Monthly Archive for May, 2004

OS X

Published on May 25, 2004 in Geek. Closed

Looks like you actually can emulate a PPC on an x86 well enough to install OS X. It’s still a little on the slow side (basic emulation results in 500:1 slowdown over the host processor, while their JIT compiler for x86 brings that up to more like 40:1 slowdown since they cache the translated code), but the project seems pretty active, and there’s lots of room for improvement. Still pretty need to see Mac OS X running on a PC (either Windows or Linux, but I’ve just tried Linux at this point). Here’s a few screenshots that show it off:

Emulate PPC on x86?

Published on May 19, 2004 in Geek. Closed

I must be in one heck of a blogging mood today. I saw this Slashdot post and thought it sounded pretty sweet. Turns out, they’ve released a GPL’d PPC emulator for x86 that is actually capable of booting OS X. Here’s the OS-News article that includes all the pretty pictures. Sounds like it’s still got a few problems (reviewer ran into a few infinite loop explosions once OS X had started, and it guzzles the whole CPU), but it actually kinda worked. Guess there’s still hope for me playing with OS X without spending money on an actual Mac. Keep figuring someone some day will release something as nice as VMware that emulates a PPC Mac instead of a x86 PC… All the OS X converts I see around my department and over in CS have my interest piqued.

Fedora Core 2: Tettnang

Published on May 19, 2004 in Geek. Closed

So I was kinda curious what the story was behind the name for FC2 (Tettnang). Honestly, I was a little curious about FC1 (Yarrow), but never looked into it. Historically, Redhat has largely stuck with a naming convention where each release name relates to the immediate predecessor in some way, but not that predecessor’s predecessor (grandparent?). Anyway, this page at the Fedora site seems to cover it to some extent, and here’s a little more discussion on what some of those release names mean (and how they relate) (even more here).

Anyway, check out the Wikipedia’s entry for Tettnang. Guess the Fedora bunch are beer fans.

Fedora Core 2

Published on May 19, 2004 in Geek. Closed

So Fedora Core 2 is officially out. I actually snagged it a few days early thanks to this Slashdot post that included this friendly torrent. Spent a while getting it up and running under VMware and it looked pretty good. Just when I starting to think about updating my RH9 box, the computer up and imploded on me. I’m not sure what happened, but suddenly X refused to start and I couldn’t even get it to give me access to a text console so that I could back everything up and reinstall. If I had to guess, I think it might be something related to my USB KVM switch and the fact that we had some sort of power glitch that made one of my UPSes go ape shit. Anyway, out came the Knoppix disc, I had samba up and running so I could transfer the stuff over to another box, and after the lengthy process of copying stuff over, I had FC2 up and running pretty quickly. Looks very sweet so far, and fortunately they haven’t done anything major to Xinerama, so getting dual-head back up was a breeze. I think the fonts look even better than they did in RH9. They’re really getting to the point where they’re putting MS to shame visually (which is always a good thing, since hopefully it forced MS to innovate/evolve a little further in order to compete).

Job Predictor

Published on May 19, 2004 in General. Closed

Here’s a silly little webpage I Richy clued me into. It supposedly predicts your ideal career based on your name (since it’s probably based on some sort of hash function or something, inclusion of middle and/or last name may improve your career path). For example:

  • Derek, Your ideal jobs is a Kids TV Presenter

  • Derek Gottlieb, Your ideal job is a Bearded Lady in the circus.

  • Derek Brendan Gottlieb, Your ideal job is a Office numpty.

  • Derek Brendan, Your ideal job is a Brain Surgeon.

  • Gottlieb, Your ideal job is a As the Speaking Clock.

It would appear that renouncing my last name is the key to a good career. Don’t even get me started on what sort of stuff it predicts for Amanda… especially after she marries me.

WebToons: Amy Winfrey

Published on May 19, 2004 in General. Closed

So recently I’ve been watching some webtoons done by Amy Winfrey (works as an animator for South Park), and they’re pretty cute. I started watching her current toon, Making Fiends, that revolves around two little girls, Vendetta and Charlotte, who go to school together. Vendetta makes all sorts of fiends and attempts to intimidate and destroy Charlotte, while Charlotte’s busy making friends. That led me to her previous set of toons, MuffinFilms, which are a variety of short animations involving muffins. There’s some real gems in there. There’s also Big Bunny, but I haven’t gotten around to watching any of those yet. My guess is… it’s about a big bunny.

E3

Published on May 14, 2004 in Gaming. 1 Comment

So I dug around for a bit, and ran across some pretty thorough coverage of the games at E3 over at GameSpot. All sorts of good stuff coming up. In the FPS category, you’ve got Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Halo 2 that all look pretty good. There’s the next Grand Theft Auto (San Andreas). The next Gran Turismo looks absolutely amazing. And they’ve got a little info on the upcoming Zelda game.

A4 paper

Published on May 14, 2004 in General. Closed

So I finally have the remotest clue what the deal is with A4 paper (and as a result why the rest of the world feels the need to use it and screw up my print jobs, and make life difficult in LaTeX sometimes). Basically, there’s a slashdot post on it that points to this page that discusses some of the ideas behind why A4 is the size it is. Apparently all metric paper has a height-to-width ratio of the square root of 2. Somehow that doesn’t make me any happier when the printer at work jams because someone has tried to print a conference paper in A4 format… Goofy metric folk.

Zelda!

Published on May 13, 2004 in Gaming. Closed

So Nintendo’s released some screenshots and a trailer for an upcoming Zelda game. Looks freakin’ awesome. I’m totally looking forward to this one!



Intel CMP

Published on May 10, 2004 in Geek. Closed

Well, it looks like Intel is finally going CMP (@ The Register and Reuters). They’re apparently going to address some of the issues associated with continuing to push for high performance with big monolithic superscalars (namely: power consumption associated with crazy-high clock frequencies, scaling limitations of centralized hardware structures, and the benefits of supporting higher throughput through parallelism instead of only relying on low-latency for sequential code). Pretty exciting if you’re a geek like me… and would love a multiprocessor system. :)