Terror in London

I am going to take a break from the technical stuff usually discussed here to express my condolences and solidarity to those people who were either hurt or killed and their families by the treacherous bombings that took place in London, UK today July 7th of 2005.

In what seems almost unfathomable, London's transit was halted for most of the day which probably adds to the surreal landscape of the aftermath of what is surely an act of cowardice by the perpetrators, whomever they may be.

It is a sad day indeed and my condolences go to those who were victimized, either directly or indirectly.

Stay Strong, London.

Free as in Beer...

For those of you who are economically conscious, or just cheap there are free (as in Beer) alternatives for almost any commercial software out there.

So let's get started.

Office and Productivty: OpenOffice is the best choice that comes to mind when you think about this one. Its ported to almost every platform (NeoOffice ports it to the mac). This productivity suite includes a Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation editor plus some extras. Most linux distros come bundled with it which makes it practical.

2d Graphics Editing: One word: GIMP. The Gnu Image Manipulation Program is the Open SOurce community's answer to Adobe Photoshop. It is full featured, but if you're accustomed to using the 'shop, I recommend GIMPShop , which takes GIMP and turns it into something more familiar.

3d Graphics: If full featured is what you need, Blender is what you need. It started as a free closed source app, but after its parent company went bankrupt, money was raised to pay off the stockholders and release the program as Open Source. its updated faster than most comercial 3d apps and its quite full featured. If all you need is a polygon modeler, I recommend you use Wings3D . Wings 3d will be a trip down memory lane to those who used Nichimen Graphic's Nendo or even Mirai to some degree. Its a pure modeler, so you'll need a different program to apply textures and render. For 3d rendering, there's Yafray . Yafray is a very functional and effective raytracer, it does radiosity and caustics.

Audio: Audacity probably doesn't have the prestige that most comercial audio applications have but its becoming increasingly popular.

I'll further add more as they come up. Post comments to what you want pointed to, and I'll be sure and include a small review of said software and link.

Cheers.

Hell is indeed frozen.

Apple Compter just announced a gradual transition to the x86 architecture. Again for those of you living under a rock these past few years, this means hardcore apple fans are probably in need of a diaper change, as this means Apple is dumping the G5 made by IBM for cheaper silicon. What this exactly means remains to be see tho the fatc remains that unrest and dissent amongst Windows users has hit a historical high and would mean a rather big push for apple with their more robust and secure OS.

Live coverage and details can be found here.

I wonder what bill is thinking.

Straight from Major Nelson...

For those of you not in the games know-how, Major Nelson is the Xbox Live gamertag of Larry Hryb. He works at Microsoft under the title of “Xbox Live Director of Programming.”

Meaning, he knows his s#¡t.

Anyhow, Major Nelson has posted a real world comparison between the upcoming Xbox360 and Sony's PS3.

Also, a funny article on how Nintendo's next console product's mock ups were less than what they seemed can be found here.

E3 was full of surprises this year.

Wow! That PS3 thing is bigger than that guy's head! :O

And they said the xbox was big. You can check out this BBCNews.com article Did you see how the PS3 was bigger than that guy's head? lol

I know what I'm getting for xmas!

My sister is going Linux

Seems my sister's old HP Pavillion has finally decided to start rejecting its WinME install.

For anybody out there looking to buy a solid desktop that is high quality, will last for years and has the need to buy a brand name PC, I'm gonna recommend HP.

Sure, you could say "Dude, you're getting a Dell" way, they have great tech support and all don't get me wrong, for some people it is far more practical to run back to the Best Buy where you got it if anything goes wrong where it will take a while for the Dell guys to come around and odds are you'l have to ship it for repairs in any case.

But anyways, my sister's old Celeron 333 with 192mb memory would probably run just a little slow with the bloatedness that is WinXP on that hardware, so we've talked it over and she's moving to Linux.

Novell Desktop Linux that is.

For those of your living under a rock, Novell recently acquired SUSE and while you'd think Novell would kill of SUSE's linux distro, its's there and they've put a lot of work into it as it seems. I've chosen Novell Desktop Linux for my sister because she's not that computer-saavy and it SUSE had always been the "Friendly" distro of Linux. It packs everything the average person needs and its quite cost effective. It comes with bundled Firefox, Open Office, GAIM for instant messaging and has a rather simple software update interface to make it easy to keep up to date.

Personally I give mad props to the Novell Linux Team, I think they're actually taking steps in the right direction with a distro that is simple and functional and not overwhelmingly intimidating for the entry-level user.

EDIT: From the too little-too late department, Slashdot reports Microsoft making an OS that runs faster on older hardware. Something ( linux ) keeping you up at night, Bill?

Virus+Spyware Extravaganza

This past sunday my computer's installation of windows ceased to respond after a restart. Aparently the filesystem (NTFS) had become corrupt so a fresh install was needed.

Do not keep your computer plugged to the internet if you're doing a fresh install of WindowsXP.

After setup had finished my first boot riddled my system with viruses and spyware, and some of my best attempts using AVP, NOD32 and even TrendMicro's Housecall failed to remove all of the infiltrations. So even after patching and the Service Pack 2 install I was stuck with a system that didn't respond to clicks on links in 3 browsers, iExplorer 6, Firefox and Opera.

I used another machine to read what could probably be the cause of my system's instability, and it seems everybody agrees on disagreeing. Some say spyware leaves entries in the Registry even after being deleted, others say Spyware and some Viruses "get pissed off" as ridiculous as that may sound and may actually harm the system permanently when deleted.

The solution as was pointed by a friend who is a systems integrator based on similar and often repeated experience was to download as many drivers as I could as well as patches and the SP2 install, burn that to a cd and wipe the system clean and re-install everything once more without an active internet connection.

3 hours later and I had regained control of my system.

I must have lost 9 hours just trying to figure out what was going on.

As I mentioned on one of my very first few posts, I want to switch to a different platform, that platform will probably be OS X, and install Linux on my AMD machine.

After having lived through this one can only conclude that sticking with windows makes you a target, regardless of how many updates and how current your system is.

Props go to NOD32, seems their antivirus is one of the few out there that is not a resource hog.

After a hiatus, here's some movie news...

Sorry for the hiatus, I'll post stuff tomorrow for sure, right now I just came back from watching Episode 3 and I'm bushed. 2500 aprox. shots of CGI make up this movie, and for once the story isn't so cheesy either, it is a movie I wholeheartedly recommend, even if you're not much into sci-fi.

Have new info on Apple's Tiger developments as well as some stuff to share on spyware and viruses. Check later today for more info.

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?