My Wii's optical drive do-nee work. Unable to read disc, it says... for all discs.

Thankfully I registered my Wii on nintendo.com and received an extra 90 days of warranty free, so my Wii is still under warranty and will be heading to Richmond (a suburb of Vancouver, BC) tomorrow via Nintendo's Purolator account.

2007 has not been a good year for white console reliability - first the 360, now the Wii. Let's hope it doesn't take them over 2 months to get the Wii back like MSFT did with the 360.

Thread: 0 replies. reply Last updated: 9:37 PM

I've been running Leopard on my MacBookPro since Saturday morning. I waited for the 10.5.1 update, I'm glad I did, but just because 10.5.1 is out doesn't mean Leopard is "golden". I'm having a lot of issues with this new OS, more than I remember having with any new release of Mac OS X.

Issues so far:

- iCal wouldn't load my calendars, I had to boot back into my Tiger backup, load iCal, do an "iCal backup" (it's in the File menu in iCal), then reboot into Leopard and do an iCal restore.

- Minor nit: If I run Mail rules via Mail-ActOn that delete messages, they reappear later and I have to delete them manually. I assume Mail-ActOn is to blame, but the delete is happening via a Mail rule so I don't see why it should matter.

- I couldn't delete the Quicksilver disk image using the Finder, no matter how I tried - dragging to the trash, cicking the eject button and choosing the Eject menu did nothing. I had to load Disk Utility and use the Eject button in its toolbar to get it to go away.

- I can't drag new folders into the Places area of the sidebar. And now that I accidentally removed the Documents folder, I can't get it back. The Sidebar tab of the Finder preferences is broken, clicking on the checkboxes does nothing. I've resorted to putting more folders in my dock until I get this fixed.

- Connecting to my AirDisk is flaky. But I'll give it credit for not seizing up my computer when I wake up my laptop at school and it realizes the AirDisk is gone. A big improvement from Tiger.

- Connecting to 802.1X networks is nowhere near as easy as it was in Tiger. The Internet Connect app is gone, and the replacement is absolutely buried deep in System Preferences... I actually had to rely on the Help menu to figure out how to set up an 802.1X configuration. Once I did, I couldn't figure out how to actually USE it. Then I decided to try "Join Other Network..." and found I could select 802.1X WEP for security, and then select my configuration - but it made me re-enter my username and password even though it was stored in the 802.1X configuration. It connected, but if I sleep and wake my computer it doesn't reconnect to it.

- If I reorder my preferred AirPort networks so the 802.1X network is first, Leopard moves it down the list anyway, and won't automatically reconnect to it. Maybe that wireless network is just down right now, but given the hassle of using 802.1X I'm just not sure.

- Xcode will no longer take me to the declaration of a POSIX function (in the appropriate included header) when I Cmd-2click on it, and so far I can't get it to autocomplete for me based on the headers included. This worked fine with the same project in Xcode 2.4.1 on Tiger. I checked its prefs and it LOOKS like the write options are selected to have this work.

- Spaces and System Preferences don't mix well. If I switch to System Preferences and its on a different desktop sometimes the window doesn't appear and I have to choose "Show All Preferences" from the View menu to get the window reappearing.

- Some apps just aren't Spaces savvy - if I switch to NetBeans, for example, the NetBeans menu becomes active but it doesn't switch to the space with the NetBeans window. I'm guessing Spaces is going to want some help from developers to make it seamless, because most of the bundled apps and 3rd party apps I use work well with it.

It's not all bad, mind you. Obviously Leopard has tons of improvements, otherwise I would never have bothered to install it. However, all these little bugs are adding up and annoying me to the point where rather than writing a long blog post about how great Leopard is (and it is great), I'm writing a long post about all the issues I'm having.

One big bright spot: it's great that proper SSH agent/keychain support is built in. Now I only use SSHKeychain for tunnels.

Also, stacks (on the dock) are AWESOME. I love the Downloads stack. And my tidy desktop. I don't even mind the translucent menu bar, but I wouldn't say it's an improvement (at all). Oh, and I love QuickLook. And Spotlight is wicked fast now, I might dump QuickSilver for it.

Because of the general bugginess, I'm unfortunately going to hold off on Time Machine until 10.5.2 or until Leopard generally feels more "golden".

Overall, I would have to say the best thing about Leopard is how FAST it is. Mail is faster, Finder is way faster, actually everything feels way faster. Of course, every new version of Mac OS X has felt faster on the same hardware than the version before it - contrary to Windows which feels slower with every new version.

Thread: 2 replies. reply Last updated: 2:27 PM

I knew it was going to be hard, but the workload I gave myself by taking the three highest workload Computer Science courses all at the same time has been... ridiculous.

I've been working on programming assignments/projects basically non-stop for quite a while now. I've been wanting to start a part-time job but it's simply not been possible!

On Wednesday I coded from 9 or 10 am straight through until 8 am the next morning. Then I went to see the knee surgeon about my knee, came home, and slept until 4:45 pm. Unfortunately that meant I slept through my classes from 2:30 to 4:30 pm. Didn't mean to. :-(

On Friday I worked on the same project from noon to six, (I had class until noon).

Then this past weekend... I stayed up late Friday night since I couldn't sleep (my sleep pattern was hosed) so I backed up my MBP and installed Leopard on it. Got up early in the morning to finish the software updates and installations and then got to work on my next major programming assignment. I worked on that basically all day except for a family visit.

Then this morning after Cyan's hockey game I started on it again and finished at 11:40 pm - just in time for the 11:59 pm deadline. :-)

To be honest, I can't believe I managed to finish that one on time. It was a big assignment but I wrote some really nice, really smart code and that led to time savings all over the place. Amazingly, after about 23 hours worth of coding, it look less than half an hour to debug and test the assignment. Nearly 1500 lines of code and I only had to change 2 lines of code to get some preliminary reasonable output. After just a few more lines fixed I had it working. :-)

Now I get to sleep so I can go back to the project I worked on last week so I can hand it on before the 5 pm Monday deadline.

Then... ugh, I'm scared to even look at iCal to find out what's next. ;-)

Thread: 1 replies. reply Last updated: 2:32 AM