a bit of a quote

Which leads us to a heading

After which there may as well be some text before:

• A bullet point
• And another one

That’s all.

Merry Christmas, by the way.

I don’t get out much. Recently this has been due to the familiar homeworkers’ burden of having to wait in for Amazon deliveries, which always seem to end up split into more parcels than items. Or perhaps I’m just a stop-at-home.

When I do get out, then, and find myself around town and of a lunchish mind, I rather enjoy discovering new haunts. What invariably happens, however, is that shortly after I order, I work out that I’ve been to the establishment before. I know this because I always end up sitting in the same chair.

Odd.

Four minutes is a long time. This is why SciCast films are limited to 2:30: filling four minutes requires far more material than people expect. What they guess will take four minutes can invariably be done in 2:30, and if you think maybe 10,000 might see a film, that’s two hundred and fifty person hours right there that the world isn’t going to get back.

So keep it short.

In fact, four minutes is so long, you can cram an overview history of Saudi Arabia into it. Wow.

Mind you, it helps if you have seriously good graphic designers, mad skillz with 3D compositing, lots of time, and a vast archive budget.

[Update: See? Told you.]

Y’all know I’m a wannabe font geek anyway, so I’ll just link to this and be done with it.

Further to this and this; a report on a storytelling panel at a video games developers’ conference. It’s worth reading that, and then skimming this remarkably circumspect review of Mass Effect, Bioware’s latest and greatest RPG. It’s been getting rave reviews, but PCWorld are refreshingly arms-length about it.

I’m currently playing Bioware’s previous effort, Jade Empire (yes, I know, I’m late to the party). It’s one of the first games since Ico to make me stop and stare at the scenery – oooh, pretty! – and the clickfest combat isn’t annoying me half as much as I expected. Probably because I have it set to ‘stupidly easy’ mode, come to think of it, and I do enjoy feeling like an unstoppable hero. Well, don’t we all?

However, I’m slightly disappointed by the storytelling. It’s a decent enough yarn, but I’m about a third of the way in and I don’t get the feeling that the main story branches at all. That is, I don’t feel as if my choices are having an effect on how the game plays out – there’s one story, and you’re funneled down it.

There’s sound reasoning for this, of course, but it’s still not very satisfying. I’m unsure, however, if my principle complaint is that I lack control over the narrative… or that I lack the illusion of such control.

Interesting.