Mr eel
I’m a Smooth-scrolling Motherbitch!
Coz I got a Logitech VX Revolution. Expensive, elaborate, huge and very nice indeed. This is the ultimate mouse. For something with 13 buttons it appears surprisingly uncomplicated. Very precise pointing and a beautiful smooth scroll wheel. It is also large enough for my oversized hands. I’ve been having problems playing first person shooters because I end up fumbling with the mouse. No more of that!
So, goodbye Mighty Mouse! You’re going onto the eBays. You’re pretty, but sadly just-don’t-work-proper. Actually while I’m gushing over the VX Revolution I’ll take the time to warn everyone off the Mighty Mouse. It’s expensive for what it is, the scroll-ball just breaks — constantly stops working because it gets dirty — and the fancy touch sensitive buttons are confusing for most people.
It’s a nice experiment but just sucks really. Oh and don’t get a Apple Bluetooth mouse of any kind. They’re laggy, heavy and batteries are a hassle to deal with.
VX FTW!
Pixelmator is Vaporware ZOMG!
Pixelmator is an upcoming image editor for Mac OS X. Looks interesting. As soon as it had been announced, John Gruber declared it vaporware. He has apparently taken upon himself to redefine what vaporware actually means. His version is dramatically different to what everyone else believes. Pixelmator was announced two months ago. It’s deadline has slipped. Happens sometimes. Hardly qualifies as vaporware. Does this mean John will now declare any announced software that isn’t available to download immediately as vaporware?
It seems he’s continuing to be a twat about it. Don’t worry though John, in this context I define twat as ‘totally reasonable and not at all unfair’.
Announcing The Modern Ghost
After a fair period of gestation my collaborator Chris Lee and I have decided to make some of our work public. We’ve been working on a Drum and Bass project called The Modern Ghost. We’ve finally grounded the project. It has a sound and approach that we’re really happy with and we are going to expand on it with more music.
In the meantime we’ve set up a page on Virb which has some biographical guff and some audio previews. We’ll be adding more music as we work on it. You can check it out here.
What I Want
What I really want is an pure Ruby server for object persistence. I’m actually getting a bit annoyed having to use ORMs. I don’t like DBs. They’re fiddly to set up and administer and I always end up using them naively which generates all sorts of performance issues. Also for simple cases they tend to be to over-kill. Ideally I want to work with Ruby code only. If I run into performance issues, I’d rather resolve them by looking at my code rather than poking about in some SQL.
Luckily there are such things already. For example there is Mongoose, which uses ActiveRecord style semantics, but stores the objects by calling marshall and writing them to disk. I plan on testing it out a bit and seeing how it performs.
The problem as I see it, is that at the moment there are different persistence libraries replicating the same tasks. Ideally it would be better to see larger support for a single project. But it looks like my complaints aren’t shared by many people. Most web app developers seem content to use ORMs.
Bugger.
Reggy - Nice, Tiny Regular Expression Tester
For a regular expression newbie like me Reggy has been super handy. It’s just a tiny regular expression evaluator for Mac OS X that runs against your sample text as you modify your expression. It doesn’t try to do anything fancy, but it’s a Cthulu send when you’re trying to figure out an expression.
Me, Playing God of War 2
I am teh god of war, none shall defy me yargh, oh you want some of this do you? YARGH, tore you in half, uh oh big statue smashing everything to shit, climb inside beat you UP! Yarrrrr killed by Zeus, gone to hell. Not in hell flying around on a flaming Pegasus! HELL YEH. Smashing Titan fingers, beat up more people, climb up on some stuff, more flying about, beat up loads more people. Knock this cheeky guy about coz he’s got some key. Right, lets fight some more people to beat up and hurt in novel ways…
STOP. No, now you have to solve a stupid puzzle. Sorry.
* sigh
Fell - A Grim Read
I just finished reading the first collection of Fell by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith. Well… It’s nasty as all get go. A brief synopsis; After some un-named scandal, Detective Richard Fell is sent from the city across the bridge to Snowtown which — bluntly — seems rooted. As if every murderer, crazy, sex-fiend and crook settled on the place like flies on shit. Not nice. Detective Fell sets himself to doing what good he can, not always with the best outcomes.
I’m tentative to say I enjoyed reading this, because the subject matter really is nasty, but well… it’s bloody awesome. I think in lesser hands the stories could too easily become oppressive, but thankfully the characters remain the focus — as opposed to novel depravities — and the dialog is miles away from the cliched rubbish we find in most Police procedurals.
If you’ve a strong stomach, I recommend picking up the books. Best thing I’ve come across in ages.
Rubinius Hits The 0.7
I’ve been following Rubinius for awhile now. It’s a Ruby VM written using C with the eventual aim of it being self-implemented. In other words the VM itself will be written using Ruby. The design is based on principles taken from the Smalltalk-80 VM which had a well-known — depending on your social circles I guess — book colloquially called ‘The Blue Book’.
I like that idea of self-implementation because it at least makes the VM approachable for C noobs like yours truly. Most parts of the core classes are already written in Ruby. That means pretty my anyone with Ruby knowledge can get stuck into it.
SO! The interesting news is that the project has now hit the 0.7 release. Not yet production ready, but whoa, they’ve really got stuck into it. It’s a really exciting project for so many reasons. Not only the self-implementation, but the other features of the VM. For example compiling byte-code or in the future a Just-in-time compiler. More exciting acronyms ahead!
Anyhow, if you have some idle time to kill, Read the release notes for Rubinius 0.7. Perhaps even download it? Do it for me? Go on! I’ll bake you a banana cake.
Missy Blood
Just lately I’ve been working on music more heavily. Typically I’ve got loads of different bits on the go at any one time. That’s good and bad. Good because I’ve always got something to work on. Bad because it can make it difficult to finish anything.
But oh well!
Here is something I was doing for kicks. After listening to loads of Acid tunes, I decided to make something kinda old school. Download Missy Blood.
Half Life 2 Makes Me Dizzy
Well, now that I have a shiny Macbook Pro I figured it was time for me to set up Boot Camp and play Half Life 2. I’ve actually played HL2 Deathmatch a good deal, but I’ve never played the single player game. I debated buying the current retail box, or waiting until Valve release the Orange Box set — HL2 and all of it’s addons.
In the end I bought it off Steam and downloaded it. Worked out to be $28AUD with Episode One, which had previously been about $20AUD by itself. Steam is very annoying or at least the client app is, but the convenience of buying online and downloading games far outweighs any irritation. I’m keen to see even more games distributed this way. Lower cost for punters, no DVDs or paper packaging. A hell of a lot less waste all round.
As for the actual game — I’ve played it for hours on end today. It is very, very good. And running on my MBP, I can crank the settings right up. It looks lush.
The only real downside is that the game makes me feel ill. Having the perspective in game swing about while my body sits still inevitably makes me nauseous. Thankfully it usually takes awhile for it to kick in, so I’ve still managed to play a large chunk of the game.
I’m looking forward to completing the game and getting back into Deathmatch again. I’ll play woefully like usually, but I hope I can avoid embarrassing myself too much.