Speedy Little Demon

The new beast arrived on Monday. So,

Monday, Construction...

Tuesday, Testing...

Wednesday, Operating Systems...

Thursday, Software...

Friday, Benchmarking...

Saturday, More Benchmarking...

If you haven't figured it out by this point, benchmarking means playing Portal and looking at the frame rate. The results? Portal is steady at 240 fps, peaks at 300 fps. That's with EVERYTHING turned up. :-)

This machine RULES!

OS X Apps

With the successful installation of OS X Leopard today, I figured I would share my own strange little software world with you all. I'm a big fan of FOSS, so most of these are free.

The User List

• Adium X - The only Instant Messager you ever need for OS X. And, it integrates with Address Book and Growl


• Firefox/NoScript - Browser of choice


• Safari - For those times when NoScript is just too annoying


• Mail/Address Book - Each is individually nice, and organized the way I like, but the icing to the cake is that they integrate amazingly well


• Quicksilver - So I don't need to go digging around my file system for applications


• Growl - It's just nice to be told what's going on, and when

The Power User List

• iTerm - Because I'm uncomfortable without a terminal


• Deeper - I like to have control over my environment


• Spaces - I like desktop real estate, and I hate clutter


• Disk Inventory X - Because I want to know where my hard drive space goes

The Multimedia List

• Handbrake - Who knows anymore whether DVD backups are legal. Screw it. I'm using it.


• iSquint - My iPhone likes videos too!


• VLC - I like to be able to play all of my videos, and Quicktime is unreasonably locked down by Apple


• Perian - This makes Quicktime just a little bit nicer, and so I can watch things using FrontRow (which uses Quicktime)


• Delicious Library ($40) - Because I have a lot of DVDs, and I like to keep track of them. The Girl just wants me to get rid of them so that they don't require cataloging

The Developer List

• X11 - I like to sit on my couch and program, but most of my development environment is on my Linux desktop. With X11, I can run applications on my desktop, but display them on my laptop


• Eclipse - A nice, free IDE

Update: Wow! I just tried out FrontRow as well. It is WORLDS better than it was in Tiger. It is unbelievably more responsive (it looks like the properly threaded it this time), has a much more manageable layout, and is just generally much more fun to play with.

Quicktime AVI Problems

I'm a Mac user. Generally, I love it. Once in a while, I have a problem that's decently irritating. My most recent source of aggravation has been playback of AVI files in Quicktime. Sometimes, depending on the codec, the sound just doesn't work at all.

Up to now, my solution has been to use VLC to transcode files to MP4 with MP4 audio. This time, no luck. So, I decided to be a good computer scientist and actually try to fix the problem instead of hacking away at it. I found a lot of posts online suggesting using the AC52 package or the xvid quicktime components, but none of that worked. Then, and I don't know why I hadn't found this before, somebody pointed me to Perian. Installation was remarkably easy, and voila, problem solved. So, use Perian to solve your Quicktime codec problems! Then, have fun playing back AVI files in FrontRow!

Semantic Mediawiki Problems

This morning I installed Semantic Mediawiki on a server for the first time and encountered a few problems with permissions. This is a very brief rundown on how I got it installed and how I fixed the problems I encountered...

First off, on installation, I had problems when clicking Initialise or upgrade tables button. To get around these problems, I used the database's root user to install Semantic mediawiki by changing the $wgDBuser and $wgDBpassword parameters in teh LocalSettings.php file.

After this, nothing worked. Whenever I tried to execute a semantic query, I got the following error:

...from within function "SMW::getCategoryTable". MySQL returned error "1142: DROP command denied to user ... for table 'smw_newcats' (localhost)".

The solution to this problem is to cd to $WIKIMEDIAROOT/extensions/SemanticMediaWiki/includes/storage and edit SMW_SQLStore.php to make the following modifications...

In function getCategoryTable (~line 1644 in my version):

• #$db->query('DROP TABLE smw_newcats', 'SMW::getCategoryTable');
• #$db->query('DROP TABLE smw_rescats', 'SMW::getCategoryTable');
• $db->query('DROP TEMPORARY TABLE smw_newcats', 'SMW::getCategoryTable');
• $db->query('DROP TEMPORARY TABLE smw_rescats', 'SMW::getCategoryTable');

In function getPropertyTable (~line 1706 in my version):

• #$db->query('DROP TABLE smw_new','SMW::getPropertyTable');
• #$db->query('DROP TABLE smw_res','SMW::getPropertyTable');
• $db->query('DROP TEMPORARY TABLE smw_new', 'SMW::getPropertyTable');
• $db->query('DROP TEMPORARY TABLE smw_res', 'SMW::getPropertyTable');

Save the changes, re-execute the query, and everything should be hunky dory.

A Good Solid Jolt to My Expectations

Wednesday began as a day of fear, continued as a day of extreme happiness, and ended in solid confusion and concern with happy undertones from mid-day. The final portion will be left as an exercise for the reader, unlike the first two, which will be explained in very uncertain terms...

Wednesday was promotion feedback day. I just started my program, so my expectations were dismally low. I've also had a bit of emotional roughness in the beginning of my program, so sometimes getting anything done felt as though I had to pound my way through the brick wall of beaurocracy with a 50 pound weight on my chest and no will to pull through. I've since gotten better. Fortunately, I also learned that my perseverence paid off. I got promoted this year, and I got good bonus because I was among the good writeups my wonderful boss (you know who you are) wrote for interns in our office. So, by about lunch, I could float pretty much anywhere in Maryland I wanted. The rest of the day happened, confused me greatly, concerned me, and continues to, but I'm still happy about the promotion and the bonus. Life is never only one thing at once, is it? That's what multi-tasking is for. Otherwise we'd all run single-task operating systems. I can't help it; I'm a geek who climbs.

So, with my newfound monetary increase, the 64-bit machine I talked about awhile ago my actually come to fruition. I'm excited. I want to order it now, but I should probably wait until I see the bonus. I'm also going to have to think about a new cell phone since my BRAND NEW one bit the dust because it GOT A LITTLE WET! Do me a favor; don't buy Samsung electronics. You'll be happier in the long run. I haven't had one in recent memory that hasn't had major problems. Microwave? Check. Cell phone? Check. Sanity? Double check. Samsung is to me as Ford is to my parents; eternally and unerringly wretched.