Apple's OS X 10.4 Tiger's Release

Sorry for the lapse in my blogging, turns out my vertigo episodes were a consequence of high cholesterol, not stress. I'm jogging 5 days a week now. Yay.

Back to the subject, Apple Computer is to officially release its "Tiger" OS real soon.

Now if you've been living under a rock or a victim of windows or just casually out of it, there's a really nifty inside look at Tiger over at Ars Technica.

Personally, I am seriously contemplating switching over to Apple. At least, I would buy an iMac G5. I would personally love to buy a powerbook, but I feel reluctant, I'm still waiting for powerbooks to go G5. There's certain apps (XSI, Half-Life2) which I would need on the mac to completely forget windows. Here's hoping.

Anyways, before you even mutter something stupid like "Mac Sux", Check that article so you can get an idea of where most of the features in windows (current and future) come from.

They say immitation is the most subttle form of flattery.

Adobe + Macromedia Merger (Or How Hell Froze Over)

Because of stress-induced vertigo, I have spent most of Monday asleep. I woke up to check my email and a couple of my daily sites to find that indeed hell has frozen over.

Adobe has acquired Macromedia for 3.4b and most probably you're going to see all sorts of weird things happen in the following months. These two desktop publishing giants have been one of the major players in the graphics world, and it has traditionally been their rivalry that has driven both forward.

With but a few clicks you can find comments on the subject that range from "this could be the best thing ever" to "this means death to 2d graphics innovation". Some of those comments have some validity, but as somebody who has used Freehand since version 6 and Photoshop since version 3 I'm more worried that my choices for software as a consumer will be narrowed or even "forced" because of such acquisition.

It's a cold day in hell indeed.

Me at Mt. Seymour, BC (Canada) 

DVD Burning Mayhem

Over the past weekend I noticed Windows XP Service Pack 2 had been installed.

For those of you who didn't know it, sp2 is what some might consider to be a sneaky update and it installs without your knowledge if you haven't opted to block it, though I've heard around the web that Microsoft can circumvent this and force-install it on most systems.

Having stated what OS version I'm running on, this entry starts when I needed to burn some files onto a DVD-R disc for archiving. Up until that point, I had burned many CDs as well as DVDs successfully with my burner (Which is a LG GSA-4163B Dual Layer enabled Drive). This DVD was to be mostly pictures and whatnot courtesy of the My Documents Folder, just in case my computer decides it wants to explode one day without my consent or warning. Needless to say, this update changes some aspects of the system which I'm sure there's little if any warning.

Needless to say, 4 perfectly good DVD-R blanks went to waste with only about 300k worth of information written to them. I wish there was a way to make those disks burnable again as it just seems like a waste. Seeing as to how I was unsure why my DVD+/-R-RW drive failed repeatedly in what seemed to be a mundane task I ran some diagnostics on my machine which reported the machine was running fine. One thing that did struck me as a potential factor was that SP2 had been installed and I realized I hadn't burned a single DVD after the update. I googled some to find answers. I stumbled upon this.

Indeed what that particular post stated was true. SP2 had as a matter of fact changed my Primary and Secondary IDE channels from DMA to PIO. I did as the post said and deleted both channels from the System Manager.

Two reboots later and I was burning my DVD without any problems.

Things seem to be back to "normal", though I wonder how many more problems I am to stumble upon now that SP2 is here to stay.

Got any SP2 horror stories?