Category Archives: Nerd

Weekend Fun

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The weather was beautiful over the weekend. I’ve been spending a lot of my free time programming side projects but yesterday was so nice I had to take advantage. So I went on my first bike ride in a few weeks. My plan was to do the usual route: up Park to Snake and then take Skyline to Grizzly Peak and come down Centennial by the Lawrence Hall of Science and the Botanical garden. Then I usually either go around the UC Berkeley campus to see what’s new or go down Claremont straight home.

Yesterday, however, Skyline toward Grizzly was closed so I had to go the other way toward the Chabot science center, then come down from the hills and take 13 to Berkeley before going up to Grizzly. I didn’t mind though cause it was so nice out.

The new front tire I put on a few weeks ago feels really nice. My turns are much smoother now and the bike feels more in control. But I think I’m leaking oil. :( I noticed it dripping out the bottom whenever I came to a stop light.

I devoted most of the rest of the weekend to trying to get Imagemagick to work on OS X. After having no luck from the binary install I checked out this guy’s post on how to Install ImageMagick from Source on OS X Tiger and got it sorted out. I think problem I had was not having the OS X Developer Tools installed. I still got an error when installing the jpeg library but it seems to work anyway.

I also got SVN sorted out last night. Now everything is on Google Code. It wasn’t until after I put everything there that I found out Mediatemple provides SVN hosting as well. Poop.

IE8 Passes Acid 2 Test; Mike Still Sad

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Recently the Internet Explorer development team posted that IE8 passes the Acid 2 standards test. Having spent a lot of time working around rendering issues in IE, I feel like I should be happy about this. I think I would be happy if everyone used the same browser. But unfortunately that’s not the case. I would even settle for all IE users updating to IE8 when it comes out. Hell I’d settle for an update to IE7. Alas, even though IE8 is standards compliant, I still have to work my way around IE6. And the chain of browsers is only as strong as the weakest link. :(

Biology: Transparent

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So I was looking at the pretty colors in The Colors of Your Degree article over at the Colour Lovers site. They list the hood colors for graduation gowns. It’s good to see that agriculture (maize [that's a color?]), physical education (sage green), and theology (scarlet) all have colors. But, what happened to biology? Chemistry? Are all of the sciences that they don’t have listed lumped together under science (golden yellow)? Why would oratory (silver grey) and library science (lemon) have colors when the major fields of science are lumped together? How upsetting.

An Apple a Day

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Last night Jules and I went to the Apple store and picked up a few goodies. iWork for her and the newer Apple keyboard for me.

It’s pretty nice. Sounds like a laptop when you’re typing. It also feels a little more comfortable because it’s flatter so my wrists don’t tilt up as much. You get the same effect with the wrist pad, but I don’t really like those all that much. Anyway, thumbs up. Go get yourself one.

Team Fortress 2, World in Conflict and more Medieval 2

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tf2-engineer.jpgI’ve been staying up playing a lot of video games this week. The Team Fortress 2 Beta came out this week after an initial delay for those who pre-purchased the Half-Life 2 Orange Box. Artistically it is excellent and it seems to have stuck to the core game play of the original Team Fortress faithfully. It’s integrated really well into the new Steam community features as well. So while you’re playing you can shift+tab to get the Steam Community overlay where you can chat with your friends online. It makes it really easy to join a game that your friend is already playing in. And the stat tracking is nice as well.

Since the engineer is my favorite class, I thought I’d share this little introduction with you. :)

I also picked up World in Conflict, the game I’ve been raving about for months now. Unfortunately it kept freezing on high graphical settings. It would run with a decent framerate and then suddenly freeze. I downloaded all of the new drivers (one of which came out yesterday) and some hotfixes for Vista. I went through four or five tries of changing graphical settings. And then I changed everything to medium quality. At that setting you switch from DX10 to DX9, and it worked. So that sucked. I mean, great that it stopped freezing in the middle of the game, but sucks that I can’t play it at a higher setting. Hopefully a patch or something will come out that fixes it.

And of course there’s the ever present Medieval 2 which I’ve been avoiding for the past couple days. My ally attacked my practically undefended castle and I don’t want to fight that battle. Not only does my castle have a small garrison, but the attacking army is probably the biggest I’ve ever seen. They have all kinds of catapults and trebuchets and things. I must think on how I’m going to retaliate and crush them!