An Apple tommorrow keeps the boredom away.

The MacBook has landed at the office after its rather sluggish progression across the globe (<19MPH seems a little slow in this day an age...man have I been bored waiting!):

Now all the stands in the way of a geeky Mac love in, is for the ever vigilant Nicky to pop the thing into a couriers hands. So tommorrow I shall begin the process of having my high expectations dashed on the rocks of Revision A niggles and coding in the most square bracket heavy language I have seen…

Speaking of coding, after finishing Learning Cocoa with Objective-C (which I’ll now re-read with Mac in hand), I began reading Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X 2nd Edition which I have enjoyed so far. Hillegass’s book gives a good background on the OS X conventions from its NextStep origins and gives plenty of topics a brief but working introduction. I like working examples simply because it makes it easier to go and find the appropriate documentation if you’ve got class names, and it’s easier to experiment when you’ve got some working boiler plate code.

As an added bonus, the author’s picture on the back cover gave me a chuckle as now I know what the illegitamate child of Brokeback Mountain and The Three Musketeers would look like:

Macsterdam

Arrive Terminal AMSTERDAM, NH, NL 27 Feb 2006 14:29

Oooh it’s getting closer…I just hope it doesn’t arrive too stoned to boot or give me an STD as soon as I put it on my lap!

I Go Mira

I was just drooling over the though of browsing on the Nintendo DS simply because it’s small and easy to carry around the house (read that as browsing whilst otherwise wasting time defecating) and I happened across the increasing buzz about Microsoft Origami.

A while back, I was testing out XP OOBE code and had a Tablet PC to test with, now that was by far the most convenient away-from-desk browsing machine I have had – I don’t consider balancing an increasingly hot laptop on my knees to be convenient. So I was left wondering why there wasn’t a mass market keyboard-less (perhaps touch-screen) device available for browsing and playing media and then I remembered the buzz about the Microsoft Mira webpad/media player.

Now the Mira buzz all went very quiet a couple of years ago and I went from being curious about Mira itself, to being curious about the demise of Mira (from what I read, Mira became just a set of technologies to be included in future products much like Cairo did – although the Motion Computing LS800 does look a bit like the concept wrought in plastic and silicon and other elements). Well from recent developments it looks like the Microsoft vision of web pads is alive and well, morphing into the Microsoft Origami project…very exciting but to be honest i’m not expecting to be able to make a paper aeroplane, a hat or a swan out of it whenever a wifi connection isn’t available.

OrigamiProject.com – A Microsoft registered domain for what appears to be Origami viral marketing – although the whole Touch Me tag echoes the Nintendo DS marketing.
Digital Kitchen (Enter -> Work -> BrandTheatre -> Microsoft Origami) – A showcase for what a Microsoft Origami device may be able to do…ahem.

I guess the XP style interface in the video will be replaced with delicious Minty Aero Glass running on Microsoft Windows Vista Origami Premium Ultimate Ultra 1337…but where will the Gig of RAM, dual core GPU and pixel shader 2.0 GPU that Vista needs to show a frosted border fit in that somewhat larger than pocket0sized chunk of consumer product? Who knows. What I do know however, is that the device in the video reminds me of the Mira mock-ups (wireless pads with media abilities) and of Cario (filled with attractive concepts which will stay out of Microsoft’s grasp for years to come…ObjectFS->WinFS->OhFFS).

I’ve also heard that some other manufacturers may just be working on innovative touch-screen media devices with browsing abilities…so expect to see something from MS soon after! This all just reminds me how much I am itching to buy a device which can read my handwriting and recognise a URL without me first spending months giving it a Rosetta Stone of my scrawl…

Shipbook Pro

According to the Apple Store order status page, my MacBook Pro shipped yesterday with an estimated delivery date of March 3rd. That’s around 11 days earlier than Apple previously estimated but with 11 days delivery time, so I guess it must be in some cargo container sailing from Shanghai to Europe…i’ll be watching the shipping news just incase it sinks en route!

Waitbook Pro Ultimate Edition

What a difference a few hours make! I just rechecked the order status and shipping has now moved to the 15th of March with delivery estimated at the 27th of March. Now I understand that it’s a new product and the dates given were just estimates, but it seems very arbitrary to say shipment in four weeks and delivery in 6 weeks…it suggests the whole thing is just guess work.

I’ve got to admit that I am now reconsidering the order for a number of reasons:

• Apple have stated their intention to transition the entire product line to x86 by the end of 2006.
• March 27th is too close to Apple’s 30th anniversary and the expected celebratory product launches.
• Merom will be out just a couple of months with it’s 64-bitness and more mature VT.
• Every month that goes by makes that ATI x1600 look less and less appealing.

So maybe it would be better to wait for the Merom based MacBook and the improved mobile graphics, rather than stick with it and get the MBP on the 27th of March only for Mr Jobs to unveil the 64-bit Merom based x1×00 powered MacBook Pro II on 1st April.

Update: Maybe that should be “Penultimate Edition” because the date has flipped back to the 3rd of March and 15th for delivery!? Maybe they are running on x86 Mac X Servers and Yonah has a repeat of the Pentium Div bug…

Waitbook Pro Extreme Edition

Gahhh, checked the status on my MacBook Pro today and I was a little bit pissed off to see the shipping date has changed from the 24th of February to the 3rd of March, with delivery expected around the 15th of March! So it’s no wonder Apple have upgraded the spec from a 1.83Ghz Core Duo to a 2.0Ghz Core Duo, otherwise by the time the thing actually ships, Intel will have probably canned the lower speed grades. So it’s still a month until I get it, but looking on the bright side at least the month is February and it’s not a leap year…w00t! I’ve just got to resist the temptation to download an OS X 10.4.4 image and use the latest Maxxuss’s patches to run it on the Dell Inspiron 9100.

I’m sure it’s just coincidence, but Apple today released the first update for OS X x86 ( 10.4.5 ) within a few hours of Maxxuss revealing his patch (I did type “revealing his crack” but it made me guffaw like the teenage moron I used to be) for 10.4.4…

M3 Perfect CF Software

If you’ve got an M3 Perfect CF adapter (aka GBA Movie Player) for your Nintendo DS and you want the latest Game Manager software you are out of luck at the moment. If you try to download it from the M3 Downloads Page then you’ll get permission denied, I contacted M3 and they are aware of the problem. Luckily Danny @ M3 provided me with the latest 24/01/06 Beta and I have added it to my Files Page.

Nintendo DS Homebrew

Fancied a bit of a change, so I began trying coding on the Nintendo DS. It’s a bit of an odd beast, living between the 8/16bit and 32bit worlds but the feature set is so dedicated to playing games it gives you a nice retro feeling. It’s the first machine I have programmed which has two different general purpose CPUs – an ARM7 and an ARM9. The ARM9 is the main DS CPU and would appear to be responsible for the bulk of processing and interaction with the graphics hardware. The ARM7 is used for Gameboy Advanced compatibility and also when in DS mode the ARM7 is responsible for talking to the sound and touch screen hardware – so in order to read the touch screen, the main ARM9 CPU gets data from the ARM7 via IPC.

To start off, I installed DevKitPro with libnds and began working on my first standard learning project using straight C. In this case I went for the Mandelbrot set viewer, it’s a good project for getting to grips with framebuffer mode (15bit color) and also gives a good indication of the floating point performance (which in the ARM9’s case isn’t great for obvious reasons). It didn’t take long to get it compiling and after copying the resulting NDS file to the CF card and slipping it into the M3 adapter it ran and I was pleased.

Documentation is quite scarce, but that is to be expected with everything having to be worked out by those luminaries of the DS homebrew scene (and I dare say a sneaky peek at the official DS SDK). It’s certainly enough to get some impressive stuff working as you can see by looking at some of the homebrew apps and demos which are out there. So my plan now is to add zooming using the touchpad, screen swapping so that the touch screen can be used to alter parameters and edit the palette and perhaps switch the code to using 3/29 integer calculations instead of floating point and try and get both CPUs to calculate in parallel. After that it’s straight into Mammary Manipulator DS…

Oh and because the M3 interface looked too un-DSish(sp?!) I made a skin to make it look more DSish!

WaitBook Pro

Just checked the apple store now for my order status and it’s estimated delivery is 3rd March. My heart sank when I saw that I had another month to wait, another month of resisting the allure of other toys, another month of resisting the relentless march of SLI desktops and PC Core Duo laptops (especially Tablet PCs are looking more and more interesting as time goes on).

In the meantime, I have just started reading the second edition of Learning Cocoa with Objective-C from O’Reilly, but I am not sure how different 10.4 is from 10.2. Also been looking at the Apple Developer Center and I fear if I plan to release any code on OS X then i’m going to need to find someone with a PPC based Mac to test the Universal Binaries. I just hope there are plenty of Universal Binaries available when it does arrive so that I only have to gasp about the technical feat of Rosetta every now and then.

I also uninstalled the Windows version of Quake 4 when I heared that it would be UB on OS X – so i’ll keep that one for OS X (that reminds me, I had better order a multi-button bluetooth mouse for gaming!). I wonder if I can just download the OS X UB and use my Windows DVD? I am guessing that I will so tell me if you know different.

Just familiarising myself…

I read a while back about a copper who had been driving an unmarked police car without sirens or flashing lights at 159MPH on the M54 motorway and 91MPH in a 30MPH area – not chasing a criminal or getting to the scene of an accident but while he was familiarising himself with a new vehicle and “honing his driving skills”. The case went to court and PC Milton was acquitted on the basis his driving wasn’t dangerous!

Surely if you are familiarising yourself with something or are honing your skills at something means that you are unfamiliar with the thing in question or you believe your skills need to be honed – in which case you shouldn’t be practicing on a public road. If anything were to go wrong at 159MPH, then doing so on a public road would have a significant element of needless risk which could only be described as dangerous driving. At the very least he should have had his lights on just so the public doesn’t think that the average person is flying around at over twice or three times the speed limit.

So today, I was please to read on the BBC News website that PC Milton’s acquittal has been overturned by the High Court and that the case would be tried again. Hopefully this time the court will decide that egregious acts of endangering the public safety cannot be carried out whenever a copper fancies honing his skills. Afterall by that logic, you should be on the lookout when police marksmen decide to failiarise themselves with their new sniper rifles!