Everyone say "Wii" on 10/2?

Oooh, Ars Technica has a news story on a slightly cryptic Nintendo press release that possibly hints at a 10/2 launch date for their Wii system. The only question is, if I buy it on 10/2, can I possibly stand keeping it in the box until Christmas for the kids?

Nintendo slyly hints at Wii release date

Ubuntu is bustin' out all over

All over my household at least. The next lucky computer was my work MacBook Pro. I screwed up the Parallels virtual install of Fedora Core 4 in a big way, so I decided to create an Ubuntu-based virtual machine this time. It booted from a 6.06 install CD image, seemed to install fine, but then the virtual machine froze when it rebooted. After Googling a bit, I realized I hadn't picked Debian Linux when I told it what kind of OS I was installing. Tried again, same problem. Googled a bit more. Aha, apparently there is a problem for some reason when giving the virtual machine more than 512MB of RAM. Dialed it down from 604 to 512, and bingo, it started up fine. I even used Automatix to install all kinds of stuff in the partition (and even had to do the same tricks to get Flash video playback to maintain audio sync). Working great. Yahoo! Or should that be, Ubuntu!

Insanity with Portal

Found this on Ars Technica... a video showing how an upcoming game from Valve called Portal will work. It is truly insane. I'm not sure I'd be able to think that quickly while playing what appears to be a first-person shooter. Oh, and this will be my first post with an embedded YouTube link. Wacky.



EDIT: the fine lads at Penny Arcade have posted a direct link to a 720p WMV HD version of the above clip. Warning, it's a 56 meg download. Use VLC to play it on a Mac if you are so oriented.


http://www.valvesoftware.com/ep2/teaser/
portal_teaser01_720p.wmv

Wow. I'm just stunned at the possibilities of this whatever-it-is.

Hopefully I won't hear my next computer

Although I should build my next PC to keep my geek cred high, I think instead I'll buy a computer from these guys. My current Shuttle system is incredibly noisy, particularly when it starts working away on things. The idea of a silent PC is wonderful. And hey, it's the greatest machine John Dvorak has ever owned!

Quiet Computers - End PC Noise

Various Ubuntu nits to pick

Well, I got in a new GeForce card with DVI and my video quality, to no one's surprised, is improved. No need to twiddle with gamma settings and the like; everything looks correct.

The problems I'm having are of the more-mundane variety. Dumb example: I've finally gotten into the world of digg and the wacky videos that people find. One wacky video showed a pair of quick-change artists that appeared on America's Got Talent (a show I refuse to watch in the same way I refuse to watch American Idol). Unfortunately, when I play it from YouTube under Ubuntu, the sound goes out of sync.

Of course, if I Google "ubuntu youtube sound" I uncover various suggestions and workarounds, and the ultimate culprit isn't really Ubuntu but the Linux implementation of the Flash plug-in. And I guess that's part and parcel of running Linux... having to take care of the fit and finish stuff yourself. It's just, well, annoying.

Edit: for my own records, here is a page that discusses how to fix the asynch sound under Ubuntu. Easy enough to follow... if you've been playing with command line stuff for a few years now like I have. For everyone else, they'll say "now tell me again why you aren't using Windows or MacOS?"

Edit #2: that page did indeed work, after I tried searching for just "firefox" rather than "mozilla-firefox" preferences. Next hurdle is trying to print. I've managed to get a single page to print out one time to the Color LaserJet 1500L I have hooked to my Ubuntu machine. In true Washingtonian fashion, I am throwing money at the problem and I bought an HP JetDirect print server; we'll see if that makes things any easier.

Rumor alert: HDMI port on new 360s. Early adopters look nervous

I'm blogging this because (a) I'm interested in getting a 360, (b) ever since Microsoft claimed they were going to provide HD-DVD playback as an extra add-on, I wondered how they were going to swing that since the 360 didn't have an HDMI port, (c) if they really are adding a HDMI port, I'd want one of those, and (c) I wanted to check out the Blogger button in the Firefox extension I just added.

Opposable Thumbs: Rumor alert: HDMI port on new 360s. Early adopters look nervous

Macs and anti-virus software -- no need

In the process of researching a question about anti-virus software for Macs for TC the brand-new Mac user, I turned up this excellent post on the MacFixIt forums of why anti-virus software for Macs actually does do more harm than good.

Macs, viruses, and anti-virus software

Dual booting fun

No, not my MacBook Pro. I'd been hearing a lot about a new bunch of eye candy called xgl that runs under Linux. (Actually, I first heard about it on This Week in Tech.) I wanted to check it out but knew that doing so under Parallels on the MacBook Pro wouldn't be fast enough. So, I decided to get back into the world of dual-booting, by setting up one of my PCs to dual-boot WinXP and Ubuntu Linux. This went much MUCH easier than I expected. Kinda.

Friday night, I did some research. Turns out that there's a SystemRescueCD that will let you resize NTFS partitions. I was only using about 40 GB of my 160 GB drive, so I booted from the System Rescue CD and ran QtParted and carved off a 30 GB partition for installing Ubuntu 6.06. (This was guided by a good illustrated tutorial on how to dual-boot Windows and Linux, although the latter parts of the tutorial deal with older versions of Ubuntu and thus don't line up with the current installation procedure...)

Snag #1: the Ubuntu installer didn't seem to like the partition without it being formatted first. So I rebooted the SystemRescueCD, broke up the new 30GB of free space into a "/" and a "swap" partition, and reformatted them as ext3 and linux-swap. Restarted with the Ubuntu install disc, used the "manual partition" option, picked the appropriate partitions and deselected the others, and install went smoothly (it even set up my dual-boot options for me automatically). This took about 2 hours in all... stayed up a smidge too late Friday night.

Saturday, I consulted this excellent tutorial on getting Ubuntu all spiffied up, including installing drivers, automatix, and xgl. Snag #2: the instructions for installing the ATI drivers didn't work for me. Did some more searches and found out there were problems with my ATI card (a Radeon 9000 Pro). Found the workarounds (it involved replacing some library, but this is all moot by the way as you'll see...), did them, and I was back on track.

I did all the fun stuff for getting xgl running and... nothing. No cool graphics, certainly, and some weird bug where the main menu was wiped out. I then started checking around, and it appeared that my dumb old Radeon card just wasn't going to work with xgl. Grr, how annoying. That all took me probably a couple more hours off and on on Saturday.

Sunday I went to Staples to get a big honking uninterruptible power supply to power my VoIP setup if we have another tree take out a transformer as happened on the Fourth of July (thereby losing power for 12 hours). Lo and behold, they had a GeForce 5500 on clearance for $60. I was sure that the answer to my woes was to go nVidia rather than ATI--their Linux drivers are just plain better. I was sure I could get it cheaper online, but there it was, and it was only $60. So I got it. Darn spur-of-the-moment decisions.

About 9PM I deinstalled all the ATI crap out of Windows, and installed the new card and Nvidia drivers. Snag #4: stupid me bought a card with no DVI output. I can't believe they still sell cards with only VGA outputs! Well, they do at stupid old Staples, anyway. Got a VGA cable and connected it to my display. Got WinXP up and running, then tried to get the Ubuntu install I'd already done working with the Nvidia card. I came close but didn't quite get there, so I just reformatted those partitions and reinstalled from the Ubuntu CD. Redid all the steps for getting Ubuntu spiffified, did all the xgl stuff again, rebooted and picked the xgl session (all told taking another couple hours, I'm getting good at this Linux thing, lemme tell ya) and...

WOW! Cool eye candy. Wavey windows, cube-transition like OS X when going from desktop to desktop, dialing up or down a window's transparency with the mouse wheel. Neat stuff, and that's just the default settings... I haven't even gotten into the program that lets you adjust these options (I think it's called compiz).

So now I'll probably spend another $40 to get a video card WITH DVI output, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the results, and that it's a LOT easier to get a dual-boot machine setup than it used to be. Believe me, if the above doesn't sound easy, trust me, it is relative to what it used to be like.