Fake’s Tank

When installing Windows on my iMac using BootCamp, I deleted my whole Mac hard drive ending up with XP taking up 100% of my computer.

I had the preconceived notion that BootCamp doesn’t spoof Microsoft’s installer into thinking there is only one hard-drive of the manually allocated space, nor does BootCamp somehow manages to protect OSX’s files using special user file rights. Windows Setup found 3 partitions (wtf?) that I went on deleting carelessly. This is really my fault in a obvious lack of attention to what I was doing.

Fortunately, I’m the happy owner of Time Capsule and Leopard so my whole Mac was backed up to the minute. Thing is, in all the excitement that comes with mistakingly wiping off your drive, I had forgot I could use that backup.

In a nice implementation of their solution, Apple noticed I had a Time Capsule running during Leopard’s installation process and asked me to use the backup it had found. Things went very smoothly afterwards. After a long wait, all my stuff was back where it had been before my mistake. I had to change the file system from NTFS to whatever Mac uses previously though.

Apart for it not working wirelessly with my Xbox 360 (which in the end is Microsoft’s fault) and sometimes having connection hiccups I really only have good words for my Time Capsule.

The Music Tank gets send a lot of stuff that isn’t music related, here’s what was in my inbox today :

I was pointed towards a MSN Music video service called In Concert in a Lenny Kravitz press release sent to The Music Tank.

While the Kravitz show didn’t really spark any kind of interest, I did spend a few minutes around the video streaming service looking around for stuff I would actually enjoy.

For something obviously “Microsoft” and actively targeting a wide audience, they kind of have a nice choice of mainstream artists.

Notably, you can stream the Smashing Pumpkins and Chris Cornell — which mostly does Soundgarden songs — among established artists like Elton John.

Services like these are nice because things are neatly grouped and bow-tied, but it’s not making any effort of posting content that would allow for musical discovery. It’s a service that brings them money first and foremost and the showcased artists are filtered accordingly… and that will always seem inevitable for giant portal websites like MSN.

So like me you spent 30 minutes trying to fix this Internet Explorer JavaScript error ?

Cant move focus to the control because its invisible , not enabled, or a type that does not accept the focus.

In that case don’t waste time trying to understand it, odds are you have conflicting ids in your document. Also, remember IE 7 and the previous versions are alone to think a name attribute should be treated like an id.

If you’re anything like me, hardcore object-oriented Javascript coding always come with unexpected errors and some of the strangest behavior you can’t really explain.

But that’s always the programmer’s fault, of course.  It turns out Javascript isn’t made to be used in a object-oriented way, but rather in a prototype-oriented fashion.

This lengthy post compares Java and Javascript and explains how a Javascript programmer
should implement object inheritance.

I found a few things strikingly useful in there, notably the delegation of the whole obj.prototype reference and the fact he never explicitly declares any class attributes as he does in Java (and how we were trained to do it).

Did you notice how many commercials of websites played during the Super Bowl? How interesting.

That’s what I call an ergonomic chair. Thanks Sofia!

The virtual past was a sad one

My experiences with virtual machines weren’t too positive until recently. I was mainly trying to run Ubuntu on my Mac for all my development needs. Linux being supported by enterprises the way it is, virtualization software vendors probably had little time allocated for tweaking their software between each new Ubuntu release and in the end it felt as though they’d never catch up.
Because Fusion broke my mouse and Virtual Box would fit the resolutions I wanted, I had to drop the whole idea of emulating Linux on my Mac. The only decent solution left was to install a webserver on MacOS (which is halfway done out of the box) and scrap the whole idea of developing websites on Linux.

No Linux, but what about Windows?

It quickly becomes obvious the main installation these software are going for is Windows XP inside MaxOS. Everything in that combination works much more smoothly in all virtualization software I’ve tried. There aren’t many performance issues either when you stick to small stuff.

But what do I do on Windows I can’t do on a Mac?

Well if I can’t be a Linux geek, I’ll at least be a able to play my PC games… right? Nope.

Up until recently, no software I knew of was able to emulate DirectX. This meant no 3D effects on your virtual installation.

Yesterday I randomly stumbled on information saying that Parallels 3 supported DirectX 9. There you go, I had to try it.

I should also mention that the latest version of Fusion is also supposed to run 3D stuff, from what I gathered in a few forums. Since I had never tried Parallels, the latter seemed more interesting to me.

Civilization 4 works…

The only game I actively play on my PC is Civilization 4 :Beyond The Sword. Parallels’ big test would be to run the game good enough in order for me to justify not dual booting my Mac.

After a few tries and some tweaking around I got Civilization 4 to work well enough on Parallels 3. Here are roughly the steps I’ve taken in order to make it work. I guess this would apply to most games too :

• Enable Direct X Shaders
  In the virtual machine’s configuration window, find the checkbox that will enable DirectX in the video tab. 3D being experimental, it’s off by default.
  
• Pump up the RAM
  From the memory tab of the virtual machine’s configuration window, I gave 1024megs of main memory and 64megs of video memory
• Lower Civ details
  When you start the game you will get a message saying you are running Civ under the minimum requirements. The game then proceeds in lowering everything it can thing of.I like to turn wonder videos off too: often the game crashed on my old Pentium 4 when I had just build the Oracle ending a perfect game start!

…but it’s not perfect

Apart from the common issues related to running Civ under its requirements, the only noticeable bug I’ve encountered yet was that the city growth and building progress bars don’t appear.

I nearly lost the rights to The Music Tank’s domain name. I tried to transfer the dot com from Domain Registry of Canada to Go Daddy but I got caught with a very bad timing and my subscription had ended before the transfer was completed.

Fortunately, DROC’s customer server service allowed me to renew the dot com and gave me a price discount for the trouble. Ironically, the lowered yearly fee for the domain is still more expensive than Go Daddy’s (without including the Diggnation code). However, I’m just happy I didn’t lose The Music Tank’s branding which I have already worked 9 years on (no matter how successful it has been).

While registering on Go Daddy, I also purchased Francois Faubert.com as my portfolio’s domain name. It’s so cheap that it would be crazy for someone working full time in the web design business not to do it.

I guess it means I’m old enough now to assume my real name and not necessarily exclusively live behind my accustomed “Fake” nickname.

A friend working for Cornerstone Promotion sent me this clip a few days back, check it out it’s disturbingly funny :