Atomic Playboy

It’s pretty common in the geek culture to have interesting naming schemes for their computers. My last ISP, Tripnet, named their servers after various Roman Greek mythological entities, in alphabetical order — Atlas was the first one. My account was hosted on Eris. (All hail!)

I currently have two computers that are used daily: Durandal and Tycho. Durandal is my main workstation, running Windows XP. Tycho is an old 233MHz G3 running OS X.

Durandal and Tycho are two artificial intelligences in the Marathon games by Bungie. I have an old retired laptop that is called Cortana, also from a Bungie game — this time an AI from Halo. The name will be inherited by the PowerBook I’m intending to buy.

So my naming scheme for my computers is based on artificial intelligences. Durandal’s previous name was Shodan, the AI from the System Shock games. I have a large supply of AI names from the Shadowrun universe to use as well. I won’t run out of names until I have a couple of dozen of computers…

I also have a naming scheme for my hard drives. Durandal is equipped with Durandal, Balmung, Joyeuse and Solais; all of them are names of mythological/historical swords.

That’s were Bungie took the name Durandal from: the sword of Roland, one of the knights of Charlemagne. Charlemagne’s sword was Joyeuse; Durandal and Joyeuse were smithed from the same piece of steel together with their third sister, Cortana, wielded by Ogier the Dane. Do you spot the trend here?

Balmung is a sword from the Norse mythology. It was forged by Wayland the smith (Anglo-Saxon god of smithing), and then used by Odin to stab the Branstock tree. He then said that he who could pull the sword from the tree was destined to win the battle. This is probably the origin of the Sword in the Stone.

Solais is actually named Claimh Solais, but that’s a bit much for a hard drive. It means “Sword of Light,” and is from Irish mythology:

The next of those cities was called Findias
And the great teacher there was called Seamus
From Seamus came the great sword, Claimh Solais, Sword of Light
From whose stroke none ever escaped nor recovered Knowledge of the Gods

I do spend quite a lot of time in front of my computer, don’t I?

Shock: “What? G4s in the iBooks?
Denial: “This must be some poorly researched article on /.“
Bargaining: “Maybe I can return my Powerbook and get an iBook…”
Fear: “What if Apple won’t let me return it because its a build to order?”
Anger: “Those SOBs knew and didn’t tell me before I spent all that money!”
Despair: “Now my Powerbook will have no resale value when I have to eBay it for the new G5 laptops!”
Acceptance: “Wait a minute — this this Powerbook kicks ass! The girls want to be with me, the guys want to be me, and I consistently get benchmarks higher than a dual 1 GHz G4 Powermac. The Airport Extreme rules, the battery life is lengthy, it runs nice and warm and winter is coming! I guess I did OK…“

Shamelessly stolen from Slashdot, only with grammar added.

Well. I’ve been thinking a bit, and I think I’ll stick with my decision to aim for a “15″ PowerBook”:http://www.apple.com/powerbook/index15.html. While the new “14″ iBook”:http://www.apple.com/ibook/ has hardware specs approaching the PowerBook line, there are enough differences to make the PowerBook come out on top.

Let’s see. The 15″ PowerBook has 1,1″ larger screen, faster memory (333MHz as opposed to 266MHz), larger L2 cache (512k vs. 256k), Firewire 800 port and gigabit ethernet. That’s enough carrots to convince me.

I’m planning to stick to this laptop for (at the very least) the five coming years, so I might as well pay some extra money to get something I feel really satisfied with.

Five years may have been a bit optimistic, but it will last me at least until I’m done with school in december 2005. After that I am very likely to get a well-paid job.

Now I promise I won’t rant about Apple products again for at least two weeks.

I now write in Swedish as well. Nothing there yet, and still the default MT templates, but I’m working on it.

Once again Apple updated their hardware once I actually managed to decide what I really want to buy.

This time, they updated their iBooks to G4 processors and Airport Extreme. Yum.

I’ll have to make a nice little chart of iBooks versus PowerBooks and see what works best for me. After all, a 14″ iBook with 1GHz G4 costs 5000 SEK less than a 15″ PowerBook of equivalent speed…

I bought myself a 120GB hard drive today. And when I put Durandal back together again, I of course spilled a glass of Coca Cola over my keyboard.

This lead to some interesting grammatical errors while typing.

I’ve dismantled the keyboard, removed all the keys and put them in some soap water (letter soup?) and cleaned the plastic parts. Let’s see if it works properly when I put it back together.

Otherwise this might be a good time to buy a wireless keyboard, which is something I’ve been thinking about for a while… I’d like to have one with a built-in trackball. That would be perfect for when I watch movies via TV-out, so I don’t have to run over to the computer every time I want to change something.

Well. At least now I have 317GB of disk space in Durandal, but the 17GB drive will get kicked out soonish.

You’re getting old and lazy. I’ve had an e-mail address hidden in a HTML comment on the front page for weeks now, and you still haven’t found it and started spamming. Take your best shot

Once again I’m thinking about switching to a bilingual blog. I’m quite good at English, but I still feel a bit hampered when I try to write about personal stuff. I just can’t find the words when I try to write about it in English.

I’m thinking a bit about registering a .se domain and moving there, and then setting up a second blog for content in Swedish. The thought right now is to have the personal stuff written in Swedish, and the technical stuff stays in English.

iTunes for Windows is released. Get it from Apple or grab it via this torrent (BitTorrent download)

First impressions: Ctrl-W closes the entire application. This is bad. In OS X, it just closes the window and keeps iTunes running and playing. This means I have to keep it in the activity field while running. Slightly annoying.

I’ll toy around a bit with the music sharing; tomorrow I’ll set up an SSH tunnel from school to home and see if I can access my music that way. iTunes only allows music sharing on local subnets; but an SSH tunnel is considered local for all intents and purposes.

Update: Some more impressions.

• iTunes quits if I right-click the close button. Broken behavior, no Windows applications do that.
• No always on top. Windows is (duh) windows focused as opposed to the application focus on a Mac; I want always on top for the mini-mode. It iTunes had only used the default Windows widgets instead of the OS X brushed metal appearance, I could use the nVidia drivers to force a window to be always on top.

For something that calls itself “the best Windows app ever” (Apple.com front page as of writing this), it sure is inconsistent with every other Windows app in existence…

More update: I’ve tried the Rendezvous sharing now. It rocks.

I have a Mac here too, and I used to mount my music collection via SMB to access it from my Mac. Now I just need to have iTunes running on my Windows machine, and the Mac sees the entire collection at once via the Rendezvous shared playlist. Rock on.

I want more Rendezvous/Zeroconf applications for Windows!

I haven’t exactly written much about this, but I got in. The last weeks have been filled with an introduction to programming, using Javascript as the programming language of choice to teach the basics of object oriented programming.

Nothing unknown to me, in other words. I’ve never done much with Javascript (or ECMA 262/ECMAscript, if you prefer), but we have barely touched any advanced topics yet. Today was a walkthrough of a menu dropdown DHTML script, which at least was somewhat interesting.

Tomorrow some guy from Microsoft will be holding a lecture; subject as of yet unknown.

35 weeks (roughly one third of the education) will be “LIA” — “Lärande I Arbete,” or “Learning In Work,” the school’s name for practical vocational training at an actual company, where we will do Real Stuff for the Real World.

We’re not paid for it, of course. Did you have to ask?

The first LIA period is from February to April. I’ve started looking at LIA reports from earlier students in search of an interesting company.

Well, lookie here — if it isn’t a Windows clone of LaunchBar! Admittedly inspired by LaunchBar, no less. Great news!