Month: February 2008

What’s wrong with UPS these days?

I’m used to UPS being incompetent fuckwads. So I’m a little surprised to find that of the three things I’ve ordered on-line recently, two of them came within 2 days of me placing the order even though they were sent “UPS We’ll Get To It When We Fucking Feel Like It” mode. I can only assume that they have a bunch of left over capacity from Christmas that they are waiting for the most inconvenient time to lay off or something.

Man I hate USB 1

Our software is installed/upgraded from CD. As part of the build process, we create .iso files and automatically burn that ISO to a CD in the build machine’s burner. When I want to upgrade the test complex on my desk, I can never find the master CD, so I usually burn a copy myself. But I don’t have any blanks at my desk, so I thought I’d try just copying to a USB “thumb drive”, and then mounting the .iso on the test machine using “mount … -o loop”.

So I started copying it to the thumb drive on my Linux box (which only has USB 1), and went away and did something else for 10 or 15 minutes. And I came back and it was still copying. So I did something else for 10 or 15 minutes. And it’s *still* copying. At this point, I suddenly realized my laptop has a USB 2 port free. So I copied the file over the network to my laptop, copied it from there to a different USB thumb drive, and took that over to the test complex and upgraded it. And having done all that, the Linux box is *still* copying the original .iso to the first thumb drive.

Update I just tried it again with “time cp” with a different thumb drive, and it only took 12 minutes and 30 seconds. I’m positive it was taking longer than that before, so I’m redoing the test with the thumb drive that was taking so long before. Maybe it’s the thumb drive that’s slow, or maybe it’s because it’s formatted ext3 instead of FAT32. I’ll report back when that one finishes. If it ever does.

Second Update: After arriving back to work, I find that the copy to the ext3 formatted thumb drive took 2:19:05. Yes, that’s nearly 2.5 HOURS! Dude, that’s fucked up.

Need some artistic judgement

I’m thinking of replacing my 17″ Powerbook G4 (aka “AlBook”) with a 17″ MacBook Pro (MBP), although I’m waiting to see if they announce something with the new three-touch touch pad like the MacBook Air (MBA). Rumour has it that they’re waiting for Intel to bring up production levels on a new chip before they do, and that’s why it wasn’t announced at the same time as the MBA.

SnowbirdsThe best feature of my AlBook is that I got a custom “skin” made featuring a picture of the Snowbirds in flight. I took it to the Wings and Wheels air show in St. Catherines last year, and got all the Snowbirds officers (including Snowbird 10 and 11, and their public affairs officer) to sign it. Several of the pilots expressed admiration for it, and asked where they could get one for their own laptops. The skin is made of vinyl, and the web site said you could peel it off, but I very much doubt it would transfer. And I don’t want to risk damaging it, especially since one of the pilots who signed it died in an accident this year. So it’s going to stay on the Albook. But I definitely want one for the new MBP.

I went to the Snowbirds web site and downloaded some of their high resolution promotional pictures, and their logo and wordmark which are available in EPS files, and played around in Photoshop a bit. I definitely wanted one with all 9 planes, and I think I like this one best, but I can’t decide on the placement of the logo and wordmark. First time ever I wished I’d installed that poll plugin, but please look at the following two pictures and tell me in the comments which you prefer. (As always, clicking the thumbnail will take you to a bigger version.)

Option 1 Option 2
Option 1 Option 2

And before you ask, yes, I am procrastinating. I need to re-engineer one of my tables and the classes that use it, and I don’t want to.