One thing about Lich King, though (or more specifically, WoW 3.0) is that it takes up a ton more memory, assumably due to the new graphics extras, and more precaching. 1.25GB, to be exact.

This really hurts on my Vista 32 machine with 2GB of RAM.

So, I just ordered a 64-bit media from Microsoft and another couple of 1GB sticks… hopefully that will speed things up a bit. It sounds like driver and application support for Vista 64 is close to parity with Vista 32, so hopefully I won’t have any issues with that.

And to pre-emptively answer the “What kind of new upgrade are you getting?” questions, here’s the new rig. Most of this stuff isn’t top-of-the-line to save a little up-front money, since I was only planning on upgrading my old box, but it’s more than serviceable, and it’s pretty future-proof as far as upgrades go; I’ll be able to buy AMD processor upgrades for this box for a good long while (yay AM3 processors being backward compatible!)

• MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard (AMD 790FX chipset)
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2.5GHz Brisbane core)
• 2GB G.Skill PC2-8500 (DDR2-1066) RAM
• Western Digital 500GB SATA 3.0GB/s HDD
• GigaByte ATi Radeon HD 3870

A lot of people will probably scoff that I went AMD this round… but like I said, future-proofing. Intel Nehalem comes out at the end of this year, and it’s basically a dead stop for anything Intel because they’re changing so much about the architecture. Plus, I like supporting the underdog when I can, and i figure figure processor diversification is good.

After some intense frustration trying to find a good video card upgrade, I’ve decided to part out my Windows/Myth machine, and make a more substantial upgrade. I know some of you out there have some older machines that could maybe use some of this stuff. Let me know if you’re interested in purchasing any of the following parts and make me an offer. Some of it’s up on eBay right now, but I’d rather sell to friends first so I’ll pull it down if you want it.

These parts I’m definitely getting rid of:

• AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 333MHz FSB
• AMD Athlon XP-M 3200+ 400MHz FSB (same as XP 3200+, fastest Socket A processor you can get)
• 2GB OCZ Platinum low-latency DDR400 RAM (2×1GB kit, this is almost brand-new)
• 1GB (2×512) Kingston DDR333 RAM
• ASUS GeForceFX 5200 AGP
• ATi Radeon All-In-Wonder 9700 AGP (no fan, 2D works ok without it)
• ASUS A7N8X nForce2 motherboard
• Chieftec 350W ATX power supply

In addition, I -may- be getting rid of some of this stuff. I know I’m going to have to lose at least some of it, since the new motherboard I’m getting only has 2 PCI slots, and one of those slots will be taken up by a wireless adapter. If you have an interest in it, let me know, it’ll probably help me make my decision.

• Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum with Audigy Drive
• Hauppauge PVR-150 analog TV tuner
• Western Digital 120GB EIDE hard drive

Let me know if you’re interested.

So, it’s been a long time since I made a post about life in general. So, here goes…
Read the rest of this entry »

In odd-request-ville… anybody happen to have or know anyone who has a Radeon 9700 Pro or All-In-Wonder that they don’t use anymore? I’m trying to resurrect my old Windows box since I don’t need it for PVR purposes anymore, and the fan on my All-In-Wonder has crapped out, so I’m trying to replace it.

Of course, I suppose if I can’t find one I can start shopping around for an X800/X850. I certainly don’t need the All-In-Wonder part of it anymore, especially since if I really feel the need to do TV-in again I have the Hauppauge card.

So, after I got started working on a couple more projects, I decided I wanted a brand to keep them under. You know, in case I hit it big or something.

Hey, you in the back: quit laughing.

I’m working on a website, which is taking valuable time away from the stuff that’s actually going to go on it, but I don’t care. Cuz I’m awful like that. Everybody needs a distraction, right?

You all already know about StudioMan (which was progressing along nicely UNTIL JOHN GOT ME STARTED ON PACKAGING UP THE CALENDAR VIEW… er… hehe. So yeah. That’s become a nice little project in and of itself.). I have two other things in the works:

ChocoMUD, a scriptable MUD client. I’ve actually chosen to write this one in Java for cross-compatibility reasons, and to keep myself learned up in a language that actually Matters™ out there in the real world. We’re really spoiled as Cocoa programmers… Swing is a real pain, although the new Swing Application Framework and NetBeans really help.

And finally, an unnamed application for iPhone, which will really just be a simple metronome with visual and aural feedback. I may end up charging a little bit for this one just to cover the costs of the developer license *grumble*

So yes. This is what I’ve been up to for the past couple months. Outside of the job hunt, that is.

After the Cocoaheads meeting the other night where I had shown John the iCal-emulating view I had made, he said something along the lines of “I hope that’s pretty independent and can be used elsewhere.”

Well, John, you’ve inspired me. I’m working on adding a few more general-purpose options and packing the view into a framework with an Interface Builder 3 plugin, so you should just be able to drop it into an app and have IB find it.

I hope to have ESCalendar.framework available in a week or so.

So, I don’t think I’ve complained too terribly much about Microsoft’s activation system… but now I will.

As I may have mentioned before, awhile back I switched to VMWare from Parallels. Well, it wants me to reactivate in VMWare, just like it did in Parallels. At the time I was too busy to mess with it, so I let the 30-day grace period expire. Fast-forward to today.

I’ve been continuing my learning process with C#/.NET as I progress along in StudioMan, just as something else to think about when I get overloaded with Cocoa. Up until now, I’ve just been booting over. I read that the new version of VMWare had some speed improvements, so I upgraded this morning and tried it out. Predictably, Vista went into lockdown mode and I had to call in for activation, since it’s already activated natively.

Here’s the fun part… Read the rest of this entry »

So, I woke up at 4AM and couldn’t get back to sleep… so I thought, what better time to start learning about bitwise operation!

Amazingly, it worked, and I’ve now gotten space-efficient serialization functions written to turn my array of bools into a nice tidy base64 string.

In related news… I’m hard at work on StudioMan. As soon as I get a little closer to UI completion, I’ll post a few screenshots. It’s going a lot better this time around than my previous try.

After ripping my hair out when Parallels once again ground my system to a halt trying to boot Windows (XP, no less), I finally decided to try VMWare Fusion.

I’m glad I did. At no point during the bootup process or while Vista is running do I feel any performance impacts in Mac OS X that really annoy me. Plus, it just looks more polished and professional than Parallels.