Tech Tok

I’m working in Windows at the moment (my development Mac hasn’t arrived at work yet) so I’m looking around for replacements for things I use on the Mac. I found out today about the “E Text Editor” (and also the free, Monaco-like font Anonymous). E is the closest thing I’ve seen to TextMate, my favorite Mac text editor.

What really struck me about the author’s description of the editor was that:

1. He has a powerful revision-control system embedded in it (in fact, the editor was just a test app at first for the revision control app library)
2. He actively sought out Allan Odgaard, the author of TextMate, and talked with him about making a Windows-based editor with a lot of compatibilty (being able to use TextMate plugins, etc), and Allan was highly in favour of the idea (the TextMate page mentions it will never be available on Windows, after all).

So I have downloaded the app and will give it a 30-day tryout. Maybe I’ll post a review here or something.

Does anyone have any other Mac-replacement recommendations? And why, after all these years, does Cygwin installation still suck so much? They need to be like a Linux distro and have a single, massive installer with everything in it, instead of forcing everyone to separately download everything as part of the install.

Microsoft is spinnging Bungie off to be an independent company again. Shane Kim, vice president of Microsoft Game Studios said “We saw ‘Halo 3′ and we were all, like, WTF? This is just Halo 2!! We are *so* *done* with them”.

Harold Ryan, talking head for Bungie was heard to cackle “Hehehehe, the plan *worked*!”

Ran across this one in a mention on Slashdot today. Qip is a freeware, Windows-only multi-IM client, like Trillian and Pidgin-formerly-Gaim.

Alas, it is not open source like Pidgin is, so I don’t see a point unless it’s a lot more featureful or something.

Iain dugg an article about the upcoming DirectX 10 specification.

Let me rephrase the opening of the article more accurately. The original reads:

Microsoft’s DirectX application programming interface (API) was first introduced in 1995. DirectX was designed to make life easier for software developers by providing a standard platform developers could use to easily make multimedia software and game programming for the Windows Platform.

Before the arrival of DirectX, developers had to program their software titles to take advantage of features found in each individual hardware component. With the wealth of devices on the market, spanning from input devices to graphics and sound cards, supporting every hardware device on the market was a tedious, time-consuming process.

The only fatual part of that is the first sentence about DicrectX coming out in 1995. Here is my rephrasing.

Microsoft’s DirectX application programming interface (API) was first introduced in 1995. DirectX was designed to lure software developers into using a proprietary, Microsoft-owned API, providing vendor lock-in and reduced availability of games on other platforms.

Before the arrival of DirectX, developers were using OpenGL, a cross-platform, standardized 3D graphics library that allowed developers to take advantage of 3D graphics without requiring deep knowledge of that hardware.

I am asked every now and again what I use to make the panoarmas I occasionally post to Flickr. Well, until recently I used some OEM software - Canon PhotoStitch. Then my brother-in-law Tony told me that Photoshop could do it. I was flabbergasted because he was right! So I used Photoshop to do this picture, which is Tony’s new cottage, appropriately enough.

Tonight I discovered some open source software that may also do the job. I haven’t used them yet, but thought I would post about them in case anyone else was interested. They are hugin, autopano-sift, and enblend.

I (or maybe Iain if he beats me to it) will post more when I’ve tried them out. Or maybe Jeff will give it a shot. Who knows?

In an atmosphere of speculation due to the about-to-begin Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference, Iain and I speculate about many things in a taxi, and later at Annabelle’s Restaurant, across the street from our hotel, the Marriott San Francisco. (13MB, 27:56)

Below is the movie I was showing at gaming Friday night. It shows a Mac running OS X, Windows XP and Red Hat Linux.

Desktop switching is being done with VirtueDesktops, an awesome workspace-switching program for the Mac (finally!). Actually, I just installed it after typing the first 5 words of this paragraph, and I am very impressed. highly recommended.

The OS stuff, however, is being done with Parallels, a $40 app similar in some ways to VMWare.

Note that there are performance drawbacks to this software, in that you wouldn’t be able to run 3D games at full speed. Everything else is pretty much full speed though - MS Office (Mac or Windows version), databases, Excel, etc. Anything compute-intensive (as opposed to video-intensive) will fly at full speed.

Note also that this consumes other hardware resources for each OS too, like CPU and RAM.

I’m looking forward to getting a quad-core Mac Pro (or whatever awful name they give the new Power Mac) later this year!

Very cool. iTorrent is a Python script that simply turns itself into an RSS proxy for BitTorrent downloads.

(provided you have enough CPUs, of course).

Techworld notes that the Russian-based company Parallels will have details concerning their virtualization support on Macs later this week.

Hmm, running Linux at the same time would have appeal for me. I would run Windows mainly for games, and would thus want as many hardware resources available as possible.

nVidia basically announced a new driver that (finally) allows for hardware H.264 accelleration.

ATi has made promises of a similar driver upgrade, but it looks like nVidia beat them to the punch.

What remains to be seen are the driver’s stability, speed and quality. It won’t do anyone any good if it’s slow, crap quality and crashes a lot, will it?