I've been running TF2 on a mac pro for a while, and I kept randomly getting that damn 'hl2.exe has stopped working' at random times; generally shortly after a level switch. I'd also get some textures turning black at times.

Well, I FINALLY found a workaround for this. Under graphics then advanced, disable multi core rendering, then tone your texture detail from 'Very High' down to 'High'. I don't know the reasoning behind these changes working, but I've not crashed since. The lost texture quality is sad, but it's better than crashing.

I've been a bit busy these last few days, sorry for the neglect here.

Been working on this:

I was going to write something.

I really was.

And it was going to be interesting and informative and generally awesome.

But I have NO IDEA what I was.

So instead, some other news.

I've set up a Left 4 Dead server, you can use it directly by opening the console and typing 'connect fireslash.net'. It'll be added to the OCR server group if I ever get the key.

I've added an uploader for original song works in progress (mainly for use by OCR, but I suppose anyone could use it. Any copyrighted content will be deleted, and songs are auto-pruned after 3 weeks. You can check it out at ocrwip.fireslash.net.

I'm running an IRC bot now on the EnterTheGame IRC network that does channel stats among other things. If you'd like stats run on your channel, email me.

I've written a very simple and very rudimentry web admin for stasiscl. It should probably be cleaned up a bit, but if you want a copy, email me. Right now it lets you upload zipped logs via a web interface, and automagically parses them out. I find this favorable to popping open an SSH window every night after raids,and I don't trust anyone else in my guild with shell access.

Oh, and John Stewart is my hero.

I was implementing a rather aggressive layout design that used a lot of images tucked up next to rounded corners. Normally this would be an image slicing nightmare, but my good friends CSS and PNG were here to help. I simply placed four alpha'd PNGs (one per corner) at -1,-1 offset to cover the edge, and replace it with a smooth border.

This created a very nice effect, and worked fantastically in every browser... Except IE6.

I can't blame IE6 for not supporting the alpha's PNGs; even if I did there are several workarounds. No, my problem is that apparrently IE6 isn't entirely sure where right and bottom even are.

Observe this demo: http://fireslash.net/~fireslash/devel/csstest.html

Now try it in IE6. (Don't have IE6 installed anymore? Try IETester)

Notice the misplacement of the corners? It only gets worse as the layout becomes more complex.

I've heard little but praise about Windows 7 over the last few weeks, so I finally broke down and downloaded it. The ideal test system was my laptop, which did not take to Vista as well as I'd hoped. While it is an improvement over Vista, it's not nearly as good as people have lead me to believe.

1) The dock is kind of annoying. Visually it's hard to tell at a glance what is and isn't running. Some apps alter the background color to indicate status (such as while downloading or copying files) but the normal 'running' color is simply hard to distinguish at a glance. Also the window focus functionality is kind of annoying.

2) Aero is still ugly. I was hoping they would either clean up or flat out trash Aero, but it's still here. My problem with Aero has always been he amount of wasted space it adds, and how poorly it integrates with other applications. Even IE looks completely out of place inside an Aero frame.

3) Performance is better, but it's still not good. It's nice to see that dwm's overhead has been shaved, but the general responsiveness of the platform on somewhat dated hardware (Turion TL-32 on 2gb of ram) leave something to be desired. Windows should have tuned down the effects a lot more than it did (Or maybe they simply can't be disabled? I've yet to check)

4) The start menu still sucks. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to cram everything in a staticly sized frame really needs to die.

5) For some reason, 64-bit IE is not the default browser, the 32 bit version is! Granted I don't use IE, but this general behavior makes me wonder about MS's confidence in their 64 bit OS.

Back to Linux for now...

Something along the lines of HTML 4.01 transitional (and not compliant) to this...




Have a nice day :)

Engadget is reporting that 30gb Zune users are having a bit of trouble with their devices... along the lines of them not working at all.

It seems that around 2AM last night every 30gb Zune on the planet woke up, rebooted, and simply didn't wake up.

Microsoft has yet to comment on this interesting little situation, but I'm willing to bet some moronic programmer at Microsoft didn't properly consider leap year in their date calculations, and they're crashing trying to figure out how to draw January -1 2009.

In related news, my iPod touch making a giggling noise every time I view that article...

Update
Looks like I was right on the money. An official response from MS...

"We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT)," Microsoft said. "By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully, then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on. If you're a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device."

Way to handle the situation guys.

Odd quirk of the week...

I had set up my router with samba to share downloaded files among my network; however, my mac simply refused to connect with it. I combed over the share setup multiple times but couldn't find a single good reason why OSX insisted that the share needed a password, and wouldn't accept guest (or a valid user/pass combination)

[mmc]
comment = Storage
browseable = yes
writable = yes
guest ok = yes
path = /mmc
public = yes

After some digging, someone suggested I turn Encrypt Passwords on in smb.conf. At first this seemed absurd since I wasn't even using passwords, but I'm not one to turn away advice when I'm stuck.

So I make the change, restart samba, and now it works. There is a bit of documentation on the issue here, which dates back to Tiger. Nice to see that Apple still hasn't fixed this at 10.5.6