Most hillarious misheard lyric in a long time. At Teresa’s karaoke birthday party tonight, someone sang Toto’s “Africa”, and the lyrics that came up on the screen (that all can see) were, honestly:

Like a leper above the Serengeti

Never mind the real lyrics are “Like Olympus” — I heard it as “Like a leopard” given the Africa theme… but this case of a bad mishearing was public and hilarious.

(this post dedicated to Katie-in-Cape-Town)

http://www.unsanity.org/archives/haxies/leopard.php

That’s what was wrong with my Leopard install. I was using (an uncompatible) hack to run Witch, a really nice power tool (which I hope, once they update, will remain Leopard-compatible)

My take on Leopard, now that it works:

• New Finder really beats the pants off the old one. Not a hard task, but an important one.
• You can almost feel the underlying API changes (I recompiled MacVim from SVN because of this)
• It’s a little more shiny. Stupid blue folders are gone, though I’m not a huge fan of the Tango-esque ones.
• Stacks are genuinely useful.
• They got Spaces wrong. I mean, this one should have been hard to mess up, given the precedent, but they did. It’s a fine virtual desktop manager (a feature in the X11 world for AGES) but it could use a few more keybindings — it’s great that I can switch desktops logically, but why must I use the mouse to move applications around? (Needs a Move-Current-App-in-Direction key combo)
• Also, closing a program will switch Spaces on you. This is wrong. It should work it’s way down the apps in the current Space, not bounce all over based on last-usage. arg.
• Time Machine is about as useful as Dashboard — which is to say, oh, it’s cute, but it’s disabled and apt to stay that way.

So you may wonder “What’s the point?” if I just kinda shot down the big features.

It’s for developers.

They’ve added official Ruby/Cocoa bindings. Python TK apps no longer require X11 (as I found out from running Pacman). Both of these are at the current version and include many nifty non-default libraries (Rails, Twisted, NumPy, etc, etc…). Not to mention all the optional dev tools (I recompiled the latest MacVim, as stated earlier. This is UNIX thinking). I’m thinking that interpreted-languages-as-second-class-GUI-programs is coming to an end. Ruby is the new Java. Make the devs happy, and they will develop for your platform.

MS is doing it too. Visual Studio Express was no accident. And today I hear about F# — which is essentially Microsoft OCaml (as C# is Microsoft Java)

The real power of Leopard — as with the real power of Vista — is yet to be seen. It comes down the line, about a year and a half from now, when the freelance dev masses come along. Vista arguably added a number of genuinely useful API stuff — the .NET 3.0 backings come as an obvious example. Microsoft, logically, is backing it’s own horse. Apple knows the flaws of writing in straight Objective-C and so opens up to more casual devs and UNIX devs by backing open, interpreted languages.

In fact, I bet they added PyObjC by default, instead of giving a user guide to it…

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct  5 2007, 21:08:09)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import objc
>>>

Oh look….

tar -cvvf /Volumes/BARAKPOD/backup.tar michener/

So I got Leopard today, and, throwing caution to the wind, decided to upgrade my system.

bzzt Wrong! I am hosed!

So I’m lifting my userdata out onto my iPod — praise be unto the gods of the command line — and am going to do a fresh install.

I guess it all works out; but I would be lying if I weren’t disappointed (so far)

However, playing with the display computers at TSW I discovered that python is ver. 2.5 and has Twisted and NumPy by default. Which is awesome.

A few days with it and everything seems to settle in a bit.

Network card works better (maybe when it got the updates something clicked) but the network is SLOWER. I dunno what they did wrong, but my Samba NAS takes forever, until I read this: http://jamespo.org.uk/wp/archives/190 — This seems to make it work fairly well

Still best to get video drivers straight from nVidia. Sorry MS.

I like the new Explorer. It has it’s faults, but it’s an improvement. Sidebar, meanwhile, is stupid and nobody uses it.

Still no major incompatibilities. So far so good.

Just finishing up these few quick notes before I write something completely different.

So tonight I took the plunge and installed Vista. Initial thoughts:

• UAC is annoying, but thank god you can turn it off (along with other Windows nags, which I appreciate)
• Network fails on boot — but request an IP and it’s good again. Step up from XP, which didn’t have a driver for my NIC by default, but step down in reliability. Maybe fixed if I get a new (non-MS) driver.
• Why do I need to do a full Windows Update to get a (very common) Sound Blaster Audigy driver? You think it’d work out of the box…
• Why can’t I turn off hiding hidden files and keep my desktop clean from desktop.ini files at the same time? XP did this…
• More reboots to get things set up than you can shake a stick at — but this is a failing of Windows in general
• So far, no incompatibility. So far.
• C:\Users! It’s like /home, but not! This is an improvement over C:\Documents and Settings.
• Whatever happened to the Run.. command?

Ubuntu worked out of the box with all this. It got my nVidia driver right. It got the network right. It got sound right. And it comes with a shitload of software. I’m not saying that’s perfect either — it doesn’t like my huge display until i edit xorg.conf, for example. And 36 updates is a light update cycle (in beta, at least) And individual apps break sometimes. But by and large, the fastest OS to install to get to baseline functionality these days is Linux, and that’s not at all the way it used to be.

Microsoft did whiff at Vista. Perhaps not as badly as they could have, but it’s nowhere near what a 6 year dev cycle should produce. Vista would have been about right if it was released with a little less graphical glitz but a similar feature set in 2003/2004.

By the by, I’m not saying Apple is a big winner either. Leopard comes out this month, so we’ll see what happens — but there they go for vertical integration.

More as I figure it out.

Earlier tonight, at Mari and Evelyn’s housewarming party…

This toast is a little nerdy, so you’ll have to excuse me.

Groans and laughs of expectation

There’s an old saying that goes “May your house always be too small to hold all your friends.”

Aww.

Now as we know from thermodynamics:

Laughter

Given a constant volume…

I gesture to the living room…

and a growing number of friends…

…which is absolutely filled with people.

The only way to keep the pressure down is to keep the temperature down.

So I say:

“May your house never explode by knowing only cool people”

The half of the room that gets it immediately laughs. The other half soon follows.

To Mari and Evelyn!

Cheers.

( The best response, moments later, came from Patrick:

Barak, that was absolute zero.

Laughs and groans )

…same as the old boss.

So I break months of silence with a post. So many interesting things happening! So many interesting people! And what did I pop up to post?

That, with my spiffy new headphones, I finally heard the method to the madness of Keith Moon.

And I’m more excited than I should be that “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is in Rock Band.

…when I hear that old song they used to play

So life’s been sufficiently crazy. And by crazy, I mean in every possible which-way. And I haven’t been writing like I should. And all sorts of things; it’s just been absolutely insane.

With a little downtime I’ve picked up Frets on Fire and have gotten pretty good at it — it’s open-source Guitar Hero with a keyboard. So I’ve been playing using my white Apple keyboard, which is nice because the F-keys are all together. This is the result:

Today I scored at #11 on the world high score list for “More than a Feeling” — on Medium, which is exactly the same as GH on Hard.

Meanwhile, my E190 paper is done (for now) and there’s much swing dancing to be done. Live band tonight, 920 tomorrow.

I now have a tumblr over at http://tumblr.photonzero.com for quick one-off posts; mostly odd quotes and links. Should have a sidebar link up in short order

…Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Saw the incoming freshman from GV to Cal this weekend. That made me feel old; along with all the festivities surrounding graduation. Next year I graduate. This scares me.

The past week has been a mixed bag with regard to dancing. Last Thursday was awesome. This Thursday was a totally off night for me. Saturday wasn’t bad at all. Sunday (in Sac) was kinda off again. Le sigh. I start running LoS on Saturday for the summer. And then I move. All while looking for a job.

It should all work out okay. I’d feel better if I were on a more even-keel with dancing, and less worrisome in general. Staying at home actually doesn’t help that much, because I feel kinda powerless. My life is a screen session, and I’m currently detached. I’d be happier (and more stressed) if I were back in the driver’s seat.

One of my side projects is bringing back to Berkeley all of my old highschool photography, so as to scan it up in Soda. Hell, I haven’t shot film SINCE, almost.

We’ll see how it all goes. I’m going home to Berkeley in less than 24, so I’ll be back soon enough.

* 10,758,381 seconds
* 179,306 minutes
* 2988 hours
* 17 weeks

How do you measure, measure a year? (so far)

My camera ticked over to 1K today at LoS.

Coming soon to a photostream near you.