It turned up on the kitchen table for my birthday. still in the plastic bag from EB Games and with a ribbon on it. Lisa is resisting, and shook her head, not understanding why I would want this toy! Fair enough. She likes a smaller form factor (WordsWithFriends).
thursday night - birthday night - and the kids are to bed, the sandwiches made, the dinner done and dishes away. the night is clear for a go at my new games.
the microsoft XBox bundle from EB Games came with the kinect and 2 games: Kinect Adventures & kinect Carnvial. EB Games bundle augmented with Battlefield 3 and Forza. Nice! A good collection of things to tempt me, and wile away the hours.
Setup
Firstly the set up from the box was reasonably easy. It took an hour or so all up. the link up to the XBox 360 's' console was straight forward except the controllers. The documentation talks about a connect button, and I found that hard to find. I kept hitting the on/off button, and it didn't link up the wireless controllers. eventually there was an unmarked square button that looked like it was next to a covered over port for one of the old PS memory cards. I thought it must be an eject button for what compartment. I pushed it anyway, and the doco's rotating lights happened. Very strange. It's like they feel the audience is so familiar with xbox now they don't need to label or indicate what the buttons are. Maybe it was the low light. (maybe i'm a 43 year old fuddy duddy...)
So, controllers connected, machine on. I try to sign up with a live id i have to xbox live, and i get the strangest message: this live id is already associated with a different gamer tag. What the hell is a gamer tag? and How do I find out who has my live id? Memory resurfaces.... slowly... of a time 5 years ago when the department at work was give an Xbox 360 as a reward and I had it home for 2 nights to play with (lara croft and.... ? lara croft?....) it all comes back. I must have set up my 'gamer tag' then. so, away we go and I 'recover' my gamer tag profile to this xbox 360. I immediately think about restoring a heap of corrupted init files (or plists) and screwing the xbox. but - it all seems to go ok.
I then sat through all the demo videos telling me how to use the machine. the Kinect something, and the Xbox main menu (something else). I end up feeling I saw a lot, but didn't see anything I wanted. How do you get a game disc into the machine? there's no eject button? Ah - there's something on a menu that opens it. Good o - and in goes the battlefield cd. it closes and the game starts. strange though - how do I quit the game? pause it? the xbox menu allows you but it's a bit obscure - you need to go back to the main menu and that ends your gaming session. strange usability to quit a game. How do I reopen the CD ? the menu option is now saying 'play the game'. strange usability. It turns out there is a little touch sensitive spot above the CD door that allows eject. right....
Battlefield 3
The battlefields main screen appears, with text mimicking an old CRT screen - you know, low res graphics and, bursty, poppy sound like it's interrupted transmissions. Great effect - on a big 97 inch panel screen. On my oldish, smallish CRT screen, it' just looks small, and it's a bit hiccupy.
in general - the fonts are too small, and almost impossible to read. Generally this is disappointing throughout the game. for each crucial section something pops up and I can't read the damn thing!
It's hard to find the controls and there are so many different configurations. There's no user manual, so you have to just keep going back and forth to the the options section to find the controls, but they have some strange relationship to different modes of the game I don't understand. What's a soldier stick? No explanation - just assumption you know.
There's a them here, and I think it's to support the post purchase 'game guide' stuff, or just general forum behaviour. You need to be engaged away from the xbox and buy more stuff just to understand how to use it. weird.
Battleifeld is impressive. I'm getting the hang of it. push the left stick down to run. push the right stick down to crouch. press and hold it down to crawl (important so the sniper doesn't take you out). the graphics, the game it's all good. I don't get it at all yet, but I"m getting there. more later.
Kinect Adventures
Kinect Adventures is simple, but the setup of a kinect in a confined space is not. it needs the calibration card, and I can't get far enough away from the screen. You really do need a 6 feet away of playspace.
given the setup problems, the kinect rally ball game is frustrating - it doesn't quite find me properly, and I can't seem to keep up and get my limbs in the right spots. I manage to get 95 and a silver medal. Happy with that. But other things beckon.
Forza
Playing a car game with your hands in the air? too much, but now possible. and I went ok. The controller based game looks better. I couldn't get the kinect control on the walk through the car gallery. it kept spinning uncontrollably around the car, and wouldn't stop to let me get in.
once in there, the engine of a ferarri through the mountains is wonderful. The controls responsive, visuals great and it's a nice car game. might also borrow F1 2011 just to check....
Friday, November 11, 2011
Xbox360 vs PS3
Dateline 1983
The smell of warm plastic, and high current power supply fills the air. Beige permeates the room as the TV with a rotary channel changer is turned to channel 0. After much fiddling, the pride of my life is connected. Will it work? What will I be able to do with this magic thing? And what games can I program for it?
With a push of a button the Dick Smith VZ200 - a Z80 based machine like the Sinclair ZX80 fires into life. It's not the ZX80, but something close. To cut a long story short, I can remember the pixelated space ship firing at incoming aliens like it was yesterday. Seminal.
So, fast forward a few years and I'm playing games on PC's. Doom was a revolution. First person shooters became the must play items, and were wild! Fast forward some more and I purchase a playstation. (pre PSOne). That console served me well for many years but has now started gathering dust.
it's been a gap - 7-10 years while our kids have come along, but I need a bit of highly graphical, adrenaline filled game play. What console to purchase?
My sentiment goes to the PS3. It's the grand child of my playstation, so I want to buy it. But I also want to learn about that newest of motion devices on the scene following Wii, and PS Move - the Kinect!
The Kinect is revolutionary and takes out the controller. But what really grabs me is that there is now an SDK following an open source hacking community using the Kinect. It's a robot maker's dream, and for me, a data visualisation maker's dream. I want to experiment with it for work. So, I'm in a pickle - Go with Xbox (and betray the past) or go with what's attracting me back there even if it's not in keeping..?
further, I have 3 kids - 2,5, and 7. What will work for them? they've played a kinect at the State library here in Victoria, and just loved it. The PS platform doesn't quite seem to have as many kiddy titles as, say, the Wii. But then the Xbox is only marginally better? should it be a Wii?
I have ended up doing a spreadsheet of a PS3 and Xbox with their motion controllers and a selection of games I want. I want 2 players, and networking. PS3 comes in at $AUD800 or so, and the XBox $AUD600 or so.
That stacks it. The PS3 is done. Bye bye superior graphics, blu ray, and hello slightly less impressive graphics (but still way better than all my previous experiences), and an amazing Kinect.
What's your take? which did you pick and why?
The smell of warm plastic, and high current power supply fills the air. Beige permeates the room as the TV with a rotary channel changer is turned to channel 0. After much fiddling, the pride of my life is connected. Will it work? What will I be able to do with this magic thing? And what games can I program for it?
With a push of a button the Dick Smith VZ200 - a Z80 based machine like the Sinclair ZX80 fires into life. It's not the ZX80, but something close. To cut a long story short, I can remember the pixelated space ship firing at incoming aliens like it was yesterday. Seminal.
So, fast forward a few years and I'm playing games on PC's. Doom was a revolution. First person shooters became the must play items, and were wild! Fast forward some more and I purchase a playstation. (pre PSOne). That console served me well for many years but has now started gathering dust.
it's been a gap - 7-10 years while our kids have come along, but I need a bit of highly graphical, adrenaline filled game play. What console to purchase?
My sentiment goes to the PS3. It's the grand child of my playstation, so I want to buy it. But I also want to learn about that newest of motion devices on the scene following Wii, and PS Move - the Kinect!
The Kinect is revolutionary and takes out the controller. But what really grabs me is that there is now an SDK following an open source hacking community using the Kinect. It's a robot maker's dream, and for me, a data visualisation maker's dream. I want to experiment with it for work. So, I'm in a pickle - Go with Xbox (and betray the past) or go with what's attracting me back there even if it's not in keeping..?
further, I have 3 kids - 2,5, and 7. What will work for them? they've played a kinect at the State library here in Victoria, and just loved it. The PS platform doesn't quite seem to have as many kiddy titles as, say, the Wii. But then the Xbox is only marginally better? should it be a Wii?
I have ended up doing a spreadsheet of a PS3 and Xbox with their motion controllers and a selection of games I want. I want 2 players, and networking. PS3 comes in at $AUD800 or so, and the XBox $AUD600 or so.
That stacks it. The PS3 is done. Bye bye superior graphics, blu ray, and hello slightly less impressive graphics (but still way better than all my previous experiences), and an amazing Kinect.
What's your take? which did you pick and why?
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Freeing up space on my mac
My mac fills up. And fills up. and fills up. I'm totally out of space. I have a 500GB time machine. maxed out. I have a 1TB external USB on the time machine. 71 GB free. (and it's not porn, nor illegal crap, so move on - nothing to see here)
anyways. when I'm searching for space ( as I was today - Toast titanium was writing a video to disk and ran out of encoding space). I have trouble 'getting to the heart of it' and 'finding easy wins'. I needed a utility.
I had this problem so often that a little while ago I investigated utilities to help solve the 'find the missing disk space' problem. I can report that I have settled on OmniDiskSweeper.
It's not that pretty. In fact it's ugly. But you know what? I used to use XTRee and file commander and all those thingos back in the good old dos days and with this problem (finding disk space) a text list is good enough. The way omni have used the column layout (ala finder) also works for me (or should I say ala nextstep but thats another story. BTW if you have a black cube next box for sale email me. NOW.). I digress.
You start the app up and it scans the top level directories to find those with the most disk space used. It then resorts. and keeps finding and resorts etc. you select a directory (/Users is good) and you see the disk space (highest space first). You click on the highest and it calculates and sorts etc. pretty soon you see where the disk space is. You get there pretty quickly. and then you do other things. so, I like it - it's a quick way of getting there.
Now that we're there what to do? one of the big culprits was ITunes and podcasts. several gig. Not good. how to archive podcasts? and does itunes keep track of it? I'm paranoid so I have copied the podcasts out of itunes to a backup location and put them onto the 1TB disk. THEN i have removed them from itunes so itunes keeps itself in shape. If there's a better way let me know.
anyways. when I'm searching for space ( as I was today - Toast titanium was writing a video to disk and ran out of encoding space). I have trouble 'getting to the heart of it' and 'finding easy wins'. I needed a utility.
I had this problem so often that a little while ago I investigated utilities to help solve the 'find the missing disk space' problem. I can report that I have settled on OmniDiskSweeper.
It's not that pretty. In fact it's ugly. But you know what? I used to use XTRee and file commander and all those thingos back in the good old dos days and with this problem (finding disk space) a text list is good enough. The way omni have used the column layout (ala finder) also works for me (or should I say ala nextstep but thats another story. BTW if you have a black cube next box for sale email me. NOW.). I digress.
You start the app up and it scans the top level directories to find those with the most disk space used. It then resorts. and keeps finding and resorts etc. you select a directory (/Users is good) and you see the disk space (highest space first). You click on the highest and it calculates and sorts etc. pretty soon you see where the disk space is. You get there pretty quickly. and then you do other things. so, I like it - it's a quick way of getting there.
Now that we're there what to do? one of the big culprits was ITunes and podcasts. several gig. Not good. how to archive podcasts? and does itunes keep track of it? I'm paranoid so I have copied the podcasts out of itunes to a backup location and put them onto the 1TB disk. THEN i have removed them from itunes so itunes keeps itself in shape. If there's a better way let me know.
ACL problem on Preferences causes Dashboard widget problem
Just spent 3 hours working out what a problem was with my MacBook. Often I find problems 'stack' on top of each other. To fix A, I need to fix B, but to fix B I need to fix C. you can imagine the stack grows high! So I started with excessive fan on my MacBook and (so far) I'm at an ACL issue with Preferences causing none of my apps being able to write preferences - including the ubiquitous command 'defaults' that is used in so much of the posts on Dashboard.
The fan noise problem I traced using Activity Monitor. Start it up (command space to get to spotlight) by typing Activity Monitor into spotlight. then order by Process and choose My Processes. The one at the top is the one sucking most CPU. as seen in other posts, my safari was big and so was my sync server.
To fix safari I went to the safari menu and chose empty cache. This certainly sped it up. Safari had been slow. Clearing the cache fixed this, and it went faster. it's CPU usage went down.
Then to sync server. This post on resetting sync contained some truths about resetting the thing. It seemed to get the CPU usage down once I had done the reset of all the sync databases. but there sstill seemed to be occasional spikes that seemed excessive. It turned out whenever i started iCal it went nuts and hung up almost syncing ONE of my calendars. I found in a number of posts the idea that you should export your calendars and then delete them so that any corruptions could be fixed. I wasted a couple of comical hours with me deleting them, and then they reappearing. I had forgotten that sync was of course retrieving them from mobileme and writing them back to my machine. But at least they weren't corrupted now. Anyway that seems to have sorted sync server.
I have a dashboard widget called iStatPro that I LOVE. It shows CPU, fan speed and CPU heat, and does history. This was a good debugging aid during the whole process. I moved it around and tried to delete some of the other widgets I have on my dashboard. But each time I logged back in the deleted widgets were there again.
I found posts talking about resetting dashboard. I did the killall Dock and tried to do defaults write com.apple.dashboard. BUT I got an error about permission denied.
machine:Library userx$ defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode NO
2010-01-02 14:19:56.476 defaults[972:10b] Could not write domain com.apple.dashboard; exiting
I couldn't work out why. I thought maybe the file has permissions that prevent it. So I deleted the file and hoped that osx would rewrite the file. It started up but didn't rewrite the file. Strange. I then did some command line stuff to work on it more:
ls -ld ~/Library/Preferences
machine-3:Library userx$ ls -ld ~/Library/Preferences
drwx------+ 332 userx staff 11288 31 Dec 20:17 /Users/userx/Library/Preferences
showed that there was a + right at the end of the permissions block in the line. This means there is 'other security information' (see man ls). But what is it? This is very hard to find (or I spent too much time on it). I found that the + is either extended attributes or an access control list. from the man ls:
If the file or directory has extended
attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by
a '@' character. Otherwise, if the file or directory has extended secu-
rity information, the permissions field printed by the -l option is fol-
lowed by a '+' character.
So, to find out how to see these/ manipulate these, lots of googling, man's etc and you can do:
the manual entry for man ls shows that you can do ls -@. No - only if you do ls -@l can you see the extended attributes. ALSO if you want to see the directory entry you have to append d:
machine-3:~ userx$ ls -@ld Dropbox
drwxr-xr-x@ 8 userx staff 272 29 Dec 21:05 Dropbox
com.apple.FinderInfo 32
The fan noise problem I traced using Activity Monitor. Start it up (command space to get to spotlight) by typing Activity Monitor into spotlight. then order by Process and choose My Processes. The one at the top is the one sucking most CPU. as seen in other posts, my safari was big and so was my sync server.
To fix safari I went to the safari menu and chose empty cache. This certainly sped it up. Safari had been slow. Clearing the cache fixed this, and it went faster. it's CPU usage went down.
Then to sync server. This post on resetting sync contained some truths about resetting the thing. It seemed to get the CPU usage down once I had done the reset of all the sync databases. but there sstill seemed to be occasional spikes that seemed excessive. It turned out whenever i started iCal it went nuts and hung up almost syncing ONE of my calendars. I found in a number of posts the idea that you should export your calendars and then delete them so that any corruptions could be fixed. I wasted a couple of comical hours with me deleting them, and then they reappearing. I had forgotten that sync was of course retrieving them from mobileme and writing them back to my machine. But at least they weren't corrupted now. Anyway that seems to have sorted sync server.
I have a dashboard widget called iStatPro that I LOVE. It shows CPU, fan speed and CPU heat, and does history. This was a good debugging aid during the whole process. I moved it around and tried to delete some of the other widgets I have on my dashboard. But each time I logged back in the deleted widgets were there again.
I found posts talking about resetting dashboard. I did the killall Dock and tried to do defaults write com.apple.dashboard. BUT I got an error about permission denied.
machine:Library userx$ defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode NO
2010-01-02 14:19:56.476 defaults[972:10b] Could not write domain com.apple.dashboard; exiting
I couldn't work out why. I thought maybe the file has permissions that prevent it. So I deleted the file and hoped that osx would rewrite the file. It started up but didn't rewrite the file. Strange. I then did some command line stuff to work on it more:
ls -ld ~/Library/Preferences
machine-3:Library userx$ ls -ld ~/Library/Preferences
drwx------+ 332 userx staff 11288 31 Dec 20:17 /Users/userx/Library/Preferences
showed that there was a + right at the end of the permissions block in the line. This means there is 'other security information' (see man ls). But what is it? This is very hard to find (or I spent too much time on it). I found that the + is either extended attributes or an access control list. from the man ls:
If the file or directory has extended
attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by
a '@' character. Otherwise, if the file or directory has extended secu-
rity information, the permissions field printed by the -l option is fol-
lowed by a '+' character.
So, to find out how to see these/ manipulate these, lots of googling, man's etc and you can do:
the manual entry for man ls shows that you can do ls -@. No - only if you do ls -@l can you see the extended attributes. ALSO if you want to see the directory entry you have to append d:
machine-3:~ userx$ ls -@ld Dropbox
drwxr-xr-x@ 8 userx staff 272 29 Dec 21:05 Dropbox
com.apple.FinderInfo 32
That's great but doesn't help. So then you can use ls to get the ACL:
machine-3:Library userx$ ls -led ~/Library/Preferences
drwx------+ 332 userx staff 11288 31 Dec 20:17 /Users/userx/Library/Preferences
0: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown
ok THAT does not look right. What this is saying is that NOBODY should be able to add files in there NOR should they be able to delete, add sub dirs etc. So, I looked at another users's directory to see what their ACL said:
machine-3:~ usery$ ls -eld ~/Library/Preferences
drwx------+ 37 usery staff 1258 Jan 2 14:41 /Users/usery/Library/Preferences
0: group:everyone deny delete
Soo - that's intriguing. how mine go so far wrong I have no idea. the command line to fix it was typical un*x obscurity:
machine-3:Library userx$ chmod -a# 0 ~/Library/Preferences
machine-3:Library userx$ chmod +a "everyone deny delete"
NICE. beautiful command line design. You can see that ACL support was hacked into unix can't you. I think it originally came from DEC and the VMS? not sure. anyway it makes sense to put it in chmod (sort of). but a chacl would be better...
then to have -a# 0 mean delete the entry number 0 is beyond me.
but that's because +a means add an entry. plus minus get it?
anyways. that reset the ACL and now I can write. I did
touch ~/Library/Preferences/blah
and that proved the problem was fixed.
the ACL thing was just so bizarre I was compelled to make an annual entry in my blog ;-)
Monday, December 8, 2008
Windows Vista on VMWare Fusion
I've just installed VMWare fusion on my macbook (with 2GB Ram) and started to play around.
Firstly - I couldn't get a downloaded .iso image to boot properly. I believe the iso was bootable (although don't actually know how to check). it was a standard MSDN image as downloaded from them... So, ?
I ended up getting a bootable dvd version of the iso, and put that in the drive, and then it was picked up and the install proceeded ok.
Given vista has been out for a while, and there's a bunch of updates/service packs etc, it's not surprising that the resulting updates took hours/days to get installed. Eventually I had a stabale Vista on SP1.
A couple of points from here:
- you can optimise the performance of the image by managing the number of virtual CPU's and the amount of ram assigned to the image. I have the iStatPro widget on my mac, and that combined with the CPU guages on the sidebar in Vista means that I could see the relative CPU loads and memory loads on the host and guest operating system. I ended up giving the image 2 cpu's and then about 1.2GB of RAM. It then seemed to operate satisfactorily.
- the performance is delicate. If there is any downloading/updating in the background both the host & guest seem to be a bit dodgy. Eventually it all settles down, but it's unnerving.
I have now installed VS2008 SP1, Expression Blend 2, and a couple of tech previews (azure & live) and I'm working in blend, and it's all pretty smooth.
the Unity feature is Excellent. I love having the mac and windows windows interlaced and running. it's a bit disturbing for the purist :-) but it works for me.
Firstly - I couldn't get a downloaded .iso image to boot properly. I believe the iso was bootable (although don't actually know how to check). it was a standard MSDN image as downloaded from them... So, ?
I ended up getting a bootable dvd version of the iso, and put that in the drive, and then it was picked up and the install proceeded ok.
Given vista has been out for a while, and there's a bunch of updates/service packs etc, it's not surprising that the resulting updates took hours/days to get installed. Eventually I had a stabale Vista on SP1.
A couple of points from here:
- you can optimise the performance of the image by managing the number of virtual CPU's and the amount of ram assigned to the image. I have the iStatPro widget on my mac, and that combined with the CPU guages on the sidebar in Vista means that I could see the relative CPU loads and memory loads on the host and guest operating system. I ended up giving the image 2 cpu's and then about 1.2GB of RAM. It then seemed to operate satisfactorily.
- the performance is delicate. If there is any downloading/updating in the background both the host & guest seem to be a bit dodgy. Eventually it all settles down, but it's unnerving.
I have now installed VS2008 SP1, Expression Blend 2, and a couple of tech previews (azure & live) and I'm working in blend, and it's all pretty smooth.
the Unity feature is Excellent. I love having the mac and windows windows interlaced and running. it's a bit disturbing for the purist :-) but it works for me.
I think I'll be purchasing VMWare fusion once the eval runs out - it's a good piece of kit.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Delicious.com - bookmarks revisited
I've been at monash uni today. The subject is marketspace - taking businesses from bricks and morter to a location independant business.
It put me on to delicious again. Haven't looked at the deliciious site for a while. I like the tagging think, but, being a mac user, I like having a desktop thats in control of things. The book marking in Safari does suck, and I like that tags are there in delicious. So, I tried looking for a bookmark widget for deliciious for the mac osx dashboard. Couldn't find one. If anybody does let me know....
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