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First of all, how to get access to the drive: Hold down Apple-T (The "Apple" key and "T") while the system boots and it will boot to "Target Mode" this makes the Mac act like an external firewire drive. If you have firewire on your PC, you can access the drive that way. Access to the files: No way to do it under Windows; I've tried. It is, however, pretty easy under Linux. Linux supports both Firewire and HFS volumes (read-only), so you can mount the drive and read the files off. Either burn them from Linux or copy them to somewhere accessible to Windows. Now, the "I don't have Linux" part: You may be able to get what you want by downloading a Linux "live-CD", essentially a demo disk. There are even several that are geared toward recovery, including RIP and The Ultimate Boot CD. I do not know off hand that these two support HFS, but it is a good bet. I believe I have used RIP to do this before. If you decide to try this route, it will take some learning. I can probably help more with a bit of it, essentially carrying my Mac firewire drive over to my Linux box and figuring out the steps again. The big thing is I have to remember how to access the firewire device from a recovery disk.

If you use the text-to-speech for anything other than a toy, the current version is fairly limited. The voices are not sufficient quality to really listen to for a long period of time. You can buy better voices to plug in, though. The big problem is that the voices are not trainable. Good text-to-speech systems have a dictionary where you can tell the system how to pronounce certain new words. It is usually a simple substitution, such as ["Geoffrey"->"Jeffrey"] or ["SCSI"->"Scuzzy"]. You can then set the dictionary by application or some such. This is especially important if you tend to listen to documents fom particular domains, such as computer science or medical. It is really irritating to hear the computer stumble over the same word again and again. Another useful feature is the ability to have the text-to-speech pick up stylistic cues, such as bold or italics words using a different intonation.

Its been a long time since I learned SQL, but if starting today, these two books might be useful: Oracle SQL Primer and Learning SQL: A Step-By-Step Guide Using Oracle. These are both Oracle-specific. Database books, by-and-large- tend to be specific to one database or another. Once you learn one, you can pick up a reference and see what is different with another database. Starting with a bit less of a heavyweight system, you can look at MySQL Crash Course (Sams Teach Yourself in 10 Minutes). The real question is "What do you want SQL for?" Answers might include "I want to do database programming," or "I want to get a job as a DBA," or "I need design a database schema for my department's inventory system". The answer really determines what books you want to start with. If you want to head into database/web programming, then: Learning PHP and MySQL looks like it would be an excellent start. SQL is a large subject by itself; narrowing your focus will help you learn. You can always broaden your experience after you get a toehold. Something which is priceless while learning SQL or new databases is a good pocket reference to SQL commands. This book, The Practical SQL Handbook, is a new edition of one I have had on my shelf for years. It covers SQL standard commands as well as the differences between many popular databases. Anyway, good luck.

Well, I was interested in adding SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records for my domain in order to do my part in reducing SPAM. (This?) CPanel only has a single box for the mail exchanger rather than allowing one to add a record. Is there some way to do this? When I was on the other side of the hosting biz, I remember being able to add arbitrary DNS records from within CPanel.

From what I can see, you should probably enter ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM (without the dot). The screen says to enter a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), so it will probably include the dot for you. What the dot does is tells the name server that it is a FQDN. Without the dot, if your domain was "mydomain.com", an entry like "mail" would be turned into "mail.mydomain.com". In the same way, "aspmx.l.google.com" woul be turned into "aspmx.l.google.com.mydomain.com", which is not what you would want. But, like I said, I would bet that cpanel wll add the final dot for you. You can test the entry with nslookup from any unix/linux system. I believe it is on some versions of Windows as well. "nslookup type=mx mydomain.com" will pull the mail server entry for you. On a mac, "host -t mx mydomain.com" will do the same thing. Also remember that it may take up to 48 hours for your change to actually take effect. This is because your name server entries are cached at many other name servers. They will still have the old entry even though you have changed it. Using "nslookup -type=mx mydomain.com mydomain.com" will pul the mail record for your domain directly from your domain so you can see what will eventually propogate to the rest of the 'Net. Lastly, double check your setup on the Google side of things.

I have posted the review here.

Review of Hauppauge MyTv.PVR PVR/DVR/TV Capture for Macintosh I received my Hauppauge MyTv,PVR several days ago. It is a video capture and digital video recorder unit for the Macintosh. It is the rough equivalent of the WinTV.PVR units for Windows. For the impatient: the hardware is wonderful, the software is barely adequate. My setup consists of a dish-network satellite system and an 800 mhz Mac Powerbook running OS X 10.4.7. This is the minimum required hardware for the unit, so I do not expect blazing performance. I also have a VCR which I want to use for playing (and converting) old tapes but do not need to record to. Hardware installation was easy. I hooked the unit to an available USB port, plugged it in, and attached my satellite receiver using composite video. If I need to, I can use an S-video cable for the satellite receiver and run composite video from the VCR. I verified using System Profiler that the box was detected. Software installation was even easier. I popped in the disk, went to the 10.3-10.4 directory, and copied an application to my Applications folder. That's it. The first time the app is run, it starts a wizard. This asks for your country and your video input type. This is where things start to go south. The labels in the wizard do not match the labels on the hardware nor anything in the Quick Start guide. So, I guessed "Cable". This turned out to be wrong. The next screen wants to autoscan for available channels. I clicked on the button before I realized that the only channel the PVR could see is "3": the channel the satellite receiver transmits on. The satellite box handles everything else. So, I had to wait for fifteen minutes while the thing scanned 125 blank channels. The Cancel button did nothing. When I finally got through this to the main screen, I got a bunch of snow. I selected channel 3 and got slightly different snow. Finally, I relaized that the "Cable" slection corresponds to "TV" on the hardware. I clicked on "Composite Video" and, after a moment, got video. Basic features of the system work quite well. It receives TV signal, you can resize the display, go full screen, pause, fast forward or rewind, or record. It has a simple scheduler and a button which goes to online TV listings. Switching to different input devices, full screen mode, etc., is easy both from the app and the remote (as long as you can remember which colored button is which). There are problems, however. The system was quite unstable until I rebooted my Mac (it never said anywhere to reboot, and most Mac apps do not require a reboot or restart of any kind to work...). The app crashed when quitting, when opening the Recorded Movies dialog, when trying to open the app in two accounts at once, when trying to close the video window while keeping the app open, etc. After reboot, stability improved immensely. After playing for a little bit, I found an application update on the Hauppauge website. This is the only bit of information on this product on the Hauppauge website *at all*. Anyway, they had an update to 4.0.1 from the included 3.6.2. I installed the update and ran it. As far as I can tell, there are no differences at all, whatsoever. Well, as to recording: the PVR software lets you record in more than half a dozen different formats, including various MPEG formats with different levels of compression and VCD formats. Recorded videos are dumped by default in your Movies directory. Some of these do not play in Quicktime, but do play in the PVR and in the free VLC application. Limitations: No way to edit or trim your recordings. You cannot cut commercials (except manually, while recording). You cannot trim the beginning or end of your recording. The "Music", "Pictures", "Movies" buttons, etc., on the remote do nothing. The buttons cannot be programmed to control iTunes or iPhoto, for instance. Apparently, the Windows version *does* use these buttons. It takes finding a Preferences setting to be able to close the video window while leaving the app open. The PVR does not use the built in Mac scheduler and has to be on for pre-scheduled recordings. If I leave the video running, my system gets much too hot, so I close the video window and leave the app open. This means, effectively, you can only really use the PVR software with one account. Performance is decent, as long as nothing else is done on the system. The fact that I have USB 1.0 means that I am limited in the resolution I can use. The G4 800 processor is nearly pegged while running the PVR. Doing anything like starting Firefox will cause the sound to stutter. None of this is unexpected, however; presumably on a Core Duo 2.1 Ghz, performace is markedly better. Overall, I like the hardware and basic functions. The software needs serious work, both in terms of installation/stability and more than bare-bones features. The Mac has rich multimedia libraries and tools, so I can only suppose the Mac edition of the PVR is low priority for Hauppauge.

The weirdest thing about the formats is that they do not support their own DRMed Windows Media (WMV) files, including all of the media sold with the "Plays For Sure" logo. The Zune also doesn't support iTunes AAC files nor Audible format audio books. Basically, anybody who has already bought music has to start over. There is an article about this and it also appeared on Slashdot. This is one of the reasons I am very hesitant to buy DRM'ed music. Several of my audiobooks won't play on anything but a few select devices. I won't get burned again.

One thing to remember in programming game AIs is that the computer player does not necessarily have to mimic human thought, it just has to look like it mimics human thought on the outside. In reality, internally, the AI player can simply cheat. Limitations of the AI are made up for by the fact that the computer player can have direct access to the game mechanics and does not have to deal with a human-computer interface (mouse and keyboard). Given this, the best way to program AIs for many games is 1) keep it simple, and 2) treat (move) each enemy separately. Since there is only one relatively slow player and there can be many relatively fast enemies, even a basic AI can be challenging. In an RTS, for instance, the player has to scroll and select units to move them. The computer player can order each of its units every turn. The player has to be very intelligent to keep up with a dumb opponent. Don't take this too far, though. Fighting off one mob after another can get boring. One simple technique to make things livelier is paying attention to crafting your scenarios. Again, the computer player can cheat by being in the right place at the right time. You know what the map looks like, arrange surprises for the human player. Now, in the cases where you cannot cheat: the computer player has to go through essentially the same interface as the human (like in Quake Bots) and/or the levels are randomized, it gets much harder. In this case, each AI player has to build its own map of the world as it goes. Most of the time, this is goal oriented. At each point, the AI has some fixed objective, like finding food, exploring, building cities, or chasing a particular opponent. The goal should be reevaluated each turn to deal with changes in circumstances, such as discovering a new enemy or finding a resource. In simpler form, this can just be a state machine. Where computer players can cooperate/communicate, build a hierarchy and report new discoveries up the chain. Send group orders down the chain and then have each AI opponent move based on the goal it is given from above. The hierarchy can be built in ("command" bots and "soldier" bots) or it can be dynamic (liek the way that Windows Master Browsers ae elected on a network). I have wanted for some time to work on a system like this which incorporates Quake Bot style mapping and gentic algorithms for tuning enemy behavior. Basically, each AI player is generated with slightly different constants for things like aggressiveness, curiosity, etc., and as they are killed off, natural selection occurs. When generating new enemies, use input from existing/surviving enemies plus some randomization. This would be great for simulating, for instance, an insect-like enemy race: a mob that learns. The "perfect" evolved bug may be very different in different scenarios and against different players. I was considering a hierarchy where killing the control bug would cause the enemy to become disorganized until a new bug was elected. I was going to work on this for the Crystal Space/Crystal Core project, but, as I am disabled, I no longer have the ability to put enough time/energy into making it work and keeping up with the rest of the project.

Another good one is the classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure. You get to play Arthur Dent as he goes through a lot of crazy adventures mostly based on the book. There is a Java version of the game or you can play online. It uses Flash and is illustrated, but is still a basic text engine. There are also several systems for designing your own text adventure, such as ADRIFT and QUEST. FrOz is an Open Source game engine using a very sophisticated language parser. Lastly, just for kicks, you may want to try TTY QUAKE, a textmode First Person Shooter (FPS).

Encrypt? Get GPG or something to encrypt your files. There is also ".mac". They have 1 GB storage with 250 GB transfer and a whole bunch of other features (web page, photo album, calendar, backup, email, auto-syncing, etc.) They also have a family pack where you get up to five accounts, 1 GB shared, and 2 GB split among the separate accounts. I've used .mac before, and though it is a bit pricy, the tools provided are very high quality and the service is very reliable. It is also Mac centric, which is a big plus for me :-)

Well, some code posted might help, but on its face, the problem you pose is impossible without changing your design. Fortunately, you may be able to change your design in steps so you can reduce the impact. I provide Psuedo-code, it will need work to compile. First, add member functions to call your static methods. Test. Modify your classes to call their member functions instead of the static functions. This should be just search/replace. Test. Now, you have a couple of choices for handling your special class(es). If it really is a one-time change for just that class, override the member function to do what you need in just that class. Otherwise, if this new behavior is something you may want to reuse in other, unrelated classes, create a new class (Call it 'E" for the moment) just to contain the exception handling code (the three member functions and the variables that were static). Now, add a field to your classes which points to an instance of this class. struct E{ void e_handler1() = 0; void e_handler2() = 0; void e_handler3() = 0;}; Next, modify your member functions so that they check this field. If non-null, call the exception handler-instance's members. If it is null, call the static methods. class YourClass{ E* e; e_handler1() { if (e != NULL) { e->e_handler1(); } else { // handle normally } }}; And test. Now you can specialize E to specialize the error handling on an class-by-class or even instance-by instance basis. You still have the static-like benefit that instances which share a particular E also share the same variables. class my_special_class{ static E* static_special_e; my_special_class() { if (static_special_e ==0) special_e = new Special_E(); e = special_e; // or whatever };}; To make things neater, create a Singleton of a basic E instance and have every instance get this by default. The your handler code always calls e->e_handler1(). Over time, replace all your calls to e_handler1() with calls to e->e_handler1() and deprecate the old methods. Anyway, that is roughly how I would do it.

Microsoft tries to make things simple, mostly by simply ignoring details. In aprticular, they completely ignor library versions most of the time. This is dangerous, as you may upgrade a critical library (like the MS foundation classes or the C library) for one application and it suddenly breaks everything else. Worse, an upgrade of an application (like an Office update) may change critical libraries without telling you and other applications start crashing. Patches and service patches often require upgrading other applications (or just cause unexplained problems). The various Linux/BSD distros on the other hand, at least attempt to deal with the real problem of dependencies: they track library versions and let multiple versions of a library coexist, they track dependencies in the packages and do not let you install packages with out proper dependencies, and they provide installers which are dependency aware so (e.g.: fink. YAST) they can fetch and install needed packages. The real problem with systems like fink and YAST is that repository management. If you want to install a package in one online repository and it needs another package from a different repo, say DAG, you need to do some management to be able to activate that repository and install the package. On the other hand, security-wise, repository management is *really* important. If that were automated, you would be able to one-click install tons of malware and trojans. Repository management leads to problems with programs or dependencies outside the repository structure, mainly comercial ones. Fink, at least, lets you satisfy a dependency multiple ways, so that, for instance, you can install either the free or commercial version of X and be okay either way. Because Fink compiles the packages itself, it has no DLL problems with minor version changes. The system that really manages individual package installs well is Mac OS. Because Applications are packages, they can provide their own versions of Frameworks (collections of libraries and other potentially shareable stuff) or rely on the system versions. Since Frameworks borrow library versioning from UNIX, multiple versions of Frameworks can exist together, and there are no problems with upgrades. You can have different Frameworks at the system, user, and package level, making installing apps into your own home on a multi-user system normally very simple. The install process manages this complexity very well. In most cases, simply dragging an app from a disk image to an application directory is enough. Standard installers take care of the more complex cases. Fink is available for UNIX-style packages and installs. System upgrades range from automatic to manual depending on preference and rarely break things. Anyway, I agree that Linux is a bit harder to manage than Windowsm especially if you are not familiar with the mindset, but I disagree that MS' habit of simply ignoring problems in the name of simplicity is the way to go.

Just got done shopping for a new PVR (Personal Video Recorder) for my Mac Powerbook. I settled on the Hauppauge MyTV.PVR USB; I'll put up a review of the product later, but this is another story. While looking for this product, I spent a good deal of time digging through the MacMall[/u] site examining different options. One of the most frustrating things is that I kept running into XP specific hardware like the ATI TV Wonder or the WinTV.PVR. On a Mac-specific site, they were giving me Windows-specific hardware in search results. Of course, if you know anything about MacMall, they are essentially an alter-ego of PC Mall and probably share the same hardware database, but one would think they could at least bother to mark Wind-specific, Mac-specific, and/or Mac-recommended hardware in some obvious way. In many cases, however, you must dig through the listing to find the exact requirements. Many products out there (particularly external drives) are Mac-compatible without particularly advertising it. Similarly, some products do not make clear their Win-specific nature. Wading through all of this can be a major pain. As a counterpoint, [url="http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Dog Electronics told me straight off exactly what I was getting and what it was compatible with. It also did not show me any Windows-specific items in the search. Anyway, just my minor rant. I'll get off of my soap box now...

I think the real lesson here is that statements like "twice as hot" just do not have much meaning with temperature unlike similar statements like "twice as far". Feynmann once wrote about a science textbook he had reviewed which had a problem in it roughly as follows: A chart showing the average temperatures of different colored stars was attached. To say nothing of the "green stars" issue, the question is deeply flawed. There is just no way that "total temperature" is at all meaningful. Temperature is a meaure of relative average motion and things get funny when you use it for too much.

After trying several, I have settled on Bits on Wheels. It is a completely native client written in Objective-C with Cocoa. It also has about the best information about your torrent I have ever seen, including stats on files, blocks, peers, and a 3-D peer view. There are several things I think are missing, though, including ability to prioritize torrents, individual file downloads, and ability to control which of several trackers to use in case a particular tracker has problems (currently Bits on Wheels just uses the first tracker in the list). Opera now has Bittorrent support built in as well, and I will probably try that out shortly.

F-Protect (f-prot) is a similar package which I have used for years. Like Kaspesky, it uses a search algorithm for identifying new viruses by looking for virus-like characeristics. It also runs on Linux (Linux version free) which means you can use a bootable Linux CD to check your Windows system. The Linux CD is impervious to viruses, so you know you have a clean scan. You can also scan Windows shared drives from a Linux server. Either way, viruses that mess with the file system or hide themselves from the virus scanner in other ways can still be detected.

Hmmm... 1) Because MS buys up competitors and shuts them down. 2) Because MS locks competitors out of the distribution channels 3) Because MS steals technology and then shuts the competitor out 4) Because MS makes certain that no one can write compatible software so customers are locked in 5) etc. Remember that MS has been convicted of these practices in multiple countries now. The only reason Linux has survived so far is there is no central organization for MS to fight--- no one to sue, no one to buy. This is partly why the SCO litigation started, as a test of a new litigation strategy to fight Open Source. I don't know why Mac has survived (even as a Mac user myself). Probably because there is a core of zealots who will sell their child before using anything else.

I have slowly had my CD-RW/DVD-R drive on my Mac PowerBook fail. It would read disks when it wanted to and basically gave up writing disks. So, since I cannot get my Mac Mini for at least several months, I looked for an external drive to replace it and figured I would get a DVD burner while I was at it. I found the Mad Dog Multimedia 16X3DVD, tripple format DVD-RW/RAM, retailing at about $100.This is actually one of a rapidly shrinking number of Firewire/USB 1.0/2.0 external drives. The PowerBook has USB 1.0 and Firewire ports, the Sony VAIO in the other room has the same mix, so a USB 2.0 drive is right out. In general, I have a number of Firewire peripherals anyway and generally prefer it to USB. It is generally the only dual-protocol choice at most retailers (Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.) and is the only one of those that even mentions a Macintosh computer.Installation was drop-dead simple. I plugged it in, daisy-chained it to my external hard drive and turned it on. I was able to put in a blank disk and burn from iTunes instantly: no drivers, no software installs, no fuss. At 16X, Burning was snappy.The drive comes with Roxio Easy Creator for Windows as well as a disk of various clips for use in DVD creation. Roxio was obviously useless for the Mac, but since general CD/DVD burning/viewing software is builtin to OS/X, I don't miss it. The only possible downside is if you had a MAc old enough to not have an internal DVD-Reader; then you would have to find and install VLC or something to actually watch movies.It supports a staggering number of formats and disk types, including CD-R/CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+-R, and various DVD-RAM formats, including 9.3 GB double-sided cartridges.The last major feature is the case itself. It is solidly and stylishly built with a black metalic case that would go well with any design that Steve Jobs can come up with. All-in-all, I am very pleased with the purchase and intend to see what other peripherals Mad Dog has to offer.

Its amazing that we have to have 420W power supplies these days. I remember when I have five or six drives running off of 300W. I always expected back then that computers would keep getting smaller and more efficient, but that's not exactly what happened. When the processor alone sucks 120W, there is not much left on a 300W PS for other components. Myself, I am replacing my light bulbs with compact flourescents to save a bit of power and reduce waste heat in the house (it's been consistently over 100 F here). I would have to be nuts to buy a system that used 400+ Watts. My next system will probably be a Mac Mini as a consequence.

A problem which comes up in desktops fairly often is that the heat sink is not attached quite perfectly. Even a small problem- not enough adhesive, not positioned properly can cause problems. These can be very hard to diagnose.Those Dells are under the battery recall, and a battery delivering over-voltage to the system can cause components to heat up (and die prematurely). Suprisingly, under-voltage can have the same effect. Other posssibilities is that if the battery is not holding charge, the charging circuitry may be running all of the time. Does it have short battery life or take too long to charge? Does it mostly heat up when plugged it? Does running without the battery help?Does the system really get obscenely hot, or does it kick out because of the heat earlier than your laptop? Does the BIOS have a temperature monitor you can watch? The reason I ask is because I ran into a very strange heat problem with a PC once where the CPU did not fit quite right in the socket. When it was running, the pins would expand and push the CPU out of contact. The system would crash. Then, now that the system was shut down, the CPU would cool and go right back into the socket. So, every time I opened it up, everything was fine. It would only fail when the system got hot, but it never had a chance to get excessively hot before dying.A silly question: has your friend tried running in battery saving mode? Does it help? If so, they may be able to run it that way all of the time. It will result in a slower, but non-crashing laptop.

True. When ODF becomes standard, you will probably see more OS builtin tools support it. For example, you will probably be able to read them in Konqueror or Nautilus, and maybe Firefox with a plugin. It should also be possible to do an XML->FOT transform which will make converting directly to PDF relatively straightforward. Text Edit on Mac already reads .doc and .rtf files: although the formatting is limitted, it is enough to read a document. I agree, though, that an Open Source and lightweight reader for Windows would be great.

OpenOffice supports (among others) the Microsoft .DOC format, although sometimes minor details are lost when going between OpenOffice and MS Word (in either direction). It is sometimes safer to use the older RTF format. RTF cannot contain as much detail, so it is more likely to appear the same in both packages. Myself, if I want to send an OpenOffice document to someone else, I usually just convert it to PDF and skip the whole mess. As far as features go, OpenOffice has everything I have looked for, including sophisticated table formatting and label layouts. It also crashes less. The menu options are sometimes in different places and he shortcut keys are different, but it is all there. I have a copy of MS Office or the Mac but have not bothered to install it.

Was I the only one who saw this topic and immediately thought *programming* languages and garbage collection?I lived in a building in DC that had garbage chutes. They were in a centralized room on each floor. You dropped the trash in and could immediately hear the compactor disposing of it below. It saved having people carrying trash all over and through the lobby and such. The rooms on each floor also became the point where all kinds of junk was deposited in the hopes that someone else wanted them: couches, ugly lamps, etc. [And yes, I several times thought of how convenient the chutes would be for dealing with unwelcome guests... "Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die..."]A system like that is absolutely necessary in many high-rises for dealing with vermin. You cannot let trash collect anywhere in the living areas of the building without paying the price. Push residents towards emptying early and often makes sanitation easier across the board. Couple that with garbage disposals in the sinks and you have very little build up of organic wastes that would attract vermin.I once read a book talking about the buildup in the former Soviet Union that the maximum population of any city could be readily calculated by looking at its waste disposal system. If a city does not have the capacity to get rid of garbage efficientyl, its growth is strictly capped by disease and so forth. This process was used to show that Moscow, for instance, probably had less than a quarter the people it was claimed to have had at its height. When you think about our current population growth, I think that garbage and where it goes is going to get awfully important real soon.The place we just moved into here, the last tennants did not take care of. In particular, they did not believe in trash service and crammed their empties in the basement, the shed, etc. The landlord has been steadily cleaning and repairing things here, but it has been much harder for us to deal with pests. Two cats makes short work of anything getting inside, but with a steady supply of them outside ... Anyway, I hate having things in my kitchen that don't belong there.

Found some idiosyncrasies while continuing to play with the program:1) No Spotlight integration. If I search for "landlord" in spotlight, I do not get appropriate journal entries in vijournal. The developer says that the commercial version does not support it either, but it is on the wish list for the next version. vijournal files are packages, and spotlight has trouble with them. I know C&P Notebook had similar issues.2) No easy "Go To Today" feature to type notes into the Today's Notes box. In fact, you have to create an entry with or without a subject to get to the general notes for the day, or at least, as far as I can see. Until now, I have been mostly creating entries with subjects and did not notice the odd behavior. You cannot, for instance, just click on today in the calendar and start typing.